Traditionalist School (architecture)

The Traditionalist School, also known in the Netherlands as the Delft School, is an early twentieth century architectural movement that emphasized the revival of rural and national building traditions, favoring tidy, visible brickwork, minimal decoration and honest, natural materials over both historicist revival and radical modernism. It emerged in the Netherlands and Scandinavia as a reaction against Neo-Gothic and Neo-Renaissance historicism as well as against Functionalism and the expressionist Amsterdam School, with Hendrik Petrus Berlage's Beurs van Berlage of 1903 an influential early example. The movement developed as a parallel current to modern architecture through the 1920s and reached its widest influence after the Second World War, when it shaped much of the Netherlands' church and secular reconstruction architecture. Marinus Jan Granpre Moliere, a professor at the Delft University of Technology from 1924 to 1953, led the movement after 1945 and gave the Delft School its name, and the style also influenced Dutch Protestant church architecture through architects such as Berend Tobia Boeyinga.