How to recognise a building

How to recognise a building 

It happens all the time: while driving through some unknown part of the Netherlands, in the periphery of my vision, some building catches my attention and immediately I know it's a school, a civic building or something other than the housing that dominates the urban environment. I don't have to think about it, I just directly know it. Scale, proportions, fenestration and other features make it evident that the building belongs to a particular use type.

So I wonder how far this goes, whether most people can recognise buildings like than and where it comes from: from earlier experiences with different buildings or from fundamental differences in form. This is an intriguing subject, especially because quite a lot doesn't seem to come from direct personal experience: if you ask a Dutch child to draw a house, they'll most probably draw an outline they've learned from books, with the roof pitch visible from the side rather than the front, as in the usual Dutch row housing.

Not turning the corner

Not turning the corner

My initial attraction to the traditional Dutch housing has not diminished through the years. Even in the largely uniform suburbs with its endless row housing, there is a certain charm in the unpretentious forms and scale of the buildings, the resulting spaces and the feeling of community they emanate. Still, there is a couple of things that puzzle me in the typical Dutch blocks. One of these is the way the blocks terminate in a wall in the shape of the cross section of the building with few if any windows. In a country where Amsterdam School architects have amply demonstrated how one can turn the corner in a building, this is certainly puzzling.

I have been told that this is so that all dwellings in the block are equal; that the ones at the ends receive no special treatment in order not to have any particular advantages from their location. On the one hand, this reasoning seems plausible within the oppressively egalitarian (or possibly procrustean) mindset of the 1950s and 1960s. In the same period, social housing had to have a maximum dwelling width that not only seems pointless today but also limited spatial possibilities in the dwelling layout, e.g. producing spare rooms slightly larger than a cupboard. It is therefore possible that policy makers used and imposed this way of thinking to produce the same quality for all. On the other hand, it can just be laziness and indifference. Many of these blocks have been designed and constructed in boom periods, when all that mattered was production volume. These were different times to the ones of the Amsterdam School.

Either way, the result doesn't change: every day I'm confronted by these rather awkward and embarrassed-looking side walls, and wonder at their acceptance by the Dutch, who appear quite clever at adapting and expanding their space and property. One doesn't often see significant alterations to such walls. I wonder why; most dwellings at the end of a block have a side garden, too, i.e. ground on which one can nowadays build a small extension without much trouble from the planning authorities.

Housing statistics

Housing statistics 

Early days of the new year, so it's time for the statistics of the previous year. Concerning the built environment, the Dutch news is that house sales have continued to increase but less spectacularly, so specialists expect that it will soon even out. There have been so many sales recently that in many municipalities there are few houses available for sale and mortgage rates are expected to increase. By the way, everyone seems happy that house prices have increased once again.

These subjects have been integral parts of the national psyche as long as I can remember. With the Dutch system of mortgaged house ownership, it's not surprising that mortgage rates and conditions are important. Mortgage debt levels determine quite a lot for both the individual and the whole society. On the other hand, people do not seem to realise what growing housing prices for the entire building stock mean. If they keep going up, it's good - that's the general tenet and it's worrying that nobody seems to challenge its sanity.

As for buying and selling houses, real estate agents used to say that the average Dutch person moves house every seven years, not always for practical reasons like family extensions or job changes. It seemed like a self-stimulating system: let's buy each other's houses, especially as soon as more houses come on the market. Aspiration, advancement and improvement are apparently much more important than the cost and trouble involved - or is it simply that people get bored with what they have and go shopping for houses like they do for clothes?