Robert van 't Hoff

Who was Robert van 't Hoff?

Robert van 't Hoff, born Robbert van 't Hoff, was a Dutch architect and furniture designer. His Villa Henny, designed in 1914, was one of the earliest modernist houses and one of the first to be built out of reinforced concrete. From 1917 he was an influential member of the De Stijl movement.

Although he was born to a comfortable middle-class background, married a wealthy heiress, and for a while was able to subsidise the publication of the De Stijl journal, van 't Hoff was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands in the years following World War I. Following the failure of Pieter Jelles Troelstra's call for a socialist revolution in the Netherlands in 1919, van 't Hoff split from De Stijl's founder Theo van Doesburg and withdrew from artistic activity, declaring himself an "ex-architect" in 1922, and spending much of the rest of his life promoting experimental anarchist communities.