Every design for Eindhoven

Eindhoven began where two small streams, the Dommel and the Gender, flow together in the Dutch part of the Campine. In 1232 Duke Hendrik I of Brabant granted the place its city rights, along with a weekly market that farmers from the surrounding villages were obliged to attend. It lay on the trade route from Holland to Liège, a modest walled town with a small castle just outside its ramparts.

What sets Eindhoven apart is how completely that quiet town was transformed. Around 1900, textile and tobacco works pulled in new workers, and then Philips arrived and grew into a multinational without ever leaving home. DAF Trucks was founded here too, and today the Design Academy Eindhoven carries the same inventive streak into a new century. It is now the largest city in the Netherlands outside the Randstad, and the Philips Museum, the DAF Museum and the Evoluon tell the story of how it got there.

Yet on the map, the Dommel still winds through it all, the same stream beside which the first houses stood.