The Dutch Urban Block and the Public Realm Models Rules Ideals

Susanne Komossa Vantilt

The Dutch urban block and the public realm Models rules ideals

Susanne Komossa The Dutch urban block and the public realm Models, rules, ideals

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This publication has been partially funded by: Netherlands Architecture Fund Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation Urban Planning and Housing Department (dS+V), Rotterdam Woningstichting De Key, Amsterdam ERA Contour, Zoetermeer

Scientific committee Professor Kees Christiaanse, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich Professor Maristella Casciato, University of Bologna Professor Anne Vernez Moudon, University of Washington, Seattle Professor Antonio Monestiroli, Politecnico di Milano, Milan With thanks to The dissertation supervisors Professor S. U. Barbieri and Professor A. Reijndorp The ‘Atlas team’ Han Meyer, Max Risselada, Sabien Thomaes, Nynke Jutten et al. Tim Vermeend (perspective cross-sections) Derk Hofman (atlas of drawings) © 2010 Susanne Komossa, Rotterdam and Vantilt Publishers, Nijmegen © 2010 English translation by Kevin Cook, Nijmegen © 2010 Foreword, Jean Castex (English translation by Kevin Cook, Nijmegen, editing by Henk Hoeks) ISBN 978 94 6004 055 9 Originally published in Dutch as Hollands bouwblok en publiek domein: model, regel, ideaal (ISBN 978 94 6004 040 5) Cover and book design Roger Willems, Amsterdam Lithography and imaging Stef Verstraaten, Nijmegen No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or made public by means of print, photocopy, microfilm or in any other manner without the publisher’s prior consent.

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Contents

7

Foreword

From morphological analysis to design: in Saverio Muratori’s footsteps Jean Castex

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13

Introduction

21

Chapter 1

35

Chapter 2

45

Chapter 3

57

Chapter 4

87

Chapter 5

99

Chapter 6

127

Chapter 7

139

Chapter 8

155

Chapter 9

173

Chapter 10

189

Chapter 11

209

Chapter 12

215

Acknowledgements

217

Credits for illustrations

219

Bibliography

Continuity and discontinuity The identity of the Dutch ‘city of homes’ Dutch cities: the public, private and collective realms and everyday life Introduction of concepts from urban sociology Architects and the everyday Dutch and other architects as ‘makers’ The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm The structure of the block and transitional architectural features The public realm and the economy of the city The relationship between the urban block and the urban economy The urban model and the urban block Atlas of drawings The mercantile water city Seventeenth-century Amsterdam: a knowledge city before its time The embellished civil engineers’ city The design of the new middle-class public sphere in Rotterdam and Amsterdam The social reformers’ city Models for a monofunctional urban block The sociocultural city The collective ideal becomes a fixture The contemporary compact city The long, hard road to the urban public sphere Conclusion: themes, methods and approaches Linkage of concepts and methods leads to a new strategy

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Foreword

Jean Castex

From morphological analysis to design: in Saverio Muratori’s footsteps The title of Susanne Komossa’s book makes quite clear what it sets out to do. It is an urban morphology study of the meaning of the urban block. It extends into the social realm, examining the relationship between the urban block and public space and its various uses. It includes an analytical element, represented by the models and rules whereby this relationship is described and ordered. Finally, it moves on to the level of ideals by outlining the design practice that emerges from the study. While the book includes an ample iconography of urban forms and their use, it is ultimately based on the continuous historical development of the city, shown in sequences of juxtaposed ground plans of Rotterdam and Amsterdam from 1625 to the first half of the twentieth century and closer to the present day (from 1981 to 2007). Most of all, however, it is based on theoretical underpinnings shared by various schools of urban morphology going back to Saverio Muratori (1910-1973), whose main writings date from his study of the urban fabric of Venice, Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia (published in Rome in 1960). The morphological research tradition of the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Versailles was based on the Laboratoire de Recherche Histoire Architecturale et Urbaine – Sociétés (Ladrhaus, 19732009), which alternately focused on history, the city and society. The study led by Philippe Panerai, Formes urbaines, de l’îlot à la barre (1977) – belatedly published in English as Urban forms: the death and life of the urban block (2004) – shows just how interconnected the Delft and Versailles schools have become and how links between them have continued to grow. Panerai contributed an article entitled ‘The scale of the urban block’ to the Atlas of the Dutch urban block (edited by Susanne Komossa, Han Meyer, Max Risselada, Sabien Thomaes and Nynke Jutten and published in 2005). This emphasised the key role played by Amsterdam in the crucial transformation process – from Haussmann to Le Corbusier – whereby the urban block was first simplified and then abandoned altogether in favour of cities split up into ‘rows’. Pursuing his fascination with Dutch cities, Panerai discussed an ‘architecture of use’ that he had encountered ‘on the road to Haarlem’, in Rotterdam and Amsterdam.1 In the same vein Jean-Charles Depaule, recalling discussions ‘on do-it-yourself, the savage mind and instrumental registers’,

discovered amid much opacity the ‘transparencies’ of the production of space.2 Penetrating the social realm and the practices prevailing there, Depaule thus initiated research into the spontaneous appropriation of the design, as well as the moment of scholarly design.

1 Panerai, ‘Une architecture de l’usage’, in A. M. Châtelet (ed.), L’espace du jeu architectural: Mélanges offerts à Jean Castex, 2007, pp. 21-41. 2 Jean-Charles Depaule, ‘Registres instrumentaux, etc.’, ibid., pp. 42-53. 3 Stübben, Handbuch der Architektur, IV, 1907. 4 Castex, et al., Turin, observations sur l’architecture d’une capitale baroque, 1986.

Interpreting the ground plans of the urban blocks in Amsterdam’s De Pijp district, Komossa recalls those in the southern part of the city (Amsterdam Zuid) and then the celebrated blocks in the Spangen and Blijdorp districts of Rotterdam (designed by Michiel Brinkman and Van den Broek respectively). In doing so, she defines the shapes of these blocks as canonical. The cities were divided into urban blocks drawn as part of an overall construction plan, in regulated areas whose underlying soil had yet to be created. This was very different from the ‘natural’ growth of peripheral districts along roads whose successive branchings ultimately created the urban blocks, or from the practice of early twentieth-century German designers. In his book Der Städtebau,3 Hermann-Josef Stübben – probably influenced by the diversity propagated by Camillo Sitte – presented designs based on the former parcellation pattern, although he was very much in favour of ‘very large urban blocks designed for a variety of uses’, for example in the Marienberg plan (p. 424), whose blocks included parks, a market and small businesses. Accentuation and diversity of functions along the streets were above all intended to ensure variety; this was taken to its extreme in the plan for Brno, at the time still under Austrian rule (p. 341). In the loop of the River Svratka (Schwarzach in German), the plan was ordered by the main street, ‘located more or less in the middle of the site, with a concave south side and a north side lengthened by recesses’. The street led to two traffic circles round the church, creating unexpected views and order in the urban landscape.

The emergence of the modern urban block The notion of the ‘urban block’ seen as an urban structure, in contrast to the street structure, flanked by built-up plots (or, in spatial planning terms, as a basic unit of the urban ground plan), may have originated in the work of the Consiglio d’Ornato in eighteenth-century Turin.4 To correct the errors that had accumulated in the city’s Roman ground plan over the centuries, the council created isole (islands, or urban blocks)

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with names taken from the calendar of saints – 144 names, from Sant’Eustachio to Sant’Anna and Santa Catarina. After 1775, acknowledging the cohesion of the group of residents within each block but compelled to reorient and widen the streets, the Congresso degli Edili set about negotiating the relationship between the private spaces of the plots and the public space of the streets that provided access to them. Removing the front façades so that the buildings no longer faced the street, they recomposed the front façades block by block. Turin’s archives are full of documents on the subject. For example, the Isola San Gabriele on Contrada del Senato5 was given a single front façade extending over three large plots and a length of about a hundred metres. Even though there were three different owners, the façade appeared as a single entity, the result of a process designed to link up the plots by means of a façade. The front façade was composed as a single entity, with a piano nobile marked by series of circular or triangular pediments. The city was turned into a monumental whole. The typology was maintained in a manner that was characteristic of Turin: an atrium, steps and two inner courtyards, the first designed with great care and the second intended for working-class housing. The urban block thus took precedence over the plot. However, the overall arrangement failed to preserve the autonomy of the plots: the inside of the block was a compromise, with the walls between plots located between the windows in the left-hand bay – rather than in the middle of the pillar – and just in front of the left-hand wall of the other bay. The composition and the specific details clashed in complex ways. Similar approaches were adopted in the main road to Milan, the Via Milano, where the front façades were composed block by block, all the way to the splendid Piazza Vittorio Veneto (the former Piazza Po),6 a threehundred-metre length of magnificent design by Giuseppe Frizzi (1824-1825). The neoclassical convention altered the typological scale of the interventions. The Dutch urban block was to take these ideas further, manufacturing the city as an ordered series of urban blocks that formed part of an overall plan. The scale of the intervention became coherent, evidence of great skill; and it raised the question of the complex status of the urban block in relation to public space, which bore the marks of both Dutch tradition and contemporary alterations. The approach to public space in Susanne Komossa’s study is of such fundamental importance that older observations have to be clarified and corrected. Although the task of simplifying the urban block, and finally abandoning it altogether, began with Haussmann’s Paris, the reality of Haussmann’s blocks can only be grasped in the context of an ‘outward-looking’ city. There was a vast difference between Rambuteau’s city (Rambuteau was the prefect under

