Willem Goeree (1635-1711) en de ontwikkeling van een algemene architectuurtheorie in de Nederlanden

In his ‘d'Algemene Bouwkunde’ (General Architecture) of 1681 Willem Goeree rightly concluded that in The Netherlands the most general aspects of architecture had hardly been studied, unlike the five orders of architecture. His treatise is in fact the first printed treatise on architecture in the Dutch language in which an attempt was made to find a connection between architecture of classical antiquity and contemporary architecture which surpassed the usual discussions of the columns or the presentation of designs by leading architects such as Post or Vingboons. Moreover, Goeree pointed out to the urban elite that its task did not just consist in embellishing the town with splendid palaces, but also in providing facilities from which all the citizens would benefit. Because of the wide range of themes dealt with and the attention for the public character of architecture ‘d'Algemene Bouwkunde’, more than any other seventeenth-century Dutch architecture treatise, also breathes the atmosphere of Vitruvius's De Architectura Libri Decem. Possibly due to the absence of illustrations this little treatise never attracted the attention received by the Dutch adaptations of the column books. An autograph handwriting of ‘d'Algemene Bouwkunde’, on the other hand, comprises many prints as well as some drawings by Goeree himself. As regards content, too, it is an important addition to the printed version. Because of the dozens of authors who are quoted, from a historiographic point of view the handwriting constitutes one of the major sources of Dutch theory of architecture. It gives a good picture of the reception of international theory of architecture in the Low Countries, in which the attention paid to Scamozzi and to the advantages and disadvantages of the many Dutch adaptations of his treatise is especially striking. Whereas for his discussion of the orders of columns Goeree could make use of many examples, in his treatise on ‘general architecture’, bringing up themes such as the private house, rural buildings, civil-technical constructions, technical and organizational aspects of building, he had far fewer written sources at his disposal. He compensated for this on the one hand by taking an enormous collection of drawings and models as starting-point of his descriptions, on the other hand by using texts on the civil architecture of Simon Stevin and possibly of Nicolaas Goldmann. Goeree's attention for this general ‘civil’ architecture did not only spring from the challenge to present something ‘new’, but it also had to do with a shift in interest from art-historical subjects to religious and church-historical questions. This shift also affected his writings on the theory of architecture, in which the study of the biblical origin of architecture was to get more and more emphasis, with themes such as the temple of Solomon and the tabernacle of Moses. For Goeree both classical Greek and Roman architecture and the architecture without rules and laws produced by man in a process of trial and error, were to be traced back to one and the same divine example. God had appointed man as his sub-architect and Goeree considered it his calling to penetrate this architecture and learn a lesson from it for contemporary building practice. For The Netherlands this was exceptional and it was to take more than a century before another attempt was made to find a link in a broad sense between the architectural form language of elitist Classicism and civil architecture. Since the texts of Stevin were only partly published and the writings composed by Goldmann in Leyden were to be posthumously published in the German language, the theme of civil architecture did not receive the attention it would get in Germany or France. Nevertheless, these works indicate that ‘d'Algemene Bouwkunde’ of Goeree was not an isolated case and that in the Dutch Golden Age a more general theory of architecture was also sought, comprising far more than the correct use of the five orders of architecture

Stevins 'Huysbou' en het onvoltooide Nederlandse architectuurtractaat. De praktijk van het bouwen als wetenschap

Hendrik Stevin, Isaac Beeckman and Contantijn Huygens, each in their own way, showed various aspects of Stevin's Huvsbou. Hendrik tried to reconstruct the writings left to him into a theory and particularly emphasized his father's views on the layout of house and town. For Beeckman it was especially Stevin's pronouncements on the building practice that gave rise to further scientific reflections and experiments. Finally, Huygens introduced, on the one hand, Stevin's treatises on mechanics and technological developments in an international scientific debate; on the other hand, he included them in the theoretical basis of the description of his house as an illustration of the practical problems that had occurred while laying the foundation. It only presents a fragmentary image of Stevin's views on architecture and town planning; nevertheless, a number of general trends are to be recognized. In the first place, Stevin expresses extreme points of view in the field of the order of architecture. Although these points of view are extreme, they do link up with a debate on architectural theory that was fought out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His theory is further characterized by a practice-oriented scientific approach to architecture, expressed in a theoretical basis of technological developments as well as in giving concrete solutions to be used in the construction of the house and in the layout, maintenance and management of the town. In spite of the fact that Stevin's inventions were chiefly aimed at the situation in the Netherlands, the attention paid to mechanical and technical aspects of architecture are definitely not beyond the tradition of architectural theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the fact that in international professional literature a one-sided interest developed in the design practice of Renaissance architecture and that in the Netherlands it is chiefly the passages on the five orders that have appeared in print, has had important consequences for the study of the relation between the architectural theory and the building practice in the Netherlands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These consequences are still to be seen in the more recent, conscientious studies of Terwen and Ottenheym in the stress they laid on proportions and measurements of their mathematical reconstructions of buildings of the Dutch Renaissance and Dutch Classicism; whereas in the significant contributions of Meischke and Zantkuijl the results of the developments in building and building technique have been highlighted in detail, among other things, from the point of view of conditions and restrictions such as the charters, but without making use of contemporary theoretical reflections on these developments. If we wish to bring these different approaches in architectural history closer together, a reconsideration of the relations between architectural theory and building practice is required. The notes from Huysbou by Stevin, Beeckman and Huygens, which betray a scientific approach to the practice of building, may form an important supplement to our knowledge of this relation. As we have seen, these notes are not unconnected, but as regards contents they seem to link up with the treatises on architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Not so much in the selective works that have appeared in print, but on the contrary, particularly in the incomplete texts inhandwriting. Paradoxically, the reconstruction of the few fragments of Huysbou and of the incomplete Dutch treatises on architecture can yield a much more complete image of the relation between the architectural theory and the building practice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands

