The Architecture of Gas: The Spatial Implications of Gas as an Energy Source in the Netherlands (1810–2023)

Funded by the NWO Starters' Grant

This project explores how gas has shaped the Dutch built environment over more than two centuries. The project examines the spatial and architectural consequences of successive energy transitions to gas, from nineteenth-century urban gasworks and domestic gas use to the post–World War II shift to natural gas following the discovery of the Slochteren gas field in 1959.

Focusing on gas production, extraction, and distribution, the research investigates how gas infrastructure has transformed cities, housing, and everyday domestic life. These transformations are traced across multiple scales, from urban planning and infrastructural networks to architectural design and interior space. By placing these spatial changes in their broader social, economic, political, and cultural context, the project reveals the lasting entanglements of gas on the Dutch living environment.