King Louis-Philippe I) and Haussmann’s. With all due respect to Walter Benjamin, the Paris of old was inward-looking.7 The arcade, for all its gas lighting and glass roofing, only lent itself to intimate use; although it contained cafés and bars, ‘they remained enclosed places’. The middle classes abandoned the street to the workers. Under Haussmann’s administration, streets became brightly lit, the police created a sense of safety, a fall in the price of glass resulted in more shop windows, merchandise was put on public display, cafés and bars put tables out in the street, traffic speeded up and lively boulevards developed. As a result of all this, habits began to change: stiff bourgeois dining habits made way for set menus that attracted almost every social group – an illusion, admittedly, but one that was in line with changing practices.8 Haussmann’s housing blocks (whether middle-class or working-class) in districts such as the former (pre-Haussmann) eighth arrondissement – the Faubourg St Antoine – can only be understood in the light of these changes. César Daly’s sixvolume opus L’architecture privée au XIXe siècle, sous Napoléon III (1864) and its second series (1872) clearly show the relationship between the housing blocks and the new conception of public space. The expansion of trade that followed the spread of commercial licences took over ground floors and mezzanines to create ‘plinths’ of shops and storerooms, supported by metal columns. Above these, the stone or light masonry buildings were divided into floors of apartments, creating a social hierarchy among the occupants. However, except in the workingclass ‘refuges’ of eastern Paris, this remnant of social mixing disguised the loss of the large courtyards where craftsmen had previously plied their trades. The ground plan of the urban block was compressed, and embellished façades were presented to the street. The few blocks that were built entirely for workers – no doubt after Haussmann – were essentially reduced replicas of middle-class housing. These cheap dwellings, built between 1871 and 1885, were intended for the better-off workers (examples included the intersections of Rue Gérando and Rue de Dunkerque near Boulevard de Rochechouart, or Rue Eugène Sue and Rue Simart in the Clignancourt district).9 Social tensions reflected a capital city in which the importance of industry was acknowledged and merchandise was put on public display. These relationships must be properly understood if we are to interpret the gradual changes in the urban fabric and reveal the coherence of the city.

Jean Castex 5 See, for example, ‘Pianta dimostrativa delle isole …’, c. 1775, in Castelnuovo, Cultura figurativa e architettonica negli Stati del Re di Sardegna, 1980, p. 1024. 6 Castex, ‘Piazza Vittorio Veneto (Piazza Po), Turin’, in Architecture of Italy, 2008, pp. 121-122. 7 Benjamin, ‘Paris, capital of the nineteenth century’, in The Arcades Project, New York, 2002. Yet even Benjamin speaks of ‘Louis-Philippe, or the interior’. 8 Gaillard, Paris, la ville (18521870), 1997. The original thesis, presented here by Florence Bourillon and Jean-Luc Pinol, was defended in 1975. The work includes important statistical analyses. 9 Santelli, ‘Les lotissements post-haussmanniens des quartiers nord de Paris’, in Des Cars and Pinon, Paris Haussmann, 1991, pp. 297-303.

The work of Saverio Muratori, and modern architecture Susanne Komossa reinterprets the work of Saverio Muratori, which provides the underpinning for her study. She does so in a detailed discussion of the indelible marks left by the practice of the ‘free plan’, modernist ideas from 1920 onwards

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and the challenges to modernism by Team X (including Alison and Peter Smithson, Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic, Shadrach Woods and Aldo van Eyck). Closer to the present, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and even Rem Koolhaas are cited for their radical reassessments of modernism. In 1959, after winning the competition for the Barene di San Giuliano district in Mestre (on the mainland opposite Venice), Saverio Muratori himself was fiercely attacked by Italy’s leading architects.10 They too had begun to challenge ‘rational’ architecture and call for a return to history and local culture and customs, but at the same time they felt strongly drawn to the Team X group. This persecution was to continue until Muratori’s death in 1973. His position deserves to be explained. We should not forget that, although he had left Venice in 1954, he was preparing to publish his Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia, which appeared in 1960. As a teacher at Venice’s vibrant, turbulent institute of architecture (IUAV) he had already made great enemies, including Manfredo Tafuri, Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi, whose ideas about the logic of the design were very different. Muratori bore the marks of the post-war cultural crisis, which he attempted to solve. Working on the INA-Casa in Rome from 1951 to 1955, he was influenced by working-class culture and preferred ‘ordinary buildings’ to architects’ overindividualistic proposals; he looked for greater professional commitment on their part. In the 1950s, despite his achievements as a pre-war rationalist architect, he was forced to reconsider his architectural position. This caused him to embark on a radical reappraisal that was soon interpreted as a ‘revolution in thinking’ and was to generate fierce hostility around him. As far as he was concerned, solving the crisis in architecture by returning to the city and history meant taking every aspect of culture into account, including politics, economics, ethics and aesthetics. To Muratori, architecture was the discipline in which all these cultural themes came together. He therefore considered architecture the most important phenomenon, and gave it priority. But he felt it must abandon its aloofness and become the historical movement for the transformation of the city. In a country where there were close links between architects and intellectuals, he felt compelled to act as a philosopher.11 He was influenced by the German romantic author Schiller. The post-war cultural crisis cried out for the recovery of lost unity, a ‘spontaneous’ unity that had not yet been shattered by the assaults of rationality. And where was this to be found? In the old city, where the various layers of history, far from being dislocated, could be seen as they had gradually evolved over the centuries. More than any other city, Venice lent itself to such a rediscovery. The philosopher Benedetto Croce inspired in Muratori a view of history as the present rather than the

past: history seen as the ‘will to do’ that guided human action, in the here and now. To Muratori, history was the place where he could exercise his historical judgement, acquire knowledge at the highest level and display his awareness of human culture. In his view, there was no longer any difference between the researcher’s analytical observation and the design as a continuation and updating of history. The titles of his books stubbornly repeated the notion of una operante storia urbana (which can be rendered as ‘urban history put into practice’). Knowledge of urban morphology thus emerged from a reversal of architectural thinking. Rejecting creation without rules, it saw architecture entirely in terms of transformation of the historical object: the city. It called for different practices, and fundamentally challenged prevailing attitudes.12

Morphological analysis and design How was the built reality of the city to be understood? By observing it, recording it and thinking about what was there before it was built and the changes the actual buildings had undergone. This did full justice to history, of which the design was simply the latest moment. This ‘design analysis’ revealed the classifications that could lend order to a disordered city. What the buildings and the shape of the city had in common was the ‘type’. Muratori remained faithful to the idea of classifying built forms and finding the elements they had in common, and their ranking, which formed the ‘nucleus’ of the type, ordered in accordance with social structures. Muratori had produced large tables (tabelloni) for his pupils, showing all the various types of furniture, built structures, cells, buildings, urban fabrics and physical settings. Each type had its own structure and its own means of linkage in one or more directions; each type had its own heterogeneous, homogeneous or juxtaposed heterogeneous or hierarchically ordered constitution. The coherence between the various types was shown by a table showing the repetitive ordering of their linkages. And it was the city that ordered the merging of these various types, from furniture to physical setting, that could be traced in each specific period of the culture.

Jean Castex 10 There is a good deal of literature on the subject. See Casabella, No. 242, 1960, and L’architettura, No. 57, 1960, which contains a fierce attack by Bruno Zevi. Twenty-five years later, in issue No. 509510 of Casabella, edited by Vittorio Gregotti, the trench warfare against typology was still raging. This is discussed in my thesis ‘Le concours de 1959 pour le quartier lacustre de la Barene di S. Giuliano, à Venise Mestre’, in Castex, Une typologie à usages multiples, classer, comprendre, projeter, 2001. 11 See Cohen ‘La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie’, in In Extenso No. 1, 1984, pp. 182-223, on the position of Italian culture. 12 Much of this is taken from Pigafetta, Saverio Muratori architetto, 1990.

The type was abstract in both structure and constitution; it had no form, no pattern (which Muratori called ‘illustration’, visual quality); as far as he was concerned, ‘form’ meant organisation. Of course, all architects tried to find the illustration that most appealed to them; but the type was something else. Muratori was fascinated by the joy of classification and comparison, which he ‘illustrated’ with the help of his tabelloni. There were three basic theorems: — The built type is only revealed in the built fabric. — The urban fabric is only revealed in relation to the whole of the urban structure.

