Werklust biografie van een gebruikslandschap

Lust for work

Theo Baart

Projects | Books

Werklust [Lust for work]

Biography of a landscape in transition

2015 | With an undiminished sense of wonder, Theo Baart has spent the last forty years photographing the vicissitudes of the landscape of his youth: Hoofddorp and the area around Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Nowhere else in the Netherlands is the landscape under such intense pressure. It is a region where all the major planning issues appear in magnified form.

In word an image, Baart shows how urbanization and globalization have resulted in the seamless integration of an agricultural area into the Amsterdam metropolitan area. He has photographed the demolition of Hoofddorp's first suburb as part of the city centre's redevelopment, and he shows how the once empty polder ha been filled with roads, bridge, railway lines and runways.

Theo Baart portrays this everyday landscape with its new residential areas, motorways and shopping centres a a mirror of Dutch culture. Werklust, the sequel to Bouwlust (1999), uses this vital economic region as a striking example of how the landscape of the Netherlands has been turned completely upside down over the last forty years.

Go to Bouwlust here