Villas, Zuidhorn

The five single-family dwellings designed by Onix in Zuidhorn are located in an area of new construction. The site is surrounded by what was once farming land, but is now largely residential. Zuidhorn began life as a rural village, a nucleus of houses related to the agricultural activities of the area; its current image is much more suburban: a generic, satellite suburb of Groningen, the Netherlands' northernmost city.

Almost all of the new houses in the area are 'nostalgic' in character, a cliché of vernacular decorative elements that is in fact far from the actual local history of the site. The houses that surround the project by Onix are primarily two storeys, with multi-pitched roofs and a range of upper level trappings (dormers, porticoes and fences) that serve to amplify their caricatural qualities. They are the transposition of a collective image that is both alienating and uniform, imposed by the market and foreign to the original nature of the site. A little further along, on the edge of the new settlement, stands an agricultural shed, typical of these polder landscapes; a very sober construction with a pitched roof, the slopes of which reach almost to the base of the building.

Between these two opposites of real and invented history, we find the Onix houses. The form is essentially that of the agricultural shed. If we look at the drawings of the elevations, where the cuts and setbacks appear on the same plane owing to orthogonal projection, the outline is analogous to that of the traditional barn, with its preference for sloping surfaces over vertical walls.

Traces of a contemporary language can be found in the way the conventional form is complicated by cuts and blurrings and by the choice of materials – heterogeneous, but of the same colour – which create continuity between facades and roof, making the whole appear to the eye of the observer as a unique and sober object. The building thus acquires the appearance of a volume from which pieces have been subtracted in order to increase the possibilities for the use of space by its inhabitants. At ground floor level, an oblique passageway containing the entrance separates the residential part from the garage, thereby reducing the bulk of the whole and generating physical and visual contact between the various parts of the surrounding terrain and the landscape. Inside the house, the kitchen-and-stair block divides the spaces on the ground floor, separating the entrance from the dining and living spaces, which are flanked by a timber terrace.

The Zuidhorn houses represent a twofold evolution of the language of the Groningen-based office. Firstly, wood, the material that characterized almost all of their early projects and brought them to the attention of their contemporaries, is almost a marginal element here. Also absent is the excessive heterogeneity found in another of their recent projects – the Veranda Houses in Almere – which makes use of the same materials but in their natural colours. The Almere houses have a weak and fragmented appearance, while in Zuidhorn the differentiation is left to the textures, which emerge thanks to the use of a single colour for all materials with the exception of the timber cladding on part of the rear facade. Nevertheless, many elements of the Onix vocabulary remain unchanged, as does the coherence with which they manage to represent their theories through their built work. Onix's buildings are simultaneously extraneous and familiar objects. They come from a profound understanding of local realty, which in this instance consists of simple agricultural sheds with sloping roofs, bent or cut where the eaves meet the facade. Their colour (charcoal) is familiar from the plastic sheets used by local farmers to protect hay bales from the rain, and there is a relationship between built volume and green space that pushes the imagination towards an agricultural function rather than a suburban, residential quality. What makes them extraneous is the studied solutions to detailing that belong to a contemporary language, devoid of any rhetoric.

It is an architecture of ideals and concreteness, whose reasoned ambiguity is the key to its success: already during the design phase it takes account of the objective reality of context (the impositions of the market, the imagination of local residents, the culture of local builders), rendering the act of building a practice in which ideas take form, without losing themselves in the sort of compromises made by those who do not understand the reality in which they operate.