Dutch divergence.

Supported by commerce and informed by a spirit of experimentation, the Netherlands currently has one of the most lively and inventive architectural cultures in the world.

The Netherlands and modernity are in many ways virtually synonymous. It is a man-made land, abstractly artificial, graphically gridded by drainage ditches and intensive agriculture, and utterly dependent on engineering and planning. It is also riven by tensions similar to those that have generally underlain modernity, such as between Calvinist sobriety and an eager experimentalism, and between democratic ideals and a bureaucratic elitism that hopes to inflict the current version of the good life on everyone. Little wonder, then, that the country has been consistently at the forefront of twentieth-century architecture.

Now the Netherlands is once again in the international limelight for having one of the world's liveliest architectural scenes. The reasons for this go beyond those mentioned above. Nowhere else is architecture so generously supported by the government. Besides the lavishly housed and funded Netherlands Architectural Institute and the post-graduate Berlage Institute, the prolific publication of architectural books and magazines is subsidized and even foreign travel is funded. So there is a lively architectural culture in a country small enough for architects to know a large percentage of their colleagues, and to interact frequently with them, for instance, when a new building has an 'open day' for their inspection.

But most importantly, the Netherlands has enjoyed a continuous boom over most of the last two decades, largely because of its astute exploitation of the burgeoning global economy, so many of whose features (such as multinational corporations) were invented historically by the Dutch. Conditions of high demand permit experiment as virtually any design can be sold or rented, even in private sector housing, currently among the liveliest architectural arenas. So commercial clients, as did bureaucrats, pride themselves on spotting and sponsoring barely-emergent talent. Unlike most countries, where young architects often struggle to find work, in the Netherlands they can set up and do their own thing.

Such conditions have inevitably led to a very varied architectural scene (of which limited space restricts this issue to showing only the tiniest glimpse), where everybody competes to be distinct, manifestly new and creative, to draw attention and work. Yet there are commonalties in this heterogeneity. Just as a group of Amsterdam architects, including Herman Hertzberger (p54), were all, despite their distinct design approaches, in some degree inspired by the late Aldo van Eyck (see AR February 1990), so there is now a group of Rotterdam architects who have all passed through the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) of Rem Koolhaas (p50), whose role in freeing up the local scene cannot be over-estimated. Those included in this issue are Willem-Jan Neutelings of Neutelings Riedijk (p58) and Willy Maas and Jacob vail Rijs of MVRDV (p38). Though all these architects have developed their own distinctive approaches they still also retain affinities both to Koolhaas and each other in their emphasis on a high level of conceptual and typological inventiveness.

Also inspired by Rein Koolhaas, who in turn follows a well-established tradition that extends back through Hertzberger and van Eyck to van Doesburg and even earlier, most of these ex-OMA architects, like others in this issue, write and research, using theory to create market niche anti publicity. Despite this, and because of the ample opportunities to build, though usually to tight budgets. Dutch architects tend to be pragmatic, shunning paper architecture and unafraid of cheap and trashy-looking materials. This last is a factor in Koolhaas most pervasive legacy (stemming from his nostalgia for '50s architecture) so that, as in no other country, supposedly serious architecture can be almost impossible to tell apart from flashy commercialism.

Perhaps because the Netherlands lacks distinctive natural features anti much of the built environment is new, Dutch architects are less deferential to context than architects tend to be elsewhere. Yet, paradoxically, landscape seems the major design theme of many recent Dutch buildings, as if compensating for the missing natural landscapes. Mecanoo's Delft University Library (p45 hides under an upward sweep of grass, all extension of the new lawn/lily pad on which the gigantic Brutalist bullfrog of van den Broek & Bakema's '60s auditorium now sits. And the rust-red facades of the Minnaert Building by Neutelings Riedijk (p58 resemble upward extrusions of earth, aptly enough as it houses the Department of Geophysics.

The Minnaert Building's central hall resembles a cave (a subterranean landscape): you can imagine stalactites and stalagmites growing where water shoots through the roof. But otherwise it and the Delft library are atypical. Usually landscape analogies are restricted to internal organization and involve warping floors to achieve a continuous flow up through a building. Thus the opportunities the free plan brought for adjacent functions to interact are extended into the section so that buildings now frame a complex three-dimensional matrix of potential interaction (so encouraging the 'programmatic instability' advocated by Koolhaas). Furthermore, the interior becomes a world of its own, largely independent of the drabness outside which such buildings both react to and effectively intensify.

