The demolition of a key OMA work prompts questions about the civic value of innovative architecture.

The Netherlands Dance Theater, the first major project built by Rem Koolhaas, was demolished earlier this year to very little note in the architectural press. It was a strangely hushed finale for a building that had drawn immediate praise when it opened in September 1987 and earned the esteem of dance audiences, performers, and architects during its relatively short existence. At the behest of The Hague municipal authorities, who plan to build a much larger performing arts center on its former site, bulldozers reduced the theater (known locally as the NDT) to debris between October 2015 and January 2016.

Koolhaas learned conclusively that the building was being demolished only after the process was already under way last fall, but he had heard the first rumors a decade ago. He’d been prepared for such news, he says, and his firm, OMA in Rotterdam, quickly commissioned the photographer Hans Werlemann to make regular documentary visits to the NDT site and photograph the demolition process until the building was razed. (Werlemann had shot the NDT’s construction some three decades prior.)

What Koolhaas did not expect was the indifference that followed.

Built remarkably cheaply, the NDT was “a mix of shed and scenography,” wrote the British architecture critic Peter Buchanan at the time of the building’s opening.
Built remarkably cheaply, the NDT was “a mix of shed and scenography,” wrote the British architecture critic Peter Buchanan at the time of the building’s opening. © OMA/Hans Werlemann

In 2014, when yet another Spuiforum competition was announced, “they wanted to put The Hague on the map, to have a large cultural institute,” explains Ellen van Loon, an OMA partner who headed the design proposal submitted to the second call for submissions. The brief tasked select firms with unifying three cultural institutions under a single roof: the Netherlands Dance Theater, the Hague Philharmonic, and the local conservatory. OMA proposed to do as much by building around the existing NDT building, making necessary improvements and renovations to the 1987 structure, and folding the entire building into a new complex. “From the beginning they were not really in line with our intentions,” explains Alex de Jong, an associate at OMA who worked with van Loon on the proposal. Both architects reflect on the competition with an exasperation that extends beyond their inability to rescue the firm’s early work. They had proposed repositioning the entrance to create a public square for open-air performances between Meier’s City Hall and the Spuiforum, and to separate public functions like the concert hall and dance theater on lower floors from the conservatory, located on the highest floor—the broader aim being the creation of a unified civic center on a site that lacked architectural cohesion. “It’s not that we are just interested in preserving all of our own buildings,” van Loon explains. “The times change.” Yet she and de Jong ardently defended the acoustics and aesthetics of the original NDT and declined to remove the building from their scheme. “Every time we showed the NDT in the renovations,” de Jong recalls of client meetings, “they said, ‘Please take it away.’”

Several months after, in mid-2015, OMA learned that Coenen had won; demolition commenced three months later. In Werlemann’s photographs of the process, concrete detritus is strewn haphazardly across the building site, part of a curtain still hangs from a severed rod, and random pieces of the dismembered facade lie underneath piles of rubble. In its dismantled state, the NDT is for the first time revealed to be patently physical—no longer a notional building or an immaterial apparition, for that matter.

Werlemann’s photographs constitute an extensive, if not comprehensive, testimony to the life and death of OMA’s Netherlands Dance Theater. They are but one part of an effort to document the building’s existence: Some interior ephemera have been added to the firm’s own archive, and the building continues to exist in plans, models, and photographs. This impulse to document and archive is itself a form of preservation, one that suggests architecture is not fully registered in built form. “Maybe [it] didn’t actually deserve eternal life,” observes Koolhaas as he muses on the NDT. Instead, the building has earned a kind of life after death: a conceptual framework that remains intact, even as structural frameworks rarely do. 

For a decade the building was threatened with razing, which was finally initiated in October 2015. OMA commissioned photographer Hans Werlemann to document the demolition site.
For a decade the building was threatened with razing, which was finally initiated in October 2015. OMA commissioned photographer Hans Werlemann to document the demolition site. - There is some irony in the fact that OMA completed its two most preservation-oriented projects yet—the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow—mere months before the firm was unable to save a significant early building of its own. Both projects capitalize on the fundamentally generic nature of the existing architecture that they supplement and expand upon, creating new buildings by reframing extant elements into something altogether more exceptional. The NDT was never a banal or standard structure, and this same approach would hardly have sufficed in The Hague. Yet preservationist work readied Koolhaas for the destructive alternative. “I’ve been intellectually prepared for something like that to happen,” he explained two months into the demolition process. His rhetoric is far removed from the pained pique expressed by many architects faced with a similar undoing of their work—for instance, the distraught pathos of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien at MoMA’s sensational destruction of the American Folk Art Museum in 2014. “If I would invest in regret,” Koolhaas remarked during a public conversation about the first decade of his practice in November 2015, “I think it [would be] a very conservative position. I definitely don’t see myself as a victim of this development.” Koolhaas’s relatively dispassionate response underscores the fact that the demolition of the NDT is, in part, a consequence of the qualities that made the building exceptional in the first place: The flimsiness and immateriality of its construction were the results of an insufficient budget, but Koolhaas turned the financial constraint into a creative advantage. (“Given the way it was built,” the architect says, “it’s also a building that you can actually take down without too much effort.”) What follows in its wake, however, is altogether more troubling. After years of failed competitions and political compromises, an anodyne, ambiguously historicist multitheater complex will rise on the cleared plot. With a neo-Venetian facade and all the elegance of a provincial office park, the new Jo Coenen design for an expanded Netherlands Dance Theater regurgitates the clichés of late Postmodernism. In doing so, it brings to light the difficulty of preserving the era’s most original buildings—many of which, like OMA’s NDT, enter preservationist discourse only after their demolition is already irreversible. © OMA/Hans Werlemann