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When you see the strictly geometrical 'Synthetic construction' on the Plesmanweg, you would not immediately think that nature is the starting point for the work of Joost Baljeu. But like Mondrian, Baljeu looked for the structures that underlie the capricious manifestations of nature. The aim was to create a new, universally applicable language of form. The cubes in 'Synthetic construction' are stacked around a perpendicular line. According to Baljeu, the spiral shape thus created was akin to nature in which everything moves around cores.

Baljeu was an important exponent of the abstract geometric movement in the Netherlands after 1945. Many artists at that time distanced themselves from the realism of the 1930s, which had become contaminated by the nationalistic 'gesundes Volksempfinden' of the Nazi era. There was renewed interest in the abstract art of the avant-garde from the first decades of the twentieth century, with representatives such as Mondrian and Van Doesburg.
When Baljeu returned to painting in 1952, after a brief foray into literature, he developed rapidly. He began to produce paintings in which areas of colour were set off against each other. To make the spatial illusion concrete, he composed the colour planes into reliefs, which gradually became more spatial and resulted in monumental constructions. Baljeu was very active as an artist, writer and teacher. He was the founder of the magazine 'Structure', for example, to which kindred artists and architects contributed.

Geometric abstraction was later rejected by many as too distant. For Baljeu, however, the opposite was true. He was a sensitive idealist who wanted to create a harmonious environment precisely by combining art and architecture. Baljeu was therefore one of the few artists who remained true to his geometric abstraction goals until the very end.