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— The urban structure evolves over time, in a succession of responses and expansions based on earlier states. It was vital not to lose sight of this threefold approach when analysing the city and the distribution of types within it. In any given city, identifying the various types made it possible to understand the culture of the city, how it was organised and how it was perceived in everyday life. That was why the type was the synthesis of the city. It was known in advance, before analysis; it was rooted in urban culture and provided insight into it. Muratori was convinced that space and time, like the notion of a house, were givens in children’s learning processes. He rejected the fragmentation of reality that rationalism entailed. He avoided the clashes created by dialectics. Like Benedetto Croce, he focused on differences rather than contrasts. In essence, Muratori displayed an all-embracing, unitary awareness of the synthesis that had been destroyed by rationality.13 Architects had to be humble, rediscover the lost original substance and aim to be restorers as well as designers. The link with history meant regaining the old built environment as a therapy for modern architecture. To give an old building a new vocation in the present was to restore the continuity of history. Coupling the knowledge of the Venetian fabric that he had accumulated between 1950 and 1954 with the winning design for the Barene di San Giuliano district in 1959, he showed how to put this historical continuity into practice. He wrote an introduction stating that the city, the real Venice, was the sole model. The urban fabric of Venice, even at the end of the 1950s, had a number of advantages: political (striking a balance between the collective realm and individuals), social (not meddling with things that worked well) and economic (finding new solutions to avoid the disorder that threatened our culture). There were four rules that expressed the transition from analysis to design, rules that were characteristic of Venice, typical of Venice, typical tout court, and hence indisputable: (1) organise the form, (2) produce buildings in related and yet distinct groups, (3) be conscious of Venetian types, and yet (4) modernise and adapt them. The three sketches he submitted for the competition precisely reflected these rules and linked his design to the development of Venice.14 The ensuing onslaught on Muratori was later to be called a disgrace to architecture.15 Academic and professional infighting in 1960s Italy meant that Muratori’s awkward lessons were dismissed and his views ignored. He died in 1973, but enjoyed something of a comeback in 1985, twentyfive years down the line, when a well-considered article reviving ideas about urban morphology appeared in issue No. 509-510 of Casabella,

now engaging in criticism of typology under the editorship of Vittorio Gregotti. Suffice it to recall the clashes between Bruno Zevi and Carlo Giulio Argan in 1959 regarding the place of typology and its relationship to the contemporary city.16 Argan discussed at length the ‘vague, general’ notion of types and its primarily inventive purpose. Zevi became obsessed – but this is not to judge his competence as a historian – with the notion of ‘creative freedom’ in contrast to typological ‘rigidification’, a position that Werner Oechslin, returning to a concept of the ‘type’ based on social structures and knowledge of practices, was to describe in 1985 as ‘shrouded in arrogance’.17 In the 1960 issue of Casabella, no less an architect and historian than Leonardo Benevolo had already lashed out at Muratori in a commentary on the Barene competition in which he called him a ‘vampire’! That a historian who regularly published on the Renaissance, modern times and the history of the city – a teacher of modern architecture who hoped it would generate ‘the most brilliant modern efficiency’ inspired by Gropius – should stoop to such depths can only be explained by the ‘scandalous state’18 of Italian universities, which at the time were simply incapable of opening their minds to contemporary architecture. Benevolo responded to the scandal with another scandal. As these clashes made clear, the transition from morphological analysis to design was always a contentious issue in the architectural profession – except among Muratori’s followers, led by Gianfranco Caniggia and the Genoa, Florence and Ferrara schools.

Modern architecture and typomorphological analysis in the Netherlands

Jean Castex 13 Gianfranco Caniggia took Muratori’s ideas further and provided useful tips about his method. See Caniggia, ‘Saverio Muratori, la didattica e il pensiero’, in Montuori (ed.), Lezioni di progettazione, 1988, pp. 124-161, and also Cataldi, ‘Designing in stages’, in A. Petruccioli (ed.), Typological process and design theory, 1998, pp. 35-55. 14 Design drawings not discussed here have been presented in numerous publications. See Cataldi, ‘Designing in Stages’ (note 13), and the BollatiMarinucci archives in Storia Architettura, VII, 1-2, 1984. 15 Cataldi, ‘Designing in Stages’ (note 13), p. 38. 16 The Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, I, 1959, published three articles, one by Argan entitled ‘Tipologia, simbologia, allegorismo delle forme architettoniche’, pp. 13-16, and two by Zevi entitled ‘Problemi di interpretazione critica dell’architettura veneta’ and ‘Attualità culturale di Michele Sanmicheli’, pp. 70-74. 17 Oechslin, ‘Per una ripresa della discussione tipologica’, in Casabella, No. 509-510, 1985, pp. 66-73. 18 Seta, L’architettura del Novecento, 1981, p. 177. 19 See Strauven, Aldo van Eyck, 1998. 20 Avermaete, Another modern, 2005.

Things have been very different in the Netherlands, in both its recent traditions and its current situation. Of course, we need to look closely at the theoretical and social changes that have taken place since 1960; but three main avenues can be identified. The first is the reassessment of modernism, via the rediscovery of other cultures and the realism of social movements. There are many works dealing with the issues that face modern architecture, including Max Risselada’s Raumplan versus Plan Libre (1987). Tribute must also be paid to Aldo van Eyck for his fascination with distant cultures, the driving force behind his criticism,19 which was reviewed and commented on in Tom Avermaete’s 2005 book on Candilis, Josic and Woods.20 The second avenue concerns lifestyles in the context of studies of everyday life, which could well revive interest in Dutch practices. German researchers study Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life and urban behaviour. Their methods provide a model for studies of social trajectories. In Britain, taking its cue from Harold Dyos, there is the Urban History Group, which sees the past as the driving force behind the present and sheds

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light on situations that hitherto seemed impossible to grasp.21 There are numerous other references, including Jane Jacobs’ books (1961 and 1972)22 and, more recently, Michel de Certeau’s The practice of everyday life (1984). The third avenue, examined in detail in the present study, is the link between continuity and discontinuity, which is reassessed by Dutch tradition and encourages it to accept a tolerant modernity. All three avenues concern dwelling layout, building typology and grouping of buildings in the city, revealing all the levels of urban form. Then there is Anne Vernez Moudon’s key research on San Francisco: her 1986 book Built for change shows the capacity for transformation of an urban fabric renowned for the quality of its dwellings. Since 1930 there have been many studies on the adaptation of the fabric, showing what has persisted and what has adapted to ‘modern’ life. In the collective work Atlas of the Dutch urban block (2005), Susanne Komossa presents a broad range of solutions and some fine examples of successful transformations which together have proved capable of structuring Dutch cities in a meaningful fashion. An interesting parallel may be drawn with Antonio Monestiroli’s ‘architecture of reality’23 and his lectures, published in 2005. The notion of tolerant modernity is increasingly popular. In the Netherlands, the firm backing provided by morphological studies based on the work of Saverio Muratori, as well as the constant practical confirmation of a version of modernism that is accepted and advocated via the design of public space and housing, have enabled formal analysis and design to come together in much of the Randstad’s emerging urban area. A true urban culture is being put to the test, and is benevolently guiding the transition from the old to the new. Perhaps we may now begin to dream of as comprehensive a catalogue as Stübben’s Der Städtebau (1907), which endeavoured to present all the morphological solutions to contemporary cities. A century on, in 2010, why not try again?

Jean Castex 21 Dyos, Victorian suburb, 1961, and Dyos and Wolff (eds), The Victorian city, 1973. 22 Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities, 1961, and The economy of cities, 1969. 23 Monestiroli, L’architettura della realtà, 1979. The lectures have been published in English as The metope and the triglyph, 2005. Italian culture provides a number of examples: Casciato et al., Funzione e senso, 1979. And, of course, on the ‘culture of congestion’, there is Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, 1978.



*

Jean Castex is an architect. Until he retired he was professor of architectural history at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Versailles, which he helped set up in 1969. He was also in charge of the Laboratoire de recherche histoire architecturale et urbaine – sociétés (Ladrhaus), which he likewise founded. The main focus of his studies is what he calls ‘urban form’, a reassessment of typomorphology (a concept developed in Italy). He introduced this concept in Jean Castex, Jean-Charles Depaule and Philippe Panerai, Formes urbaines: de l’îlot à la barre, Paris, 1977 (a highly praised English translation of this seminal work, Urban forms: the death and life of the urban block, was published by Architectural Press in 2004). The book has been reprinted several times and is still used as a textbook. Other publications by Castex that are of relevance to the present study are Lecture d’une ville: Versailles (co-authors Patrick Céleste and Philippe Panerai), Paris, Moniteur, 1980, Histoire urbaine, anthropologie de l’espace (co-authors JeanLouis Cohen and Jean-Charles Depaule), Paris, CNRS, 1995, and Chicago 1910-1930, le chantier de la ville moderne, Paris, Editions de la Villette, 2010. The following book of his should also be mentioned: Renaissance, baroque et classicisme: histoire de l’architecture 1420-1720, Paris, Hazan, 1990.

Jean Castex, Paris, 2010* The headings have been added by the editor of the series of which this book forms part.

