Far from home

‘Acceptance of the banal conditions of construction enables a good concept to become fit for building,’ say the Dutch architects Claus en Kaan. In The Netherlands, those conditions include a culture of consensus, where the architect has no special authority as creator, tight budgets, strict project management and standardised products. However, their results in these quotidian circumstances are extraordinary: invigorating yet restrained, visceral as well as intellectual. Kees Kaan took me to see one example, their recently completed Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) at Rijswijk — a tour de force of expression, form and experience. But afterwards we began by discussing the product of a quite different building environment: their Royal Netherlands Embassy for Mozambique in Maputo. It was, says Kaan, ‘an adventure’.

There must have been an immediate contrast with the building industry here in Holland, which we might call synthetic, with its absence of craft and its preponderance of off-the-shelf products...