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On the wide, windy beaches of the Netherlands, strange skeletal creatures roam. They have no muscles, no motors, and no brains. They're made of yellow plastic tubing, and they walk. These are the Strandbeesten ("beach beasts"), the creations of Dutch artist and engineer Theo Jansen. A physicist by training, Jansen began building them in 1990 with a bold ambition: to create new forms of life that could survive on their own. Not biological life, but a kind of artificial evolution made from PVC pipe, zip ties, and sails. The secret of a Strandbeest is its leg. Jansen used a computer...

Joost Swarte the greatest dutch comic artist of all time.

If you had to name the single Dutch artist who quietly shaped how the world reads, draws, and even builds things, Joost Swarte deserves to be near the top of that list. He's not a household name outside comics and design circles, but his fingerprints are on far more of visual culture than most people realize and that's exactly what makes him important. In 1977, Swarte coined the term "ligne claire" , clear line , to describe the drawing style pioneered by Hergé, using strong, even-weight outlines, minimal hatching, flat color, and cartoon characters set against realistically rendered backgrounds. That...

In 2007, two lurching concrete towers appeared in the Annenberg Courtyard of London's Royal Academy, rising 14 and 16.5 metres above the Palladian symmetry of Burlington House. Built from reinforced concrete components stacked in tiers, the towers looked like the remains of a bombed-out apartment block from a Middle Eastern war zone. This was Anselm Kiefer's Jericho and like most of Kiefer's work, it was less a sculpture than a provocation dressed as architecture. The towers weren't built for London. They first appeared in September 2004 inside a disused Pirelli factory in Milan, part of a larger series Kiefer began...

Stedelijk Museum CS If you visited Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum sometime between 2004 and 2008, you didn't find it on the Museumplein next to the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum. Instead, you'd have taken an elevator up a stark 1968 office tower right by Centraal Station. That's the story of Stedelijk Museum CS , an unlikely but formative chapter in the museum's history. By the early 1990s, the Stedelijk's original 1895 building on Paulus Potterstraat was showing its age. It lacked the fire safety and climate-control standards a modern museum needs to protect its collection, and after years of discussion about...