So, this is the first time that I passed (and with a very good mark) my Academic Essay class. Before I let y’all see it, I want to thank Marcel van Bockhooven for writing it with me (the assignment was done in pairs) supervisor Nelson Mota and my old supervisor Pierijn van der Putt who let me join the new group.

Introduction

In the south-east of the Dutch capital Amsterdam lies a small urban enclave called Linnaeushof. Closed off from the surroundings and focused on a large church in its middle. This catholic church is the Church of the Holy Martyrs of Gorcum and was designed by Kropholler in 1927 together with the housings and monastery around it. The housing served exclusively the people affiliated with the church and Linneaushof provided them with all the services and amenities they could ever need; the inhabitants could live out their days almost exclusively in Linnaeushof, as apart from the aforementioned church and housing, the urban enclave also included a school and shops.¹ Nowadays, fewer people attend the church and not all the inhabitants of the enclave are affiliated with it. The focus has shifted somewhat, as the shops are also largely gone, to the tennis courts just beside the church. However, due to the spatial articulation and the particular functional (traffic) connection to the urban network of Amsterdam, Linnaeushof is still very much an enclave, with a strong identity and perhaps some distance from its immediate context. The enclave was built just as modernism in Architecture was growing more and more influential, and although Kropholler is viewed as a traditionalist, his attitude towards the problem of mass housing and metropolitan living suggest, but at the same time transcends the modernist paradigm.

A Brief Description

Alexander Jacobus Kropholler was born in 1881 into a large family of 5 children: two of the children grew up to be architects, two became musicians in Germany and one became an artist. The Kropholler family was very artictic. A.J. Kropholler became well-nown for his Berlage-influenced architecture; especially due to his designs of sober brick churches and town halls. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kropholler, as all the Dutch architects at the time, wordked within a field which was split into several groups of differing positions and ideologies² many of them, such as the Amsterdam School, de Stijl and even Nieuwe Bouwen claimed to be influenced by Berlage. While some architects, such as Rietveld, who transitioned from De Stijl into Het Niewe Bouwen, Kropholler always kept faithful to the rational and somewhat traditional-looking architecture and the “Hollandse bouwtraditie” (Dutch building tradition)³. For over 10 years, Kropholler worked together with Staal. They developed a style that combined Berlage’s influences and the high-rise architecture of the USA. After they split, Kropholler focused solely on the “Hollandse bouwtraditie”. After the ending of the cooperation with Staal, Kropholler joined the “Algemene Katholieke Kunstenaars Vereniging” an associations of catholic artists, in which other figures, such a Granpré Molière belonged as well. After his accession, churches formed an import role in the oeuvre of Kropholler; he designed about 18 churches and several town halls.⁴

The building of the church in Linnaeushof was financed by the sale of the surrounding dwellings, thus the whole enclave was focused toward the inside; the church. When one stands in the enclave, one can hardly notice the surrounding city-fabric of Amsterdam. The housing scheme is really closed off from the surroundings, but it is not a gated community; anyone can enter. There are three openings in the building blocks where people can get in and out of the enclave, two larger ones that can be used by cars and one small just enough for the pedestrians. In the enclave there are 4 different kinds of facades that surround the central space (where the chuch stands), however they bear a marked resemblance to each other, the biggest difference between them is in the articulation of the roof. But all the facades consist of red hand formed brick, even the church, forming a diverse, if not sober scheme. The plans on the other hand are the standardized behind every facade, only the housing on the corners have different plans, but that is mainly because of the different shape of these buildings. Kropholler likely wanted to create diversity in housing types and plans but also needed to approach the enclave as a mass housing project because of its size. Thus the project contains a few standard plans (maisonettes, row-houses and apartments, for example) within a larger scheme. The design also needed to be built cheaply, because the profit from the sale of the houses went toward financing the chuch. The Linnaeushof can therefore be seen as a combination between modernist thinking on rationalized dwelling and traditionalis formal language. However, it should be noted that Kropholler himself opposed modern architecture of it time⁵, and probably never wanted to make a modern design. That’s probably why Kropholler tried to make various façades for the different blocks, even if the floorplans were almost the same.

