In the 1930s, architecture critics on both sides of the Atlantic were hailing the apostles of the International Style: Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and the Dutchman J.J.P. Oud. There is no question that Oud was an important figure in modern architecture, yet in a 57-year career, he undertook only 90 projects, less than half of which were realized. Just five were outside the Netherlands, and only one of those was built.

Oud began his studies in 1903 at the Quellinus School of Decorative Arts in Amsterdam. Three years later, he designed his first building: a house for a relative in his native Purmerend. In 1907, under pressure from his father, he began to study architecture, finding work as a draftsman in the office of Joseph Cuypers and Jan Stuijt. In May 1908, he left them to enroll at the National School for Drawing Education, where in 1910 he was awarded the Structural and Mechanical Engineering Drafting Diploma; he augmented his studies with various courses at the Delft Institute of Technology. In 1912, Oud worked briefly in the Munich office of Theodor Fischer (who was then engaged in public housing and urban redevelopment) and attended Fischer’s lectures at the Munich Polytechnic.

Oud returned to Holland enthusiastic about an architecture based on new construction and materials, but his practice in Purmerend produced only a few vernacular buildings: the Vooruit Laborers’ Association premises (1911), the Schinkel Cinema (1912), and a house (1912) in Aalsmeer. In 1913, Oud moved to Leiden, but he found little work until, in 1915-16, he designed the Leiderdorp housing estate with Willem Marinus Dudok.

In 1916, Oud met the painter-critic Theo van Doesburg and, together with architects Jan Wils and Bart van der Leck and expatriate Hungarian painter Vilmos Huszér, founded the De Sphinx art club. Soon, joined by philosopher Anthony Kok and painter Piet Mondrian, they formed the loose-knit group of avant-garde artists known as De Stijl. For varying periods over the next decade, others came and went. Membership seems to have consisted of writing for the polemical journal De Stijl, edited by van Doesburg; between 1918 and 1920, Oud published seven pieces. However, he did not sign De Stijl's November 1918 manifesto, finally withdrawing from the group in 1921 because, like all the rest, he fell out with van Doesburg. Meanwhile, they collaborated on several projects, including the Allegonda villa (1917) at Katwijk aan Zee and the De Vonk holiday house (1917) at Noordwijkerhout. Van Doesburg's role was limited to color schemes and stained-glass windows. The association ended in 1919, when Oud disagreed about colors for a public housing scheme. Oud also expounded on Frank Lloyd Wright’s work for De Stijl as well as the European architectural community. Unlike his De Stijl colleagues Wils and Robert van 't Hoff, he was interested more in Wright’s technology than in his philosophy. Oud had known about Wright since 1912, but his work showed none of the American’s influence until some unrealized projects—concrete low-income houses (1918) and industrial buildings (1918-19) for his father’s Purmerend distillery—echoed Wrightian forms. Although Oud thought that Wright’s architecture was “flawless,” he accurately predicted widespread, ill-informed imitation.

In 1918, Oud became the Rotterdam municipality's chief housing architect. His bland schemes in the Spangen (1919-20) and Tusschendijken (1920-23) districts of Rotterdam led observers to conclude that he was a socially concerned architect. He later denied that motive, stating that he simply sought “a good and agreeable form for [the housing] . .. as exact and as clear as the form of a good car.” Those words point to a change of path. Oud read Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture (1923) soon after it was published, and his subsequent work demonstrates its immediate effect. His worker's row houses (1924—27)—brick disguised as concrete—in Hoek van Holland and his “dwelling Fords” (1925-29) in Rotterdam’s Kiefhoek are stuccoed white cubes. Neither scheme hinted at Wright or De Stijl. Indeed, Oud’s only references to the latter can be found in the Rotterdam Witte Dorp site office (1923) and the Café De Unie facade (1925), both in Rotterdam.

Oud’s reputation as a modernist was established in 1927 by a “model dwelling” —another row of white boxes—for the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition, Thereafter, largely through his frenetic self-publicity, he was applauded in Europe and especially in America as a leader of what Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson dubbed the International Style. Johnson later asserted that Oud inspired him to become an architect. He commissioned the Hollander to design a house (1931) for his parents, but it was never built.

After about 1928, Oud’s anxiety about fame, combined with his workload, plunged him into depression for several years. He accepted few commissions, and fewer were realized—notably, a church (1928-29) at Kiefhoek and some furniture after 1931. Public housing proposed for Blijdorp, Rotterdam, in 1931 remained unbuilt. The breakdown interrupted his career for almost a decade and changed his destiny.

Oud’s career

limped through the 1930s. In 1933, he resigned his post to concentrate on private practice. Three years later, he was offered a Harvard professorship but declined it, and Gropius was appointed. Only some interiors of the liner Nieuwe Amsterdam (1937) and a new headquarters (1938-42) for the Shell Company in The Hague were realized. For the Shell building, Oud chose again to embrace ornament, and when his former American devotees saw photographs of it after World War II, they immediately consigned him to the scrap heap, accusing him of compromising modernist principles.

Oud’s last major project, a National Congress Center in The Hague, begun in 1956, was unfinished at his death. Nothing distinguishes it as his or even as Holland’s. His slender oeuvre reveals him as a seeker after architectural truth in the Dutch vernacular and in the work of Wright and, because he was eager for recognition, in the anonymous, austere forms of Western European objectivity. Perhaps in the Shell building, he found it in being true to himself.

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.