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Chapter 4

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm

The structure of the block and transitional architectural features The transition from the private space of the dwelling to the public realm: the Dutch urban block as intermediary The task of the Dutch urban block is today determined by the changing demands made on dwellings and the housing environment. The nature of the public realm itself is also changing, and so the programme for the urban block is different and the relationship between the dwelling and its environment must be reshaped each time. This ought to result in new architectural models for the dwelling and the housing environment. What often happens, however, is that familiar urban block typologies are simply transformed and recycled, as in the case of Amsterdam’s Java and KNSM islands, where the themes of the closed and the open urban block have been revived. Sometimes there are unexpected ‘reinventions’,1 such as the design for Amsterdam’s GWL site with its pavilion-like buildings in green surroundings. The transformation of the urban block in relation to the public realm is a continuous process, which can be described as ‘work in progress’. It is a tremendous challenge – not just in typological and quantitative terms, but also when it comes to developing new architectural models that tackle the issue of the Dutch urban block far more broadly than we have been accustomed to since the Second World War. Owing to increased prosperity, the average new dwelling is larger than it used to be. This is not just because people can afford larger dwellings, but also because they spend more time there and in some cases even work from home. As a result of this, and also because of the growing number of single-person or two-person households, individual space requirements have increased and average occupancy per dwelling has fallen. The number of people living in each dwelling is thus declining, and so therefore is population density in existing city centres, restructuring areas and new housing districts.2 So far the implications of this for public space in neighbourhoods and districts have not been studied,3 but it seems likely that towns and cities are not as busy as they once were and that streets are getting quieter. Another trend can be observed in Amsterdam and Utrecht, cities with a highly educated population and a relatively large knowledge industry. Owing to the need for a public realm and places where knowledge can be exchanged,4 people – especially those work-

ing in the knowledge and creative industries – are prepared to accept smaller dwellings in order to live and work in or close to the city centre. In such areas, population density has stopped falling or even started to rise. In the urban areas of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, people are now required to park off the street and the standard number of cars per dwelling is two rather than one. This is inevitably leading to the introduction of new typologies for car parks, which are now located underground, in inner courtyards or even on roofs. Areas inside urban blocks that used to be green are now increasingly paved. In many places (even the low-rise dwellings on Amsterdam’s Borneo and Sporenburg peninsulas) the new ‘parking norm’ has resulted in gardens being transferred to the roof, or abolished altogether as private outdoor space. Once again, however, the situation is different in and around the centres of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Many knowledge workers are prepared to get rid of their cars altogether in order to live centrally. Their living and working environments are starting to become greener as people turn their balconies into lush miniature urban Arcadias and plant roofs, streets and quaysides with flowers or redesign them as picnic places or terraces.5

1 Brouwer, ‘A new old coat: the reinvention of urban tissues and dwelling types’, in Komossa et al., Atlas of the Dutch urban block, 2005, pp. 246-250. 2 Even rising housing density (expressed in numbers of dwellings per hectare) can in some areas be accompanied by a fall in the number of people actually living there. 3 However, for reasons of sustainability and energy conservation, the need for urban densification is no longer questioned. 4 Of course, other factors play a part in the choice of location, such as accessibility, public transport, local facilities, ease of access for pedestrians and cyclists, the housing supply and, of course, status. 5 A good example is the MVRDV building and the surrounding area on Amsterdam’s Silodam. 6 The term ‘urban block’ is generally understood to mean the closed urban block, surrounded by streets on four sides. The definition used in this study is broader. Thus a cluster or ‘stamp’ consisting of several separate buildings surrounded by traffic routes, as in Rotterdam’s Pendrecht district, is also treated here as an urban block.

An increase in the number of cars inevitably has implications for public space: either it is taken over by the cars, or they are carefully hidden away. No satisfactory balance has yet been struck between cruising traffic as an enrichment of the public realm and cars as stationary or moving street decoration in relation to the large numbers of cars in search of somewhere to park. The same applies to green space and children’s play areas in cities. Here again the question is to what extent green space can be part of inner-city locations, and what to do with the kids: park them in pretty playgrounds full of springy chickens, or redesign public space so that they can play anywhere? The increasing diversity of city dwellers also means we must think about socioeconomic mixing and the nature of the public realm. Not only the city, but also the area in and around the urban block,6 should provide space for a variety of people who do not all have the same social, cultural or economic backgrounds and whose daily living habits differ. What this means for

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the architectural and urban planning task of the Dutch urban block in today’s context is that we must not only build larger dwellings and provide enough parking space, but also ask ourselves how dwellings in today’s new expansion and restructuring areas and inner cities can be geared to a diverse population and the public realm at urban block and city level. Could overlapping functions be the answer? As the population structure changes, the erstwhile ‘model’ districts – much of which is taken up by collective green space – are now increasingly unpopular, and threatened with demolition. Their residents, old or new, complain of crime and neglect. With increasing diversity, models for the urban block that focus entirely on collective space and ‘the regenerative function of housing’ are starting to look obsolete. The same goes for new housing plans that focus too heavily on the collective realm. Such models seem unlikely to survive for long in the face of a changing population structure. Instead of a collective realm, the contemporary Dutch urban block needs a differentiated public realm that welcomes all city dwellers and gives them space to develop. This will only be possible if there is public space not just in the city but also in and around the urban block, where various population groups can manifest themselves, city dwellers can see what others are up to, people work and go to school, loitering teenagers are treated as a normal phenomenon, individuals and groups are confronted with one another, ideas are exchanged and opinions are formed. If an area is really to form part of the public realm,7 we must ask ourselves to what extent tomorrow’s urban block and its immediate surroundings can provide space for the exchange that is implicit in the public sphere. As regards ‘tomorrow’s urban block’, we architects need to know which architectural models are available to us, and then analyse their rules. How was the transition between the private and public realms shaped in the past? How can today’s dwellings be appropriately linked to the city? How can public space truly be designed as the pivotal feature of an area, rather than a mere extension of housing? However, it is not enough just to know the architectural and urban planning models and rules. We also need to know – and critically examine – the sociocultural and economic ideals on which such historical precedents were based. For a very long period of time, from 1600 to 1935, the shape of the Dutch urban block remained narrow and elongated, with more or less the same depth and length. The block displayed a considerable degree of continuity throughout this 335-year period. However, its structure changed. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s

ring of canals, the individual house was a socioeconomic unit. In the nineteenth century the entire urban block took over this function, in the form of the programmatically mixed urban block. This was also reflected in the structure of the façade. In the seventeenth century each house had its own architecturally distinct façade. In the nineteenth century façades were designed street by street. They had a varied substructure, a similar central section and separate roofs for each house. The emphasis was on a succession of similar façades in each street wall, rather than separate façades for each house. The urban blocks that the early twentieth-century social reformers designed for the working class no longer included economic functions such as shops and workshops, which had still been an integral part of the programmatically mixed nineteenth-century block. These were now replaced by ‘collective’ facilities for the residents’ daily hygiene and sometimes also education. The composition of the façade changed once again, emphasising the urban block as an architectural unit. In the 1950s – by which time the closed urban block had completely disintegrated – the collective realm was the predominant feature in districts such as Pendrecht, not only in the areas between the housing blocks, but also on the scale of the neighbourhood and the district. The district was presented as a single unit, a three-dimensional overall architectural composition. In the 1970s the collective-space model – originally developed in order to emancipate the working class – was reapplied when restructuring the existing urban fabric, as in Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarktbuurt and Rotterdam’s Oude Westen districts. The façades of the blocks in urban renewal areas were fragmented. Typical features of the new style – later to be dubbed the nieuwe truttigheid, or ‘new tweeness’ – were small scale and variety. At the end of the twentieth century the urban block was transformed yet again. As far as façades are concerned, we now appear to be returning to an architecture of the city.

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm 7 The ‘public realm’ or ‘public sphere’ is usually defined as the domain in which there is both virtual and physical exchange of ideas, opinions, experience, knowledge, ideologies, goods and labour. The definition used in this chapter is a narrower one. The ‘public realm’ is defined here as the physical space in and around the urban block, which provides space for the exchange that is associated with the public sphere.

Silodam block of flats, designed by MVRDV, Amsterdam.

The transformation of the Dutch urban block has been briefly described above with reference to the structure of the block and the composition of façades. The remainder of this chapter will document and interpret this transformation process in relation to the public realm, with reference to features of the architectural model that are of relevance to the present-day design task: — What ideal was associated with the architectural model, the specific example, in each given period? What was the agenda of the urban block? What were the goals associated with the block, the schedule of requirements and the functions in and around the block, such as space for commerce, transport, relaxation and recreation?

Profusion of plants on a balcony in Silodam.

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Comparison of access typologies and transitions between dwellings and the public realm, 1900-2000, 1:625 (BG = ground floor).

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— What were the intentions behind the urban block? Were they economic, sociocultural or hygienic? — How were the sequence and the distance between the dwelling and the public realm designed? — What was the nature of the transition? How were architectural features used to organise the transition? — What was the role of intermediate areas such as corners, pavements, landings, front gardens and canopies, and what part was played by the access typology and the façade that were meant to provide a link between indoors and outdoors? — What was the layout of the dwelling – for example, did the interior face the street?

