At the age of 49, Wiel Arets (b. 1955) is one of Holland's leading young architects and has won an international following for his spare industrial forms and his theoretical writings. Trained at the technical University of Eindhoven, Arets often works with translucent glass, concrete, and wood to integrate compositional strategies with his interest in transparency and reducing essential space to a bare minimum.
His work has been compared to the rigorous vocabulary of Dom Hans van der Laan, the monumental lyricism of Tadao Ando, and the expansive transparency of Pierre Chareau. This book surveys the Dutch architect's work by presenting 31 of his most significant buildings and projects completed since the late 1980s, including the Academy for Arts and Architecture in Maastricht (1993), the AZL Pension Fund in Heerlen (1995), high-rise apartment blocks in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and police stations in Vaals, Boxtel, and Cuijk. A theorist as well as an architect, Wiel Arets is very highly regarded in his native Holland as an architect who works in the modernist tradition yet whose innovation and influence defy comparison and categorization.
He is a noted lecturer and educator, having held numerous teaching positions, including at the Architectural Association, Columbia University and the Cooper Union in New York, the HAK in Vienna, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and the ETSAB Barcelona. He currently is the director of the Berlage Institute Ph.D. program.
In 1997 Arets was one of ten architects selected to contribute preliminary designs for the new MoMA expansion in New York. Influenced by his multidisciplinary studies at the Technical University of Eindhoven (where Hella Jongerius now teaches design), Arets began to draw from contemporary art, biology, cinema, and literature for inspiration in his work. He is well known for his writings, which go beyond architecture to cite Paul Valery, Jean-Luc Godard, and Gilles Deleuze, among others.
One of his most well-known essays is "Raster and Rhizome," which compares his architecture to a rhizome in that his buildings rise to the surface and disappear again, with ever perceptible changes and layers building up in root-like scales and protrusions. This monograph, the first since a 2002 publication by Princeton Architectural Press, presents 31 projects in chronological order, from the Beltgens Fashionstore in Maastricht (1986-87) to a competition for the redevelopment of the Monjuic district of Barcelona (2002). Although most of his projects are in The Netherlands, the book includes an unbuilt project in Ghana, a competition for Sydney, Australia, and three projects in Spain.
Arets's buildings are often geometrically rigorous and minimal, and his material palette includes gray and black plaster and paint, steel, wood, cement, and translucent glass. He is most renowned for designing three police stations in The Netherlands, in which he uses different kinds of glass in varying transparencies to distinguish areas that are traditionally "visible" to the public from those areas that are traditionally concealed, such as cells and private offices. Overall, Arets's architecture emphasizes content over superficial image; the architect has commented that it is partially a reaction to the stylistic excesses and rampant signage in the contemporary landscape.
It is these contemporary concerns such as artful changes in scale, cinematic progression, multidisciplinary approaches to architecture, and the binary opposites privacy and exposure that make Arets a favorite among students and a talked-about figure in today's architectural circles.
