ABSTRACT
In the 1950s–1960s, Hugh A. Maaskant (1907–77) was the architect of choice for corporate capital emerging from the post-war reconstruction period in the Netherlands. As the ultimate pragmatist, he managed to be always in line with the policies and tendencies of the moment, accumulating a vast portfolio of commissions. His immediate legacy has been split between a highly critical reading of his work through the ideological lens of Team-X, from the 1970s onwards, and the later documentation of his prolific activity as relevant and interestingly symptomatic of architectural modernism’s equivalent of Realpolitik in the Netherlands. Never a reformist, his reputation as a rational and technocratic architect, believing in the virtues of capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of post-war democracy in the face of the cold war, made him an obvious candidate to give form to the growing amount of transatlantic investment in Europe.