Amsterdam’s ring of canals: the home as a socioeconomic unit During the seventeenth century, the canal house was a place where housing and work coexisted. In a sense this was a continuation of the tradition of mixed activities that had become common in the now overcrowded city centre (although some goods were already stored in warehouses along the River IJ). Canal houses were trading houses, storage areas and dwellings rolled into one. The commercial office, or comptoir,8 was on the street, the attic was used for storage, and the merchant’s family and servants lived in the back room and on the upper floor. The basement at the front of the house was usually let to traders in bulk goods such as beer and wine. Individual canal houses in Amsterdam thus contained a mixture of various social groups and economic activities: businessmen, traders in local and international goods, ship owners, persons of leisure, shopkeepers and wage-earners. The canal house was a sociocultural as well as economic microcosm. The relationship between the public and private realms was also shaped on the scale of the individual house. The pavement, the stairs, the wide corridor and the comptoir were simultaneously part of the house and the public realm. The house was directly linked to a ‘global’ traffic and transport system comprising pulleys mounted in gables, quays and canals which in turn were linked to the River IJ, and side streets full of shops and workshops. The quays had a transport, storage, trade and recreation function. There was a great deal of overlap between the various functions, and as a result the canals, quays and side streets formed the public realm surrounding the block. The quays and side streets were undoubtedly very busy – a great deal of everyday life took place there. The hierarchy of the streets in this system was simple and amazingly effective. The canals were the main streets; the narrow, waterless side streets provided a pedestrian link (flanked by workshops) with the city centre; and the cross

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm 8 French for counter. 9 They were found in the less deliberately planned parts of the city, such as the old centre and Jordaan. 10 It is always claimed that the housing function predominated in the ring of canals (Taverne, Abrahamse and Noyon), but this overlooks the complex social as well as economic organisation of the house and the urban block in that part of Amsterdam.

canals provided the connection with the surrounding area. There were scarcely any alleyways within the ring of canals.9 As already mentioned, the individual house was the basic unit in the block. However, the block as a whole also formed an economic unit, composed of individual buildings or plots. The succession of individual buildings along the building line formed the closed urban block. At urban block level the stables and coach houses were collective facilities. The spacious inner courtyard, most of which was taken up by the houses’ large gardens, formed an inner-city Arcadia where each merchant’s family had a miniature ‘country home’ in the form of a summerhouse. In contrast to the prestigious merchants’ houses along the canals, the side streets contained smaller houses that were workshops, shops and dwellings all in one. The blocks with internal gardens combined a large number of urban functions, and even markets, churches and cemeteries were to some extent part of the block fabric. They were located in recesses and leftover spaces in the bends of the ring of canals. On the scale of the city, the differentiation of functions within Amsterdam’s city walls was simple: the old city, the ring of canals,10 Jordaan, the Plantage, the moorings and the warehouses along the IJ. As for the integration of housing and industry, segregation of industry and trade began in the seventeenth-century ring of canals. The building regulations (known as keuren) banned businesses that caused local pollution or other forms of nuisance. These were located in the Jordaan district.

Series of façades in the ring of canals.

The late nineteenth-century mixed-use urban block In the nineteenth century the individual building ceased to be a microcosm of the city. It was no longer the individual house that formed an urban microcosm of production and consumption (as it had done in the seventeenth-century ring of canals), but the closed urban block as a whole. The block was still closed, but often had a rear passageway. The basic subdivision was the plot. Building now took place on a larger scale, and a series of plots could be developed and built on as a single project. Flats were built for a number of tenants or owners within such rows of buildings.

Façade, 59 Herengracht, 1659.

Floor plan, 59 Herengracht, 1659.

A typical example: De Pijp in Amsterdam The typical nineteenth-century urban block provided housing for various population groups and places for work, shopping and entertainment. It was not only functionally but also socioeconomically differentiated and mixed. In this mixeduse urban block, each street wall had its own architectural and housing typology. For example, the goudrand (‘golden perimeter’) – the elegant buildings in De Pijp overlooking the Sarphati-

Cross-section, 59 Herengracht, 1659.

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park – consisted entirely of housing. Through streets were flanked by shops and upstairs dwellings. Businesses, dwellings and groundfloor shops alternated in the backstreets. Public functions, such as bars and cafés, were preferably located on the corners. These were meeting places where the various social worlds in the nineteenth-century urban block came into contact. In the side streets there were mainly houses divided into upstairs and downstairs flats, the first of their kind in the Netherlands. The downstairs flat usually occupied the ground and first floors, with the front room or entire ground floor often taken up by a shop or business that was run from home and was either one or two storeys in height. The upstairs flat was purely a dwelling, sometimes a single one but sometimes let floor by floor or even room by room. A typical feature of this arrangement was the open porch with steps and two or more front doors opening onto the street. The ground-floor door was the entrance to a dwelling, shop or business, and the second door on the landing at the top of the steps provided access to the upstairs dwellings. Sometimes there was a third door that served as a second entrance to the downstairs flat. The open porch can be seen as an extension of the public realm of the street. It was finely decorated with tiles, wrought-iron fencing and patterned front doors. Sometimes the porch and the double-height shop front formed a compositional unit. The materials, ornamentation and composition reflected the occupants’ status. The façade of the upstairs flat was flat and plain, soberly decorated with simple brick bands and a single balcony. The sash windows in the façade had opaque leaded panes that filtered light and ensured privacy. Both the upper and lower sections of the windows could move; this literally made the relationship between indoors and outdoors on the upper floors a ‘shifting’ one that could be regulated at will. The contrast between the varied substructure of the street wall and the plain façades of the superstructure reflected the relationship between the various functions in the urban block and their relationship with the public realm of the street. The substructure breathed, as it were, and had a variety of relationships with the street; the superstructure was plain and almost remote, emphasising the privacy of the dwelling. The façades of the town houses on the Sarphatipark were far more lavishly decorated, often with more than one balcony. Materials and ornamentation sometimes even differed from building to building, thereby emphasising the individual dwelling. In this street wall, the small porch on

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm

the street with steps and a front door to the raised ground floor (bel étage) created distance. From the front room, which of course was part of a kamer en suite, occupants had a splendid view of the park, and at the same time were literally raised above the hustle and bustle of the pavement and the street. Pavements became wider in the nineteenth century. The new districts made little or no provision for national and international trade and storage of goods via canals, and this changed the use of the street. Shops and businesses were now more geared to the urban economy. The goudrand buildings overlooking the singels, squares and parks were used solely as dwellings. Singels and parks, new public-realm features of urban expansion areas, became places for meeting people, recreation, play and contemplation. During this transformation of the urban block, a difference in urban planning models emerged between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In Rotterdam the nineteenth-century block was – and still is – much more clearly a mixed-use block, with broad socioeconomic differentiation within each street wall and each block. There was also considerable variation within neighbourhoods. Sociocultural and economic hierarchy was reflected in the width of the streets and the distance from, for example, the green singels. The through streets were flanked by ground-floor shops with upstairs dwellings, while the secondary streets housed businesses (also with upstairs dwellings) and had shops on the corners. The tertiary streets mainly provided housing for the growing number of workers in the port, shipyards and other industries. Amsterdam’s planned approach to nineteenthcentury urban expansion allowed social differentiation between districts. In Amsterdam the Van Niftrik plan (and later the Kalff plan) created a second ring round the city. Within this nineteenth-century ring, the Kinderbuurt, Oud Zuid, De Pijp and Dapperbuurt districts were – and still are – distinct from one another in terms of elegance.

The early twentieth century: collective space is introduced into the urban block With the spread of specifically working-class housing following the adoption of the 1901 Housing Act, the shape of the hitherto closed urban block changed: it gradually began to open up. Especially in Rotterdam, a number of publicly accessible functions were transferred to the inside of the urban block in the form of collective facilities. This changed the character of the public realm in and around the block. The notion of ‘public housing’ as a social ideal and a task for social reform was born. At least as far as working-class housing was concerned, it

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included an entire range of social and hygienic goals such as ‘modern’ dwellings with separate bedrooms for boys and girls, separate kitchens, good ventilation, measures to curb alcoholism among workers, collective facilities as a means of emancipation and so forth.11 Apart from building costs, economic factors now played only a minor part in the organisation and design of the urban block; people worked elsewhere, in large port and industrial areas, and activities associated with the urban economy were excluded from the block. The public realm became a collective realm for the neighbourhood and its occupants, who all had the same background and whose everyday lives followed a similar pattern. Roughly speaking, the goals of housing associations and local authorities could be divided into quantitative ones (such as more affordable dwellings) and qualitative ones (including measures to promote hygiene, improvement of living conditions and sociocultural goals). At dwelling level, major public health goals included sunlight, fresh air and good ventilation. Another qualitative feature was a separate living room rather than a kitchen where the occupants washed, cooked and lived. Separate bedrooms for boys, girls and parents were also advocated, for social as well as hygienic reasons. However, there were other, less readily apparent social agendas. In Rotterdam’s Spangen district, large lifts and galleries ensured that groceries could be delivered straight to the front doors of second-floor dwellings. This meant that housewives no longer had to go out into the street to do their daily shopping. For similar reasons, refuse chutes were installed in dwellings and central heating systems in housing blocks. Grocery lifts in stairways were still a feature of many projects in the 1950s. On the one hand this made housewives’ lives easier, but at the same time it excluded women from the urban public realm. The social reformers evidently thought of the public realm as something to be avoided. Finally, female home inspectors were regularly appointed as part of new housing association projects. Their job was to make sure that households were well run and that dwellings were used and cleaned properly. Collective facilities at urban-block and sometimes even neighbourhood level included sun terraces and collective gardens where residents could spend their time in safe, healthy conditions. There were play areas and galleries for small children, for example in Van den Broek’s 1934 block in Rotterdam’s Blijdorp district; in bad weather they could play in the galleries. Some housing blocks had sewing rooms and classrooms for sociocultural activities. Other new features were bathing and washing facilities in the form of bathhouses at neighbourhood, or

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm

preferably block, level. Along with shops (often run as cooperatives), functions that had originally been part of the urban public realm were thus ‘collectivised’ and moved closer to the private realm of the dwelling. Of course, this also meant that cafés and other public drinking establishments were excluded from the new districts. In this connection, Arnold Reijndorp has spoken of the ‘domestication of urban living’.12 In a sense, this shift towards the private and collective realms also meant the domestication of public life.

11 De Jong and Komossa, ‘Van saamhorig ploeteren naar opgesloten koesteren’, 1981, pp. 2-17. 12 Reijndorp, ‘The domestication of urban living’, in Komossa et al., Atlas of the Dutch urban block, 2005, pp. 259 ff. 13 Berlage was also involved in the urban plan for Vreewijk.

