What Can We Learn From Dutch Brickwork?

Roaming Roger is back with another walk’n’talk 🌷 This time, it’s Zeeland in the Netherlands.

Dutch Architecture in Zeeland: A Blend of Tradition and Innovation

Zeeland, the southwestern province of the Netherlands, boasts a distinctive architectural heritage shaped by its geography, history, and culture. Known for its picturesque landscapes and extensive coastline, Zeeland’s architecture reflects the region’s ongoing battle with the sea and its rich maritime history.

1. Traditional Dutch Farmhouses:

Zeeland is dotted with traditional Dutch farmhouses known as “boerderijen.” These structures are characterized by their large, thatched roofs and whitewashed exteriors, often surrounded by lush gardens. The design typically includes a central living area flanked by utility spaces for farming, reflecting the region’s rural past.

2. Flood-Resilient Architecture:

Given Zeeland’s vulnerability to flooding, the architecture has adapted to mitigate water damage. One of the most notable examples is the Delta Works, a series of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, and storm surge barriers designed to protect the area from the sea. Buildings in Zeeland often incorporate elevated foundations, robust materials, and innovative water management systems to withstand potential floods.

3. Historic Townhouses and Buildings:

Zeeland’s towns, such as Middelburg and Zierikzee, feature beautifully preserved historic buildings. These include Gothic and Renaissance structures with ornate facades, stepped gables, and large windows. The Stadhuis (City Hall) in Middelburg, with its elaborate Gothic architecture and imposing tower, is a prime example of the region’s historical richness.

4. Maritime Influences:

Zeeland’s proximity to the sea has significantly influenced its architecture. Fishermen’s houses in towns like Veere and Vlissingen are often small and sturdy, with compact layouts to protect against harsh maritime weather. These houses typically have simple, functional designs with gabled roofs and brightly painted shutters.

5. Modern Innovations:

Modern architecture in Zeeland balances tradition with contemporary innovation. Projects like the Zeeland Bridge (Zeelandbrug) showcase cutting-edge engineering while respecting the natural landscape. New residential developments often feature sustainable design principles, such as energy-efficient materials and integration with the surrounding environment.

6. Cultural and Religious Buildings:

Zeeland also hosts a variety of cultural and religious buildings, including churches and abbeys. The Abbey of Middelburg, originally a 12th-century monastery, is a prominent historical and architectural site now housing the Zeeuws Museum.

Further Reading: Abbey of Middelburg

Zeeland’s architecture is a fascinating blend of historical styles and modern innovation, deeply influenced by its unique geographical context. From traditional farmhouses and resilient flood defences to historic townhouses and cutting-edge modern structures, Zeeland offers a rich tapestry of architectural wonders that reflect its enduring relationship with the sea.

For more insights into Zeeland’s architecture and heritage:

Visit Zeeland:
▶ https://www.zeeland.com/en/visit

10 Things you did not know about Dutch Architecture:
▶ https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-facts/dutch-arcitecture-10-things-you-did-not-know-about-dutch-architecture/

Zeeland Cultural History:
▶ https://www.debloesemvanzeeland.nl/en/in-the-area/cultuur-historie

Middelburg City Guide
▶ https://www.yourdutchguide.com/cities/middelburg

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#zeeland #netherlands #RoamingRoger

