Theo van Doesburg, Model Artist House, 1923
Theo van Doesburg, Model Artist House, 1923
In this house the architectural game is also played with colors. The architect and writer Theo van Doesburg understood actually modern architecture and modern painting as complementary, arguing that the two media had something basic in common: the flat plane. He believed that painting could serve as a laboratory for testing architectural ideas.
This house, to be built of “iron and glass”, contains asymmetrical volumes rotated about central voids, projecting primary-colored planes as floors, walls, and ceiling into surrounding place. Therefore the artist photographed this model of the artist house from above and from below as an object suspended in space to display its ability to confront space and time.
The works of van Doesburg were coming as continuation to paintings of De Stijl group, but he also was inspired with Dada movement, constructivism and cubism. It was an output format for Bauhaus students. Piet Mondrian, whose works were an inspiration to him, reduced use of colors only to red, blue and yellow, and the non-colors as black and white. In the opinnion of artist, this selection would keep the abstract thinking through the viewers. In Theo van Doesburg works, some of elements are used to cause intuitive association to f.e. femininity, masculity, dynamics, statics.
References
Sennott, Stephen. 2004. Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture. London: Taylor&Francis Group.
Reviewed by Irmina Gerełło, March 2017.