In the early twentieth century, as a result of all these arrangements and services, the urban block became socioeconomically more monofunctional, with a one-sided focus on housing and related facilities. In both Amsterdam and Rotterdam the socioeconomically mixed urban block made way for blocks and neighbourhoods with a far more homogeneous population structure. The social reformers’ urban block was far less differentiated than its nineteenth-century predecessor, which had been both a sociocultural and an economic unit. It was also more uniform, for it consisted of a large number of largely identical dwellings. A difference thus arose between complexes and housing areas intended for unskilled workers and ones for skilled workers and the middle class. Not only did this encourage social segregation at urban-block and neighbourhood level, but streets became visibly less varied. Corner bars disappeared, and corners of urban blocks became architecturally plainer. Some activities that had previously taken place in the street, such as children’s play and various domestic tasks, were transferred to the collective inner courtyard. There was a risk of architectural monotony. The programmatic uniformity and repetition of identical dwellings raised the question of how the urban block or complex as a whole – and of course the social reformers’ ideals – could be expressed in a new manner. The result was new compositional patterns for façades. The emphasis shifted to the block as a whole, which is why there was often something castle-like about the social reformers’ complexes, with their prominent gateways and underpasses, and corners marking the ends of street walls. Although Rotterdam and Amsterdam pursued the same goals and ideals in the wake of the Housing Act, there were a number of fundamental differences in the models the two cities developed for the urban block at the start of the twentieth century. Rotterdam continued the garden city idea (first developed in Vreewijk)13 in its ‘high-rise’ projects in Spangen, Bospolder and Tussendijken. In the Spaarndammerbuurt and Nieuw Zuid districts, Amsterdam developed

Gateway to the inner courtyard of Michiel Brinkman’s urban block in Spangen, Rotterdam.

Collective facilities in the inner courtyard: bathhouse, laundry, boiler house and terrace for children to play on.

Gateway, 2003.

Corner of urban block, 2003.

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the super-block, based on German ideas about mixed-use building14 as interpreted and introduced by Berlage.

Rotterdam: the stacked garden village In the new districts built between 1900 and 1930, Rotterdam pursued the idea of the closed nineteenth-century urban block with a rear passageway. A new feature was the inclusion of a collective garden in the inner courtyard, as in J. J. P. Oud’s blocks in Tussendijken. There the courtyard was designed in accordance with the model developed for the Vreewijk garden village, in turn based on examples from Britain’s garden city movement. In Vreewijk the row of back gardens belonging to ground-floor dwellings was set off from the inner courtyard with hedges. Next to these was a footpath (previously a rear passageway). In the middle of the courtyard was the collective garden, again bounded by hedges. Oud then used the motif of back gardens, a footpath and a collective garden in the ‘highrise’ projects in Tussendijken. Here access to the collective gardens was not via a system of short cuts and rear passageways as in Vreewijk, but via a lockable gate for the occupants of the upstairs dwellings. The ground-floor residents’ private gardens directly adjoined the footpath round the collective garden. This model was taken further by Michiel Brinkman. His merged double urban block in Rotterdam’s Spangen district was the most prominent example from this period, but also the one that was hardest to grasp. His design for the Spaansebocht (‘Spanish bend’) linked up two elongated or else three crosswise blocks.15 This created a large inner courtyard broken up by smaller crosswise and lengthwise blocks. The link to the surrounding streets was provided by four gateways and a small section of street inside the block, making the courtyard accessible to the public. The entrances to the groundaccess dwellings on the ground and first floors were located on the inside of the block. The result was a completely new linkage and transition between the public and private realms, from the path providing access to pairs of adjoining dwellings and their gardens and the small square shared by ten dwellings, to the street through the block, where the playground, sun terrace, bathhouse and laundry were located. The gallery, a second-floor ‘aerial street’ that provided access to the maisonettes, was also located on the inside of the block, completing the notion of the vertical garden village. Brinkman interposed collective spaces and facilities at block level between his open urban block and Spangen’s public realm. This quite definitely increased the distance between the private realm of the dwelling and the public realm. The block turned into a bastion, an urban enclave with laws and rules of its own.

Amsterdam: super-blocks in Spaarndammerbuurt and Amsterdam Zuid In the early twentieth century, the motif of the double ring of buildings was introduced in the Spaarndammerbuurt and Amsterdam Zuid districts. This was an elongated, closed urban block that was bent and curved in all kinds of ways to create urban spaces, courtyards, streets and squares.

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm 14 For more on this, see Chapter 9, ‘The social reformers’ city’. 15 In Brinkman’s version the merging of urban blocks did not lead to a reduction in the number of dwellings, which was the same in all three models.

In Spaarndammerbuurt, the result was a series of inner courtyards that were linked to each other and the surrounding streets by gateways. The inner ring was lower – three storeys with pairs of stacked dwellings – than the outer, five-storey ring. The gateways, the low buildings, the roofs and the gables emphasised the collective nature of the inner courtyards, as village-like enclaves in the city. All the dwellings, including the upstairs ones, had their own front doors in a small porch that opened onto the pavement. From here, residents only had to cross the pathway to reach the communal garden, which was surrounded by a low fence. Access to the dwellings in the outer ring was via a ‘Hague porch’. This meant that first-, second- and third-floor dwellings had their own front doors on an open first-floor landing. In a sense, the Hague porch was derived from the nineteenth-century porch. It was open to the street and hence was an extension of the public realm. The steps linked the landing directly to the pavement. Rather than the individual building or dwelling being identifiable in the composition of the façades in the collective courtyard and the streets, the emphasis was on the size of the complex as a whole. Particularly on the streetward sides, the focus was on the overall volume of the complex rather than the individual dwelling. Corners and gateways were highlighted by graphic features such as turrets. From the outside, the residential courtyards resembled castles. In Amsterdam Zuid, the double rings of buildings did not create closed, collective inner courtyards or enclaves, but spatial sequences of boulevards and squares that were part of a network of large and small streets. The small streets provided a link with the city centre, and the boulevards with other districts. A good example of a boulevard was the wide, stately Noorder Amstellaan (renamed Churchilllaan at the end of the Second World War). Rijnstraat was a typical side/shopping street, and Jekerstraat was a good example of a combined neighbourhood square and residential street. In this arrangement, gateways and alleyways again provided links through the ring. Collective facilities such as schools were included in the ring in strategic monumental locations on squares. The classic division of the urban block into front and rear sections was

Gateway to Zaanhof, Spaarndammerbuurt, Amsterdam.

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maintained. The composition of the façades emphasised the continuity of the street walls and the urban space rather than the volume of the actual block, and this was accentuated by having façades that were identical in height. There were two access typologies in Amsterdam Zuid. One was the Hague porch.16 The other was the ‘battery of front doors’, in which an ingenious system of stairways gave two of the three upstairs dwellings their own front doors at ground level. This was almost certainly an echo of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when Amsterdam was still a city of homes and the more prestigious houses had their own direct access to the street. The Hague porch and the ‘battery of front doors’ allowed this tradition to be continued in urban blocks that were divided into flats.

The 1930s and 1950s, Blijdorp and Pendrecht: the public realm makes way for collective space The housing experiments of the 1930s put an end to the public realm in Dutch housing. It was replaced by collective space at block, neighbourhood and district level. The construction of Van den Broek’s housing block in Rotterdam’s Blijdorp district17 in 1934 marked the end of the closed urban block as the urban vernacular in Dutch cities. The hitherto closed – or only partly open – urban block now finally disintegrated. In this transformation process, Van den Broek’s block consistently reflected modernist ideals about, for example, row housing and open corners that greatly increased the amount of sun and daylight in all the dwellings, as compared with the closed corners in urban blocks. The open urban block thus became the icon of modernism. At the same time, it continued the tradition of early twentieth-century reform projects for workers, among other things by providing collective facilities such as a communal garden and galleries for children to play in. The modern dwelling layout, already visible in Michiel Brinkman’s Spangen project, was further developed by Van den Broek. The dwelling was flexibly divided up on the basis of precisely defined daytime and night-time activities. At night, fold-away beds turned the living room/study into a children’s bedroom, and the children’s playroom into a bedroom for the parents. Such flexibility made the dwelling resemble a closely fitting ‘glove’ rather than a more roomy ‘mitten’.18 Some of the collective facilities introduced in working-class housing in the 1920s, such as bathhouses and laundries, became an integral part of the dwelling in middle-class Blijdorp, albeit in a minimal, compact form that would recur in 1950s projects.19

Consistent application of porch access and builtin grocery lifts meant the end of door-to-door trade in milk, fruit and vegetables. Housewives in modern porch-access flats put their money and shopping lists into a basket, then hoisted the groceries and their change back up again. The intentional effect of this was to keep physical contact between housewives and traders, such as milkmen, to a minimum.20 Van den Broek himself described the glassfronted porches as extensions of the street, as roadside lamps. In practice, however, they increased the distance between the dwelling and the street. His decision to locate the ground-floor dwellings over a raised plinth of storage areas had the same result. The creation of storage areas below the ground-floor dwellings and a gallery for children to play in at the same level on the inside of the block also meant that the ground-floor dwellings no longer had individual gardens. These were replaced by a collective garden in the inner courtyard, to be used by all the occupants. In Van den Broek’s design for the block of flats in Blijdorp, the amount of green space at urbanblock level was increased by leaving one side, facing the Vroesenpark, unbuilt. The collective space in the inner courtyard was carefully divided into a play gallery, a school garden and a boating pond for the children and a garden for the adults to lie in and enjoy. Van den Broek designed a separate place for each activity. The omission of one side of the block reduced housing density. Activities that had previously overlapped in the street or the park, such as play areas for children, were now transferred to the inside of the urban block. The number of people out in the street decreased. As the various functions and activities were divided up and segregated, the public space of the street lost some of its potential as a place for exchange and possibly also conflict.

