Hollands

A brief peregrination through the polder-flat triangulation of Amsterdam, Haarlem, and The Hague—cities that seem to have been arranged not so much by urban planning as by a Calvinist sense of spatial guilt, each offering up its own species of canalized melancholy. Amsterdam, where the scent of hashish clings to the insistent charm of gables and glass; Haarlem, a Protestant dream of quietude, still somehow haunted by the ghosts of Remonstrants and dodgy millers; and The Hague, bureaucratic yet baroque, where justice and irony both seem to reside in sealed chambers. Sixteen photos of windows, water, and the peculiar civic serenity that only a nation below sea level dares to cultivate.