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Tijen, Willem van
(b Wormerveer, 1 Feb 1894; d Zandvoort, 28 May 1974). Dutch architect. He was trained and first employed as a civil engineer in the former Dutch East Indies (Java). He was repatriated in 1926 after a serious attack of polio. A year later he decided to become a housing architect. After settling in Rotterdam, he designed plans for housing and residential areas, working variously with Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, Leendert Cornelis van der Vlugt and Ben Merkelbach. These designs aroused great interest among the architects of Nieuwe Bouwen, of which he soon became an influential representative. Through his contacts with progressive-liberal entrepreneurs, van Tijen was also able to have several unusual residential complexes realized in prefabricated units, including the block of flats Bergpolder (1934), Rotterdam, which established his reputation. Van Tijen’s unshakeable belief in an open and democratic society convinced him in the late 1930s that the rational pragmatism of Nieuwe Bouwen was not an adequate means of giving form to life in all its multiplicity. During the German occupation, therefore, he was the moving force behind a dialogue with more traditionally-minded architects. In the 1950s he agreed to major industrialization in order to alleviate housing shortage. He built many prefabricated houses, usually in residential neighbourhoods that he had laid out (Rotterdam, Delft, Vlaardingen, The Hague and Amsterdam). He struggled until 1965 to obtain government legislation guaranteeing sufficiently high minimum standards of quality for government-subsidized housing. From 1960 van Tijen worked mostly on committees and investigated the fundamental values of housing; he subsequently declared that the main point of departure for every architect should be to satisfy the ‘essential needs of housing’. He worked in a firm with H. A. Maaskant (1937–54) and with M. Boom, J. Posno, and later with A. van Randen (1955–74).
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