De Architectura (1599) van Charles De Beste. Het vitruvianisme in de Nederlanden in de zestiende eeuw

An unknown manuscript in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) of Brussels (ms. II 7617) by the Bruges mason/bricklayer Charles De Beste: Architectura. Dat is Constelicke Bouwijnghen huijt die Antijcken Ende Modernen of 1599 forms a significant addition to our knowledge of Vitruvianism and Dutch theory of architecture in the sixteenth century. The work is not a translation of De Architectura Libri Decem, but on the basis of sixteenth-century commentaries on Vitruvius and followers it deals with a diversity of subjects from classical and contemporary architecture. Occasionally the texts are supplemented with De Beste's own, sometimes critical, observations and references to the situation in the Netherlands in general and in Bruges in particular. De Beste's treatise on architecture consists of eight books, devoted to arithmetics, geometry, astronomical instruments, sundials, architecture, perspective, fortress-building and artillery, respectively. At times the contents and illustrations of De Beste's treatise, dedicated to interested devotees of architecture, are quite close to contemporary northern building practice, whereas in other cases they are relatively theoretical in character and based on outdated examples. The variety in contents of the themes and the size of the manuscript, comprising a total of 578 folios, are a clear indication that the usual interpretations of the reception of Vitruvius and his commentators in Dutch sixteenth-century theory of architecture are no longer tenable. In these interpretations, mainly based on the printed documents of Coecke van Aelst and Vredeman de Vries, Dutch translations and commentaries are one-sidedly explained as practical examples for craftsmen for the application of colonnades and ornaments. Although Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Hans Vredeman de Vries dedicated their well-known treatises on architecture to craftsmen, these works - as the author puts it - were first and foremost meant for the group of art-loving enthusiasts and commissioners to whom De Beste had turned. Moreover, traces of other architectonic subjects dealt with by Vitruvius and followers, covering more than just colonnades, are to be recognized in the treatises on architecture of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Vredeman de Vries. Consequently, the conclusion is that the manuscript of De Beste does not imply a break with the tradition of the ‘book on columns’, but is the continuation of a wider Vitruvian tradition in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century, which the selective works in print are also part of. Finally, a hypothesis follows on the question what objective Coecke van Aelst, Vredeman de Vries and Charles de Beste had in mind when compiling their various treatises on architecture. An article on De Beste's comments on a few buildings in Bruges and on his instructions for the iconography of tombs was published in Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis jaargang 131 (1994): 'De Architectura (1599) van Charles De Beste (1599). Een onbekend architectuurtraktaat van een Brugse bouwmeester' (The Architectura (1599) of Charles De Beste (1599). An unknown treatise on architecture by a Bruges mason/ bricklayer) by C. van den Heuvel

The Optical Counterpart of the X-ray Transient RX J0117.6-7330: Spectroscopy and Photometry

We conducted spectroscopic and photometric observations of the optical counterpart of the X-ray transient RX J0117.6-7330 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, during a quiescent state. The primary star is identified as a B0.5 IIIe, with mass M = (18 +/- 2) M(sun) and bolometric magnitude M(bol) = -7.4 +/- 0.2. The main spectral features are strong H-alpha emission, H-beta and H-gamma emission cores with absorption wings, and narrow HeI and OII absorption lines. Equivalent width and FWHM of the main lines are listed. The average systemic velocity over our observing run is v(r) = (184 +/- 4) km/s; measurements over a longer period of time are needed to determine the binary period and the K velocity of the primary. We determine a projected rotational velocity v sin i = (145 +/- 10) km/s for the Be star, and we deduce that the inclination angle of the system is i = (21 +/- 3)deg.Comment: submitted to PASA; 6 figure

Metaphors in Digital Hermeneutics: Zooming through Literary, Didactic and Historical Representations of Imaginary and Existing Cities

The paper proposes to bridge two areas of inquiry, digital hermeneutics and metaphor within a digital environment, by the analysis of a less studied phenomenon, i.e. how interpretation is supported and shaped by metaphors embedded in an interface. The study is articulated around three use cases for literary, didactic and historical representations of imaginary and existing cities based on a model (z-text) and interface (Z-editor) for zoomable texts. We will try to demonstrate that the zooming and contextualization features of the tool allow creating layers of meaning that can assist interpretation and critical readings of literature and history