The commission for this curious complex of two houses and two shops was an offshoot of the housing development called 'De Punkt en De Komma’ which Álvaro Siza had built in The Hague between 1983 and 1988. In this earlier project, the Portuguese architect seemed to have been converted into a privileged pupil of the Amsterdam School. The same Dutch tradition appears in the pieces that comprise the complex situated at the entrance to the parking lot of Ven der Vennepark. As Siza himself points out, brick, curved lines and the vertical predominate in one of them, while white plaster, straight lines and the hori­zontal prevail over the other. Seen from an angle, the brick mass acts as a background for the plastered house; from the opposite direction, the white house is blocked from view by the closed house, “as if it were an eclipse.” Together they constitute a striking formal counterpoint bringing to mind the two complementary tendencies that dominated modem Dutch architecture during the Twen­ties: the almost Expressionist model of Kramer and De Klerk vis-á-vis Oud’s basically orthogonal composition... [+]