Between 1972 and 1974, artist Jan van Goethem created three monumental installations consisting of tinted glass plates in the Gemini building on the campus of Eindhoven’s technical university. The art works are situated in three locations within the building: on the window façade, interior walls of the building’s central hall, and the ceiling. The work in total is an in situ (site-specific) installation with a geometric-abstract character. The term geometric abstraction refers to the use of forms that can be created using a drafting compass and a ruler, such as a triangle, square, rectangle, circle, or a straight line. A characteristic of Jan van Goethem’s body of work is his combination of this formal language with an intuitive use of color. In order to lend a sense of depth to the spatial organization, he seeks to let the forms move in tandem with the structure of a building in his architectural applications. The installation in Eindhoven is one of the earliest in a series of several monumental glass works developed by the artist, throughout his career, for governmental buildings and educational organizations such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Leiden University.
Upon approach of the Gemini building, we first encounter the external glass façade on the second floor on the side of the cafeteria. Van Goethem has applied a decorative pattern of two orange-yellow lines on this glass façade. His design unites the window with the campus landscape behind it as a single canvas that splits itself into various surfaces. One line goes across the center of two glass parts, diagonally shifting downward. A second diagonal line then appears from the top in a recurring pattern. Black steel contour lines, flanking two orange-yellow glass stripes, lend depth and weight to the glasswork. On sunny days the glass pattern brightens the cafeteria with orange-yellowish lines, or golden beams. The window thus becomes an extension of the architecture, the interior, and the surrounding landscape.
The second work is located on the interior walls of the central hall. Blue glass, surrounded by strips of green, embellishes a number of glass wall panels. The shape is similar to a Greek letter Y of which the top axis has been horizontally expanded. In contrast to the window façade applications, the glass on the interior panels was not fit into steel, but into aluminum frames. These aluminum frames serve the same purpose as the steel on the façade, lending additional weight to the lines within the overall composition. The blue and green color fields form a pattern that seems to make an upward movement, adding further emphasis on the supportive function of the building’s concrete pillars.
The third part consists of five identical glass works mounted in a steel frame under the building’s skylight windows. The glass works are made up of square, rectangular and triangular glass plates in the colors blue and white. In the middle of the glassworks, the frame points downwards which allows the glass panels to bend downwards at that point. This produces a similar Y-shape to that on the interior wall panels, but this time the Y-pattern appears to depict an airplane or bird. Transparent glass was fitted around the white surfaces, resulting in a space in which the paper airplane or bird drifts through the air, as it were. This figure refers both to nature and to technology, and specifically to the faculty of Engineering and the department of Aerospace Engineering that were originally housed in the Gemini building.
This art work is exemplary of Jan van Goethem’s interest in both architecture and visual arts. After finishing his education at the Academy of Architectural Engineering in Tilburg he worked as an architect for several years, before choosing a career as a self-taught artist (Aletrino, 1967). He found inspiration for his work in various architectural applications: from transparent alabaster panels placed in windows within Byzantine architecture to Roger Bissière and Fernand Léger’s glass-in-concrete works. The architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Victor Horta also inspired his architectural applications of colored glass windows. For the glass project in Eindhoven, Van Goethem found inspiration in the glass roof of Saint-Lazare railway station in Paris, but also in the well-known glass applications by Matisse for the Chappelle du Rosaire in Vence, in the south of France (Goethem and Aletrino, 1981). Nonetheless, Van Goethem could find inspiration in “anything”, often referring to the force and freedom he experienced while developing his geometrical language of forms (Smit, 1968). For example, he was interested in uses of negative space, such as the transparent surfaces within his glass works that serve to balance the colored surfaces in his compositions. He has similarly applied these principles within the other disciplines he practices, including painting and screen-printing, “in order to add even more weight to the shapes” (Goethem, 1973). Yet according to Jan van Goethem, it is up to the admirer to notice these works and give meaning to them: “Form, color, and the varying spatial environment will always influence the individual viewer’s experience” (Goethem, 1973).
Authors
Alec Broekhuizen (author) is an intern in 2023 as part of his study Arts, Media and Society at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS)
Laura Schuster (editor/translator) is a freelance editor and translator
Britte Sloothaak (editor-in-chief) is curator of the TU/e Art Collection
References:
Aletrino, Paul. ‘Kunst Uit K-IJ-K-E-N Op Straat’. Algemeen Dagblad Rotterdam, 6 april 1967.
Goethem, Jan van. Jan van Goethem : 12 Oktober-18 November 1973, Museum Fodor, Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Museum Fodor, 1973.
Goethem, Jan van, en Paul Aletrino. Kunst Belicht: Jan van Goethem. Raak Lichtarchitectuur, 1981.
Smit, Loek. ‘Met Expositie in Kasteel De Nemelaer, Haaren: Brabantse Come Back van Jan van Goethem’. Eindhovens Dagblad, 19 September 1968.
Images:
Image. 1 Jan van Goethem, Glasproject voor Werktuigbouwkunde T.H. Eindhoven (gevelwand), 1972-1974, Glass in steel frame, photo: Alec Broekhuizen
Image. 2 Jan van Goethem, Glasproject voor Werktuigbouwkunde T.H. Eindhoven (binnenwand), 1972-1974, glass in aluminum frame, phto: Alec Broekhuizen
Image. 3 Jan van Goethem, Glasproject voor Werktuigbouwkunde T.H. Eindhoven (plafond), 1972-1974, Glass in steel frame, photo: Alec Broekhuizen