OUD REASSESSED.

Was J.J. P. Oud a great architect? Or even an interesting one? The exhibition at the NAi and the accompanying 576-page publication J.J. P. Oud 1890-1963, A Poetic Functionalist may fail to convince one (and indeed may not themselves be convinced) of the Dutchman's architectural genius. Instead their joint tactic is to examine Oud's position at the very start of the De Stijl movement and his cultivation, like that of the overtly propagandist Theo van Doesburg, of important international contacts. At the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Oud appears as a taciturn forefather to more recent, media-astute Dutch planning and design gurus. Tellingly, Rem Koolhaas served as keynote speaker for the show's inauguration.

To begin with, the Main Hall of the Jo Coenen-designed NAi is itself a rather Mannerist assembly of Modernist forms and surfaces. For this exhibition, it is occupied by a swirling white monument concocted by New York nonagenarian Philip Johnson. One of the few members of the old avant-garde still alive, Johnson frequently corresponded with Oud after first visiting Rotterdam in 1930. In the famous Modern Architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1932, he and Henry-Russell Hitchcock placed Oud's radical housing precincts at the Hook of Holland and Kiefhoek, and his terrace of five minimal dwellings at the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung, side-by-side with works by Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Also in the MoMA exhibition was a large model of an Oud villa commissioned by Johnson for his mother. Intended for Pinehurst, North Carolina, this country residence featured an orthogonal two-storey block with a circular sunroom spinning off one corner; extruded parallel walls to screen swimming pool and tennis court; and such technical gadgets as a mechanical turntable in the garage and moveable wall segments made of glass. Never in fact realized, a model of the H. H. Johnson House marks entry to the NAi exhibition. It connects visually, amid discreet background music by composers Jakob van Domselaer and Willem Pijpers, to Johnson's monument and to the text of letters -- sent between the two architects -- projected onto photographic portraits on the far wall.

The Rotterdam model was reconstructed by Oud c. 1951 when he remade or perhaps doctored several artefacts from his earlier career. (Clear proof of his desire to be positioned favourably in history.) The most important of his models, drawings and period photographs are placed on long baby-blue tables elegantly installed by the Amsterdam designer Marijke van der Wijst. These surfaces are parallel or perpendicular to each other but askew of the NAi's own geometry so that a certain centrifugal motion is set up about the temporary Johnson structure. On the mezzanine above is a long gallery with pre-De Stijl, provincial works by Oud: only an occasional flush facade has hints of the vanguard compositions to come.

With his strangely ornamental Shell Headquarters in The Hague (1938-42), Oud fell out with the New York mandarins (van Doesburg had already died in 1931). By then Oud had left his official position with the City of Rotterdam and appears interested less in housing and town planning than in refined or hermetic single works. How many fans of Kiefhoek or De Unie cafe, however, can recognize as Oud's the prestigious National Monument on Dam Square, Amsterdam? Such late works as the Bio-Convalescent Centre for Children in Amhem (1952-60) and the Netherlands Congress Centre in The Hague (completed after his death in 1963 by Oud's son Hans) seem determined by personal visual criteria. In the first issue of De Stijl magazine, in 1917, Oud wrote that 'Architecture, like Painting, is evolving in the direction of the universal and the monumental'. In his own work, the monumental rather insipidly won out. Inside the monument at the NAi, videos relay Johnson's messages for 2001. 'The best thing to do,' says the wily tipst er, 'is to copy Oud, not me.' Maybe.