Serialism closely related to certain works from the de Stijl and Bauhaus movements in design and architecture called "serial art" by some writers (; ; ; ), specifically the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and Burgoyne Diller, who had been seeking to “avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements” . Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner: So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says:
Joan van der Mey capacity he developed the facade for the 1912 Palm House at the Hortus Botanicus among other buildings. That same year brought the commission for the Scheepvaarthuis, a large cooperative building for six Dutch shipping companies. Van der Mey sought the assistance of his former colleague-architects Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, and the architect "Adolf Daniël Nicolaas van Gendt" was responsible for engineering the concrete structure. Van der Mey's job was to coordinate the extensive symbolic art and sculptural program, inside and outside. Much of the sculpture is the work of Hildo Krop and H. A. van den Eijnde, but