Pieter Verhagen

Pieter Verhagen was a planning engineer, who designed more than a 100 towns and villages parks, landscapes and village expansions. He was named Doyen of the Dutch Towns during in lifetime. Between 1913-16 he worked at Rotterdam where he opened an architectural office together with Marinus Granpré Molière. This office quickly grew to become the leading urban planning office.

He also played a key role in the post-war reconstruction and expansion of the city of Rotterdam and countless other towns and cities. His focus was on urban planning but he never lost sight of nature and landscape. Verhagen was a nature lover from his early youth. He came from a family with no religious beliefs, and they went out for gardening on Sundays and his father took his family walking in the dunes to teach them botany.

Designed by the three planners Jos Klijnen, Marinus Granpré Molière, and Pieter Verhagen, the park in Rotterdam was the “Kralingse Bos & Plas”, whose marshy slopes had already been filled with sludge from the Waalhaven in 1910. The design no longer followed the model of a 19th century city park in order to provide room for the numerous new inhabitants of this part of Rotterdam and to adapt the park to the existing landscape. Instead a polder park was created with trees on the shore of the lake, long footpaths, islands in the lake, and beaches along the shore.