Jan Buijs

Jan Buijs: The Building That Glowed at Night

On the Grote Marktstraat in The Hague, from 1928 onward, a department store burned in the dark. Its walls were glass, lit from within, and across them ran the name of a socialist workers' cooperative in enormous sans-serif capitals. One later description compares it to a roughly cut opal, the glass crust lending its light a pearly hue. The De Volharding building did not have advertising applied to it. It was advertising — a city-scale luminescent sculpture, and the closest thing interwar Dutch architecture produced to a manifesto you could read from three streets away.

A Colonial Childhood

Jan Willem Eduard Buijs was born on 26 August 1889 in Surakarta, in the Dutch East Indies — the Java of sugar and civil servants rather than the Amsterdam of canals. He attended the hogere burgerschool there before making the long passage to the Netherlands in 1908, a country he had presumably never seen. In 1909 he entered the Technical College at Delft to study architectural engineering, and did not emerge with his qualification until 1919: a full decade, interrupted by the First World War, which the neutral Netherlands spent under mobilisation.

Haarlem and the First Commissions

His entry into practice came through recommendation. On the word of the architect Ad van der Steur, Buijs took a post as assistant architect in the Department of Public Works in Haarlem. The municipal job produced his first significant building, the Stedelijk Gymnasium in Haarlem of 1923–24, and a run of private residences in The Hague and in the wealthy dune-side suburb of Wassenaar.

Then, in 1924, he made the arrangement that defined the rest of his career. With Joan Lürsen he founded the firm of Buijs and Lürsen in The Hague, on a clean division of labour: Buijs designed, Lürsen oversaw construction. It is a partnership structure that tells you something about both men. Buijs was to be freed entirely for invention, and someone else would make it stand up.

The Clinic and the Cooperative

The work that followed came fast and was startlingly various. The Rudolf Steiner Clinic of 1926–28 was unornamented and, in one characterisation, almost animistic — a building that seems to be alive rather than assembled. The De Volharding building followed immediately, in 1927–28.

De Volharding was the headquarters and store of a socialist cooperative society, and Buijs treated the commission as an opportunity to fuse two rival avant-gardes. The composition draws on De Stijl — the asymmetrical arrangement of box-like shapes, planes sliding past one another — while the propagandistic use of lettering and light comes straight out of Soviet Constructivism. The glass envelope was illuminated from behind so that the whole mass became a lantern; the smooth, colourless walls carried the cooperative's message in type. It belongs to the brief international moment historians call the architecture of the night, when electric light was new enough that a glowing building read as a claim about the future.

It still stands, nearly a century on, though the radiance has faded and survives chiefly in photographs.

A Cathedral of Labour

Buijs's other great commission, the headquarters of De Arbeiderspers, the workers' press, went up between 1929 and 1931 in a harder New Objectivist idiom. Contemporaries called it a cathedral of labour. It was demolished in 1972, which is the ordinary fate of interwar office buildings and a large part of why Buijs is less famous than he ought to be. By the mid-1930s he had loosened: a private residence for the Leembruggen family in 1935–36 wrapped an Objectivist exterior in yellow and grey glazed tiles.

Across all of it, his signature was hybridity — New Objectivist rigour crossed with De Stijl composition, and interiors that were essentially Bauhaus. He was among the first in the Netherlands to specify Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture, at a moment when that meant importing an argument as much as a chair.

Politics as Practice

The ideology was not decorative. Buijs was a member of the socialist party, and he taught art and architecture to workers' children. His major clients — a cooperative society, a workers' newspaper — were institutions of the same movement, and he commissioned art for them, including a relief by the sculptor Rudolf Belling. The glowing façade on the Grote Marktstraat was, in the most literal sense, a socialist building shouting in a commercial street.

He retired in 1955 in poor health. Lürsen carried the firm on with a new partner, A. van Haaren, until 1974. Buijs died in The Hague on 19 October 1961, aged seventy-two.

Why Jan Is Called a Genius

The case for Buijs rests on a single, unusually clean act of synthesis. In 1927 the European avant-garde offered a designer several incompatible packages: De Stijl's abstract compositional geometry, Constructivism's agitational graphics, the New Objectivity's insistence on programme and structure. Most architects picked one. Buijs, in De Volharding, welded them into a building that was simultaneously an abstract composition, a piece of political communication, and a functioning department store — and did it by treating electric light as a primary building material rather than a service. That is a genuinely original conceptual move, and it produced a building recognised as canonical enough to have generated its own scholarly literature in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

The counter-case deserves saying. Buijs's output was small and his career effectively over by his mid-forties as a designer of consequence; he founded no school, wrote no theory that survives in the standard accounts, and taught no generation. His masterpiece has lost the illumination that made it a masterpiece, and his second-greatest building was knocked down in 1972. He depended on Lürsen to realise what he drew. And a good deal of De Volharding's power came from a client — a socialist cooperative that wanted to be seen glowing — as much as from an architect.

What survives the deflation is the quality of the original idea. Buijs saw, earlier and more completely than almost anyone, that a modern commercial façade could be a light source and a text at once, and that the two could be made beautiful rather than merely loud. That is a narrow kind of genius, but it is a real one.

Legacy

The De Volharding building's afterlife has been quieter than its debut: still on the Grote Marktstraat, still box-like and asymmetrical, no longer alight. But it remains the standard illustration of interwar illuminated architecture, and the argument it made — that a building can be a public announcement without being a billboard — has outlasted both the cooperative that paid for it and the political movement that made it thinkable. Buijs, born in a Javanese town to a colonial world, ended up giving Dutch modernism its brightest single image.

Achievements

• Trained at Delft University of Technology