House in Opwijk by Marie-José Van Hee Architecten | Buildings | Architectural Review
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Highly Commended: The second award winning entry from Marie-José Van Hee Architecten, this home in Opwijk carries an unusual and understated sophistication
A house for a child psychiatrist sounds like something that Otto Silenus, the terrifyingly austere Modernist in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, might cherish as a dream project, but this psychiatric practice-cum-home in Opwijk, near Brussels, is disarmingly approachable − at least materially. The red pitched roof, shallow red bricks laid with contrasting mortar, and the windows of the facade looking on to the square have the diagrammatic quality of a child’s drawing: this is unmistakably a home. But there is something unnerving about the fenestration.
One upper window cantilevers out, bug-eyed, into the street, while the house seems to have been blinded in its other eye (in fact this deep recess is a little terrace, affording light yet privacy to a bathroom). The window on the ground floor grimaces, only half-flush with the wall.