Imagining the Dutch polder landscape. A design by OMA from 1986

In 1986, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) / Rem Koolhaas created a landscape design for the Haarlemmermeerpolder, located between Amsterdam, Leiden, and Haarlem. They were invited by urbanists and planners wanting to denounce the urban policy in the 1980s. Dutch spatial development, once characterized by reclamation and bold city planning, had come to a standstill.The possible urbanity of the Haarlemmermeerpolder - a unity based on differences and incongruences - can be considered the spatial and ideological blueprint behind that decade's more famous designs by OMA. While the project for the Haarlemmermeerpolder seems to present a modernization of agriculture, it is one of the few instances in which a past, present, and future image of the Dutch polder landscape was created. OMA reconciles the desire for ground-breaking and large-scale public projects with a diversified society, an immaterial economy, and a political system that seems to sabotage the possibility of a consciously created landscape. © 2015 European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS)