ABSTRACT
The phenomenon we call ‘De Stijl’ was not an organized movement but a frequently changing collection of artists who rarely if ever met each other and never exhibited together. What connected them and gave them the semblance of a common direction was the magazine De Stijl and the driving personality of its founder and editor, the painter and writer Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931). Although the group's greatest achievements were in the field of painting – above all the work of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) – Van Doesburg believed that its ultimate field of activity must be architecture. Two years before he died, looking back over the thirteen-year ‘Struggle for the New Style’ in the pages of the Swiss journal Neuer Schweizer Rundschau, he wrote:
It is unquestionably the architectonic character of the works of the most radical painters that finally convinced the public of the seriousness of their struggle, not merely to ‘influence’ architecture, but to dictate its development towards a collective construction. Although in 1917 there was as yet no question of such a collective construction, certain painters attempted, in collaboration with architects (van der Leck with Berlage, I with Oud, etc.) to transfer systematically and coherently into architecture and into three dimensional space the ideas they had developed through painting on canvas. The germ of a universal style-idea was already latent in this struggle to combine architecture with painting in an organic whole. 1
C.-E. Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Composition à lo guitare et à la lanteme, 1920 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315013077/3dae8f3c-357e-48a0-abc6-c356a8461b45/content/fig1_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>