From Individual to Community: Geometry as a Mediating Tool in Jan Verhoeven’s School Architecture

Drawing from Aldo van Eyck’s theories of ‘twin phenomena’, the Dutch architect Jan Verhoeven (1926-1944) found in the manipulation of geometrical patterns a powerful design tool for reflecting on the duality of individual and community. Despite the key contribution of Verhoeven's work to the emergence of Dutch structuralism, and although it was acclaimed by critics and the wider public at the time, that work has not received the academic attention that it deserves, overshadowed as it is by other figures of his generation, such as Herman Hertzberger, Piet Blom, and Joop van Stigt. Expressed in all his projects is a keen interested in the symbolic and existential meaning of geometry, a meaning unabashedly loaded with classical connotations from the point of view of the design process yet manifesting in a daring vernacular appearance in its built form. This is especially true of the eight nursery and primary schools that Verhoeven designed from 1973 to 1984. This paper focuses on analyzing Verhoeven’s first two such projects, the schools in Rozendaal and Cuijk. In both projects, he tried to bring architecture close to its users through formal, constructional, and perceptional resources - directly derived from the application of geometry - while accepting a general European trend towards the wearing away of the modern movement in favor of a transition to other aesthetic and ideological horizons.

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