A contemporary fortified town – NRC

Long before their completion, the Vinex districts were in danger of ending up on the dung heap of architectural history. When the first tufts of Vinex homes appeared a quarter of a century ago, critics labeled the new residential areas where 800,000 homes were to be built a complete failure. The general expectation was that the more than a hundred neighborhoods that were built in the context of the Fourth Extra Spatial Planning Memorandum (1991) would become monotonous and boring. Some critics even predicted that the new neighborhoods would become the ‘ghettos of tomorrow’, others were sure that they would be demolished in thirty years.

Not one of the dire predictions came true. On the contrary, already in 2006, a year after the official end of the Vinex period (1995-2005), it became apparent Vinex!, a ‘morphological exploration’ by the Spatial Planning Bureau, that the Vinex neighborhoods had become the most varied residential areas after 1945. Nevertheless, the last residential areas planned by the central government are still known as ‘uniform suburbs.’

The Helmond Vinex district Brandevoort clearly shows how unjustified this is. Thirty years ago, the municipal council of Helmond determined that the newly built residential area of ​​approximately 6,000 homes should have the character of an old village. Even or perhaps especially in the digital age that had just begun, many Dutch people prefer to live in an old village, as research into housing preferences had shown.

Rob Krier (1938), a Luxembourgish architect with an office in Berlin, was commissioned to design the Vinex village. Krier, a postmodernist from the very beginning, did not design a village, but an entire town with ‘de Veste’ as its centre.

Fascist architect

Krier was lyrical about the Vinex districts. “They are unprecedented, cities are not built in such a systematic manner anywhere in the world,” he exulted in an interview in this newspaper in 2002. As a traditionalist architect, Krier hardly had any work in Germany, he also said at the time. “I am considered a kind of fascist there. Traditional architecture is still suspect there, because the Nazis were also in favor of it. The great thing about the Netherlands is that in addition to ultra-modern architecture, there is also room for traditional architecture.”

Yet Krier’s neo-traditionalism, which he applied in many places in residential areas and housing complexes in the Netherlands, was also met with much resistance among Dutch architects and critics. In 2010, the then chairman of the Association of Dutch Architects Bjarne Mastenbroek even called ‘retro architecture’ the ‘best-selling lie of this country’ and compared Krier and his Dutch followers to populist politicians such as Geert Wilders.

The moral outrage that Brandevoort evokes stems from the still prevailing dogma that architecture and art must be ‘contemporary’. This is based on the belief in the zeitgeist, an invention of early 19th-century German philosophers who believed that an invisible zeitgeist, like a kind of god, propels history towards a certain end goal. Nowadays, few people think that history will end with the self-realization of the world spirit (Hegel), communism (Marx) or a neoliberal world order (Fukuyama), but the belief in the spirit of the times has remained. Critics still justify a certain type of art or architecture by appealing to the spirit of the times that wants and dictates it. They often add that those who do not obey the spirit of the times are doomed to irrelevance.

But history simply has no purpose – and so the spirit of the times is nothing more than a German chimera and contemporaneity a meaningless concept. It’s very simple: everything that happens or is created is contemporary – otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Or, as Igor Stravinsky, the composer who a century ago was accused of being uncontemporary for his return to classicism, once noted: “It is said that one must move with the times. A superfluous piece of advice: how can one do otherwise? Even if I wanted to repeat ‘the past’, the strongest efforts of my evil desires would remain in vain.”

Most influential architect

The fact that ‘the past’ cannot be recreated in architecture is immediately visible in Brandevoort. Certainly, with its pleasant squares, canals and kinked streets that are not too wide, the Helmond Vinex district is reminiscent of the picturesque centers of old Dutch towns. And with their different brick facades and staggered eaves, the houses on the Brandevoort city walls designed by Dutch architects resemble old canal houses, while they are actually terraced houses with almost identical interiors. But although De Plaetse, the elongated central square with shops and a cast-iron market hall, is car-free, the machine that drastically changed urban planning after 1945 has not been banished from the center of Brandevoort. The cars are mainly parked in the courtyards of the closed blocks, which are much larger than those in old towns. As a result, cars are much less present on the streets of the Veste than in older new-build neighborhoods.

The contemporary nature of Brandevoort is also evident from the success of the district. Not only does the new Helmond Vinex district meet the contemporary desire for living in an old town and the house prices there are higher than in other Brabant Vinex districts, Kriers has also developed urban planning skills in the Netherlands. New ‘old towns’ have emerged in many places over the past twenty years. Such as Op Buuren, a residential area in the Utrecht municipality of Stichtse Vecht that was built according to the Krier method around 2010 in the shape of an old village on the Vecht. For example, Rob Krier, who is still reviled for his brutal disobedience to the spirit of the times, became the most influential architect in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 21st century.