Thinking through Building The Eindhoven School

In December 1988, the exhibition “The Eindhoven School: The Modern Past” opened at deSingel in Antwerp. Presenting the work of twenty-three architecture graduates from TU Eindhoven (TU/e), this exhibition signaled the emergence of a new type of architecture in the Netherlands. However, unlike the Chicago or the Amsterdam School, the Eindhoven School was not presented on the basis of formal similarities. Instead, it was described as “a constellation of diverse attitudes which range[d] from Han Westerlaken’s high tech to the refinement of Jo Coenen and the intellectualism of [Wiel] Arets and [Wim] Van den Bergh,” but also included the work of John Körmeling, Sjoerd Soeters, René van Zuuk, Martien Jansen, Gert-Jan Willemse, Johan Kappetein, Jos van Eldonk, and Bert Dirrix.1