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm 16 The Hague porch (Haags portiek in Dutch) was used in The Hague from 1900 onwards as an access system for stacked working-class and middleclass dwellings. It ensured that even upstairs dwellings in three-storey housing – the standard building height in the city – had front doors that were in direct contact with the street. The ground-floor dwellings had front doors at street level, and the first-floor and second-floor dwellings had front doors opening onto a first-floor landing that was directly connected to the street by an open staircase. The stairs up to the second floor were just inside the front door on the landing and so were part of the upper dwelling. ‘In those days, living upstairs meant less status’ (Pars, Het Haagse portiek, 2005, p. 12). 17 As well as in Merkelbach and Karsten’s Landlust project in Amsterdam. 18 Venturi and Scott Brown, Architecture as signs and systems, for a mannerist time, 2004, p. 37, ‘Glove versus mitten’. 19 Generations of Dutch people bathed in the lavet, a deep basin that was installed next to the kitchen and also served as a washing machine (it was driven by water pressure). 20 I am not aware of any evidence that the grocery lift actually helped reduce the number of children conceived out of wedlock.

Pendrecht: the green ideal of the reconstruction period During the period of reconstruction that followed the Second World War, up to the end of the 1960s, the urban block disintegrated even more than it had in Blijdorp. The idea was to pave the way for housing ‘surrounded by collective space’. As housing density per hectare fell dramatically, the amount of communal green space in the new districts greatly expanded, further increasing the distance between the dwelling and the public realm. The programme for the reconstruction of Rotterdam had been drawn up by Van Tijen, Maaskant, Brinkman and Van den Broek back in 1941 (immediately after the 1940 bombardment) in a study entitled Woonmogelijkheden in het nieuwe Rotterdam (‘Housing potential in the new Rot-

Cover of Maristella Casciato, Franco Panzini and Sergio Polano’s Funzione e senso, Milan, 1979, showing J. J. P. Oud’s proposal for the urban blocks in Blijdorp.

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terdam’).21 Together with A. Bos’s 1946 book De stad der toekomst, de toekomst der stad (‘The city of the future, the future of the city’),22 this provided the link between pre-war and post-war housing. The first task during the reconstruction period was to replace the approximately 25,000 dwellings destroyed in the bombing. Van Tijen et al. took a critical but also positive view of attempts by functionalist architects to divide up cities into housing, work, recreation and traffic functions. Although they considered the pre-war efforts powerful and ‘modern’, they also felt they were ‘abstract’. ‘However, functionalist architects ... saw new potential in reality: open, orderly cities and towns, with clear division of functions, technically and socially perfect and hence clean.’23 What they liked about the modern pre-war projects was the carefully thought-out orientation of the housing blocks, the absence of sunless corners, the sociocultural facilities such as schools and shops, the amount of green space and recreational facilities and the large windows. At the same time, they pointed to the contrast between ideal housing and everyday life. ‘The reality of the public market, of the workday, of the port may be harsh, raw and ugly, but it stimulates the imagination and creates activity.’24 And they added ‘But in the future we will strive for a stronger humanity which can not only allow enjoyment and provide calm, security and comfort, but can also withstand them.’25 Unfortunately, the study did not analyse this contrast in further detail. After a brief review of ‘modern’ Dutch architecture, starting with Berlage, it presented the programme for the new housing districts. As Van Tijen et al. saw it, the new districts would be socioeconomically segregated housing districts inhabited by people of different ages and with differing family structures, but not from different social backgrounds. Looking back, this housing programme can be seen as the first deliberate attempt at urban segregation. ‘The awareness of profound differences between residents, differences in age, needs, wishes, preferences and desires, as well in sociocultural level, is one such aspect. One housing district should be suitable for workers, the next for the lower middle-class and intellectuals, the next for families and the next for single people; there should be space for children, elderly people and adults, for men and women, for people who above all feel themselves to be city dwellers and for those who want to maintain as much contact as possible with green space and openness even in the midst of the city.’26 This was a clear statement of the programme for districts such as Pendrecht and Zuidwijk. It involved not only urban segregation, but also linkage between type of building and family structure. ‘The differences in housing requirements that lead to differences in building are twofold: differences in type of family (young families, standard families, large families, el-

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm 21 Van Tijen et al., Woonmogelijkheden in het nieuwe Rotterdam, 1941. 22 Bos et al., De stad der toekomst, de toekomst der stad, 1946. 23 Van Tijen et al., Woonmogelijkheden in het nieuwe Rotterdam, 1941, p. 12. 24 Ibid., p. 14. 25 Ibid., p. 15. 26 Ibid., p. 18. 27 Ibid., p. 19 (author’s italics). 28 The ‘stamp’ reached its nadir in 1960 with Groosman Partners’ design for Amsterdam’s Buitenveldert district, in which hook-like blocks of identical dwellings were repeated ad infinitum. 29 Bos et al., De stad der toekomst, de toekomst der stad, 1946.

derly people) and differences in social standing (working class, lower and upper middle class, intellectuals and professionals). The aim here is a solution in which differences in housing originating in the type of family are woven together into as vigorous a whole as possible. On the other hand, there must be a clear distinction between working-class and middle-class housing.’27 The factors on which this reasoning was based were not explained, any more than those regarding the clash between everyday life and ideal housing. Were they financial and economic (‘building for the people who needed it’), or sociological (‘a new social order’)? Built during the reconstruction period, Rotterdam’s Pendrecht district was a leading example of 1950s housing. The district had a threedimensional mirror-image composition based on population statistics.28 In the new housing models, the pivotal feature of the district was green space of every kind. In the agenda for the reconstruction districts, green space was credited with almost magical properties, such as ‘reconciliation of city and nature’ and ‘enhancing community development’ (as De stad der toekomst, de toekomst der stad put it).29 At the same time, programme and form coincided, i.e. form almost literally reflected the programme.

The private and public realms in the 1950s: the relationship between the dwelling, the collective realm and the public realm The dwelling became an open unit in ‘open’ surroundings. At the same time, the family was defined as a ‘closed’ building block of society – a building block (later a cornerstone) that was specifically determined by socioeconomic background, size, age brackets, activities and other demographic details. Design drawing for Pendrecht, 1951.

In post-war garden cities such as Pendrecht, the layout of the dwelling became an even closerfitting ‘glove’ than it had been in Blijdorp. Key features of the design were precise division into daytime and night-time activities, efficient division of functions, division of labour between men outdoors and women indoors, and short walking distances for daily activities. At the same time the dwelling was both literally and figuratively detached, as a ‘space for the closed family in an open society’. What remained was the visual link to the collective realm. In Pendrecht a distinction was made between different types of building, each of which reflected family structure. The population structure, and hence dwelling size, also formed the basis for the three-dimensional composition of the ‘stamp’ as a compositional unit in the urban plan (and later as a social unit in the new district). Each of the four distinct groups was assigned its own building type which differed from the others

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in height, position in the urban plan and access and housing typology: young families with one or two children in three-room gallery-access flats, families with more than two children in fourroom flats on ‘stilts’, larger families in six-room terraced houses, and elderly people in two-room bungalows. As already mentioned, the above-ground or half-sunken plinth of storage areas increased the distance between the dwelling and ground level, and hence the public realm. Only the larger dwellings and the bungalows for the elderly had their own adjoining gardens. All the other private gardens were replaced by communal ones, i.e. collective green space. The access system was itself part of the collective area: the galleries in the high-rise buildings and the porches in the raised urban blocks effectively lengthened the route that had to be travelled from the public realm (the shopping centre and the through roads) via the collective realm of the ground-level area to the front door of the dwelling. The private and public realms were both literally and figuratively remote from one another. The dwelling itself was again ‘open’, with plenty of windows and balconies. The question remains what such transparency actually meant and stood for. The increased distance between the private and public realms and the segregation of functions may be said to have caused private and collective space to merge, with the result that there was no longer any public realm round the dwelling.

Ground plan of Oude Noorden, Rotterdam, 1946.

The ‘stamp’ With the introduction of mirror-image or repetitive three-dimensional ‘stamp’ as a social and architectural composition, the former urban block underwent a huge increase in scale as an urban planning unit – for the new unit in the urban plan was no longer the stamp, but the group of stamps. In Pendrecht, ten stamps formed a demarcated unit. If the area of Brinkman’s Spangen block (1.8 hectares) is compared with that of a Pendrecht quadrant (14 hectares), it will be seen that the increase in area was roughly eightfold. Together with the size of the urban planning unit, the amount of collective space also increased considerably, at the expense of the private outdoor space of the individual dwellings and the public realm as an area for the exchange of ideas, opinions, experience, knowledge, ideologies, goods and labour. In districts such as Pendrecht, collective space was not public space, for only local residents – preferably with the same background and living habits – were welcome and invited to use it. People from other quadrants, let alone other parts of the city, had no business there; they only had access to the through roads and the shopping centre.

