Last week, Phillip wrote a great post about observation structures in Norway. To start this week, I thought I’d follow his post by sharing some contemporary watchtowers built in the Netherlands that are also worthy of geeking out about.

To start with, the topographies of Norway and the Netherlands are quite different. One of the of the reasons why the structures from Phillip’s post are so spectacular is because of their scenic settings. But if you heart jumps at the mountainous situation those observation decks, your heart may flatline looking out across the Dutch level landscape from these watchtowers. That is, until you look down at the the structures themselves.

I couldn’t figure out if there was some kind of governmental agency that sponsored or coordinated the construction of these guys, but it seems remarkable if such a variety of these spectacles decided to pop up on their own. If I could read Dutch or get past links to covers of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” I might be able to find out. (FYI: Even the Indigo Girls have covered it.) I found all of the photos above on the flickr site of Klaas Vermaas, an architect from Utrecht. His photostream is huge (nearly 19,000 images) and growing, packed with photos from all over the place but still plenty of photos from the country he calls mijn huis.

Alex