The seminal project was OMA's Jussieu Library competition entry (on which Maas anti van Rijs worked when with OMA). In this, floors spiralled up inside a glazed cube, on whose translucent facades the slab edges revealed the tilted strata-like levels inside. This is the obvious antecedent to both OMA's Educatorium and MVRDV's Villa, the former as light and stylish as the latter is chunky and crude. As with most Koolhaas designs the inspiration for Jussieu was Le Corbusier: the Strasbourg Congress Centre. This source remains detectable in the Educatorium, though more obvious are the interlocking Us of the Carthage villa. Modified to a U and V, they express the building's dual nature with sedentary functions in the static boxy U and movement in the dynamic V.

Villa VPRO's compact form disturbs minimally the wooded hilly site which the spiralling interior contacts at several levels. The roof is also a landscape, parts of it drawn down as courtyards bringing natural light into the deep plan. This is a special case of a consequence of exploiting the landscape analogy: the blurring of distinctions between interior and exterior. But this usually occurs inside, where some parts are more internal than others a characteristic skilfully exploited by MVRDV whose continuous folded slabs, sometimes floor and sometimes wall, separate more private and interior spaces from more communal and open ones.

Having touched on reasons for the architectural vitality of the Netherlands anti some characteristics common to buildings in this issue, we should ponder the general topicality anti lasting relevance of work which is outrageously experimental anti conceptually challenging. Most critics might use the increasingly conventional label of hypermodernism to describe this inventive, abstract, diverse, conceptual yet individualistic, hyped-up and exaggerated Modernism. But Dutch historian anti critic Hans Ibelings characterizes it as Supermodernism (fair enough, though unnecessary). Yet he also claims this architecture is that of the emerging global age, when big buildings with boxy mute exteriors and complex inner worlds might be plopped indifferently anywhere on the planet.

Refuting such a dreadful notion will also give critical perspective on the relevance of current Dutch architecture. As so many pundits claim, the modern age ushered in by science anti consolidated in the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution is giving way to a new age brought about by electronics, the new sciences, globalization and so on. We are now in a confusing transitional period when waning Modernism is being challenged by at least two other major cultural paradigms. To clarify this in a short essay we must risk over-simplification.

The modern cultural paradigm has been characterized as scientific, rationalist, progressivist and so on. But behind these and other characterizations lies a single idea: that there is an objective reality. Stupendously successful in conquering the material world. this paradigm is also profoundly alienating anti desensitizing leading to social, psychological, urban anti ecological breakdown. Crumbling since Freud, terminally wounded by quantum mechanics, this paradigm's credibility has steadily eroded, especially since the '60s. In retrospect, Aldo van Eyck's attacks on ClAM-type functionalism for ignoring the role of human consciousness were part of this process.

Now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme and postmodernists see reality as an arbitrary social construct (hence the fad for scenarios to generate design). This, together with the collapse of all the 'grand narratives' such as progress, has reduced culture to a play with empty signs and genres. But though this cultural paradigm (which academic and commentator Charlene Spretnak has usefully defined as Deconstructionist Postmodernism) inverts aspects of Modernism it also retains many of its most pernicious features such as its alienating hyper-individualism and abstraction from grounding in experiential realities.

But there is another emergent paradigm which is more likely to prevail - not least because the assumption that reality is only a construct offends common sense (something no paradigm, by axiom, can sustain). Spretnak calls this paradigm Ecological Postmodernism. This assumes a larger reality: the dynamic unfoldings of cosmological processes and biological and social evolution which we impact upon with increasing potency. Thus reality is neither external to and untouched by us (Modernism) nor mere mental projection (Deco-Pomo), but an unfolding process in which we play a creative and participatory role. This reality is neither abstract and rational, nor fabricated through fantasy and scenario, but experiential anti so shaped by context, or better, embeddedness in multiple contexts.

Some architects still fight a defensive corner within Modernism, usually narrowing it to safe certainties such as High-Tech and Minimalism. But most of the more exciting architecture found in the Netherlands belongs to the transitional paradigm. This manifests in the nostalgic quotes and play with past genres of a typical PostModernist such as Koolhaas. More generally it is evidenced in the over-emphasis on invention, scenario, chance design strategies, the visual rather than the experiential, and other caricatured exaggerations of Modernism not least the now terminally-tired aspirations to be avant-garde. Like most architecture applauded in schools and journals, this does not mark the dawning of an architecture for the global age. Instead it is what Marshall McLuhan called a sunset effect, a strident exaggeration of aspects of an outworn paradigm. But the conditions which made the Netherlands role in twentieth-century architecture so inevitable might now be holding it back from formulating the architecture for a very different era.