Thuis - At Home
If Heren 5 (translated as “5 gentlemen”) were a boy band instead of an architecture firm, they'd cover Burt Bacharach's “A House Is Not a Home.” This Dutch architecture firm has taken great pains to tailor their residential projects--whether luxury apartments or elder-care centers--to the inhabitants' ideas about how feel “at home.” Heren 5 is not interested so much in having its own “image” or “signature” as in designing buildings that suit the needs of the future residents and of the particular site. In this book, seven striking portraits of Heren 5 building occupants, in both interviews and in the beautiful photographs of Kees Hummel, illustrate their philosophy. In addition to providing detailed project documentation, the book gives the results of a survey of 620 occupants of Heren 5 buildings. This degree of attention to client constituent concerns about community and privacy, among other issues, is what sets the firm apart from others and signals a new paradigm, an approach that will appeal not only to architects but to those who commission and live in those structures as well.
