agenda. Although they began from completely different starting points,
with very different agendas, like the American material feminists, the
members of the De Stijl group were firmly committed to the idea that
the new environments would bring about new behaviours. In 1918 van
Doesburg and Oud created a holiday residence at Noordwijkehout for
De Vonk, a social centre for workers, especially women. The former was
responsible for the tiled floors and the colours of the doors. He explained
to his fellow architect, in characteristically De Stijl rhetoric, that ‘we
can bring our emotion, realised in space and atmosphere, to its full
independence precisely through our coloristic and formal projects.’^8
The projects in which the De Stijl artists and architects engaged crossed,
or rather ignored, the public–private divide. They created a number of
private residences – among them van Doesburg and Jan Wils’s town house
for the de Lange family in Alkmaar – but they also worked on numerous
projects linked to commerce and leisure – cafés, theatres and exhibition
halls among them. The abstract, geometric forms and colours of the typ-
ical De Stijl interior environment were eminently suitable for both private
and public spaces, and helped to erode the differences between them. Van172 Doesburg’s 1923 design for a hall for Amsterdam University provided a
Theo van Doesburg, tiled corridor in the De Vonk holiday house in Noodwijkerhout,
1917 , illustrated in Innen-Dekoration, 1925.