(abridged version Bonas Essay) Michiel Brinkman (1873-1925) Michiel Brinkman was born on December 16, 1873 in Rotterdam. After high school, where he was a brilliant student, he attended the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences in Rotterdam, under H. Evers. After his studies, he joined the architect Barend Hooykaas jr. At bureau Hooykaas, he soon became chef de bureau. Barend Hooykaas worked mainly for trade, industry and for church communities, especially the Dutch Reformed Church in Rotterdam. The experience and contacts that Brinkman was able to gain from working for Hooykaas certainly left its mark on the nature of his commissions in the first years of his independent career from 1910. Stylistically, however, he struck out on his own. His death in 1925, without prior illness, came as a bolt from the blue. Only fifteen years of independent work were behind him. Nevertheless, in the meantime he had built up an agency with a good reputation in Rotterdam. The large number of commissions for industry in his oeuvre is related on the one hand to his training and experience with both H. Evers and B. Hooykaas jr, but on the other hand also to his personal talent for working out special, technical problems. Especially in the early days, these industrial assignments made up a large part of his work. Clients from industry provided Brinkman with a continuous stream of orders. Around 1920 there was a change in his work: factory construction gave way to residential construction. Brinkman's complex of gallery houses in Spangen attracted a great deal of publicity. From 1923 he worked on an aesthetic recommendation for the Mathenesserweg and surroundings, commissioned by the Municipality. After his sudden death in 1925, Brinkman's firm was continued by his son J.A. Brinkman, who associated himself with L.C. van der Vlugt. As architectural firm Van den Broek and Bakema, the firm still exists. Major social activity Brinkman was not the type of architect who pushed himself to the forefront by highlighting his work. As a result, there are hardly any planning notes known from his hand. Nevertheless, he acquired a place in the cultural life of Rotterdam. Like most of his peers, he was a member of the Vereniging Bouwkunst en Vriendschap. Brinkman was also among the first members of the architectural society "Opbouw," which was founded in 1920. Starting in 1921, Brinkman held a board position at the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences, where he himself had studied. Brinkman was a member of the BNA and also president of its Regional Circle. In the societies mentioned so far, Brinkman was present primarily as an architect. However, Brinkman was also a theosophist and as such affiliated with the Dutch Theosophical Society. At the meetings in Rotterdam, he met C.H. van der Leeuw, who would become important to Brinkman as the client for the new Van Nelle factory. Brinkman concentrated mainly on the city of Rotterdam. He belonged to the group that worked to make the rapidly expanding and up to chaotic Rotterdam a beautiful and livable city through architecture. Both his company buildings and his housing plans bear witness to this. His famous complex in Spangen constituted an experiment that shows respect for the human scale, in the broad sense of the word. His aesthetic recommendations for the Mathenesserweg and its surroundings show his commitment to a current debate on the role of government, namely the "Bauberatung. From idealism to practical classicism Students at Rotterdam's academy received a thorough technical education, as well as drawing classical orders and learning classical composition principles. This rationalized classical tradition, through its strong anchoring in education, formed the point of reference for a whole generation of European architects, who were confronted with a new industrial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. The design principles derived from classicism, especially the pursuit of the typical, of systematics and mathematical regularity in measures and proportions, proved an indispensable complement to rationalism abroad, especially in Germany (Behrens) and France (Perret, Garnier), which sought a new, dynamic relationship between function, material and construction through formal experimentation. The Rotterdam town hall competition: a picture of the times Only just established independently as an architect, Brinkman was invited in 1912 to participate in the closed competition for a new city hall in Rotterdam. His Rotterdam connections and the influence of his old teacher must not have been foreign to this. Evers, who eventually won the competition, played a role in its preparation. Industrial Culture Michiel Brinkman's independent career spanned only 15 years, from 1910 to 1925. However, this was a crucial period for Dutch architecture. The architect's field of activity shifted from traditional-representational tasks to new areas, particularly to industry and commerce and - since the introduction of the Housing Act in 1902 - to public housing. It was precisely in these areas that the nineteenth-century artist-architect was increasingly sidelined by engineer and contractor. It was Berlage's main achievement that he redefined the role of architecture. Architecture had to adapt to the new capitalist society, which judged buildings on economic return. Supported by German examples in particular (Peter Behrens), Brinkman found in the classical design discipline an efficient means of analyzing complicated tasks and translating them into a clear and eloquent architectural form. The design principles he applied here recur in all his designs for utility buildings, as well as in his offices and housing projects, some of which will be discussed in a little more detail below. Construction, form and decoration As a gifted structural engineer, Brinkman applied all kinds of structures and combinations of structures, up to and including complete steel and concrete skeleton construction, but always opted for brick facades. In addition to aesthetic considerations, functional considerations also played a role here: brick exterior walls are resistant to the Dutch climate. Especially in industrial construction, this system offers great advantages. Concrete and/or steel frame construction with brick facades and sufficient windows allow for a flexible layout of the work floor. Moreover, the exterior takes on a clear, expressive form that gives the company a clear face to the outside world. In more representative assignments, Brinkman exploited this separation in a different way. Concrete and steel structures make spectacular spatial climaxes possible without the exterior losing its closed, summary form. Slot In historiography, Brinkman's oeuvre has been reduced to a preliminary history, a run-up to the big story. Anything that did not fit into that was left unsaid. We know Michiel Brinkman as the creator of the housing complex in Spangen, considered the forerunner of the first gallery flat in the Netherlands, the Bergpolderflat, a high point of the Nieuwe Bouwen movement. In addition, he figures as the one who introduced the monolithic mushroom concrete construction, later also used in the Van Nelle Factory, to the Netherlands. A broader view of Michiel Brinkman's work quickly reveals that it lacks the suggested uniformity. His oeuvre is more than a prelude to Nieuwe Bouwen and can even be considered an amendment to the rationalist tradition in which that movement is rooted. Brinkman was a gifted structural engineer in iron and concrete, but that was not the essence of his understanding of architecture. Trained in a classical tradition, he believed in the autonomous power of architectural form. In his endeavor to confront this belief with a new age of great changes in the technical, economic and social fields and thus to test it for its continued relevance lies the main and still current significance of his oeuvre.