Skin graft

Visiting Ypenburg on a rainy day in March can be a depressing experience. Laid out on a sharply delineated plot of reclaimed land south of The Hague, Ypenburg is a curious quilt of medium- and low-rise housing, some designed by prominent Dutch architects and others by housebuilders. It covers 219ha of an archipelago intersected by largely deserted streets and canals. There is no hint of mixed use yet and no public transport, making the place feel deserted, isolated, and, on a grey day, disappointingly incoherent.

However, MVRDV's masterplan for an 800-home slice of Ypenburg does have a density and grain that will improve the area once it has been fleshed out by residents, sports and community facilities and projected commercial development. After completing the masterplan, which it won in a 1998 competition, MVRDV was retained to design some of these homes. Hagen Island, the most recently completed area, is as colourful, witty and postmodern a comment on the nature of such housing as you are likely to find.

MVRDV is one of the best-known practices in the Netherlands. Formed by Winy Maas, Jacob van Ries and Nathalie de Vries in 1991, its designs foreground the tension between the interests of architects, constructors, clients and users, as in its VPRO offices in Hilversum (1997). It is also well-known for theoretical work such as Pig City, a high-rise accommodation system for livestock that is a pragmatic but extreme reaction to a very Dutch problem. In fact, the willingness to push concepts to their logical conclusions is an abiding theme of MVRDV's work.

Its Hagen Island housing is part of the Vinex programme, a Dutch government plan that aims to provide 635,000 new dwellings by 2005. Although budgets are always very tight, a combination of inventive architecture, tolerant planning and an efficient construction industry has given the Netherlands a huge legacy of contemporary building to bequeath future generations.

The irony is that the most visible sectors of Ypenburg are very conventional housebuilders' fare. When you first approach the site, you see rows of one-off family houses, which are as bad as any commuter homes in the world. Some even have heritage-thatched roofs, giving the lie to the notion that the Netherlands is a nation of contemporary architecture fans.

MVRDV's project is hidden at the back, behind the more polite colours and forms that are the public faces of the development. It feels a bit like the garrulous child at a society wedding, a critique of received notions of what makes a well-mannered house. The layout is a modified form of the working-class terrace, familiar from early 20th-century British towns. These were two-storey houses with slim back gardens and pedestrian alleyways. At Ypenburg, this layout has been modified so that, instead of long terraces with gardens backing onto gardens and high walls separating them, you have building fronts and backs alternating as you walk along the alleys and low walls enabling clear views through to other houses. Also, the terraces are broken – the longest continuous sequence of houses is eight units long.

The architect has made something like a child's drawing of a house. Pitched roofs, four windows and a door in the front facade and huge blank gable ends are the language here. Each house is clad in a rainscreen of a single material. Some are clad in ceramic panels, others in Kalzip profiled aluminium panels, wooden shingles, terracotta roof tiles and green painted timber. The minimal detailing – eschewing overhanging eaves – adds to the impression that this is the work of a child with a colouring-in book and a limited number of pens.

The cladding is an audacious move, a strike against the arbitrariness of conventional exterior cladding for modern housing. A rainscreen system means that the exterior could happily be made of almost anything waterproof but developers still specify brick and consumers still buy it. Ypenburg is an eloquent and exuberant critique of public expectations and developer attitudes to mass housing. But the question is: would anyone want to live there? The layout makes privacy a problem. There are areas where full-height living-room windows face other windows just a few feet away, making net curtains essential. The low dividing walls are great for the photographs but provide very little delineation between public and private exterior space. Despite the willingness of the Dutch to live densely and openly, it could only be a matter of time before fences appear.

Also, the wonderful arbitrariness of the cladding is diminished by its obvious flaws. Tiles have already begun to fall off a couple of the houses, and the welded details on the aluminium-clad houses look flimsy. Suddenly, residents may find themselves pining to live in the solid brick boxes that this project is trying to supersede.

Hagen Island is perhaps the embodiment of concerns first rehearsed in the practice's 1998 book FARMAX, subtitled Excursions on Density. Maas wrote of the need to engage with the phenomenon of 'object fatigue' in architecture and to formulate a 'humane banality', asserting that our cities had reached a point where there was no background, just a procession of self-referential buildings. He argued that architecture should give a human face back to background. At Hagen Island, MVRDV has, in an extreme way, tried to do that, to the point that the project challenges the supposedly sacrosanct notions of human scale, material quality and security.

FARMAX also says more concentration on interiors is the result of contemporary obsession with the object building. At Ypenburg, the interiors are very conventional in layout and finishes, so residents can customise at will. It is interesting that architectural photography hates this kind of customisation (you won't see much evidence of it in our pictures), but it makes the development a much more human place to be.

The Vinex sites need placemakers of the utmost skill – as flat, low-lying landscapes on the edge of town are not always the most promising locations for new communities. At the very least, there is a definite identity to MVRDV's houses, and a sense of fun that will be appreciated by residents. The project blurs the line between architecture and housebuilding, unconventional materials with conventional forms, innovative layout with conventional interiors. It provides everything the conventional homebuyer could want, but is not conventional. Hagen Island is a paradox, then, and one that, if seen as a polemic, could have a lot to contribute to the debate around the provision of mass housing in the Netherlands and beyond.