Professor Dirk J. de Vries has been appointed Professor for two days a week in the History of Building in Leiden, during the other three days he works as a coordinator of Building History at the National Division for the Preservation of Monuments and Historical Buildings in Zeist. He had a technical education (MTS Mechanical Engineering and HTS Architecture in Zwolle) and studied History of Art (Utrecht University). His dissertation: ‘Building in the Middle Ages. Urban Architecture in the former area of Over- and Nedersticht’ (1994) is, however, based predominantly on archive research. He learned to apply the subject of Building History by studying the preservation of historic monuments as practised by such eminent predecessors as H. Janse, G. Berends and R. Meischke. De Vries was editor and chief-editor of the Bulletin KNOB (Journal of the Royal Netherlands Society of Architectural History) between 1993 and 2010, vice-president of the German Arbeitskreis für Hausforschung (1991-2010), co-founder (1992) and now advisor of the Dutch Foundation for Building History (SBN).
