From Memling to Rubens

The Golden Age of Flanders

Why did Hans Memling paint everything in such minute detail? How did Rubens, in just a few brushstrokes, create special effects that Steven Spielberg would envy? And why was the Southern Netherlands the artistic centre of the world for three centuries?

From Memling to Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders tells the story of Flemish art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as you’ve never read it before. It’s a rollercoaste...

This research introduces the concept of visibility as a useful tool to assess the democratic features of public spaces. It understands democratic public spaces as open spaces, which are accessible to all and allow different cultural expressions for individuals and groups. The concept of visibility refers to the visual perception of the observable features of distinctive urban groups in public space, which give evidence of how these groups engage with, shape, and construct public space. The re...

This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic design skills. The validity of the framework and the assumption is tested respectively in interviews with a variety of designers and in observations of di...

When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior posi...

To understand the physics of Black Holes, it is important to understand the first law in Physics which controls our entire universe. This is the law of “Perfect Equilibrium”. Within the entire universe there is always a prefect equilibrium between all the physical forces like gravity, forces of inertia, radiation pressure and Electro-Magnetic Interaction forces at any time, in any direction and at any space coordinate. This is the fundamental law in physics on which also the existence of ...

Incoterms® Rules accompany the goods from the seller on their way to the buyer. Incoterms® Rules concern themselves with almost everything and that could be the reason that – so now and then – people decide not to apply them.

Once I met a logistic manager who turned out to hate Incoterms® Rules. And – of course – then I wish to know why. “They keep me away from where I aim for as I want to give my customers as much service as possible. And that doesn’t work when you prearrange ...

This history is intended for students and their academic teachers and those in the general public who are interested in having a highlighted chronological panoramic view of from where the human capacity for creating civilizations is coming ever since anatomically modern humans came into the picture at the earliest about 200,000 years ago. Volumes Book-1 and Book-2 specifically deal with Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Book-1 begins with a summary that accentuates the last phenomenal 2...

- A woman who is lying in a coma in a hospital and later tells what at that time was discussed in the hall of the hospital, far from the department where she lay...

- A man who recognizes people who previously were only in his surroundings while he lay in coma...

- A woman who for surgery is cooled down to a level where her brain no longer functions, reports on that operation from personal observation

Just three of the millions of near-death experiences (NDE's) that people have experienced i...

“This book is an enrichment for the standing debate about Europe and should be published and widely read and discussed.” – Boudewijn R.A. Bouckaert

Reflections on Democracy in de European Union, with a foreword by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, is a unique volume that offers an interdisciplinary approach on EU democracy, law and politics from economic, juridical and philosophical perspectives. It is divided in three parts and deals with EU’s contemporary challenges, its historical d...

‘The great-grandfather I never knew has gradually become closer to me as I read what was written about him and discovered the circumstances in which he must have lived and worked. It has become Jos’s story, following his path from budding architect to the one who has the age I have now. For me it also became an act of looking back.’

Architect Jos Viérin (1872-1949) played a prominent role in the reconstruction of the Destroyed Regions. After World War I, it was decided to reconstruct i...