Habitat and Architecture: Disruption and Expansion

Introduction of the book and historical overview of the subject of Habitat in architecture, with references to contemporary practices.

Planning History of a Dutch New Town: Analysing Lelystad through Its Residential Neighbourhoods

This article seeks to analyse the reciprocal influence between the post-war urban planning policies and the development of residential neighbourhoods in Lelystad between 1965 and 1990. This city has been designed ‘from scratch’ as the urban centre of the IJsselmeer Polders, the largest land reclamation project of the Netherlands. Lelystad’s...

The Legacy of CIAM in the Netherlands: Continuity and Innovation in Dutch Housing Design

This article discusses how CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) influenced Dutch housing and urban planning. It starts by looking at programs and policies of the 1920s and 1930s Dutch housing design, and the way in which the new ideas of CIAM were there incorporated. In this history, the design of the AUP (Algemeen...

The elusive bigness of Bakema

Architecture and democracy: Contestations in and of the open society

In many ways the work and ideas of Jaap Bakema epitomize the best of the architecture of the post-war Dutch welfare state: it is utterly unapologetic about its modernity as well as its drive to be universal and egalitarian. Bakema firmly<br/>positioned his office and its production at the heart of the Dutch welfare state system. Not only did he,...

Victor Gruen: the environmental Heart

Victor Gruen is the pioneer of the regional shopping centre, he is the “Mall Maker”, which, is also the title of a book by M. Jeffrey Hartwick about this Austrian-born architect. Well known for his first commercial projects, which have been copied and analysed worldwide, mostly negatively influencing the structure of cities and societies, Gruen...

An Archaeology of the Ordinary: Rethinking the Architecture of Dwelling from CIAM to Siza

This dissertation examines architectural operations developed from the 1950s through the 1980s that challenged modernity’s “anxiety of contamination” and that have negotiated the boundaries between the realm of the individual and the social, the expert and the mass men, the local and the universal, modernity and the vernacular. The central...

Unknown history: Le Corbusier in front of the 'Academism' of Jan de Ranitz in the preparations for the new United Nations Headquarters at New York (1946)