Artwork Data
Artwork Location
Address
Isabellaland 1732-1874, Den Haag
City district
Haagse Hout
GPS data
52.0951694, 4.3690009 View on map
To be found on route
Artwork Description
Text
After World War II the housing shortage was also very high in The Hague. In the southwest, a lot of additional construction took place. In the mid-fifties, building activities also began on the Wassenaar side. Architect and urban planner Dudok had also designated the Veen and Binckhorst Polder as a site for housing in his structural plan of 1949. In 1953, engineer F. van der Sluijs delivered a plan for the new housing estate Mariahoeve, named after the farm of the same name in that polder. The urban planner's plan included six neighborhoods with lots of greenery and their own facilities. Due to the alternation of low and high-rise buildings and a less rigid street plan, it would become significantly less monotonous than the previously built The Hague Southwest. High-rise buildings were planned on the edges. Construction began in the spring of 1958.
The new district, as was customary at the time, was subject to the percentage rule. 1-1.5% of the construction sum was spent on art. Eric Boot was one of the artists commissioned to create a work to beautify the new district. He created a relief for the facade of one of the flats on Isabellaland.
Educated at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Boot has been an independent sculptor since 1963. Although his sculptures and reliefs are sometimes reminiscent of the sculptures of the famous English sculptor Henry Moore, Boot arrived at abstraction in a very different way. Whereas Moore took nature as his starting point and therefore always kept working figuratively, Boot systematically constructed his own world from abstract, mathematical forms. Moreover, he often combined more than one loose form into a new, exciting whole. As in his relief on the facade on Isabellaland.