There are two different architects called Han van Loghem, as can be seen in the exhibition Architect JB van Loghem (1881-1940) in the spotlight† In the first two rooms of the exhibition in the ABC Architecture Center in Haarlem, the work of the first Han van Loghem is shown on the basis of, among other things, beautiful photos by Hans Peter Föllmi and furniture. With a few exceptions, such as the experimental terraced houses in Amsterdam’s Betondorp from 1923, the garden areas and villas and other buildings that Van Loghem built in and around Haarlem in the years 1909-1925 are made of brick. Like his wooden furniture, his early brick architecture betrays the influences of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Amsterdam School and especially Berlage, the architect who is still often regarded as the father of modernist architecture. The undisputed highlight in the first part of the exhibition is Tuinwijk-Zuid, the most beautiful of Van Loghem’s garden districts in Haarlem, whose centenary is the reason for the exhibition.
In the fourth room, dedicated to Van Loghem’s late oeuvre after 1927, a radically different work can be seen. The furniture here is not made of wood but of tubular steel. And most of the villas that Van Loghem built at the time, such as JJ Hartog’s house in The Hague from 1937, have white plastered, flat facades and large windows that make it clear that he had changed in a short time from a traditional Berlagian architect who carefully moved to innovation sought in a supporter of the revolutionary New Objectivity or New Building.
Committed
The only similarity between the early and late Van Loghem is that they were both socially engaged architects who sympathized with the Soviet Union, the world’s first socialist country. The first Van Loghem had even turned his architectural firm into a cooperative and in 1919 became a member of the Union of Revolutionary Socialist Intellectuals (BRSI). At the end of 1925 he eagerly accepted the invitation of the Dutch engineer Sebald Rutgers (1879-1961) to work in his Autonomous Industrial Colony (AIK) Kuzbass, a conglomerate of mines and chemical plants in Siberia where hundreds of Americans and non-Russian Europeans worked. Van Loghem raised his desk and left with his wife and children for the village of Kemerovo, which was to develop into an industrial city.
In the third room of the exhibition there are black-and-white photos and design drawings for workers’ houses, schools and other buildings that Van Loghem made as chief architect of the AIK Kozbass. It remains unclear what exactly Van Loghem built in Kemerovo, but it is certain that many of his designs were not carried out due to corruption and opposition from the Russian communist party supervisors. He did, however, build a number of typical Dutch terraced houses, which were called ‘sausage houses’ by the Russian residents.
Debacle
Van Loghem’s stay in Kemerovo turned out to be a debacle. After a year he had had enough of ‘the gang of lazy bureaucrats’ in the AIK Kuzbass, writes Rudolphine Eggink in JB van Loghem. Architect of an optimistic generation, a recently published adaptation of her dissertation on Van Loghem. As early as 1927, Van Loghem returned to the Netherlands disappointed.
Nevertheless, his stay in Kemerovo resulted in a metamorphosis for the architect Han van Loghem. In Siberia he discovered functionalism and ‘the voice of purity’, as Van Loghem himself called it in 1927 in an article in Architectural Weekly, and he became a supporter of the functionalist Nieuwe Bouwen. The overwhelming nature in the steppe country made him realize that listening to ‘one’s own voice’ was a big mistake, he wrote, because ‘that voice can never match the iron necessity, which creates the least complicated and purest works’.
Back in the Netherlands, Van Loghem settled in Rotterdam, the city where Nieuwe Bouwen was given the most space. Still, he didn’t get many orders. His largest building was the 1933 Sports Fund Pool in Haarlem, which was demolished in 1995.
Although the Soviet Union had disappointed him bitterly, he did not turn away from communism. In 1931, on his own initiative – and in vain – he took part in the competition for the Palace of the Soviets that Stalin’s regime had launched. And as a board member of Opbouw, he wanted to turn this Rotterdam architects’ association into a militant movement that linked Nieuwe Bouwen with left-wing politics.
conversion
Van Loghem’s break in style resembles a conversion: as a proselyte to the belief in pure architecture, he distanced himself from his impure early work. ‘Too decorative and not concise enough’, he thought after his return from Siberia.
In this way, the exhibition and the book about Loghem unintentionally show that the historian Auke van der Woud was right when he labeled Berlage’s paternity of Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen as a myth in his essay in 2008. stardust. One hundred years of mythology in Dutch architecture† Just as there is no connection between the gruff brick Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam and the Van Nelle factory of glass, steel and concrete in Rotterdam, the first Van Loghem has nothing to do with the second when it comes to architecture.
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