Cornelius Van Eesteren was a Dutch Modernist architect and town planner. Van Eesteren came from a family of building contractors in N Holland. Following a conventional secondary education, some drawing lessons and a short spell as a carpenter’s apprentice, he turned his attention to architecture and in 1915 joined the practice of Willem Kromhout in Rotterdam.

Two years later he gained his architectural diploma from the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Technical Sciences. He studied at the Hoger Bouwkunstonderwijs in Amsterdam (1919-22) and won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to visit Germany in 1922 to study brick architecture. He also spent some time at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he met one of the famous architects - Theo Van Doesburg, a leading figure in the Dutch De Stijl movement, which was strongly influenced by the principles of Cubism.

In 1923 Van Eesteren worked in Paris with Van Doesburg and met the painter Piet Mondrian. Together they formulated the architectonic principles of Neo-Plastics. From 1924 to 1927 Van Eesteren worked under Jan Wils and continued his studies in town-planning. By 1929 he had become chief architect in the town-planning department in the City of Amsterdam, supervising the development of the city for the next fifty years.

Van Eesteren based much of his work on a plan by Berlage prepared in 1917, which he revised and enlarged in accordance with extensive research. He was one of the first planners to analyse the development of a city, and use this information to predict future needs. From 1930 to 1947 he was president of CIAM and professor of town-planning at the Technical University in Delft 1947-67.