Harris Armstrong Fund Lecture: Wiel Arets

Wiel Arets, founding director of Wiel Arets Architects and a professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will deliver the annual Harris Armstrong Fund Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series.

Arets is an architect, educator, industrial designer, theorist, and urbanist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He earned his Master of Science in Architecture from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1983 and, in the same year, founded the internationally recognized practice Wiel Arets Architects (WAA) with offices in Amsterdam, Maastricht, Zürich, and Munich. A number of projects have been awarded a prize such as the Utrecht University Library, the Maastricht Academy of Arts, the renovation of the Schunck Glaspaleis in Heerlen, Four Towers Osdorp in Amsterdam, the Post in Maastricht, the IJhal in Amsterdam, and most recently the Van der Valk Hotel Zuidas in Amsterdam.

Arets is currently a professor in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he was previously dean and Rowe Family Dean Endowed Chair. Prior to joining IIT, he was a professor of building planning and design at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. His books include STILLS, Autobiographical References, and Un-Conscious-City, along with the recently published monograph Nature is Nature (January 2022) on the work of his studio.