Café-Restaurant De Unie

Café-Restaurant De Unie is recognizable by its bold, flat facade featuring a geometric grid painted in primary red, yellow, and blue. Designed by architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud and completed in nineteen twenty-five, the building was originally a temporary, narrow structure intended to fill a vacant lot on the Coolsingel. Its stark, modern aesthetic contrasted sharply with the surrounding nineteenth-century masonry, prompting one contemporary critic, J. Verheul, to call it an outrageous disfigurement of the street.