After almost two decades of having it as decoration in my bookshelf, or propping up my wife’s second screen, I’m finally going through Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order.

Alexander defines structure-preserving transformations as changes that can take an existing thing and make it better, more alive, more interesting. It dawned on me lately that the physical aspect of the Netherlands is so beautiful because, for the most part, the Netherlands itself is a structure-preserving structure.

Why is this the case? I suspect it’s the water. A lot of the country is built below sea level, in marshy terrain. Any hope of keeping your feet dry required careful studying of the reality in the ground, followed by judicious changes tha twould be as simple and resilient as possible. Most of these transformations were done in pre-industrial times, with limited energetic and technological resources, so the level of attention to existing reality and adaptation had to be perfected into art.

Right now, there’s much more room for ego, thanks to a wonderful abundance of energy and technique. There are quite some eyesores, mostly from the seventies and eighties. But, for the most part, the Dutch go about building their physical reality in structure preserving ways. You can see this in the beautiful inner cities of historic cities, as well as in the countryside. I even see it, to a lesser degree, in new housing, whether private or social (though it pales in life to historical inner cores). What keeps this going? Is it the threat of the water? Or an unstated commitment to preserving the joy of what is already there? I don’t know how this miracle mostly keeps operating.

All I know for sure is that I’m grateful to be around it.