Polyphemos House, Klevarie, Maastricht Sustainable Building, Dutch Architecture Images
Polyphemos House in Maastricht
15 Feb 2022
Designed by Martens Willems & Humblé Architecten
Location: Klevarie, Maastricht, province of Limburg, The Netherlands

Photos: Philip Driessen
Polyphemos House, Holland
Polyphemos is a private house at the Klevarie site in Maastricht. Within the historic city walls this was before an old monastery garden, later a hospital and nursing home. But always served as hidden green space for the site. In our urban plan for the site we cherished this green space.

The gate on the abstreet functions as a ‘pars pro toto’ for this project. The charming modernist nursing home of the architect Schellinckx from 1962 still stands at the site A unique modernist incident within the cityscape for Maastricht standards.
Within these conditions, one lot remained free. On the edge of this place stands a high monumental tree. In the small garden from the 1950s that belonged to the nursing home, a stump of an ancient monumental Ginkgo Biloba was preserved. This is the remnant of the first Ginkgo Biloba that was imported from China by a Franciscan monk to the Netherlands at the end of the 18th century. (Of these cuttings are spread over the most important botanical gardens in the Netherlands, including the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden.)

The housing volume is formed by a number of urban planning restrictions and the presence of the tree on the plot. As t...