Gallery

Description

Made for a couple, the H-House is located in a green area of Maastricht. The clients are a dancer and an actor, as well as being landscape architects. Behind the site is a formal garden, occasionally open to the public. The interior of the home is primarily a single loft-like space with a central mezzanine. Two smaller independent volumes - the entrance and bathroom - are adjacent to the main volume. Terraces define the position and shape of the house, with each terrace having its own separate character.

Having no structural walls, only a few rectangular columns support the house's slabs, which have been positioned to minimize impact. All the other walls, internal or external, are made of glass. Within this loft-like setting, the stairs of the house play its role as an independent object. The required range of privacy can be controlled with a series of curtains, drawn to softly define the interior spaces.

The combination of transparent and opaque glass, as well as the sliding and fixed portion of the façade, creates a number of different possible responses to the changing of the seasons and the fading of daylight. The spaces of the house are permeated with richness due to the layering of the unadorned configuration, the combination of materials and the variations in use.

Biography

Wiel Arets, born 1955 in Heerlen, the Netherlands, graduated from the Technical University Eindhoven in 1983. In the same year he established Wiel Arets Architect & Associates in Heerlen. In 1997 the office was moved to Maastricht. In 2004, a second office was opened in Amsterdam, with a third opening in Zürich during 2008.

The studio of Wiel Arets Architects has extensive experience in the fields of urbanism, and architecture, with public, private and utility buildings on every scale. Additionally, the studio develops products for both limited and mass production in collaboration with leading design manufacturers.

Wiel Arets has held a number of academic positions at some of the world’s most renowned schools and universities including the Architectural Academies of Amsterdam & Rotterdam, the Architecture Academy of London, the Columbia University, the Cooper Union in New York, the HAK in Vienna, the UdK in Berlin and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
From 1995 to 2002 he was dean of the Berlage Institute Amsterdam/Rotterdam, teaching in the same institution until 2009. Since 2003 he is member of the Advisory Board at Princeton University.

The work of Wiel Arets Architects has been widely published in magazines and several monographs. The firm’s work has been recognized through various awards and nominations, the Charlotte Köhler Award in 1988; the Rotterdam Maaskant Award in 1989; the special Emerging Architect mention of the European Architecture Award in 1994 and the Rietveld Prize in 2006, among others.