Jos Klijnen

Jos Klijnen collaborated with Marinus Granpré Molière and they had great influence on Dutch urban building. They both belonged to the Rotterdam functionalists. Klijnen is generally regarded as a pioneer of the Organic City and a representative of the Rotterdam avant-garde in the 1920s. The apex of his experiments with an expressionistic formal idiom and organic floor plans came with the design he submitted to the 1927 competition for the League of Nations headquarters. His work is unique in that it combined authentic and regional elements with impulses from the national and international avant-garde.

Designed by the three planners Jos Klijnen, Marinus Granpré Molière, and Pieter Verhagen, the park in Rotterdam was the “Kralingse Bos & Plas”, whose marshy slopes had already been filled with sludge from the Waalhaven in 1910. The design no longer followed the model of a 19th century city park in order to provide room for the numerous new inhabitants of this part of Rotterdam and to adapt the park to the existing landscape. Instead a polder park was created with trees on the shore of the lake, long footpaths, islands in the lake, and beaches along the shore.