Louis Herman De Koninck (1896 to 1984) was a Belgian architect and designer, and one of the most original modernist voices of his generation. Born in Saint-Gilles, Brussels, he trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and worked early on in the studio of Victor Horta. Rather than approaching modernism as a theoretician, De Koninck rooted his work in a close study of the vernacular architecture of the Belgian coast, distilling the plain logic of rural building into a refined and rigorously rational language. From this foundation he developed an unmistakably personal form of modernism, marked by a breakthrough handling of light, volume and space. His most celebrated buildings, his own house (1924), the Lenglet House (1926) and the Haverbeke House (1927), were realised before the founding of CIAM, of which he became a member of the Belgian section in 1929. The Lenglet House in particular is regarded as one of the finest examples of international architecture of the 1920s, mentioned in the same breath as Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House and Le Corbusier's Cook House.

De Koninck's pursuit of rationality extended naturally from architecture into the objects that furnished it. He was an inventive maker of furniture, glasswork and tapestries for his own houses, and in the early 1930s produced a series of chromed tubular steel pieces conceived in the spirit of total design. His most important contribution to the domestic interior is the Cubex kitchen of 1930: a modular, standardised and industrially producible system whose softly rounded doors and chromed handles made it a timeless classic, first presented at CIAM and installed in homes across Belgium for decades. A committed innovator, he also devised a render of crushed glass and gravel and a gravity fed central heating system, and from 1940 to 1974 he taught architecture at La Cambre in Brussels. At his death in 1984 he left his carefully kept archive to the Archives d'Architecture Moderne in Brussels, which has helped grow recognition of his place in the history of modernist architecture in Belgium and beyond.