Voerendaalstraat, Tilburg

Voerendaalstraat, Tilburg

The train coming to Tilburg from the north passes along a street that has always attracted me: the Voerendaalstraat. The view of its modernist architecture from the train is appealing; it looks like one of the many residential developments that made good use of modernist morphology to lighten up the image of the Dutch housing and create streets that seem worth living in. The whole surrounding neighbourhood of Koolhoven, appears to be in the same style. It must have been one of the early Dutch suburbs and it's rather remarkable that it was designed by modernists. That's more or less all I can find on the architecture of Koolhoven and the Voerendaalstraat. The many architectural guides to Dutch architecture appear to contain nothing on either.

In the end it doesn't matter much. Is it that important to know who designed this or that - not only buildings but also industrial products, infrastructure etc.? It's nice to be able to find it if one is interested but it changes little in reality. In this case, it wouldn't alter the appeal of what I see from the train if I knew who the architects were. If anything, I might be more critical if they were among the prominent ones. One tends to be more lenient with the anonymous designers. As it is, the Voerendaalstraat is a delightful image and a promise of a pleasant environment. That's a compliment to any architect but more significantly to the country and city that contain these streets and neighbourhoods.