Daan Groeneveld
The Architecture of the Interior
Image: A new place for Ceramics
A New Place for Ceramics in a City of Stone
This is a project on two material cultures so typical of Maastricht. The project has been a detailed study of the Maastricht tradition of building in natural stone. It also aims to reinvigorate the culture of ceramics, that has influenced the city’s industrial development but has now disappeared from it.
A new Ceramic centre is proposed between the city centre and the former Sphinx factory, bringing the ceramic culture close to the people while underlining its industrial history. Adopting the factory-hall typology, a large space is central in the scheme which, as ceramic workshop and exhibition space, keeps the tradition ‘alive’. The hall is surrounded by smaller annexes offering more intimate spaces and connecting in scale to the surrounding tissue.
The project relates to the natural stone culture by reinterpreting, in the structure and the facade, the tectonic language of Maastricht all-stone facades. By translating this language to (recycled) brick and concrete, materials that are mouldable like ceramics, the material cultures are ‘merged’. This shows how architecture can innovate through tradition.