(abridged version Bonas Essay) Herman Haan (1914-1996) Education After failing to complete a few schools, including the trade school and the HBS, Haan attends the MTS in Groningen for two years. In this building by Van der Vlugt and Wiebenga, he is confronted early on with the idiom of the Nieuwe Bouwen movement. Around 1932, Haan entered the service of the Groningen architect Egbert Reitsma. After working for six months as a draughtsman for the cartographic department of British Petroleum, Haan received his first serious commissions as a private architect: a bank branch with residence and a detached villa. In 1940, Haan moved to Rotterdam and joined the architect/contractor Ph. Kanters, where he collaborated on an office building, a silo for the Blaauwhoedenveem on the St. Jobshaven and the famous warehouse "De Molukken. In 1941, Haan enrolled in the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture (HBO) and traveled to Amsterdam in the company of Leo de Jonge, Jaap Bakema and Lotte Stam-Beese, among others. At the academy, his teachers included Willem van Tijen, who characterized Haan as "an honest open-hearted student and a hard worker. According to other teachers, Haan has a good understanding of architecture, rises above mediocrity and produces handsome drawing work. During a "youth study weekend" in Doorn on June 6 and 7, 1942, Herman Haan comes into contact with the thought world of another important source of inspiration: Gerrit Rietveld. During the weekend in Doorn, Rietveld responds to the central question, "What do you hope and expect from Dutch architecture in the time to come ?" and then answers that "...in Dutch architecture the sense of space is developed and to help thus unfold life (before our eyes). After the course was suspended due to the war situation, Haan began his final year of study in 1945. However, his graduation plan is rejected by the traditionalist teacher Zwiers. Haan forgoes a retake and plunges into his career as an architect without a diploma. Independent architect From the moment in 1935, when Herman Haan nailed a sign with "H.P.C. Haan, architect" to the wall, he has worked more or less as an independent architect. During his early days in Rotterdam, he gained experience at Kanters during the day and worked on smaller projects in the evenings, such as a student house in Rotterdam. Thanks to contacts from the resistance and the reconstruction of Rotterdam, his own practice gets off to a good start after the war. At the end of the 1940s, his own firm was strengthened with Piet de Hoog (b. 1918), with whom Haan worked closely until 1963. Around 1967, the partnership between Haan and his associates is transformed into Atelier aA. His interest in Africa grows more and more. Sometimes Haan's impulsive character emerges, when he no longer sees any point in a project and immediately leaves for the Sahara for several months, leaving his collaborators distraught. A commission for housing in the district of Sterrenburg III in Dordrecht in 1975 is the last major project for the office and Haan. Atelier aA ends, as vaguely as it began, in the mid-1970s. Haan's last realized work is a vacation home in Burgsluis in 1984. Team Ten Herman Haan is a true builder and by no means a great theorist. His publications on architecture are few and limited to brief explanations of plans; what matters is the built result. However, Haan does try to make his knowledge of non-Western cultures within the world of architecture negotiable through various lectures. During the second half of the 1950s, he attends a number of Team Ten meetings. Team Ten is a reaction against the functionalist dogmas of the older generation of CIAM architects. Central to the discussions at the meetings is the desire not to deny the complexity of social relations between the building and its surroundings, which is what actually happens with the separation of functions, but rather to accept them as the starting point for a new architecture and urbanism. Haan is a member of the Dutch delegation for the final CIAM meeting organized by Team Ten in Otterlo 1959. Like Bakema, Van Eyck and Smithson, Haan delivers a lecture. His topic is living in the desert. The lecture is also published in the accompanying Forum issue and the official conference report. The lecture highlights aspects that can be found in Haan's work, such as the patio as a "grandiose threshold between complete privacy and interminable space" and the simplicity of building. Not many of these expressions are known from Haan. Of Team Ten's activities, he found that the wine tasted considerably better than the stories, philosophies and results. Haan's oeuvre Haan's work can be roughly divided into three periods. An initial period, in which he more or less 'searchingly' tried to formulate his own response to the pre-war modernist idiom. After the realization in 1951 of his own residence, he manages to develop a completely individual architectural language of form in a series of detached houses. During the 1960s, the nature of the commissions changed. In this latter period, the one-off commissions with a small-scale character give way to the more large-scale projects. Slot Herman Haan is a man about whom many strange stories can be told. Haan is a flier. His colleagues admired the abandonment with which he enjoyed life, but they also did not take him very seriously as a result. In fact, Haan was more adventurer than architect. Herman Haan was known more for his travels to Africa than for his architecture. Through his drive and entrepreneurial spirit, Haan introduced a large number of people to African culture and ways of life. However, he never captured his knowledge of Africa in a cultural philosophy, unlike, say, Aldo van Eyck. Haan's interest lay more in the people and their stories and legends, in nature and in the building methods and techniques that he recorded in many drawings and sketches. Whereas Van Eyck finds mostly abstract connections to Western cultural philosophy in the Dogon stories, Haan also takes them seriously as derivatives of real events and goes in search of concrete evidence for them. The relative unfamiliarity of Haan's architectural work is partly explained by the lack of publications of his own or theoretical constructions. Nor did he deal with social issues such as public housing, and he never received a commission for a public building. In the sixties his projects on the campus of the TH Twente still receive some attention, but this disappears in the seventies partly due to Haan's diminished interest in building (and increased interest in Africa) and also the houses no longer fit into the atmosphere of the "New Truttiness. Haan's work is difficult to place in one movement because of his idiosyncratic, bold way of designing. His designs are clear, consisting of rectangular forms, but made delicate by a humane attention to the occupant and detail. Why caress your delicate wife and not your home...... Education: MTS Groningen/;Academy of Architecture Amsterdam/1941-1945 Additional positions: Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam/guest lecturer/1956;Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm/ lecturer/1957-1958;Dutch delegation to the CIAM meeting in Otterlo 1959/member/1959;T.H. Eindhoven/guest lecturer/;University of Oslo/guest lecturer/;Art College London/guest lecturer/;Art College Bristol/guest lecturer/