Urban paradigm?

EASTERN HARBOUR DISTRICT AMSTERDAM: URBANISM AND ARCHITECTURE

By Marlies Buurman, Bernard Hulsman, Hans Ibelings, Allard Jolles, Ed Melet, Ton Schaap. Rotterdam: NAi. 2003. [euro]60

Since the end of the 1980s the Eastern Harbour District in Amsterdam has been transformed from redundant dockland to a residential community of over 8000 dwellings. This book is a record of that process. It combines a series of essays on the history, politics, economics, sociology, urban design and architecture of the district and lavishly illustrates both the process and its outcome.

The book nicely spells out the importance of both space and time for a project such as this. The scale and topography of the district, with its alternation of finger-like islands and wide dock basins, influenced many aspects of the project. It offered a clear subdivision of the territory, which informed decisions about the phasing of development, and the specific dimensions of the islands fundamentally influenced the built forms. The time scale, of over a decade, allowed lessons learned to be fed back into the process. Additionally it saw political and socio-economic changes in which the role of the public sector diminished and market-driven private investment became dominant. The influence of this on the urban and architectural programmes is clearly described, as are the accompanying shifts of emphasis and style in the architecture of mass housing. The small-scale concerns of 'social' housing are progressively replaced by more conspicuous formal gestures as projects fight for attention in the marketplace.

Emphasis is descriptive rather than critical, and this is a virtue. It is relatively rare to have such a dispassionate account of any architectural project and certainly of one on this scale. Events are just presented as they occurred; nothing is obscured or confused by authorial partiality. Many architects of note have undertaken individual projects. Wiel Arets, Jap Coenen, Diener & Diener, Hans Kollhoff, Enric Miralles, MVRDV and many others have contributed. In their various ways their works here become a kind of summary of the current state of European housing. A disappointment is that there is virtually no detailed description or discussion of the individual dwellings, apartments or houses. Very few building plans are at a scale where internal arrangement can be properly read. Is this because mass housing is seen as a commodity, in which standard plans are arranged within striking forms whose primary objective is to grab attention in the battle for market share?

This is a serious book to be read as an objective documentation of a major event in urbanism and architecture. It contains many beguiling images, enjoy these, but please read it for its deeper messages about the processes that are at play in the modern city and how these affect the way people may live.

Book reviews from this and recent issues of The Architectural Review can now be seen on our website at www.arplus.com and the books can be ordered online, many at special discount.