Hermanus Johannes Lovink - born in Terborg in Gelderland in 1866, died in The Hague in 1938 - was not an engineer like Hendrik Wortman. He was an agriculturalist and an administrator, and the institutions he led shaped the modern Dutch countryside. In 1891 he became deputy director of the Association for Wasteland Redevelopment, a private body charged with reclaiming heaths and moors and turning them into farmland. The next year he was promoted to director. Under his leadership the association drained parts of the Peel, halted drifting sand dunes near Kootwijk on the Veluwe, and planted forests on Schoorl and Texel. In 1901 he became Director-General of Agriculture for the Dutch government, and in 1904 he reorganized the agricultural college at Wageningen into what would eventually become Wageningen University. Naming a pumping station for him was not simply a tribute. It was an acknowledgment that the polder beneath the pumps owed something to the man who had spent half a century arguing that the Netherlands could grow.

Construction began in 1954 to a design by Dirk Roosenburg, who also designed the Wortman station up the dyke and whose architectural lineage runs forward into Dutch modernism's most influential firms. The building is composed of three rectangular blocks: a long horizontal engine room, a smaller block above it housing the transformer, and a vertical stair tower linking ground and terrace. Steel-framed windows run in clean horizontal bands. Built on a slight slope, the southwestern facade rises noticeably taller than the northeastern - a small structural elegance that emphasizes the entrance and its terracotta relief. Inside, the engine room is largely open, exposing the concrete trusses overhead and the two vertical centrifugal pumps below. Modernism, in this idiom, meant making the machinery legible. You can see what the building does.

The engines were installed by March 1956, and the Lovink began full operations in September of that year. Together with the Colijn station at Ketelhaven and the H. Wortman station in Lelystad, the Lovink helped drain East Flevoland, officially declared dry on 27 June 1957. Its two pumps move a combined 1,160,000 litres of water per minute - that is, more than nineteen tonnes every second - lifting it 5.2 metres up from the polder canals into the Veluwemeer, the long ribbon of water that separates the Flevopolder from the old Dutch mainland of Gelderland. Because the region's canals are all interconnected, the three stations were called back into action through the 1960s to help drain South Flevoland as well, completing that polder in 1968. The Lovink was automated in 1991. Its engines were refitted between 1993 and 1995, and the switching system upgraded at the same time. In 2002 a recreational lock was added just south of the building so pleasure boats could pass between the canal and the Veluwemeer.

On 13 December 2010, the Lovink Station was declared a rijksmonument - a Dutch national monument. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed cited four reasons: the station's historical importance to the reclamation of the Flevopolder, its architectural value as a clear example of modernism, the artistic value of J. M. Roosenburg's terracotta tableau, and the integrity of the surviving structure. It was the first national monument ever designated in the Flevopolder. There is a quiet symmetry to that. The polder is the youngest Dutch province, drained from the seabed within living memory of the people standing in it. To rank one of its buildings alongside seventeenth-century canal houses and Gothic cathedrals is to declare that the act of making land is itself a form of Dutch heritage worth preserving. Out in the canal Jacqueline Verhaagen's blue-concrete artificial island, De Blauwe Dromer - "The Blue Dreamer", placed there in 2001 - floats as a reminder that the polder is still adding to itself, one work of imagination at a time.