Customer Reviews

Mart Stam's Trousers: Crimson Speaks with Michael Speaks and Gerard Hadders

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This is an excellent book that moves away of conventional praise of architects' work. In fact, it tries to have a look at the misteries and contradictions of that conventional praise. In a land where consensus brushes almost all aspects of society, these collection of essays, photo-reports, interviews, epistolar exchanges and odes, shows that consensus has it price. As during the last years Holland copes the architectural scene as the promised land, this book shows what is behind these recent success.

An intriguing, if not worrying, attempt to unmask the historical manipulations, propaganda, politics and petty fights of dutch modern architecture, and redefine these actions as fundamental for the development of modern architecture. Making use of the same strategies of historical manipulation, new discovered material, and unexplored arguments. The contributions of Mathijs Bouw and Michael Speaks have a directness that surprises, and the irony is sweet and palatable (although not less lethal). The pieces of Wouter Vastiphout and Michelle Provoost are strong and enlightening in a strange way: one's realise that the dark corners of modern architecture were neither dark nor corners.

The letter exchange between Oud and Johhson is almost hardcore, and the excerpts from Koolhaas, Peter Smithson and Carel Weeber are delightful.

Amusing and intriguing, "Mart Stam's Trousers" is the right book to anyone who wants to know what relates the Rietveld-Schröder House to comtemporary dutch architecture, if there is a relation or not.