Academy of Art and Architecture

Academy of Art and Architecture in Maastricht, Netherlands by Wiel Arets Architects, 1993

Constructed early in Dutch architect Wiel Aret's career, the Academy of Art and Architecture in Maastricht (an addition to the Academy of Art) achieves dramatic results with a minimal aesthetic. Comprised of two studio blocks, the parti consists of four, nine-square "cubes", linked by a bridge. As the bridge indicates, circulation plays an important part in the experience of the Academy. It is beyond the "alabaster skin" of the glass-block facade that the visitor feels the building's full effect, which the exterior only hints at.

The new entrance is formed from an extension of the plaza created by bridging the addition. The plaza's paving gives way to a glass-block floor that echoes the vertical faces of the building, hinting at activities below. Upon entry the visitor is placed in a circulation network that links to the existing building's circulation. Common functions such as library, bar, and auditorium are housed within the entry "cube", while rising vertically one can traverse the bridge to the studio block.

Wherever the city is functioning below standard, architecture takes action. It takes the place of the city's spontaneous and organic functioning; it is a prosthesis, architecture is always the place of, "in the place of".   -Wiel Arets

Providing moments of interaction between students and faculty, the circulation is diagrammatically simple (two parallel lines), though spatially dramatic. The ramp at left illustrates the interest created from the juxtaposition of circulation and program. In this instance the ramp leads down to the auditorium, separated from each other by a wall of glass and concrete columns. The movement of people down the ramp becomes a voyeuristic device, visible to the auditorium's gathering. Not to belittle the programmatic spaces of the building (which are simple, yet effective in their use of concrete, glass, and detailing) but the dominate feature of the design is the circulation system.

As the exterior points to, the studios are lit by infill areas of glass-block between the gridded, concrete structure. Allowing light to pass, though only giving a slight indication of what exists on the other side, glass-block is the ideal material to distort the building's relationship with its surroundings. In this aesthetic the Academy presents to the city Aret's theoretical leanings become apparent. The building never offers itself as precise offering; instead it is an architecture of dialectics: opaque and transparent, meaningful and meaningless, real and unreal. The architect's analogy of the city to the human body enables him to treat urban intervention as a process similar to a surgeon's or medicine's treatment of the body. The maladies of the city are diagnosed similar to a bodily illness with different reactions for each situation. In the case of the Arts Academy, the addition stitches together two parts of the city, creating an urban, exterior space as the bridge hovers above, a symbol of this process.