Wall House 2 in Groningen, the Netherlands was originally designed in 1973 by American architect John Hejduk in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Unrealized due to high costs, the project was realized in the Netherlands in 2000, a year after John Hejduk lost his battle with cancer, in a very different location than planned.
Let’s examine this mysterious structure and its history together.
Wall House 2 History
The residence was originally planned and designed for construction in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1973 for Ed Bye, a landscape architecture faculty member at theCooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in New York City and a friend of Hejduk. It is known as the project for which John Hejduk, who had several other works besides Wall House 2, made his reputation. The project never materialized due to the high costs involved.
While it was presented to other potential clients, the project was always shelved before construction could begin due to lack of financing.
In 1990, the project became known in Groningen after it was mentioned in Daniel Libeskind‘s book “Creating City Limits”, also known as the Groningen Books. The inclusion of Hejduk’s project in the book made sense in light of the fact that Libeskind was a former student of Hejduk and was known to admire Hejduk. The project has attracted the attention of people from many disciplines and has received investment from a Groningen-based development company. After John Hejduk’s sudden death, the house was built exactly as the architect had envisioned it, 28 years after its conception, on a different continent and for a different client.
German architect Thomas Müller was appointed as the project architect. As a former student of Hejduk at Cooper Union, he had a personal relationship with Hejduk. It was not an easy task. Due to the gaps that had to be left between rooms, building codes and construction techniques, the house was expanded from its original size to 232 m². Müller and Derk Flikkema redrew the plans and Hejduk revised the drawings at every stage until his death. The building, which cost 600 thousand dollars in total, was sold on the condition that the public could visit it for one month a year.
It is now part museum and part private living space.
Wall House 2 Architecture
The Wall House 2, with its lake view, stands out with its extraordinary appearance as well as its history. Concrete, steel and wood are used together in the completed structure. Its three-dimensional structure, created by organizing horizontal and vertical planes around a central axis, allows the experience of voids. It is divided in two by a two-dimensional plane, but at the same time it groups the functional areas of the dwelling that need to be separated from each other.The use of light colors reinforces the perception of the visual separation between the volumes, which can be accessed by a spiral staircase behind the wall. The wall dividing the space seems to stand independently on its own feet, but is connected to the volumes by invisible glass connections as designed by Hejduk.
From the entrance of the house, a staircase leads to the study, kitchen and dining room. There is a bedroom on the first floor and the living room on the top floor. Each unit appears to use a cantilever structure, but in reality these floating masses are supported by a grid of columns.
The idea of the Wall House was conceived by Hejduk to impartially emphasize the symbolic meaning of the wall as a free-standing painting in human life. It is thought that Hejduk gained his affinity for walls in his previous projects.
“Life has to do with walls; we’re continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the element we’re always transgressing… The wall heightens the sense ofpassage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the “present.”
John Hejduk
Hejduk emphasized the idea of the element of time coming to a temporary halt and the effect of passing through something on time. He thought of the past and the future as before and after the wall. The past carries closed and geometric forms such as bathrooms, sculpture and stairs, i.e. functional areas, while the future expresses the functions of daily life, sleeping, eating and living, separated on a vertical plane. The color palette used was chosen specifically to strengthen this emphasis. The colors on the back are lighter and more everyday than the colors on the front.
The painting of the house in colors is related to Hejduk’s experience at Le Corbusier’s La Roche House in Paris. He spent a long time there and visited several times in the same year. “After my experience of this house,” he says, “I could never design another white or monochrome house.” In the La Roche house, the colors “were almost imperceptible at first, but after being there for a while I found that not only were they constantly changing, but they were also delicate and quiet, and at the same time saturated.”
“If a painter could by a single transformation take a three dimensional still life and paint it on a canvas into a natura morta, could it be possible for the architect to take the natura morta of a painting and, by a single transformation, build it into a still life?”
John Hejduk
The house reflecting the Cubist movement could not stay away from Corbusier’s open plan and spaces. Each element is designed separately from the other. But Hojduk, who carefully designed the perception and spaces of these structures, combined Corbusier’s architecture with Cubist architecture with a unique art.
My Thoughts on Wall House 2
The Wall House, which incorporates open-plan and cubic functional and functional structures, one of today’s popular concepts, had many difficulties in its arrival to the world. However, after its construction in 2001, it has integrated with its surroundings in a much more harmonious way than planned and predicted. This structure, which is difficult to understand at first glance, has managed to convey its own building system to its visitors with its own architecture and perception skills as they enter and experience it.
What do you think about the Wall House? Do you think there might be something left that it has forgotten while it contains so many features? Is there anything missing or wrong with this wall that divides the structure of the house in two? If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can read our review of Neugebauer House , another work that stands out with its colors and design.
Architect: John Hojduk-Thomas Müller
Architectural Style: Cubic-Corbisian Architecture
Year: 1973-2001
Location: Groningen, Netherlands
Photo: Liao Yusheng