Serious Fun is about architecture and urban design games that have been conceived and created by architects, urban designers, artists and game developers since the end of the twentieth century – from doll’s houses to construction games and city building games, from SimCity to Block by Block.

The games are looked at from both a game technical and an architectural-critical point of view. As much attention is paid to the games themselves (the way they look, their construction and rules) as t...

For the first time in history, the Internationale Bauausstellung or IBA is

being held outside Germany, in Parkstad- Limburg, the Netherlands. What started as an exhibition for modern construction in 1901, has developed into an urban planning instrument that often provides a powerful impulse to the local economy, public space and society. IBA Parkstad was launched in 2014.

Through sometimes intricate, sometimes far-reaching urban and rural interventions and the cohesion of regional politan Par...

All over Europe, cities struggle with an accumulation of environmental crises like global warming, the depletion of natural recourses, pollution and the extinction of species. If we want to keep our cities liveable, we have to make them circular and climate adaptive.

Making our planning methods, production processes and building economies circular in order to remove the causes of the environmental crises, is a tough assignment. Turning our cities into climate-adaptive environments, ready to c...

The development of historical geographical information systems (HGIS) and other methods from the digital humanities have revolutionised historical research on cultural landscapes. One of today’s major challenges, however, concerns the concepts and tools to be deployed for mapping processes of transformation—that is, interpreting and imagining the relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes, both in space and in time, at micro- and macro-scale. The opening up of increasingly divers...

Although largely overlooked in studies of architectural history, church architecture in a Gothic idiom outlived its 19th century momentum to persist worldwide throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium.

Global Gothic presents a first systematic worldwide understanding of "Gothic" in contemporary architecture, both as a distinct variation and as a competitor to recognized modern styles. The book’s chapters critically discuss Gothic’s various manifestations over the past centur...

In recent decades, architecture has been seen as a field of practice that contributes greatly to the performativity of public space. In spite of the explosion of virtual communities through social media and the limitations imposed by pandemics, architecture today still holds an active role in (literally) building our societies. Bearing in mind its acute politicisation in past years, Living Politics in the City looks at public space from the perspective of architecture and its effective contri...

This small booklet contains the inaugural speeches of Th. K. van Lohuizen and Cor van Eesteren on their appointments as professors at the Technical College of Delft. The texts provide novel insights into their respective teaching programs, and appear here for the first time in English. An analytical reflection on their work by the architectural historian Herman van Bergeijk introduces them.

In 1990 the then Minister for Culture, Hedy d’Ancona, issued the Delta Plan for Cultural Preservation: a large-scale and national program to thoroughly improve collection storage conditions in Dutch museums. This signalled the start of a transformation of the Dutch museum.he reason for this radical transformation of Dutch museums was the pending privatization of the country’s national museums. From the beginning of the 1990s, national museums had to stand on their own feet. That gave the ...