Theodorus Josephus Taen Err Toung (Berlin, December 12, 1889 - Boxtel, October 30, 1970) was a Dutch architect. Life and work Taen was a grandson of P.J.H. Cuypers and the third of four children of his daughter Maria ("Mia"). The latter had married F.G. Taen Err Toung in 1886. Taen was not only not Catholic but also partially, and visibly, of Chinese descent. The mixed relationship between the two resulted in a scandal. Only after Taen converted to Catholicism did Cuypers, and then reluctantly, give his consent to the marriage. The writer Lodewijk van Deyssel, also a relative of Cuypers, wrote about this marriage in 1892 in the serial Kruising van rassen, which also appeared in book form in 1894 under the title Blank and Yellow. Theo Taen was born in Berlin, where his father had a business specializing in Japanese and Chinese food products, oriental paper and oriental art. When Taen and Mia's marriage collapsed in 1897, Cuypers had his grandchildren kidnapped and transferred to Limburg, where they were placed in boarding schools. Little is known about Taen's subsequent childhood, nor about his training as an architect. Around 1918, he would have established himself as an independent architect in Amsterdam and drew the design for St. George's College in Eindhoven. In 1921 he designed the town hall of Goirle. Because Taen left for the Dutch East Indies, the commission for St. George's College was taken over by Eduard Cuypers' firm. In 1945, Taen returned to the Netherlands, having worked in the Dutch East Indies for 25 years and spent several years in a Japanese camp. One of his first commissions in the Netherlands was for the design of the Sint Catharinalyceum in Eindhoven, today's Van Maerlantlyceum, for the same client for whom he designed the Sint-Joriscollege in 1918. Shortly after accepting this commission, he associated himself with J. de Jongh and Th. Nix. The firm De Jongh-Taen-Nix, later Taen and Nix, designed in the 1950s and 1960s, among other things, at least eleven Catholic churches, initially in traditionalist styles related to the Delft School and Bossche School, later in a more functionalist style. (Source: Wikipedia. April 2018)