(abridged version Bonas Essay) Gert Boon is perhaps best known for being part of the influential editorial board of the magazine Forum, whose members at the time included Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger. In the formation of this editorial board, Boon played a crucial role. Boon's field of activity covered the design disciplines of architecture, urban planning and typography. Within the architectural works, two types were prominent: houses (villas) and, to a lesser extent, schools. Obviously, the clients of the villas were private individuals. In addition to detached houses, Boon also designed a number of conversions in the historic city center (mostly Amsterdam). Schools are important in this sense, because the school in Emmen is Boon's most published design and because the theme of building for children fits in very well with the ideas of Forum and can perhaps even be called illustrative. Hertzberger is known to have enjoyed building schools and one of the most famous works of Dutch architecture dates from the Forum period and was designed for children: the orphanage by Aldo van Eyck. As for urban planning, almost all of Boon's expansion plans also revolve around housing. His plans have nothing to do with the traditional urbanism of strip construction or building blocks. The previously mentioned discipline of typography mainly involves editorial work for the magazine Forum. Boon did not write for the magazine, but took care of the typographic design in 1958. In addition, from 1959 Boon was a lecturer at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. He also taught for two to three more years in Delft, together with Jan Brouwer. Both Gert Boon's father and grandfather were architects. Their buildings are in the tradition of Jugendstil. Education and apprenticeship After high school, Boon first studied for four years, until 1940, at the School of Arts and Crafts in Amsterdam, of which Mart Stam was director. In 1948, he left for Switzerland. He received his degree from the E.T.H. (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich in 1953. During his college years, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Boon made a number of study trips to Italy. In 1952, for example, he spent several months in Florence. Then in 1953 he worked at an architectural firm (Brivio et al.) in Locarno. Work After working at the Swiss firm, Boon established himself independently as an architect in 1953-1954. His office was first located at Herengracht 336 in Amsterdam and, after the move in 1958, at Leidsegracht 7. Collaborators in his office were Joop van Stigt for a period of four to five years, Fridjof v.d. Berg as draughtsman and supervisor (also four to five years), Dolf Schuurman-Stekhoven for making perspective drawings and scale models (mid-sixties) and further known names are Hans Bosch, Piet Berger and Van Lierop. Views on architecture Boon did not publish many texts in the professional press, but one of his few manifestos shows a great attention to residential quality. He considers this, as realized in the gallery flats in the 1950s and 1960s, to be substandard, wants to get rid of the one-sided quantitative approach to housing and advocates other forms of housing, for "the habitable brick." Three concepts occupy a central place in his architecture: intercourse, cohesion, encounter. Architecture should be about people, should anticipate human behavior. Specific, functional spaces within the home receive a lot of attention in the design and are renamed: kitchen becomes cookhouse, (open) fireplace becomes firehouse. In this humane approach also fits his dealings with the people who worked for him. He did not call them employees but co-workers. Boon also often maintained good relations with builders and craftsmen and he admired their craftsmanship. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that Boon gave an important place to making, to technology. Seemingly simple matters such as rainwater drainage and degree of openness of windows and doors: he even lectured on them in Zurich. Energy management within a building was also a theme for him. Characterization of oeuvre In his criticism of postwar housing and his focus on building for people, Boon was certainly not alone: the new editors of the magazine Forum, of which Boon was a member, strongly advocated "the other way of living." This editorial board, soon referred to as the Forum Group, included Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger. They made the case for a ".... much-needed different attitude of architects, namely to do everything that lies within the capacity of architecture in terms of being generous in paying attention to what people should expect from their environment, physically and spiritually." It should therefore come as little surprise that Boon's architectural language later became strongly intertwined with Forum architecture, known as "Structuralism." However, early in his career, just after graduating from the Kunstnijverheidsschool in Amsterdam, Boon made a design for a house in strongly modernist style. A comparison with Le Corbusier's villas of the 1930s comes to mind. Thereafter, Boon developed an austere and not very unique style. Especially in his many residences from the 1950s and 1960s, we see the same elements recurring: pent roofs or gable roofs with gentle slopes and the use of brick and wooden infills. The modernist idiom is completely abandoned here. From the mid-1960s, structuralist influences increasingly permeate his designs: we see a growing preference for dividing the building into smaller parts, which can then be endlessly varied, rehearsed, arranged, thus responding to place and program. His residential structures also attest to his belief in the new forms of housing on an urban scale. In a structuralist design, according to Boon, if two or more building elements are brought together, a new element should emerge. If not, it would have nothing to do with structuralism. He considers the interplay between the same and different to be one of the essences of structuralism. So a simple juxtaposition of elements does not yield enough for him; what matters to him is the reworking of the basic element and the relationship the elements then enter into with each other. Later, Boon found the debate within Forum becoming one-sided and structuralism degenerating into games of form. Yet he never gave up his belief in the essences of this movement. Exactly what Gert Boon's position was in the group of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger, and later Piet Blom and Jan Verhoeven, is difficult to determine. So although he was a Forum employee from the very beginning and had plenty of progressive ideas, he did not manage to turn them into important commissions and leave his mark on Dutch architecture. He remains a somewhat curious figure in the background. Education: Kunstnijverheidsschool Amsterdam/1936-1940; E.T.H. Zürich/1948-1952 Additional positions: Academy of Architecture Amsterdam/teacher/1959-; T.H. Delft/teacher/; magazine Forum/editorial secretary/1958-1963