Marinus Granpré Molière

Marinus Grenpré Molière studied at the Technical University of Delft and collaborated with Jos Klijnen. They had great influence on Dutch urban building and both belonged to the Rotterdam functionalists. In 1916 he installed an architectural office together with Pieter Verhagen. This office quickly grew to become the leading urban planning office. Grandpré Molière is generally regarded as a pioneer of the Organic City and a representative of the Rotterdam avant-garde in the 1920s. As a professor of the Delft Technical University (from 1924), he later became the founder of the traditional Delftse School. His considerable impact reached through his 30 years of teaching until the 1950s.

Designed by the three planners Jos Klijnen, Marinus Granpré Molière, and Pieter Verhagen, the park in Rotterdam was the “Kralingse Bos & Plas”, whose marshy slopes had already been filled with sludge from the Waalhaven in 1910. The design no longer followed the model of a 19th century city park in order to provide room for the numerous new inhabitants of this part of Rotterdam and to adapt the park to the existing landscape. Instead a polder park was created with trees on the shore of the lake, long footpaths, islands in the lake, and beaches along the shore.