Dutch Polder Construction Site with Windmill, Netherlands, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Dutch Polder Construction Site with Windmill, Netherlands, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Dutch Polder Construction Site with Windmill, Netherlands, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-00975E

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Somewhere in the flat Netherlands, a construction crew has torn up the polderland with the cheerful confidence of a country that had spent three centuries deciding the ground beneath its feet was a work in progress. The foreground is a chaos of excavated earth and broken brick — the raw material of a postwar Dutch town being assembled from scratch, or an old one being replumbed for the modern era — and through the wooden gate beyond, the tidy brick farm buildings of the new Netherlands are already rising on the drained and levelled ground. Behind them, a traditional four-sailed windmill turns with the air of a monument that has not quite been told it is no longer needed, still plausible in a landscape that was abolishing everything it stood for. The Netherlands in the 1950s was engaged in the largest land-reclamation and rebuilding programme in its history, the Zuiderzee works underway and every polder a fresh argument that the country's past and its engineered future could occupy the same field. The windmill appears to agree, which is the most Dutch possible response to being made redundant.

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