Brutalism in the Netherlands

Dutch postwar architecture took a distinctive path through structuralism, a humanist offshoot of brutalism centered on repeating modular units. Aldo van Eyck's Orphanage (1960) in Amsterdam, composed of small domed cells around courtyards, became its founding work, and Herman Hertzberger extended the idea in the Centraal Beheer (1972) office building in Apeldoorn, a concrete labyrinth designed for informal work life.

Alongside this, the reconstruction of Rotterdam produced robust large-scale modernism: Huig Maaskant's Groothandelsgebouw (1953) and the work of Jaap Bakema and Johannes van den Broek, whose TU Delft Auditorium (1966) is one of the country's boldest concrete sculptures. Members of Team 10, the Dutch architects helped redirect international modernism toward the ideas from which brutalism grew.