The design story of Marker Wadden is unique. This man-made group of uninhabited islands in the Markermeer mainly comprises marshes and shallow waters, which makes them perfect bird habitats. Only the main island is accessible to the public.

This newest piece of the Netherlands – its landscape, the urban design of the settlement and the architecture – has been designed with care and attention. An impressive approach that leaves the shaping of the landscape largely to nature. By realizing M...

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How to Build an Indian House focuses on one of Mumbai’s and India’s perennial and most daunting questions: mass housing. It documents, analyses and represents robust examples of different housing types in the city. Along with the documentary drawings and photographs, Sameep Padora developed a series of analytical models in order to understand spatial organization and infrastructure in residential building typologies.

This documentation is particularly perti...

Since 1890, the Royal Museum of FIne Arts in Antwerp has been home to a rich collection spanning over seven centuries of art history; from the Flemish Primitives to Expressionists. More recently, the Museum has been enriched by another treasure by the Dutch architectural firm KAAN Architecten. Their restoration work and new design combine a contemporary allure with the glorious but somewhat neglected beauty of the 19th-century landmark. Completely conceiled within the existing museum, the new...

Reflections tells the story of the renovation of the largest seventeenth-century palace of the House of Orange and the new underground extension. Spectacular photography and captivating texts showcase KAAN Architecten’ ingenious design for the project, the history of the palace, the convergence of old and new and the palace's current role as an museum.

The underground extension is inextricably linked to the historical building even while leaving the facade and the interior of the palace unt...

Margaret Staal-Kropholler (1891–1966) is regarded as the first woman architect in the Netherlands. She completed her first work as an unqualified architect in 1917. Less well known is that Grada Wolffensperger (1887–1965) became the first woman to complete the univer-sity course in architecture at the Technische Hogeschool in Delft that same year. A further twenty women had completed their architectural training by 1945.

Why and how did these women become architects at a time when women w...

Dutch Waterworks Worldwide documents the story of architecture and landscape photographer Luuk Kramer’s journey documenting waterworks built by Dutch engineers around the world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, from polders in Poland to dikes and dams in Japan, from canals in Brazil to a small lock in Surinam.

The Dutch brought knowledge gleaned from centuries of experiences with living in a delta, including land reclamation efforts, droughts and catastrophic floods. They wer...

The Netherlands was made by humans. Cities, polders, the landscape and even nature reserves have all clearly been shaped by man. The country’s planned development is as unique as it is famous.

This book describes the intriguing history of spatial planning in the Netherlands from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Where does this strong tendency towards regulation and planning come from? Did these thousands of plans always come together? Or did planners and urban designers sometimes ge...