Dutch diagnosis.

In Almere, where the streets are named after movie stars, Julyan Wickham has fashioned a place that creates a new sense of community on a site reclaimed from the sea.

The Dutch are particularly keen on facilitating casual social interchange. Such is the fundamental diagnosis of Julyan Wickham's recently completed Health Centre in Aimere -- a mechanism for meetings between its public and the medical professions. The building is structured around reception spaces and lingering places and rooms that push out cheekily to acknowledge themselves so that a new communal realm is created within and about the architectural envelope. For the van Eyck office, architecture has always been more than the box -- patterns of use are more vital than any formal gamesmanship. In Almere, this humanitarian impulse finds not just an immediate programme with basic sociological implications, but an urban environment which is itself in search of some shared sense of community.

Almere is a new settlement in the polders east of Amsterdam. Formerly on the bed of the Zuider Zee, this technology-dependent province of South Flevoland is a fast-developing tract of farmland and satellite townships. Part colony, part allotment, Almere (the name means 'All Lake') is marked by a tidy artificiality. Founded as recently as 1976 -- it was drained in the 1960s -- Almere is a tripartite municipality of Stad, Buiten and Haven, the collective population of which is now approximately 120 000. These immigrant souls are inevitably part of a big infrastructural exploration. Within that, the architect was a modest but key participant. Wickham's Health Centre occupies a location of significant influence in the geography of the inhabitants and develops from an attitude towards institutions as condensers of activity that are physically and psychologically barrier-free.

Almere-Stad is an orthogonal office and shopping precinct. The building site is in a subsidiary development called Filmwijk. This is not the typically abstract lot of reclaimed land but an experimental housing quarter, radially co-ordinated from a principal transport artery (Orson Wellesstraat) with plots of row or courtyard units designed by several of the Netherlands' more interesting architects (Bosch, Mecanoo, de Architekten Cie). The Health Centre is at the physical and metaphorical heart of this densely architectural domestic world, springing from its semi-circular entry nucleus. Further, it frames -- with Hertzberger's Junior School across a public garden -- a threshold from the outside zone of traffic and construction sites into the protected web of Filmwijk, so the north wall of the Health Centre is legible both as a membrane for privacy and as a kind of billboard for the quarter.

The curious Hollywood nomenclature for Filmwijk's streets and lanes (the Health Centre's curvaceous bits are on Grace Kellystraat) register the artificial spontaneity of the community. The shocking purple wall to the external thoroughfare is itself something of an artifice. Mock battlements sit on a small berm like a lodged vessel and screen a battery of intimate rooflit consulting rooms beyond which a more free-form and open architecture can occur. The arrayed light monitors to these examination chambers and the low-lying openings immediately beneath are in punched syncopation until both ends of the purple hull wrap in to secure the building in place. Around the prow, towards the planners' centre point, the architects' palette switches to a slightly rancid yellow and the bulkiness breaks down to form an inner garden and an inviting threshold of entry.

The latest building separates out in bulk and colour, and with softer edges, so that one is attracted inwards. In particular, a greater transparency into and through the interior world, and the promise of light-filled moments within, lead the visitor between curved flanks and through sets of sliding doors to a central control desk. It is then immediately clear that the outrigger-type pavilion, drifting to the south, contains the civic pharmacy and that the main event, shielded by that condensed lilac wall on Orson Wellesstraat, is a sheltered linear organism off which a myriad rooms are gathered. This binnenstraat, or interior street, is Wickham's market place, a contemporary manifestation of the classic aspiration to build a house like a town.

In the almost ahistorical town of Almere, this is a centre which invites the making of daily narrative. The secluded rooms for various doctors, dentists, midwives and physiotherapists are contained within the principle facade, a row of small spaces like studios or chapels with their individual sun monitors. Between these private functions and the busier binnenstraat are tiny lavatories and coupled antechambers like front porches so that the interior elevation seems to function like a neighbourhood street. Across, and about the service desk, the corresponding strip harbours kitchenettes and a secretarial pool behind a much more fluid and transparent facade. Above the market place or shared galleria is a low glazed vault that floods the hall with northern maritime light. At both ends, the space pauses in discrete patches of garden before continuing through to the greater outdoors. Beyond the desk and main entry, a full-span door swings open into the dispensary.

Wickham has produced a building with that slightly eccentric casual sense that one associates with the seaside. Mooching outside around its periphery (there are service doors to the back) the bright colours and low scale, the dry gardens and thin windows are reminiscent of holiday chalets with a suspicion of fun palace. The almost diminutive contained officescape has portholes and Sputnik chandeliers and glass screens that bow and surge not unlike the refractive creations of Baron Horta: one is always being attracted to light. The materiality, and immateriality, of glass and pigment -- components in redder purple, scarlet and grey -- supersedes that of concrete or metal or wood in the sandwich between floor and ceiling. Perhaps only the high-backed benches in the binnenstraat are unnecessarily trendy; though some private reverie before a medical appointment may be no bad thing.

The architects are in the uncommon position of replicating town life where none has existed heretofore. Their interior is about interface within this new citizenry so that the obvious sense of Filmwijk artificiality decomposes and becomes one of mutual living. The interior street -- and the real ones outside are definitely suburban -- is furnished with plants and post-box and message boards in a linear parti like that of Hertzberger opposite. But unlike the Junior School with its axial and boisterous accessibility, the Health Centre folds into a more circuitous and private plan. By accommodating both a desire for openness and the discretion demanded for doctor-patient consultation, Wickham achieves the expressed spirit of the promoters. Only the meeting rooms push outward into bay windows, and then into screened yards leaving the total form of the Health Centre as a distinct constituent of the fledgling mini-metropolis.