In the late 1940s, work start­ed on one of the biggest land recla­ma­tion projects ever in the Nether­lands. Based on a plan by engi­neer Cor­nelis Lely, two large pold­ers were reclaimed in lake IJs­selmeer, the for­mer Zuiderzee. In 1968 the long-term project was com­plet­ed. Both pold­ers were struc­tured with a geo­met­ric pat­tern of canals, roads and fields. The emp­ty new land proved an ide­al place for exper­i­ments. At Water­loop­bos, Dutch water engi­neers spread scale mod­els of water man­age­ment projects in a for­est. In the 1990s com­put­er sim­u­la­tions took over, and the scale mod­els were sim­ply aban­doned in the for­est. In 2018 the trans­for­ma­tion of a giant wave tun­nel into the stun­ning Delta­work sculp­ture added a con­tem­po­rary touch to this his­toric site. 

Sev­er­al oth­er (land)art works have been installed on the ratio­nal­ist pold­ers over the decades – most of them cel­e­brat­ing the flat­ness and arti­fi­cial­i­ty of the landscape.