Therefore positioning Linnaeushof in a history of Dutch dwelling architecture might be more problematic than it would seem. While historians have largely focused on de Stijl and Nieuwe Bouwen as the most prominent movements in the building in the inter-war period⁶, Searing points out that many developments are being re-evaluated, especially those who, like Kropholler, have been largely influenced by Berlage and even the strongly traditionalist “Delft School” of Granpré Moliere.

However, with hindsight, it might be considered that the combination of a perhaps more traditional articulation, mass housing and its unique position as an enclave within the greater metropolitan network of Amsterdam has made Linnaeushof an attractive place for its inhabitants far from the modernist dream-turned-nightmare of bare, transparent, standardised and ultimately controlling housing that can be seen in the film “Playtime”⁷ which, much like Lefebvre, criticizes modernism’s tendency to design only in terms of functional relationships and machine production, which results in a bland environment that is more like a prison for the human inhabitant.

We would like to discuss Kropholler’s attitude to the nature of modernity, identity and the facilitating everyday as it is evident in his Linnaeushof project in Amsterdam. Here, a certain amount of perhaps seemingly opposing attitudes are present which we will now analyse in more detail, specifically dealing with the architect’s treatment of place, identity and the problem of dwelling and mass housing.

Everyday life as facilitated by the architecture of Linnaeushof

Lefebvre argues that the modern project has led to an autonomy of different disciplines and thus severed as inherent order present in everyday life, all the while placing a very strong conscious emphasis on the link between form and function ⁸. And while certain architects, such as Venturi and Scott-Brown have tried to salvage the inherent symbolism and meaning in architecture, they failed to relay all but the simplest architectural messages, such as “I am rich” and the like⁹. Truth be told, this effort might have come a little too late. By the time Venturi and Scott-Brown published “Learning from Las Vegas” in 1972, the Western civilization had already been stripped of any inherent underlying system, except the debased, commercialised, and as Lefebvre argues, commercially controlled everydayness¹⁰.

Linnaeushof, a project built along a more traditionalist lines in the inter-war period, does not seem have been influenced by modernity, indeed, it fits quite snugly into Heidegger’s description of an ideal dwelling, as it conforms to all four of his requirements (connection to heaven, earth divinity and mortal¹¹, especially if we consider the whole plan (and so the church) as an extension of the individual dwelling. This allows true dwelling to take place, and thus provides its inhabitants with a sense of identity. This is especially true if we consider the circumstances under which Linnaeushof was built. As a small catholic enclave in Amsterdam, with a church, a cloister and a school, it provides community facilities for its inhabitants that surely strengthen a sense of belonging to a place. Furthermore, the whole project is orientated toward the church in the middle of the block and provides a literal and symbolic focal point¹². Such intense focus on place-making betrays a humanist approach to architecture.

However, far from being completely traditionalist, or anti-urban, as is the case of Granpré Moliere’s Vreewijk in Rotterdam¹³, the Linnaeushof also displays an unusual stance towards urbanity and technology. The project’s embedidness and functional traffic connection with the metropolis is softened by the articulation of the transition from the main roads into the block. Furthermore, far from being a mere imitation of a village square, the height of the buildings, the rationalisation of the façade, which means that maximum effect is reached with a few variations in the articulation and the standardised floor plans of mid-rise apartment buildings means that Kropholler was most likely aware of the discourse on affordable dwellings and his design can be seen as an alternative to the modernist abstract projects by J.J.P. Oud in that were built even before his time. The design by Kropholler attaches a great importance to the familiar, the recognizable and the identifiable.

Thus, there seems to be a slight discrepancy between the more “modern” concern of the architects, such as the standardized apartment units and rationalized façade designs with the more traditionalist articulation and detailing. And while some scholars argue that tradition is not a static thing in itself, but is capable of gradual change over time¹⁴ , the three approaches that Alan Mann describes are as follows. The traditionalist approach where the architects presents no innovative features and does things “as they have always been done”, the modernist method, in which the architect reinvents the wheel, or a third way (which was proposed by Eco) where the architect would “link the basic codes and conventions of society…its basis exists within the framework of social and aesthetic expectations. At the same time, this architecture would anticipate cultural, technological and economic changes…”¹⁵.

