The space between.

REVISIONS OF SPACE: AN ARCHITECTURAL MANUAL

By Dick van Gameren. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 2005. [euro]35

This book is essentially a piece of self-promotion, although it is an engaging one. Dick van Gameren is a Dutch architect whose practice took off in the mid-1990s when he designed some stylish houses in narrow sites in Amsterdam which attracted some attention at the time; he has since emerged as a designer, with various collaborators, of imaginative large-scale schemes. Revisions of Space introduces each category of these projects with a short lecture about the importance of the space between rooms; evidently an Anglophile, he illustrates this with diagrams of buildings by architects from Smythson to Baillie Scott, and from Lutyens to Foster as well as by a few others. His argument, although promising, does not really exploit the potential of the various issues raised; but this is a thoughtful book, and it includes a somewhat overstated afterword by Hans Ibelings, a critic whose work is becoming increasingly worth reading.

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