Bos’s book De stad der toekomst, de toekomst der stad compared Oude Noorden and the plan for Rotterdam’s Zuidwijk district.

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The neighbourhood concept at city level The neighbourhood concept was an attempt to treat the neighbourhood/district and the city as a single entity. For each scale there were precise descriptions of the public functions that belonged there, and the people they were intended for. Housing was also differentiated on the scale of the city. Different population groups were effectively assigned to separate areas: the wealthy to Lijnbaan and Pelikaan in Rotterdam’s city centre, and the port workers to the southern garden cities. In between was a buffer of green space. There was a detailed programme for the Zuiderpark: ‘Strolling, walking, picnicking in natural surroundings made way for active recreation: gardening and sport in purpose-built areas. Green space, with a standardised number of square metres per head of population, was assigned a specific purpose – a neighbourhood, district or city park, allotment gardens and sports grounds – and divided proportionately over the city.’30 With the added differentiation of green space at dwelling unit level, the distance between the private realm of the dwelling and the city centre with its public urban facilities had once again been maximised.

The 1970s (infiltration of collective space into the historical fabric of the city) and the 1990s (revival of the urban enclave) It is fascinating to see how the Rotterdam model and ideal of collective space as developed in Pendrecht and Zuidwijk were projected in the 1970s onto urban renewal areas in the former nineteenth-century ring, such as Oude Westen.31 Once again, the distance between the dwelling and the public realm was increased by interposing collective space. Both Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarktbuurt and Rotterdam’s Oude Westen districts were scheduled for demolition (in the 1950s and 1960s respectively). The main reason in the case of Nieuwmarktbuurt was to create a business centre and build a metro system; in the case of Oude Westen, it was to improve the quality of the buildings, which were no longer felt to meet current standards. Another key factor in the plans to demolish the two districts was the notion that urban functions should be divided. In the 1970s, after mass protests by local people and owing to changing views about demolition and high-rise building (for example in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer and Delft’s Zuid districts), Nieuwmarktbuurt and Oude Westen were the first districts in the Netherlands to undergo ‘urban renewal’. The idea was to find housing and block typologies that avoided high-rise building and at the same time tackled perceived problems in the districts, such as the growing number of cars, the poor condition of the dwell-

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ings, the lack of children’s play areas and green space and the absence of social facilities.

30 Andela, ‘Van wieg tot graf in het groen’, in Reijndorp and Van der Ven (eds), Een reuze vooruitgang: utopie en praktijk in de Zuidelijke Tuinsteden van Rotterdam, 1994, p. 61. 31 Compared with the experiments in Rotterdam, the Amsterdam urban renewal model was closer to the early twentieth-century urban tradition.

Two examples of urban renewal: Rotterdam’s nineteenthcentury Oude Westen and Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century Nieuwmarktbuurt districts The two radical ‘urban renewal laboratories’ Nieuwmarktbuurt and Oude Westen were very different. One difference lay in the urban fabric of the city. Nieuwmarktbuurt was right next door to Amsterdam’s historic centre. Previously known as the Lastage, it had become a separate urban planning unit back in the early seventeenth century, when the hitherto illegal buildings outside the St. Anthoniespoort gate in the glacis (the clear field of fire outside the fortifications) were more or less legalised by the construction of the Nieuwmarkt square on a covered-over section of the Geldersekade and Kloveniersburgwal canals. The construction of this square meant that the structure and density of the Nieuwmarktbuurt expansion district were almost totally in keeping with those of the historic city centre. The urban blocks built in the district were relatively short and compact, averaging some 50 metres in depth. Some 80% of the buildings still date back to the seventeenth century and are listed monuments.32

32 De Loches Rambonnet, De Nieuwmarktbuurt, 1995.

In contrast, the urban fabric of Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Westen district was rather similar to that of Amsterdam’s De Pijp (based on the slagenlandschap pattern of strip-by-strip building found in the polders). Oude Westen was a typical nineteenth-century expansion district. Its streets were ‘strung out’ between Nieuwe Binnenweg to the south and Kruiskade to the north. As a result, the urban blocks were elongated and in some places very shallow. Initially there were hardly any cross streets. Before urban renewal took place, Nieuwmarktbuurt, like Oude Westen, had consisted of closed urban blocks with an inner courtyard that was not accessible to the public. The new housing projects of the 1970s broke with this tradition. In Aldo van Eyck’s Pentagon building in Nieuwmarktbuurt, as well as the new urban blocks in Oude Westen, the inner courtyard was opened up, allowing access to the dwellings to be transferred to the inside of the block. In the Nieuwmarktbuurt housing projects, the inner courtyards were designed as squares forming part of the system of alleyways and narrow streets that typified this area of the city. Despite urban renewal, the urban fabric remained fairly densified. At the same time, particularly in St. Antoniesbreestraat, the ground floors were kept free of dwellings to provide room for shops, bars and cafés. Advantage was taken of the differences in height between the inside and outside

Diagram of the garden city, displaying the ideal of synthesis between the village and the city.

1950s advertisement for ideal domestic division of labour.

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of the blocks to design three-dimensional inner squares, resulting in a succession of pavements and raised sections. These lengthened and differentiated the transition between the street on the outside of the block and the access to dwellings, i.e. the front doors on the inside. In Aldo van Eyck’s Pentagon project, the ground-floor dwellings had access on both sides. The front door was on the inner square, and the living rooms had a door that opened directly (without a porch) onto a small landing on the street or quayside. Access to the upstairs dwellings, which in St. Antoniesbreestraat were over bars and cafés, was via open porches reached from a raised pavement that surrounded the inner square. Unlike in, say, Amsterdam Zuid, these porches were not extensions of the public realm. Their intermediate status, between the semi-collective, semipublic inner square and the private realm of the dwelling, was somewhat ambiguous. Were they part of the dwelling or part of the square? The typology developed in Oude Westen was based on raised ground levels or residential streets. On the ground floor the new blocks provided areas for sociocultural establishments, such as a school or a health centre in Josephstraat and St. Mariastraat. Above these were the ‘residential streets’, with access via collective open staircases. The entrances to the new dwellings – usually three-room or four-room maisonettes – were mainly on the raised residential streets. Even in urban blocks that had parking facilities in the inner courtyard, with a collective garden on the roof, access to the dwellings was likewise transferred to the inside of the block. These raised residential streets did not form a system that was part of the public realm of the street, for people were unlikely to choose an alternative route through the district that constantly involved going up and down flights of steps. On the contrary, the raised streets and galleries on the inside simply increased the distance between the dwelling and the street. Besides the open inner courtyards providing access to the dwellings, the new fabric of Oude Westen included a large number of large and small squares and cross-connections. This meant it was less compact. At the same time, there was a deliberate policy to exclude businesses and shops. The increase in the amount of public space by means of squares and cross-connections, and the transfer of access to dwellings to the inside of the blocks, was accompanied by reduced density and less overlap in functions and use. What had once been a busy part of the city became a housing area with almost nothing but sociocultural functions. Two different trends can be seen in the urban renewal designs for Amsterdam and Rotterdam. On the one hand, collective space was intro-

The transformation of the Dutch urban block in relation to the urban public realm

duced and access to dwellings was transferred to the inside of the urban block; as in the 1950s, this increased the distance between the dwelling and the public realm. At the same time, however, local traditions were continued. In Amsterdam, the inner squares in the open urban blocks formed part of the urban composition. In Rotterdam, the residential street with maisonettes on either side was a continuation of the collective ideal developed for Pendrecht. An ideal originally conceived for an expansion area was thus projected onto the existing urban fabric.

The 1990s: urban enclaves in Amsterdam (the GWL site) and Rotterdam (the Müllerpier) The GWL site in Amsterdam and the Müllerpier in Rotterdam are recent examples of the restructuring of urban sites that fell vacant as harbours and industries moved away. Sites such as Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid and Amsterdam’s eastern and western port areas were the largest inner-city expansion areas for public functions, housing and offices. The plans for both the GWL site and the Müllerpier were produced by the architectural and urban planning firm KCAP. In the series of comparable 1990s projects, such as Amsterdam’s KNSM and Java islands (which revived the closed and open urban block respectively), the two sites were remarkable for their urban planning structure. They were relatively small neighbourhoods, similar in size to the ‘superblocks’ in the Spaarndammerbuurt district. Rather than expansion or densification projects, they were ‘urban pockets’ that differed in structure from the rest of the urban fabric. They were designed to be neighbourhoods with a divergent character of their own. Both projects contained five to six hundred dwellings. The urban block as an interchangeable urban unit was drastically reduced in size. The individual block contained only twenty to forty dwellings, rather than the hitherto customary two hundred (for example in the closed urban block). The formerly elongated block now became short, wide and more or less square.

An example of a green enclave: the GWL site in Amsterdam This restructuring plan was drawn up for the site of the former municipal drinking-water plant in the Staatsliedenbuurt district. The open arrangement of the buildings, mainly short blocks amid extensive green space, was very different from that of the surrounding area: the district’s nineteenth-century fabric of closed urban blocks, and the sheds on the adjacent wholesale market site. The urban planning structure, consisting of pavilions in green surroundings, harked back to the nineteenth-century theme of the green

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