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Talk about Wiel Arets. The Dutch designer was born in Heerlen, and subsequently located his offices in Amsterdam and Maastricht, and more recently in Switzerland and Germany. He is a case of considerable interest in architecture and contemporary criticism. The architectural work by Wiel Arets, performed by his drawings with great sensitivity and skill, embodies, like no other, the philosophical experience of the present time and the urban condition. His architecture, deaf to the "background noise" of the architecture world produced by invasive and somehow hegemonic cultures of the hyper-formalism, is a valuable distillation of irreducible architectural substances.
Arets' career has been quiet, and at the same time, it has strongly penetrated European architecture. His formation spans intercontinental cultures. On the one hand Arets, in his studies as a student, he absorbed theoretical activities of rationalism and Italian and Dutch neo-rationalism (notably Cesare Cattaneo, Frits Peutz, Hans van der Laan, but also Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi); to the other, just as mature, he replaced a tactile and material atmosphere of an oriental matrix to the classical composition of the buildings. This character of contemporary spirituality, that Arets absorbed through a Japan study tour, is particularly linked to the work of Tadao Ando, and he was the first scholar to spread Andos' work in Europe.

The anti-nostalgic decantation of this two experiences takes place in the 90s, when Arets published his theoretical text An Alabaster Skin, an in his early architecture, particularly in the Academy of Art and Architecture in Maastricht.
Here, both the the Northern European lesson of the planimetrical and spatial articulation of the buildings, and the masterful use of exposed smooth concrete or glass blocks floors, permuted him to achieve an international success. Soon, several publications on the work of Wiel Arets come out; awards, including the Mies van der Rohe Award, and many academic honors lead to an energetic teaching activity between Europe (Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and the Architectural Association) and the United States (Columbia University and Cooper Union). From 1995-2002 he was the dean the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and he formerly taught at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. In 2012, he was appointed dean of the prestigious IIT's College of Architecture in Chicago.
In the works of the 90s, his interest in the building for standardized and aggregated forms never extinguished, using large glass or even metal surfaces. In this context, one of his most interesting work is the apartment tower on KNSM Island in Amsterdam, built with rusticated concrete panels, and the Police Station in Boxtel, entirely coated of U-Glass profile. Since then Arets has realized other works by slight variations on the theme of the surface, even utilizing a naturalist silkscreen treatment in Utrecht University Library completed in 2004. But the built projects we show in this issue are the most recent, carried out between 2009 and 2012; these works embrace all the "nature" of the built setting: residential, public, office. Now, Arets' previous masterly repertory seems to be undergoing a more intense progression toward a large use of glass, turning his multi-sensory mirroring to his closest natural and artificial environments.

Giacinto Cerviere

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