Folio: Cornelis van Eesteren’s General Expansion Plan for Amsterdam

After winning the Prix de Rome in 1921 aged just 24, the architect and urban planner Cornelis van Eesteren began his career in collaboration with De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg whom he met at the Bauhaus. By the age of 33, Van Eesteren was the chairman of CIAM, and devised the ambitious General Expansion Plan for Amsterdam (Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan) in 1934, although it wasn’t implemented until after the Second World War. ‘Only by elementary means can beauty be attained again,’ he wrote in 1925