Open Air Museum De Lakenhal: Maison d’Artiste

Founder of De Stijl Theo van Doesburg and architect Cor van Eesteren have designed the Maison d’Artiste in 1923. A challenging design that has never been executed. Open Air Museum De Lakenhal presents a prototype, developed by Professor Mick Eekhout in collaboration with students of the Delft Technical University. This prototype (scale 1:5) is shown within a museum context for the first time ever, on Het Gerecht square in Leiden.

The Maison d’Artiste was designed in 1923 by artist Theo van Doesburg and architect Cor van Eesteren. The design for an artist’s residence was presented during Les Architectes du Groupe ‘De Stijl’, an exhibition of architectural design from the Dutch avant-garde movement De Stijl. This group exhibition was held from the 15th of October till the 15th of November in Galerie l‘Effort Moderne in Paris. A prototype of the Maison d’Artiste (scale 1:5) is on display on Het Gerecht square, near the Leiden Pieterskerk, during the exhibition Open Air Museum De Lakenhal: 100 years after De Stijl, and can be viewed until the 27th of August this year. The reconstruction of the artist’s house was created by students of Architecture at the Delft Technical University, under supervision of Professor Mick Eekhout.

Function and shape

The Maison d’Artiste shows how the arts of painting and construction merge harmonically in an ideal artist’s residence. There were experiments with new ideas about space that fitted the ‘zeitgeist’, in which the shape naturally flows from the function. Apart from this, there were experiments with new materials, such as reinforced concrete. The Maison d’Artiste doesn’t have a front, back or side; the desired geometrical shapes were formed by applying cantilever walls and floors with flat roofs.

Floating Architecture

Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren have developed a new style of constructing, airborne as it were, as if there was no gravity. The designers were criticized in the press, because they didn’t take the practical implementation into consideration in their floating architecture, and because they left this unsolvable problem to the engineers. However, the groundbreaking design, which was way ahead on the developments in technology, would be of great influence on Modern Architecture.