Alexander Bodon

Alexander Bodon: The Quiet Craftsman of Dutch Modernism

More people have stood inside Alexander Bodon's architecture than inside almost any other Dutch building of the twentieth century, and hardly any of them noticed. The Amsterdam RAI is a machine for trade fairs — vast, neutral, endlessly reconfigurable — and its whole purpose is to disappear behind whatever is being exhibited in it that week. That was Bodon's temperament as much as his brief. He wanted buildings that were, in a contemporary description of his work, chic, proper and well-made. He did not want them to shout.

A Cabinet-maker's Son

He was born on 6 September 1906 — in Vienna according to some accounts, in Hungary according to others; either way the family was Hungarian and the household was a design household. His father was an interior designer and cabinet-maker working under the influence of Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession. Bodon grew up among joints, veneers, drawings and the physical fact that a thing is only as good as its making, and he was trained in furniture building himself before he was trained in anything else.

That sequence — furniture first, architecture second — explains much of his later career. He never lost the cabinet-maker's assumption that detail is not decoration but structure.

The Boy Who Saw De Stijl

At thirteen he visited the Netherlands and, through humanist circles his family moved in, met the architect Jan Wils. In 1926 he went back to study under him, and there he encountered the world of De Stijl at first hand: Vilmos Huszár and Cornelis van Eesteren, the abstract geometry, the primary colours, the total rejection of ornament. He described the experience as discovering a new civilisation.

He had begun studying in Budapest in 1924, but the Hungarian architectural establishment of the period was conservative, and Bodon could not accept it. In 1929 he moved to the Netherlands permanently. He worked briefly in the offices of J.W.E. Buijs and J.B. Lürsen — Buijs being one of the boldest Dutch modernists of the moment — and apprenticed with the firms of Ben Merkelbach and Charles Karsten.

A Bookshop on the Keizersgracht

His first independent commission came in 1932: the Schröder en Dupont bookshop on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. It is a small job, and it made his name. Inserting a rigorously modern interior into a canal house on one of the most historically freighted streets in Europe is a test of nerve and of tact, and it established his modernist credentials immediately.

He joined De 8, the Amsterdam group that was the sharp end of Dutch functionalism, and from 1934 collaborated with Merkelbach and Karsten. That same year he set up a studio in Amsterdam shared with the photographers Eva Besnyö and Carel Blazer — a nexus of émigré and avant-garde talent in a city that was, briefly, a refuge.

The School

From 1934 to 1941 Bodon led the Nieuwe Kunstschool in Amsterdam, the Dutch attempt at a Bauhaus, serving as both instructor and director and heading its interior design department. His students included Otto Treumann and Benno Premsela, who became two of the defining figures of postwar Dutch graphic and interior design.

The school's closing date tells its own story. Bodon became a Dutch citizen in 1939; the Nieuwe Kunstschool ended in 1941, under occupation.

Starting Again

He re-emerged as an independent architect in 1945 and from 1954 was a partner in the firm of Van Bruggen, Drexhage, Sterkenburg en Bodon. The postwar work is a portrait of the Dutch reconstruction economy: the AVRO broadcasting studio at Hilversum, the house called De Leperkoen at Lunteren in 1948, the Apollo Hotel in Amsterdam in 1961, the Hoogovens training centre at IJmuiden in 1966 — a facility for the steelworks that was rebuilding the country's industry.

And running through it, over decades, the RAI: the Amsterdam exhibition and convention complex, dated by some accounts to 1951 and by others to a building campaign beginning in 1960, because it was never really one building but a continuous programme of halls. It is the work he is identified with, and its problem is a genuinely hard one — to enclose enormous clear-span volumes that can host a boat show one week and a book fair the next, with the services, circulation and daylight to make that painless, in a form that reads as a public building rather than a warehouse.

Why Alexander Is Called a Genius

The case for Bodon is unfashionable, because it is a case for excellence rather than for originality — and he would have been the first to say so. A contemporary assessment noted that his work revealed a real technical interest without any pursuit of innovation for its own sake.

What he had was an unusually complete command of the chain from furniture joint to city block. Very few architects can detail a bookshop interior and then organise a hundred thousand square metres of exhibition hall; the two ends of the scale require different mental habits, and Bodon moved between them for sixty years. The specific skill in the large work is spatial and organisational: understanding how crowds flow, how a neutral volume can still have proportion, how a structure spanning enormous distances can be made to feel calm. The specific skill in the small work is the cabinet-maker's — knowing that a modern interior fails at the junctions.

The third element is judgement about tone. Postwar European modernism has a deserved reputation for bleakness, and Bodon's work conspicuously escapes it. He kept the warmth, the materials and the finish of his Secession-influenced upbringing inside a functionalist framework. That is a synthesis, and it is harder than either purity would have been.

The counter-case is real and he half-conceded it. He invented no forms, wrote no manifesto, and did not push the discipline forward; the ideas he worked with were De Stijl's and De 8's, absorbed at nineteen and refined for the rest of his life. His largest building is, by design, self-effacing. If genius means rupture, Bodon does not qualify. If it means the complete internalisation of a language until it can be spoken at any scale without error, he does.

Legacy

Bodon died in Amsterdam on 22 January 1993, aged eighty-six, a Hungarian who had spent sixty-four of those years being a Dutch architect.

The Netherlands lost a great deal of its building stock in the war — Rotterdam most of all — but Bodon's misfortune is the opposite kind: his best-known work is the sort that gets demolished not by bombs but by growth. Exhibition halls are replaced when the market wants bigger ones. What survives is partly physical — the RAI still functions as the country's principal fairground, the Apollo Hotel still takes guests — and partly transmitted, through the Nieuwe Kunstschool students who carried his standards into a generation of Dutch design. He remains, in the histories, the model of the modernist who was less interested in being new than in being right.

Achievements

• Notable work: Europahal RAI
• Notable work: Apollo Hotel Amsterdam