ABSTRACT
The subsoil of The Netherlands is largely made up of marine and fluviatile soft sediments, resulting in an abundance of brick and an absence of natural stone in buildings. The country has only few local supplies of natural stone suitable to be used for building, most of them concentrated in the far south of the Province of Limburg. After World War I, the scarcity of building materials combined with the increase of entrepreneurship and the reinterpretation of ‘local identity’ in architecture resulted in more intense use of locally quarried stone, both by the more ‘traditionalist’ architects and the ‘modernist’ architects. Carboniferous sandstone from the Cottessen region together with Kunrade limestone was nationally boosted shortly after World War II, leading to different uses. This paper identifies the change from ‘vernacular’ applications to ‘modern’ applications of native Dutch natural stone and defines the stylistic differences, essential to be taken into account in conservation and adaptive re-use.
