Nicolaas Molenaar Sr. (1850-1930) Molenaar came from a family of carpenters and contractors who were quite active in Friesland. He must have received his first instruction from his father, while he also took drawing lessons at Sneek. Already at the age of nineteen, he was entrusted with the execution of the St. Martinuskerk in Sneek, designed by P.J.H. Cuypers, under the supervision of C.H. Peters, the later state architect. His work there must have been well liked by Cuypers, because hereafter he is engaged as superintendent at several churches designed by Cuypers: the Bovenkerk in Sappemeer, the St. Jacobus in The Hague. In connection with the work on this Hague church, he moved to The Hague, where he would live until his death. On Cuypers' advice, Molenaar joined the office of the State Architect for Education, J. van Lokhorst, in 1875. Here he worked for ten years, although, it is said, he did not like it very much. Several buildings constructed by this office (including university laboratories in Groningen and Leiden) were probably designed by Molenaar. In 1885 he designed his first church himself, destined for Vleuten. Various commissions followed, so that he finally left the civil service and established himself as an independent architect. As such, he fared quite well for quite some time. In 1893 he received a first prize for a residential complex he designed on Sweelinckplein in The Hague. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1900, several of his designs were awarded a silver medal. Of particular importance to his career were his good contacts with the Jesuit order, for which he carried out numerous commissions. After the construction of the Canisius College in Nijmegen (1898), the Jesuits withheld further commissions from him for unknown reasons. This contributed to a qualitative decline in his work, which lasted quite a long time. After 1905 he was over that again and designed several more of his most significant works. Miller was not someone who liked to be in the limelight. He did not have pupils in his own right. His son Nicolaas jr. was also an architect and did work with his father for a while, but otherwise went his own way. Molenaar Sr. remained active into old age. His last designs date from 1925. In 1928 he suffered a stroke that prevented him from continuing to work. Molenaar's oeuvre includes both profane and church buildings. His profane work is quite extensive. It includes many schools, foundation buildings, residential and commercial buildings, the latter especially many in his native Sneek. Of his buildings for institutions can be mentioned Groenesteyn in The Hague (1892, demolished 1971) - in Gothic style with a monumental chapel as a central part - and his most impressive work in this area, the Canisius College in Nijmegen (1898) - a strict symmetrical building in forms somewhat reminiscent of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Of his residential houses, mention should be made of the country estate De Cloese at Lochern (1892) and a series of houses on Statenplein in The Hague (1902). Although Molenaar occasionally designed profane works in Gothic style, he usually used forms derived from the Dutch Renaissance for such commissions. Molenaar is significant primarily as a Catholic church architect. His church buildings clearly show influences of his teacher Cuypers, but also of the other grand master of neo-Gothic architecture in the Netherlands, Alfred Tepe. Cuypers has a fairly strong preference in his work for forms borrowed from classical Gothic. Molenaar has a related view, but on the other hand he shows in several works a strong affinity to the design of early Gothic. In doing so, however, he almost never goes so far as to seek inspiration from Romanesque. His second church, the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in Groningen (1886, demolished 1962), already gave a clear indication of the direction in which Molenaar would primarily seek. The cramped building site necessitated the installation of galleries. If one looks for Gothic examples for such a construction, one quickly ends up with the early French Gothic style. The design of the church therefore corresponds to this. Another element that will be common to Molenaar was also found in the Groninger church: a façade with two octagonal towers. This is almost certainly a borrowing from a main work by Alfred Tepe, the Krijtbergkerk in Amsterdam (1880). Molenaar would design similar facades at St. Ignatius in Nijmegen (1894) and chapel Groenesteyn in The Hague (1892). In the design of these facades, however, Molenaar deviates considerably from Tepes' example. Of the many early Gothic-style churches he built during this period, Our Lady Immaculate Conception in The Hague (1890-1892) was one of Molenaar's undisputed masterpieces. In this very monumental basilica with two towers, as it were, Molenaar's views came to a synthesis for the first time. The basilica is equipped with galleries and possesses a richly landscaped trefoil-shaped choir, all in forms borrowed from early Gothic. In general, Molenaar's church building of the 1990s shows a certain tendency toward austerity in design, culminating for the time being in St. Willibrordus in Wassenaar (1903), built in bright red brick. Related to this trend is perhaps Molenaar's design for St. Martha in The Hague (1907, completed 1924), which was inspired by the late Gothic style of the Dutch coastal region. It is noteworthy, incidentally, that unlike Cuypers, he began very late to treat his church interiors as clean work. An important feature of his work is his occupation with central construction. Already the O.L. Vrouwe in The Hague shows pronounced centralizing tendencies due to its wide transept, which also recur in other work such as the chancel of the Noordwijk church. In the period after 1890, the idea emerges strongly that a church building should be able to offer the greatest possible number of churchgoers an unobstructed view of the altar. Experiments with centrally arranged churches are therefore strongly encouraged. Molenaar produced several designs for central buildings, mostly in a design that strongly recalled The Hague's Our Lady. However, none of these plans came to fruition. In his church in Noordwijk (1894, completed in 1927 with a different tower section) he had already experimented with a system of vaulting that allowed a minimum number of pillars and thus met the requirement for greater clarity of the church space. In 1912, Molenaar was commissioned to build the Church of St. Engelbewaarders in The Hague (demolished in 1982). In this building all tendencies in Molenaar's development came together. The early Gothic design, the search for a centralizing space, a vaulting system with as few supports as possible and an extreme austerity in detailing. For the plan of the building, Molenaar used a number of elements from the Liebfrauenkirche in Trier, one of the few centralizing Gothic churches. To achieve the largest possible vault span, he resorted to the eight-part domed vaults of early Westphalian Gothic architecture. The use of such vaults, which is unique in Neo-Gothic, produced - combined with a small number of supports according to the system developed in Noordwijk - an extraordinarily wide space. The external proportioning had also been treated with the utmost care. Until the very end, Molenaar remained faithful to neo-Gothic for church commissions. Only in his last church, the H.H. Martelaren van Gorcum in The Hague (1922, demolished 1941), did he try a slightly more modern design. For a long time, an architect's progressiveness was used as a criterion for his significance. When one does that, Molenaar is not an important architect. He was decidedly traditional in his views. However, when one does not use modernity as a yardstick, it is better to judge an architect like Molenaar on his merits. It cannot be denied that his use of materials and detailing sometimes appear somewhat dry and monotonous. However, he derives his significance from his talent for handling building volumes and especially his spatial ability. The way in which he managed to give shape to space makes this relatively unknown architect a master builder of more than ordinary significance.