1922
Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren
Maison Particulière (Private House)
Maison Particulière (Private House) was a collaboration between Dutch artist Theo Van Doesburg and architect Cornelis van Eesteren. At the invitation of art collector and dealer Léonce Rosenberg, Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren created the pair of houses — Maison Particulière and La Maison d’Artiste (Artist’s House) — for an exhibition featuring the De Stijl group at Galerie de L’Effort Moderne. Since its founding in 1918, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne has shown a number of avant-garde artists, including Auguste Herbin, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso.
The De Stijl group emerged with the founding of its eponymous journal in 1917, with Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian at the center of the art movement. Though both artists reacted to the heightened subjectivity and visual chaos of Cubism, their approaches to creating a new type of art differed. In April 1921, Van Doesburg began teaching at the Bauhaus and started to incorporate influences from Russian Constructivism, in particular, the prominent use of diagonal lines. Van Doesburg met Van Eesteren at the Bauhaus and began to develop his ideas on “visual architecture.” Van Doesburg sought to highlight the spatial and temporal dynamism using form and color, as opposed to the fragmented composition of Cubism.
Interested in the notion of growth and repetition, Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren disassembled the traditional cube and developed the Maison Particulière as a series of a-hierarchical planes composed of primary colors, without distinction between front and back, top and bottom. Van Doesburg described the thesis of this new kind of architecture as an “the anti-cube”: “its various spaces are not contained by an enclosed cube. On the contrary, the cellular spaces develop eccentrically, from the center to the periphery of the cube, such that the dimensions of height, width, depth, time, receive a new plastic expression.” (matières 9: espace architectural, Volume 9, author’s translation)
In 1924, the year following this exhibition, Doesburg penned his seminal text “Towards A Plastic Architecture.”
References:
matières 9: espace architectural, Volume 9 (Editor: Lucan, Jacques), Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2008
Fré Ilgen, “Symettrey as Key Notion in the Inter-relationship between Science and Constructivist Art”, The Quarterly of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry, Volume 9, Numbers 1–2, 1999
Theo van Doesburg, “Towards Plastic Architecture,” De Stijl, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1971
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Theo van Doesburg formulated and reformulated multiple permutations of theoretical frameworks for art and architecture. Some, such as his 1918 De Stijl manifesto, broadly engaged the reconstruction of culture in the transcendence of the universal beyond the individual. Ultimately, this yearning for universalism with undercurrents of internationalism colored much of Van Doesburg’s ambition with respect to De Stijl. With it, he hoped to establish a common mode of design and cultural communication. Van Doesburg went further with his 1924 manifesto, “Tot een beeldende architectuur” — Towards a Plastic Architecture. Here, in typically axiomatic fashion, he forcefully articulated the case for a non-stylistic style. Van Doesburg formalized the avant-garde fascination with non-euclidean geometry by insisting that only such new geometric systems could transcend the limits of spatial conception of the past. Van Doesburg later extended his notion of hyperdimensional space to cinema, and proposed a new kind of filmic performance which would synthesize new aspects of space. Van Doesburg’s final theoretical project was Elementarism, in which we hear echos of the initial universalism of De Stijl as well as the formal and mathematical specificity of “Toward a Plastic Architecture.” Van Doesburg crystalized some of his theoretical efforts in his Maison Particuliare of 1923 — a hypercubic house. His description of hyperdimensional cinema space could apply as well to the house: “[This] stage [of evolution] will form this crystalline space through color, orchestrated by means of movement. The spectator will look into a completely new world, he will be able to follow the whole process of this dynamic light-sculpture like the orchestral work of Schoenburg, Stravinsky, or Antheil. … The separation of “projection surface” is abolished. …. The new experiments, geometrically orientated, succumb to laws of an almost architectural structure for a multidimensional film space. ” (Film as Pure Form, quoted in Henderson 487). The Maison Particuliare was widely known, but the work took on a new life as Van Doesburg was awarded the Sikkens Prize in 1968 and become a touchstone of structuralism with republication — along with many of Van Doesburg’s projects and texts — in the journal “Form”, the late 1960s periodical of structuralism and neoplasticism. But far from destroying architecture, it liberated architecture from architects: “We, the generation of today, do not want houses that architects design for us. We want each to fulfill his needs as an individual, not as a mass produced idea of a [single] human being. We want a set of building parts, technologically up-to-date, designed to be assembled in many ways, so that we can shape our own environment and avoid the predetermined package that architects are imposing on us.” (Form, Maurice Agis and Peter Jones, Theo van Doesburg is of today)
