The Low Countries. Jaargang 11

The Right Distance
The Architecture of M. José van Hee

One of the very first designs by the architect Marie-José van Hee (1950-) to be built was an electricity substation for the City of Ghent. That dates from 1982. In 2002, crowning a career that now spans more than 20 years, the ModeNatie in Antwerp (see p. 301) stands like a beacon. Both these buildings were official commissions for public amenities; but Van Hee is best known as an architect of private houses. In her approach to architecture she has followed her own course with great constancy and has had little truck with the neo-modern tendencies of much contemporary Flemish architecture. Her highly individual approach was already visible in the electricity substation in Ghent; unceasing work on form has given it masterful shape in several private houses, and it clearly permeates the ModeNatie too.

Nationalestraat in Antwerp was constructed in the late nineteenth century in the Parisian style, as a straight, modern connection between the city centre and the new district round the docks at the southern end of the city. In 1894 the monumental Hotel Central was built on one of the corner sites on this would-be boulevard. Taking nineteenth-century metropolitan architecture as its model, it had a rounded gable to its frontage, an abundance of mouldings and frontons and a sturdy dome. In short, it displayed an urban coquetry to match the vanity of Antwerp.

Work on adapting the building to house the Mode-Natie began with the removal of all later roofs, intermediate floors and outbuildings. Van Hee returned the building to its original state in order to reinstate the clear basic structure. Her changes to the outside of the building have been kept extremely discreet. The new rooftop storey, for example, is hardly visible from the street, since the attention is led to a massive cornice that combines the edge of the roof and the parapet in a quasi-traditional crowning of the facade. She has avoided showy additions in order to keep the external appearance of this nineteenth-century building as intact as possible.

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M. José van Hee, the Antwerp Modenatie's staircase (2002). Photo by Kristien Daem.

In addition to restrained changes, Van Hee has also made one grand gesture. Not a pointless flourish, but a worthy addition to the public space of the city. Broad new doorways have been pierced into each of the street-fronts, giving access to the former courtyard which has been covered with a glass roof and now forms an intermediate space between interior and exterior. This means that from now on there is a public passageway running right through the block containing the ModeNatie. All the activities of the ModeNatie are accessed from this single central space by means of an utterly overwhelming staircase, a real mountain of steps, passages and landings. The mountain of stairs can undoubtedly be traced back to Van Hee's mountain journeys and the ascending routes she admires there. It illustrates the thoroughly three-dimensional and dynamic experience Van Hee's architecture requires. Interior views and well-considered spaces ensure that the atrium is visible from everywhere in the building. In this way it truly forms the heart of the ModeNatie.

The enclosed inner space is a constant feature in Van Hee's work. Atrium, courtyard, patio, terrace, outdoor room, small garden, cortile or carport: in numerous designs they provide the structuring principle of the plan. Van Hee's penchant for outdoor rooms has Latin roots. This is certainly obvious in the elegant nonchalance with which herbs, potted plants and cats occupy space under the outdoor arcades of her own house in Ghent. As the way her house is used makes abundantly clear, the courtyard is very definitely its focal point. Not only do almost all the rooms open onto it, so that it can be used as an alternative route from one to another, but in addition this creates diagonal views from one room to another across the outdoor courtyard area.

Van Hee has created a courtyard at the ModeNatie too. The former open courtyard of the main building has been roofed with glass and is now what is called an atrium. In many office buildings, shopping centres and hotels the atrium serves as a substitute for the outside world, where the real city is. It is a safe but selective cocoon containing shops, cafés and other activities that normally belong in the public space of the city. On the ground floor of the ModeNatie are a bookshop and a brasserie, but they bear no relation to those trappings of today's inclusive museum complexes: the art shop and the themed café. They are not intended primarily for visitors to the museum and are not even accessible from the atrium. In other words, the ModeNatie atrium was not designed, like North American examples, as an anti-urban device that interiorises public life and

M. José van Hee, the courtyard of her own home in Ghent (1996). Photo by Francis Strauven.

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brings about the loss of urban public space. The normal way of things, with shops and cafés opening onto the street, has been maintained. With an effect comparable to Victor Horta's Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, the ModeNatie building is edged with a plinth of independent commercial enterprises. Van Hee has not made a monotonous monolith of the ModeNatie, but has actually enhanced the liveliness of the street.

Visitors to the top floor of the ModeNatie have a delightful view of the centre of Antwerp. Virtually the entire facade is composed of windows, but the opposite wall of each room is completely closed. From the top of the stairs there is nothing to indicate the roof terrace behind this blank wall, with the South Quays still blocked from view and the panorama over the Scheldt not yet revealed. Van Hee never reveals everything at once, in fact she finds that a bit obscene. The phantasm of the 360^o view, of the transparent box, the absent facade, is alien to her. In her architecture the view is not total but measured, masked and mediated.

In her own home Van Hee has expanded the facade into a cupboard as long as the room, which together with the deep window recesses keeps the life of the streets at a distance. At the ModeNatie too the sections of wall between the windows on the street front of the exhibition rooms are deeply encased so that the windows are set in deep recesses. If one stands by the window one has a clear view of the city, but the view in from the street is limited. It is easier to look out than in. This effect, which safeguards the privacy of the interior without closing it off from the outside world, is another of the constants in Van Hee's work. It works by doubling the enclosure of the building by means of successive screens that are opened up in different ways. It is here that the distinction between mask and face stands out. The face of the building, the nature of the life that the building accommodates, only becomes visible once one is past the mask of the outer facade. The mask is more closed, immobile and distant, but it is not hermetic.

It would be possible, but wrong, to see the relationship between city and building in Van Hee's architecture as a turning away from the outside world of the public domain, the building of a rampart against danger, ugliness and curiosity. The house as a small fortress. However, this is actually a mediating and protective architecture. It shows that there is life inside without showing the people who live there. It does not reveal everything, and so it does not have to be truly closed off. On the street-front of Van Hee's own house the window is above eye-level and no curtains are ever drawn, so in the evening you see the lights burning from outside. This architecture is absolutely urban because it seeks a measured contact with the life of the streets. It keeps the right distance.

kristiaan borret

Translated by Gregory Ball.

M. José van Hee: Kortrijksesteenweg 553 / 9000 Ghent / Belgium tel. [phone] / fax. [phone]