Henri Maclaine Pont was born in 1884 in Meester Cornelis, a district of Batavia, the capital of the former Dutch East Indies. In 1893, he returned to the Netherlands with his parents. Here Maclaine Pont studies architecture at the Technical High School in Delft, where he graduates in 1909. From 1909 to 1911, he then works at the office of architect C.B. Posthumus Meijes in Amsterdam. His own career as an architect begins in 1913, when he settles with his own office in Semarang on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. He receives his first design commission in 1911 for the headquarters of the Semarang-Cheribon-Stoomtram Company in Tegal on the island of Java. Design principles include climatic requirements, the use of indigenous building materials and the use of indigenous manpower in construction. Maclaine Pont not only applies a second facade to cope with the climatic conditions, but also determines the location and building volume based on this. By giving the elongated building an east-west orientation, he achieves minimum heating and maximum ventilation. The design initiates further discussion of a modern Dutch East Indian architecture, in which not only Maclaine Pont plays an important role, but also the architects C.P. Wolff Schoemaker and Th. Karsten. For building in the tropics, a solution in a constructive sense seems to be at hand, but the search for the possibilities architecturally remains. The question is what role the indigenous architectural tradition can play in this. Maclaine Pont makes his vision clear in his design for the Technical High School in Bandung (1918-1919). The building consists of pavilions linked together, grouped around two centrally located auditoriums. The shape of the roofs was created by merging common Javanese roof shapes. Illumination of roof ridges and placement of wolf ends also contribute to good ventilation. The architectural discussion bogs down after 1924. Maclaine Pont embarks on archaeological research into the origins of the Kingdom of Majahapit and publishes widely on the subject. An important part of that research is the study of indigenous traditional building structures and techniques. Based on his research, he realized his last building in Java, the Catholic Mission Church in Pohsarang east of Kediri (1936-1937), in which he experimented with dome construction. During the Japanese occupation, Maclaine Pont was interned. After the capitulation of the Japanese in 1945, he returned to the Netherlands, where he died in 1971.