R. van 't Hoff (1887-1979) Rob van 't Hoff (November 5, 1887, Rotterdam) was the son of the chemist-bacteriologist Herminus Johannes van 't Hoff, who was director of the Waterworks in Rotterdam. His parents were socially committed and friends of Frederik van Eeden, and the family regularly attended the utopian living and working community "Walden. From 1906 to 1911, Van 't Hoff studied architecture at the School of Art in Birmingham. Van 't Hoff was interested in rural housing, architecture with a social perspective and the Arts & Crafts Movement. From 1911 to 1914, he continued his studies in London at the Architectural Association Westminster. There he was introduced to new modernist movements. In June 1914, he traveled to the United States and met Frank Lloyd Wright. Starting in 1911, Van 't Hoff built residential houses. Initially in traditional style, but in 1915 he designed in Huis ter Heide the first concrete house in the Netherlands for A.B. Henny. He met Huib Hoste, Theo van Doesburg and J.J.P. Oud and was involved in De Stijl from 1917. Van 't Hoff married the then 19-year-old damsel Petronella Hooft in 1918. A year later he broke with De Stijl because, in his opinion, this movement showed too little social commitment. In 1923 he traveled to England, where he built up contacts with anarchists and anonymously published his socially critical writing "Abolition" (1926). In 1928, Van 't Hoff spent nine months at the April Farm Cooperative Association in Coopersburg, USA. Charles Garland, the founder of this community, had asked him to design new buildings, but Van 't Hoff disagreed on the design and returned to the Netherlands. In 1937, he settled permanently in New Milton, England. He withdrew more and more: he did maintenance work on an estate, built furniture and read socially critical studies. In 1945, he designed a housing commune to be built for workers in bombed-out Coventry, but this plan was never realized. Van 't Hoff never worked as an architect after that. He died on April 25, 1979. Van 't Hoff destroyed most of his archives during World War II, but did create 11 panels listing his oeuvre. After World War II, interest in Van 't Hoff grew. Attention was paid to him at the retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the early 1950s. In 1962 attention was paid to Van 't Hoff at the exhibition "Autonomous Architecture" at Het Prinsenhof in Delft, and a retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre followed in 1967 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.