De Stijl is the name
of a magazine, founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg in Leiden, that
became the mouth piece for a group of painters, sculptors, architects
and writers. Co-founders were the painters Piet Mondriaan and Vilmos
Huszar, the architect J.J.P. Oud and writer A.
Kok, who were joined in 1917 by painters Bart van der Leck and
Gino Severini, the architects Jan
Wils and Robert van 't Hoff and the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo. Later
the carpenter and architect Gerrit Rietveld, the painters Hans Richter,
El Lissitzky, César Domela Nieuwenhuis, and Friedrich
Vordemberge-Gildewart and the sculptor tConstantin Brancusi joined in
while Theo van Doesburg published proze and poetry in the magazine from
1920
onwards under one and later two pseudonyms.
The principles of these artists of
such varying backgrounds and character, that united them, could be
described in short: the total abstraction - e.g. the total absence of
any reference to any element of perceptible reality and reduction of
the expresive elements to the elementary: straight lines, right angles
and primary colours and three non colours: black, grey and white. With
these limitations to their expressive vocabulary and the exclusion of
any reference to reality the artists sought an universal vision of
reality, which prevented any limitation with regard to subject matter
and character of the artist. Their first manifest published in 1918
formulates this doctrine: ‘EThere is an old an a new sense of time.
The old focuses on the individual. The new on the universal. The
struggle of the universal against the individual reveals itself in both
in competition as in the art of our time. The war destructs the old
world with its content: individual dominance in all matters. The new
art has pronounced that what incorporates a new sense of time: balanced
relationships between the universal and the individual’ (De Stijl, II, p2).
In architecture Oud's
project for a factory in Purmerend (1918), was the first result of this
new style, combined with Rietveld's arm chair soon followed by Oud's
residential work in Rotterdam; after some experiments in zoning by
Van
Doesburg, Van Eesteren and Rietveld gezamenlijk (1923),
Rietveld's Schröder-huis in Utrecht was built, Van Eesteren's design
for a house on the river was made and Van Doesburg did some interior
design for restaurant
L'Aubette in Straatsburg and Oud succesfully planned a housing estate
named ‘Kiefhoek’ in Rotterdam. Van Eesteren
later applied the principles of De Stijl for his urban plan for housing
estates in Amsterdam-West.
After the housing estates Kiefhoek and Witte Dorp, Oud built in Rotterdam Café de Unie on the Mauritsweg and site managers cabin for the Witte Dorp as his most prominent Stijl buildings in Rotterdam.