Mondrian

Introduction

In Holland as in France the formation of a new style of architecture depended on an aesthetic derived from avant-garde painting. Here it was produced by the De Stijl group, founded in 1917 and consisting of the painters Mondrian, van Doesburg, Huszar, and van der Leek with the architects Oud, Wils, and van t'Hoff. Their magazine, De Stijl, was launched in October of that year and continued until 1931 when van Doesburg, who was largely responsible for it, died. It explained their ideas and reproduced their work, and after the First World War was extremely influential outside Holland, especially in Germany (Khan, 78-98).

Discussion

Mondrian was the most important painter and, with van Doesburg, the main theorist of the group. He had been painting Abstract pictures with compositions based exclusively on the horizontal and vertical since ca. 1914, but it was only in 1921 that his style was fully mature. Then he composed his pictures on an asymmetrically balanced grid of black horizontal and vertical lines and restricted his palette to the primary colors with gray and white. Van Doesburg produced similar, though not identical work. They thought that these basic angles and colors expressed fundamental reality, that the universe was formed from opposing forces. By painting harmonious, balanced pictures they were showing these forces in an ideal equilibrium. The balance had to be asymmetric, according to Mondrian, as symmetry marked things as being apart, separate, and therefore against the universal (Jackson, 65-98).

The architecture of the De Stijl group lagged behind their painting; it was only in 1923 that their ideas started to influence buildings, or rather projects for buildings because very little was actually built. But earlier work by van t'Hoff and Oud must be mentioned. In 1916 van t'Hoff built a concrete villa at Huis-ter-Heide outside Utrecht. It has a flat roof with wide cantilevered eaves and a blocky, rectangular form which betrays the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright whom van t'Hoff had met in Chicago. But it is symmetrical and rather monumental, and in this way differs from later De Stijl buildings.

In the following year (1917) Oud produced a project for a terrace of holiday houses at Scheveningen which resembles Garnier's repeated housing units. Then ca. 1919 Oud designed a project for a factory at Purmerend which again has Wrightian parts and an asymmetric central element recalling paintings of a slightly earlier date by Mondrian and van Doesburg. Another ...