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[Music] hello I’m Roger Bisby from the skill Builder Channel I’m in the Netherlands not Holland but Zealand so anybody that loves brick work has to take a visit to the Netherlands because they got some brick work here everything’s built out of bricks even this beautiful old wind pump some people call them windmills but in Holland basically they’re wind pumps they’re wind powered and they used to be used to drain the land of course now they got wind turbines generating electricity and that does the same job being below sea level meant that they just had to use these wind pumps to Chuck the water back over the the Dyke if you like back into the North Sea and very very successful they are at it too I don’t think there’s another Nation on Earth that knows more about water engineering than the netherlanders so all over the place you’ll see bits of maintenance going on repointing on this brick work and obviously a lot of it is done with the old lime mottar like this job here but a huge amount of it and I would probably say the majority of it is being done with sand and cement and although people go oh s c you can’t use that in most cases you don’t see a lot of detrimental damage I mean all this is lime here but I don’t have to walk very far before we find sand and cement here we got a lot of rubbers basically rubbers were a softer brick they didn’t do this in the Kiln because the Kil would never be able to fire a brick that’s smooth and straight so what they did is they made the brick and then they cut or rubbed all the detail out in it forming those curves there so if you look at it you’ll see that’s the brick as it would have been squared off and what they’ve done is cut into there cut into there and then rounded that off down below you’ll see the stone work where they’ve done exactly the same thing and you notice that the stone hasn’t done anywhere near as well as the brick in standing the test of time a lot of that was due to pollution the brick a clay brick is actually a lot better at withstanding pollution and then look at that the wind erosion on this stonework was the bricks have held up pretty well the stone has really had it that’s all going to need to replacing what is very popular here is wall time got wall tires everywhere holding the buildings together they do a great job and people often worry about wall tires they think oh if you see wall tires in a building it’s falling down but in actual fact if it’s been tied together like that then there’s no reason why it should go anywhere really a bit of strong Sanda cement pointing really tough and I reckon okay look there’s damage on the brick works I reckon that damage was probably there a long time before they did this repointing so the name of this town if you want to visit it is middleberg so this point in here is actually lme it’s quite unusual because it’s been done with a bit of weather struck which you don’t see a lot of here it tends to be smudged everywhere you go around here if you’re a brickie is Just A Feast for the eyes just absolutely beautiful beautiful little buildings so the Flemish Bond would be a row of headers a row of stretches row of headers rower stretches rower headers so they’ve got that that’s that’s actually proper Flemish Bond there got a nice line pointing but you can see it’s just smudged it’s not the fancy stuff they very big beds aren’t they so they wouldn’t have been able to do anything too precise with that they just basically rub it in this line brush it over jobs are good but I don’t know it’s a funny thing isn’t it because if you called somebody in to do some pointing in your house in England and they did that you would be asking for your money back and it’s really there’s nothing wrong with it it’s just a question of fashion seems to be Flemish Bond everywhere doesn’t it which I suppose you’d expect really wouldn’t you why would I do English Bond but I don’t know what you think but I think it’s absolutely beautiful brick there’s such a lot of variation and character in it when you look at some of the bricks that we tend to use on mass build nowadays they’re just a bit boring aren’t they even when they’ve tried to make them look interesting they end up looking boring so these are quite modest houses aren’t they really but um quite attractive but let’s go and have a look at something that’s a little bit more ambitious that they did the building of a church and if you think about it that hundreds of years ago they were building these things on reclaimed land and um it was reclaimed from the sea so basically it was a lot of sand and I know that Amsterdam is built on Timber piles all those beautiful buildings in Amsterdam actually built on basically tree trunks that they just drove into the sand and they uh they’re still standing 300 years later they’re still there so this is an incredible building isn’t it it’s a church 1647 and a Protestant Church famously in the Netherlands was one of the places that stayed out of the grip of the Catholic Church even though they pushed up here and chased Protestant persecuted them tried to convert them to what they called the true Faith basically by sticking red up pokers up their backside and burning them in oil until they saw the error of their ways but it didn’t work a lot of those Protestants actually the hugos and people like that they fled to England they did a lot of good work you know they were Artisans a lot of them they made tools they made lace they were pretty handy people in many ways and um I do believe that whs work hard and starv as as we now call it but whhs taac oh it would have been taac the taac was actually a Hugo brand they they started producing brick trails and um Plastering Trails way back way back in those times so you know they brought all the skills over to England how to make brick Lang Trails 1674 you expect a little bit of that wouldn’t you especially as it’s all built on Sand but again look at it it’s all brick work everywhere you look they could produce really ornate buildings mostly with brick they put a bit of stone there they like to do a bit of mixing it up with a bit of brick and a bit of stone but a lot of it if you look is just brick so this building behind me was basically I think just the town hall it wasn’t a religious building it was just a very fancy building it looks pretty good doesn’t it but it’s actually about the same age as me only it stood the test of time a little bit better it’s like some kind of medieval Town Hall you can kind of see the stonework is is really not that old I’m only saying that because I read the date on it so here’s a puzzle for you this brick wall I’ve got no idea what this says but I’m sure somebody is going to translate it it’s next door to the library so it’s just across the way from there so there’s something written here in the brick work and I was thinking it was actually carved in the brick work before the bricks were laid which would have been very clever but no what they’ve done is they’ve they’ve used some kind of template there haven’t they possibly a diamond blade router morar sort or that kind of thing and they’ve just carved it all out it’s gone straight through the mortar line bloody clever isn’t it really there’s my bike so this is a hotel and I suspect this isn’t an old building either actually just got that bit of face stone work on it if you look at the Gable ends the Gable ends are all done in brick