The Artificial Landscape-Contemporary Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture in the Netherlands. (Neo-, Super-and Second Modernism).

Edited by Hans Ibelings. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers. 2001. [euro]41,197

Judging by grumpy mutterings current in England about the alleged airs put on by young visiting Dutch hero-architects, there's a feeling that the Dutch take the view that the Late-OMA Netherlands is where it's really happening. There is also a feeling that they might just be right. This book, which is actually about recent Dutch architecture, urbanism and landscape - and not just the landscape of its title - will be closely scanned for hard evidence of the primacy of the Low Countries during this current half decade and perhaps longer. A quick check through the index suggests that all the right names are here including wrinkly sparring partners Hertzberger and Koolhaas. And there is a lot of really exciting design. And the usual number of designers of routine office and housing blocks with little decorative/structural tricks. These have been talked-up on grounds, you initially suspect, of balance and because in the new critical dispensation, such differentiations as between 'right' and 'other' are not particu larly relevant.

In one of the remarkably cant-free essays at the back of the book editor Hans Ibelings writes, 'The disappearance of the compulsive tendency to construe everything in symbolic terms has not only freed the designer from an onerous duty to keep on producing "meaningful" architecture, but has made it possible for architects, critics and historians to view architecture differently in that things are now accepted phenomenologically for what they are.' The layout is a bit lumpy and the texts tend to be about Being Dutch Architects in the Twenty-First Century - but buy it.