R. Stenvert

Van monumenten en ruimtelijke netwerken in plaats en tijd Een cultuurtopografie van Nederland.

Historisch geografisch tijdschrift 26 (2008) 24 - 41.

In de serie Monumenten in Nederland wordt gepoogd een bescheiden verbinding te leggen tussen architectuurgeschiedenis en historische geografie. De klassieke monumentenbeschrijving heeft in deze serie een metamorfose ondergaan tot een cultuurtopografie met daarin grotere aandacht voor ruimtelijke en historische aspecten. De twaalf boekdelen geven samen een bestandopname van het cultuurhistorisch waardevolle gebouwde erfgoed in Nederland van rond de millenniumwisseling. De relatief korte ontstaansperiode van ruim tien jaar leidde tot een nagenoeg homogeen resultaat, dat op zichzelf staat maar ook als uitgangspunt voor verder onderzoek kan dienen.

Built heritage and spatial systems in time and place: a cultural survey of the Netherlands

By the publication of the last two volumes, the series Monumenten in Nederland (Built heritage in the Netherlands) was completed in July 2006 after a little more than ten years. Thereby, after a considerable period of time, a new general survey covering the whole country and presenting a coherent overview of the culturally and historically most valuable objects and structures, became available. In 1903, work on a general survey of the country was started, but it progressed slowly so that between 1908 and 1933 an additional provisional list was compiled. This became the basis of subsequent editions of the Kunstreisboek (Architectural Guide of the Netherlands; the Dutch equivalent to Pevsner Architectural Guides). From 1995 onwards this guide was transformed into the present series in which more attention is paid to historical geographical aspects as well. The series provides a reference work in which concise factual information on place, time, type and style is published. Also ample attention is paid to cultural connections. As it covers the whole of the Netherlands, the series can be used for quantitative surveys of architectural aspects in relation to their historical and spatial distribution, as is shown in the examples of town halls in the Netherlands and the distribution of buildings in the province of Zeeland. This province is taken as an example in an attempt to establish a correlation between the scale of a village or a town and the range of types of its buildings. The first results of such an analysis shows a significant gap between the average village and the average town in Zeeland. These towns can subsequently be divided into three groups (normal, medium and big). Particularly the accumulation of functions like care, commerce, higher education, and industry are characteristic of towns as such. The series Monumenten in Nederland is based on a so-called synchronic collection of still existing buildings, omitting buildings that could well have had an impact on the village or town where they stood, that have disappeared. Recently, more attention is being focussed on diachronic approaches, in which the change over time is taken into account. In historical research a synchronic approach, as in Monumenten in Nederland, always has a methodological flaw, but the purpose of the series, its amount of concise factual information and more specifically its coverage of the whole country does compensate for this. The series therefore forms a useful starting point for additional research on the historical geography of historic buildings.