work one thing you get a lot of this this flamish architecture where they make this real really fancy Gable ends there but you can see they put some massive great tires at the back of it to save it toppling through and then all the way through the building they got big wall ties holding it together in case you were wondering what the running water was it wasn’t another bit of my dodgy Plumbing again all W ties all the way up the top looks like it’s sunk a bit if you look at it face on you can see that it falls away at both ends but what they’ve done very cleverly is they’ve added some brick work at the top there all the way along and they’ve straightened it out so there’s a pig in it isn’t there basically if you look at it in the middle you can see where the cses taper away so they lost the brick so that that’s Dro by about 3 in isn’t it on either end maybe a bit more actually maybe 6 in it’s pretty good isn’t it still standing I think that’s the big test really on anything is is it still standing will it be here in a 100 years time absolutely the thing I’ve got to say about the Netherlands in general I’ve met a lot of Dutch people always had fun with Dutch people they always been great but they are so bloody civilized I mean this place just beautiful and everybody’s friendly no aggro no litter no anything they just they sorted it out long time ago they worked out what to do not fight yesterday I said that these things are redundant and they now used wind turbines to Power electric pumps it rained last night really heavily I was amazed to see this thing is working so here’s a nice little chapel that I came across just cycling out in a country in Zealand and it’s actually just the remains of something that was much bigger I’ve just been talking to the guys who are doing a bit of restoration work on it just been up there with his cherry picker they said to me that it was part of a bigger church you can just see here on the edges where the brick workers stopped these would have been where the walls went along all the way to the end there all that’s gone now somebody’s nicked all the bricks as well I reckon it was part of a village there was a village here as well so hence you wouldn’t put a big church like this right out in the open country for no reason at all nice bit of brick work still in good next and he’s just been up there doing clearing a bit of vegetation out actually there’s a few trees going up in there let’s see let’s have a look inside it’s simple the thing about Chapel is again because it’s Protestant country it’s all about Simplicity as opposed to the Catholics which are about lots and lots of embellishment lots and lots of bling in the Catholic in the Catholic Church nothing fancy nobody’s more important than God that’s what I thought simple chairs not very comfortable I can’t believe I got it so wrong about these windmills they’re everywhere and they’re working so I don’t know why I thought maybe they’d abandon them all and gone for electric pumps everywhere I’m sure they have but this is Lovely isn’t it another one to add to my collection I must admit I never really thought about I’d looked at the slats on a windmill and I thought how do they catch the air and of course they don’t what they do is they put great sail cloths over the over the fronts of them so those slats are only there just to hold the sail cloth in place and it’s that that catches the wind and obviously they tilt those veins if you call them veins each one has got a mechanism on it so it can tilt it feather it if you like backwards and forwards towards the wind and then at the back the sail at the back turns the whole structure around you can see on the top there where they’ve got the revolving piece and the sail at the back is the thing that turns it to face the wind so this is porm blocks they use these all over Europe you never see thermalite blocks been used so very very easy block to build with Clay blocks and nothing has to be that tidy if you look at the mot courses and everything just sling them up so long as they’re vertical and then they’ve got a Timber floor going over the top of it which is um not what we saw in Belgium we saw they were all concrete bison beams there but here got a Timber floor it’s actually a roof overb it’s an old building so they’re just extending it adding to it everywhere and then it looks to me like they got a load of bricks here ready to do a brick face so I appreciate that what I’m doing here is a building blog if you like uh and we are a building Channel but I don’t think that you can come to the Netherlands and ignore cycling cuz it is just amazing everybody knows that the Dutch ride bikes and everybody rides bikes doesn’t matter whether you’re 5 years old or 85 years old they ride bikes and one of the reasons for that is obviously cuz it’s flat but the other thing is that the whole thing is just made for bikes they’ve got bike paths everywhere there’s quite a lot of people who have got these little trailers which are kind of like kitty carts if you like but they got their dogs in them but you know people go fast here even even even elderly people you just I keep getting over taken by old ladies they’ve got all these paths so you don’t need to wrestle with the traffic so just to make your life really easy at every Junction they’ve got these numbered Junctions this Junction is 86 and it tells you that if you carry on straightforward you come to Junction 7 and if you go right you come to Junction 88 so if you got a little map you can see exactly where you’re going it’s just riding by numbers really you don’t need to speak the language you just use the numbers to get wherever you want to go and it’s just an amazing thing it really is cuz you can’t get lost provided you got a map of course this is legitimate this is all to do with building because this place wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for all the SE defenses pumps lock Gates dikes canals you name it huge civil engineering undertaking which started hundreds and hundreds of years ago so now they’re heading out to the Open Sea and there’s another boat waiting to come into this lock that amazing that those Gates hold back all that water so here we have the modern equivalent of the old wind pumps certainly got some wind turbines in the Netherlands for sure [Music] and this is a lovely looking modern building it’s actually a little restaurant and it’s right out on the peninsula you think one thing you know about building by the sea is that anything still even if it’s well galvanized tends to get rusty very quickly and if you look at this I’ve got no idea how old this building is but let’s haszard a guess and say 10 years old and you can see the rust you can see the rust in the panels the rust at the top not going to last is it it’s going to be a major major maintenance problem and even this thing which is a sculpture is already showing signs of rust so let’s hope they sell a lot of coffees you can see the rust around the around the windows good old slate roof that’s looking good Nick actually apart from the old bit of brick work up the top it hasn’t fared too badly at all has it you can see where they’ve done the repairs and Replacements but pretty good isn’t it really for something that was built in the 1300s and you always have to ask how many of our buildings are going to be standing that long the things we buil today [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]