Wall House #2
Groningen, Netherlands
Thomas Müller/van Raimann Architekten & Otonomo Architecten

A famous house project, designed in 1973 and reconstituted from drawings

© Christian Richters

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Alexander Gorlin, AIA

It is virtually without precedent that a house is constructed posthumously exactly as intended by the architect, 28 years after it was designed, on a different continent, and for a different client. The architect, John Hejduk, the longtime dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York, unfortunately died in July 2000, just before construction began on his seminal project, the Wall House 2.

Hejduk had originally designed the Wall House 2 in 1973 (the first was done in 1968) for Ed Bye, a landscape architect and fellow faculty member. Plans for building the modestly sized primary residence, on a forested site in Ridgefeld, Connecticut, were abandoned due to concerns over the cost of building. But now it has been realized in Groningen, the Netherlands.

For 11 years, officials from the city of Groningen remained committed to constructing Hejduk's famous project, an extraordinary intersection of Cubist painting, Surrealist sculpture, and architecture, even as one potential client after another fell through. Then early this year, a development company, Wilma, b.v., decided to build the house at its own expense, turning it into a speculative venture. Due to building codes and construction techniques—which required, for example, leaving space between the wall and rooms for hand plastering—the house was enlarged proportionally 20 percent from its original size, to 2,500 square feet. A client has now purchased the house at a cost of $800,000 and will be moving into it in January.

Executing the design for a different time, place, culture, and client seems an impossible goal in terms of creating an authentic work of architecture. Nevertheless, the house in Groningen captures the intensity and flavor of Hejduk's model and drawings, effectively challenging conventional notions about authenticity.

The Wall House employs the vocabulary of Le Corbusier to explore the relationship between inside and outside in a more extreme way than did the Swiss-French master. You enter by going up a flight of stairs to the piano nobile, where you find various biomorphically shaped spaces containing the study and, at the end of a long corridor, the kitchen and dining room. Above is the living room, below is the bedroom. These distended volumes, which seem to be filled with air (or gas) and pressed tensely against the wall, appear cantilevered. However, they are supported by a grid of columns, emphasizing the wall as a rhetorical, not a structural element.

See the November 2001 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Wall House #2 www.wallhouse.nl

Location:
Groningen, Netherlands

Gross square footage:
2,500 sq. ft.

Client:
Niek Verdonk, director of city planning, and Olof van de Wal, of Platform Gras, both of Groningen

Architect:
John Hejduk (deceased)
New York

Thomas Müller
Thomas Müller/van Raimann Architekten
Fritschenstraße 27/28
10585 Berlin
phone: 030 348 0610
fax: 030 341 5024

Otonomo Architecten
Radesingel 17
9711 EE Groningen
phone: 031 50 318 36 77
fax: 031 50 318 10 36
email: otnomo@inn.nl