This thesis examines the energy performance of dwellings of Dutch non-profit housing associations towards a future sustainable housing stock. Improving the energy performance of dwellings aims to improve the quality of dwellings and therewith to lower the actual energy consumption. Lowering the actual energy consumption of dwellings contributes to the battle against climate change. This thesis addresses four studies. Study 1 assesses the energy performance progress of over two million dwellin...

Historiographical accounts of the American artist Donald Judd, and of Minimal art in general, have focused primarily on the debates surrounding the emergence of his work in the United States, and New York in particular, from the mid to late 1960s. Little is known about Judd’s early exposure in Europe in between the artist’s inclusion in a group show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 1965, up until his first solo show in Europe at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherland...

According to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection man is one species among many. This provokes in a self-evident way comparison of anatomical and physiological characteristics. Less common is the idea that the same approach can be put forward with regard to cognition. On a particular moment in evolution the cognitive abilities of the branch which would eventually result in the human species must have been of the same type as these from other species evolving into different kind...

There is an alternative history of life on this planet. Jaap Rameijer, known for his revelations about Rennes-le-Château and Glastonbury, outlines the secrets of the Anunnaki and the Illuminati to the reader. He shows how our early history was a history of slavery, where gold had to be mined for the gods. It was an era of high technology, of old gods and new gods, of very old civilizations and their imposing structures, of the clay tablets, the Bible and other religious scriptures and of the...

This searing memoir, written by a son about his mother’s dementia, is set in a town in the Netherlands but the issues reflected are relevant anywhere. The family are devoted, but the mother’s decline reveals undercurrents in their relationships. We hear of the conventional medical approach to this difficult area of care but the family reject the medication so frequently prescribed to control patients.

For a while, they care for her themselves at home but her increasingly erratic and some...

Awe-inspiring reference work on the Flemish and Dutch art of drawing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with masterly drawings from the collection of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)

The Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels houses the largest collection of drawings in the country. Among its highlights are works by leading artists of the Low Countries, including Pieter Bruegel I, Joris Hoefnagel, Hendrick Goltzius, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Jordaens.

As the ...

A magnificent introduction to the Cobra art movement

With French as its working language, Cobra was pretty much the last truly European movement within Modernism. The group’s anarchic story is not just an important strand in art history — it remains as lively as ever and has inspired all sorts of artists who were never directly involved with Cobra. The work bequeathed to us by Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Constant, Corneille and other kindred spirits is as fascinating as ever, both raw...

This book discusses the lithic technology of the neighboring sites of Ruien and Kerkhove (Belgium). The Final-Palaeolithic occupation of Ruien took place during the harsh climatic conditions of the Younger Dryas. The Early and Middle Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Kerkhove on the other hand lived in the temperate and forested environments of the subsequent Early Holocene period. The aim of this work is more precisely to gain a better understanding of how the practice of flintknapping evolve...

Over the course of 202-2021, during the pandemic, Kara Walker has produced series of drawings in the style of a medieval 'Book of Hours'. Enigmatic images appear to traverse a range of time periods, from scenes of biblical and mythological origins, to images of historical violence, to others that suggest more recent political strife. The highly personal nature of these images capture Walker's own response to the intersection of past and present as a way to understand our contemporary politica...