Outside the world of architecture, Hans Tupker is not a well-known name. His oeuvre is not large. Moreover, it consists mainly of small commissions, such as a row of houses on Borneo Sporenburg, the former harbor island in Amsterdam that changed into a residential neighborhood twenty years ago. A slightly older work is the labor office in Almere from 1990, a modest building consisting of a glass substructure and a stone superstructure. But in Dutch architecture, Tupker, who died late last month, is considered a legendary teacher. Starting in 1970, he taught architecture for more than a quarter century at Eindhoven University of Technology and the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. Here he trained numerous architects who, over the last 25 years, have contributed to the great international reputation that Dutch architecture still has, such as Jo Coenen, Rudy Uytenhaak, Sjoerd Soeters, Bert Dirkx and Wiel Arets. Tupker was not a classical teacher who taught students a trade. "He was more of a facilitator who took each student down a path that suited him," recalls Sjoerd Soeters, who became friends with Tupker as a student. "He also introduced you to very different things than architecture. He let you hear Jimi Hendrix and took you to a Captain Beefheart concert. I saw Pink Floyd and Roxy Music at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam thanks to him." Tupker's unorthodox teaching style was influenced by the "free" education he himself had received at the Academy of Art and Industry in Enschede. At the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, Tupker was schooled in the structuralism of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger and Piet Blom. But for Tupker, structuralism was not the last word in architecture. On the contrary, again and again he introduced his students to the latest architecture from around the world. For example, he had Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid comment on students' designs long before they became world-famous. "He gave us a universe of examples and references," Soeters says. "A galaxy on the basis of which we could at least plot our initial course. That we went on to explore other firmaments from there made us all end up somewhere else, sometimes closer, sometimes further away from home, but all from the same origin."