Wall House II (also known as Bye House) is an

historic building This list is of heritage registers, inventories of Cultural property, cultural properties, natural and man-made, tangible and Intangible cultural heritage, intangible, movable and immovable, that are deemed to be of sufficient Values (heritage), ...

Groningen, Netherlands Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...

, that was designed by

John Hejduk John Quentin Hejduk (July 19, 1929 – July 3, 2000) was an American architect, artist and educator of Czech origin who spent much of his life in New York City. Hejduk is noted for having had a profound interest in the fundamental issues of shap ...

. it is one of his few realized designs. Heiduk originally designed Wall House II as a residence to be built in

Ridgefield, Connecticut Ridgefield is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York ...

. However, due to cost constraints, the project was abandoned. In 2000, a Dutch development company, Wilma, started building the house in Groningen, based on Heiduk's original design and later revisions. Wall House II has a very large wall as its central feature, composed of four organic-formed rooms and a long, narrow corridor. It is considered a mix of

Cubist Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

painting,

Surrealist Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

sculpture and architecture.

The building

Wall House II was constructed in the Hoornse Meer neighborhood with a view across the Paterwoldse Meer. The wall and column are constructed of reinforced

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wi ...

. The corridor is steel-framed with wooden stud walls and a

stucco Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and a ...

exterior. In discussing the wall section of Wall House II Heiduk stated:

“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 of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the “present.”

Discussing the house colors, Heiduk referred to

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...

’s La Roche House in Paris, stating:

“After that experience,” he says, “I could never do another white or primary-colored house.” In the La Roche house, the colors “were hardly apparent at first, but after you were there awhile you saw not only that they changed constantly, but that they were delicate and muted, and also saturated at the same time.”

History

Hejduk originally designed Wall house II in 1973 (the first was done in 1968) for landscape architect A.E. Bye. Hejduk was an architect, artist and educator who later became Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union. Bye was a fellow faculty member at

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

. Due to the high estimated costs of construction in the wooded area, Wall House II was put on hold. it was proposed to other clients, but was never started. In 1990 the Wall house II project was introduced in Groningen on behalf of the experiment “Making the City Boundaries”. On the basis of Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan, people from various disciplines were asked to design signposts along the city’s most important arterial roads, telling the story of Groningen. Libeskind was a former student of Heiduk. Wall House II was realized through the efforts of Niek Verdonk, Groningen’s director of

city planning Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...

, and Olof van de Wal, the head of Platform Gras, a city-sponsored architectural group. For 11 years, Verdonk and Van de Wal worked to develop Wall House II. Eventually, the Wilma BV Developers and Kamminga estate agents agreed to build the house and sell it. The Berlin architect Thomas Muller, a former student at Cooper Union, was appointed project architect. He was then working in Groningen under supervision of Kleihues. Due to

building codes A building code (also building control or building regulations) is a set of rules that specify the standards for constructed objects such as buildings and non-building structures. Buildings must conform to the code to obtain planning permission ...

and construction techniques-which required, for example, leaving space between the wall and rooms for hand plastering-the house was enlarged from its original size, to 2500 square feet. Muller redrew the plans with Derk Flikkema of Otonomo Architects in Groningen, with Hejduk reviewing the drawings in each phase up until his death. The construction cost was $600,000 in total, and it was sold with a proviso that the public can visit it one month a year.

References

*Wal, O. and Wolff, A., Wall House #2: John Hejduk in Groningen. Groningen: Platform GRAS, 2001. *Hejduk, John. Mask of medusa: works 1947-1983; ed. by Kim Shkapich. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1985. *Martin, Marijke. “Hejduk's Wall House #2 realized in Groningen.” Architecture and Urbanism 375 (2001): 102-09 *Sveiven, Megan. "AD Classics: Wall House 2 / John Hejduk" 06 Feb 2012. ArchDaily. Accessed 07 Oct 2012
Online
*Gorlin, Alexander. “Wall House, Groningen, the Netherlands.” icArchitectural Record 189 (2001): 150-53 {{coord, 53.1831, N, 6.5530, E, source:wikidata, display=title Buildings and structures in Groningen (city) Houses in the Netherlands