If I've managed to glean anything from the three months I've spent working and tooling around Holland it would have to be the idea of relaxed pragmatism as an art form. Relaxedness, however, is something of a cover, as even lazy spontaneity manages to appear as a neatly compartmentalized ritual, set aside in certain districts, certain courtyards, certain canal-faring pleasure craft (as I write, a narrow boat is drifting aimlessly down the Herengracht, its merry band of passengers drumming primal beats for no particular audience.) All of this ambience, is, of course, wholly manifest in the contemporary architecture of Holland, most notably in the area of housing and Dutch architect's penchant for the supposedly neutral housing block. Neither as stern or Teutonic as its counterpart in Berlin, the Dutch block is nevertheless characterized by its sense of inevitability--as a tidy composition of reshuffled ingredients that remains discernable in spite of (or perhaps because of) the provocative color schemes, volumetric play, and deft façade variations. Part responsible-bicycling-tolerant-liberal-citizen/steward, part ruthless development, the Dutch housing block seldom rises to the level of the sublime and in its aggregation with similar schemes within a larger urban plan, it often becomes downright banal as the array of façade patterns, voids, and color palates dissolves into static sprawl.

Perhaps the rest of the world should be so fortunate as to have such a high baseline standard of design. If I should go so far as to say that Dutch architecture is competence perfected, then it is less a criticism of Dutch design and more of a comment on the relative banality of the Western world's current ambitions. The Dutch may not be the embodiment of Nietzsche's last men, but even for a nation that takes its ability to handle a lack of space as a mark of pride, it seems that density--that all-too-familiar fetishized siren call for architects and planners--is a rather weak end to value in itself. Through some Faustian bargain, architects have managed to conflate the image of density with the seemingly elusive utopia of urbanity, producing a hybrid (extract from that term what you will) that is just comfortable enough to squelch further desires and extremes. The condition at which one arrives is akin to Roemer van Toorn's notion of "Ikea Modernism" where architects are enlisted as lifestyle designers for middle class individuals, providing relatively affordable, formulaic objects that vary enough to convey a sense of individuation within an otherwise rigid infrastructural framework of commodified taste.

And indeed, when one first approaches such masterplanned hybrid suburbs such as Almere, Ijburg, Ypenburg or Amsterdam's eastern docklands (Borneo, Java, KNSM), one is faced with an immense sense of contrivance that ebbs and flows along with the quality of each individual project in the larger whole. Architecture is perhaps the ultimate contrivance, but rarely is the result both so elegant and so desperate. What these towns lack is identity and their self-conscious attempts to co-opt some alternate, romantic image of cultural authenticity is not unlike similar grabs made by their American "new town" counterparts. But whereas American developments tend merely to offer nostalgic caricatures of existing historical housing and commercial typologies, the new Dutch towns are often content to appropriate bizarre thematic non sequiturs to paste onto their street signs. Hollywood, Peter Sellers, Lucille Ball, FDR, JFK, Harvard, Yale, and the Wright Brothers all have their very own strip of asphalt. Even Socrates has a housing block named in his honor--presumably for those tenants who prefer the examined life.

One could dismiss this rather benign phenomenon as mere whimsy were it not for other instances of identity soul-searching such as in one housing block in Ypenburg where the exterior of each street side unit is adorned with a vertical glass box within which each resident is free to advertise his/her avatar to the community. Ranging from antiques to sports displays to children's toys, the combined spectacle is the kind of thing most households generally reserve for one or two days around Halloween and it only serves to reinforce the deserted film set like atmosphere of the development. This architectural detail may also be something of a modern rendition of the famed Dutch keyhole view favored by Baroque masters, or perhaps this element, which places a stuffed Pooh-Bear into a lineage that includes Honthorst and red-light window whores reveals a latent struggle for identity and individuation within a designed community that can only imitate rather than foster these instincts. Architects have seemingly managed to perfect everyday comfort and are now unsure how to proceed. Some hesitantly strike out toward the favela or the temporary, seeking to harness the power of the informal, while others look towards the mega- and its distant promises of social revolution through large-scale metropolitan/infrastructural action.

If architects feel bored, it is either because there are no real problems left to solve beyond our own boredom or because there is a lack of socio-political ambition with which to invest in projects at the depth and scale required to deal with the fundamental problems that have yet to be addressed. At this point, it is simply an old-fashioned and naïve avant-gardist conceit to propose a tactical architecture solely intended to jar people from their complacency when real-world disasters hardly register for more than a day or two in scrolling text at the bottom of a screen. Aberration, irony, randomness and perversity are commonplace and easily absorbed into a pragmatic culture--particularly in Amsterdam--yet, if in the spirit of liberalism, architecture has graced us with the forms of inclusivity and comfort, then why is this situation so discomforting?

Justin Fowler is the Architecture editor of The Utopian and a Master of Architecture candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.