Linnaeushof certainly answers the call for a catholic enclave, but how about anticipating various changes. While we cannot speak for the architect, but the project itself makes is still standing, though not all the original functions have been kept. Furthermore, we can see that the varied availability of dwelling types and dwelling areas has stood the test of time very well, especially since big cities require a mix of functions and residents¹⁶. Furthermore, instead of working-class Catholic families, the apartments now sell for high prices to the well-to-do.

What we propose is that the project could be classified as proto-critical regionalist. Kenneth Frampton argues that critical regionalism is not a certain unified style, but an attitude adopted by the architect toward the matter at hand, critical regionalism is framed as neither populist nor back-ward looking, but as mindful of cultural context, concerned with place-making and in touch with the global architectural discourse¹⁷. The list of critical regionalist architects includes such diverse figures as Botta, Barragán and Ando, however, their architectures are very diverse. Especially interesting is Barragán, who “veered towards a nostalgic anti-modernism”¹⁸, thus showing that the personal conviction of critical regionalists is also not a monolithic thing, but can vary from architect to architect. Moreover, Goldhagen argues that modernism should be viewed neither as a style, nor as a political movement within architecture, but rather a discourse of architects who have decided not to ignore the onslaught of modernity¹⁹. That is why the modernist discourse, in its various phases, was able to discuss such diverse issues as rationalization and standardisation, pop culture and social agenda²⁰.

Kropholler might not have been a fully fledged modernist, although his Linnaeushof does show several strains in common with the pastoral view of architectural product in modernism²¹, namely the belief that architecture can provide a soothing environment within the modern metropolis. Furthermore, we can view Linnaeushof as drawing and contributing from and to various fields of modernist discourse, such as mass housing and providing a green living environment in the city. It also caters to the need of appropriation and identification of its inhabitants and is thus far ahead of its time, since these issues would be raised again by Team X after World War II. Thus the architects, while was able to be involved in contemporary architectural discourse, while respecting the cultural context of this particular project, which in our view, is what Frampton describes as the critical regionalist attitude.

Conclusion

History of architecture, and architectural projects themselves are not always easy to classify, and efforts to make them fit a certain ideology end up selective and therefore limited²² . It seems it is not difficult for an architect to claim a certain heritage. Both Modernist, Amsterdam-school (Expressionist) and traditionalist architects in the Netherlands have claimed to be the sucessors to Berlage, for example, and in a certain sense, all of them are correct. In Kropholler’s Linnaeushof, we find a surprising mixture of ideas and forms. The green quiet enclave, “an area of quietude” as Le Corbusier would say, is carefully embedded into the metropolitan network. Kropholler, in our opinion, must have been aware of the modernist discourse and have been equally interested in solving the problem of mass housing within the city. However, unlike some of his modernist contemporaries, he did not chose to dissolve the city into a field with housing slabs, nor did he dissolve the city into a low density garden village scheme. While we could argue that any of the following approaches would have been impossible, we only need to take a look at Van Tijen’s and Maaskrant’s Bergpolderflat building to see that an ideologically charged piece of architecture need not take megalomaniac proportions, but can be realized as a manifesto on a smaller area than the grand schemes (of for example Le Corbusier and his projects for cities) would have us imagine.

Linnaeushof, due to its unique combination of urbanisation and architectural articulation, becomes an ideal fragment, rather than the fragment of an ideal. In this project, a synthesis of several ideas is realized which hint at a different sensibility than purely a traditionalist one, although we can safely say that Kropholler did reject the formal and urbanistic proposals of the then up-and-coming modernism. The special attention given to place making and identifiable formal language, while dealing with the typically modernist problems of standardisation and mass housing. While it may not have been the architect’s original intention, the project is able to anticipate the future, with subtle differentiation in external and internal articulation, and an inclusion of different dwelling typologies within the project. We believe that this approach can be seen as a critical regionalist one. Frampton essentially sees Critical regionalism as an alternative to post-modernism and populist architecture which included some traditionalists²³. Kropholler continues in the Berlage’s footsteps, and while he does reference history, it is never a pastiche or a copy of a pre-existing work, he can imbue his work with the familiar, but it is never cliché.

The architect’s sensibility, in regards to the place, the contemporary discourse on mass housing and the a unique take on urbanism in this project can be seen as forerunners of critical regionalist sensibilities that are able to provide an architecture which lends itself to the people and to the place, yet without compromising its integrity.