Hugo Criekemans, a psychologist by training, ran an art gallery from 1968 to 1971 in the Turnhout furniture store Succes Design. He exhibited and sold works by Victor Servranckx, Roger Raveel, Gilbert De Corte, Jan Vaerten, and others. He had a good rapport with Paul Neefs, who visited regularly, from the start. He recognized Neefs as one of the few visitors who truly understood art. When he and his wife had building plans in 1971, they did not hesitate to approach him. They had not yet acquired a building plot, and Neefs took them on several tours through the green subdivisions around Turnhout, but since they particularly valued immediate access to shops, services, and culture, they ultimately preferred living in the city. They found an undeveloped plot in the city center, a piece 9 m wide and over 50 m deep, right next to a remarkable house that had been built there a few years earlier by Lou Jansen: a spacious home with a doctor’s practice that extended over the 17 m permitted building depth. The Criekemans couple’s program was much less extensive, and their house was therefore 7 m less deep. Their requirements were simple: a house with three bedrooms and separate living quarters for the live-in mother. They wanted plenty of light, and since they owned an extensive art collection, sufficient wall space to hang paintings. For the rest, they gave their architect carte blanche, albeit with the unspoken expectation that their house would itself become a work of art.
The house blends inconspicuously between the existing houses. With its completely flat facade, it seamlessly continues the street wall. Yet it resembles none of the houses in the street, not even its right neighbor, with which it nevertheless shares affinities. Neither building looks like a residence. With its large facade-wide portico, the doctor’s house resembles a small industrial building, while the collector’s house, with its large glass section on the first floor, looks like a Parisian artist’s studio. While one facade is executed in Belgian blue stone, the other is covered in anochre-colored plaster – a color desired by Criekemans, who knew it from his travels in southern France. Yet the new building behaves very properly towards its neighbor. The large window section aligns precisely at the top with the elongated strip window of the doctor’s house, and above both facades have an equally high ‘forehead’, a blind wall of over 2 m high (which in the doctor’s house, however, was already adorned with a kind of small chapel). The steel entrance sections of both houses are also exactly the same height, although painted in different colors.
The calm flat facade gives no indication of the remarkable dynamics that lie behind itThe entrance leads through a narrowing hallway to the left end of the building where there is a glimpse of the garden. But the angled window immediately directs the visitor to the ascending staircase in the opposite direction. This staircase, which cuts across the house, marks the beginning of a spatial dynamic that unfolds throughout the entire interior, up to the top floor. This unusual spatial effect originates from the architect’s decision not to place the rear facade parallel to the front facade, but to turn it 30° to the south to draw in as much sunlight as possible. Especially in the living space on the first floor, the different positions of the front and rear facades create a remarkable, ambivalent spatial effect. The two fully glazed exterior walls, both articulated by two slender columns, set out their own frame of reference, and these intersect each other in the living space. Depending on the direction in which the observer looks, they are set off balance. If you refer to one frame, you experience the other as slanted, and vice versa. This effect is reinforced by the staircase, which rises perpendicular to the rear facade. From the perspective of that facade, it’s simply a normal straight staircase (and the side and front facades appear slanted), but viewed from the front facade, it’s an incongruous body that diagonally intrudes into the living room. And driven by the changes in direction, the staircase also generates a spiral that reaches to the second floor, where it culminates in a cluster of bedrooms.
The tension between the two directions is visually expressed at the rear of the house. The fully glazed slanted wall of the living space is intersected by the straight terrace (running parallel to the front facade), while from the inside this is actually experienced as slanted. And the terrace is partially sheltered by the slanted extension of one of the bedrooms. Together, this results in an almost cubist highrelief of mutually sliding facets.
The living space is bathed in bright light and its walls are abundantly adorned with artworks, a multicolored variety of paintings that each demand attention and exert their own visual effect. It appears that the architect primarily conceived the house as a strong dynamic space – a space that not only had to withstand the visual forces of the present art but also incorporated these forces as a component of its dynamics.
‘Architecture in the Golden Sixties – The Turnhout School, Lannoo Campus, 2012’.
