Hertzberger graduated from Delft in 1958 and joined Aldo van Eyck and Jaap Bakema on the editorial board of Forum, the magazine that pulled Dutch architecture away from postwar functionalism. His own work turns those arguments into a method: a neutral structural order of concrete blocks and repeated prefabricated units, deliberately left unfinished, into which the people who use the building are expected to build their own occupation. Offices, Montessori schools, the experimental Diagoon houses and theatres all follow the same rule — the architect supplies the frame and then stops. Critics have called the results graceless; he has answered that legibility and appropriation matter more than facades. He taught at Delft for thirty years and received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2012.
