Designing Freedom
Studio Hartzema creates designs with a timeless beauty. For us, spatial design is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve harmony between buildings and green space in which people feel at home. Knowhow, combined with the greatest care and love, make the signature of an excellent design.
We believe that a design is successful if it responds to human needs instead of adjusting them. Spaces should not be shaped for how people should behave, but spaces should create the conditions in which everyone can feel free. Make space and leave space.
The beginning
In 2005 Henk Hartzema founded his studio to develop an organic form of design. No preconceived recipe or fixed visual language, but focusing on the use and perception of space. With an open attitude, but according to consistent qualitative standards, Studio Hartzema builds on knowledge and experience gained in previous projects and collected through research. Great energy and curiosity for the world that surrounds are tools to manage internally the design tasks. In 2019, FRESH, an independent institute for research and development, was founded. This not only develops knowledge, but also actively shares it in the professional world.
Ergonomics at all scales
Space is seen with its inherent value, and iteration sharpens all ideas into new, sublimated forms and boundaries, appropriate to man’s relationship to his environment. Studio Hartzema serves in various roles in this process; designer, initiator, guide, listener, maker, prompter, researcher. We feel at ease with clients who focus on content, with a broad view and a further horizon. Team players in a collective design effort.
In this way, our portfolio is filled with sustainable environments for living, working, education and care, and combinations thereof. In addition, work is steadily being done on a body of work in which architecture on the one hand and regional developments on the other find a place.
Finding the need
The recognition of the genuine needs is an essential part of any design task. We also believe that a design is more successful if it responds to the environment and makes choices for the future of the city and the country.
In the design process of each project, evaluates the original needs of the client and configures them to solutions that benefit the broader context and the further future. If design can be seen as allowing and embracing the many truths that interact with each other to create a new reality – and not as the expression of the designer’s own personality – the demand must be made that it answers the purpose, no matter how complex.
The iterative process
Once the constraints of the design problem have been outlined, we rely on an iterative process to create good spaces, places, neighbourhoods, cities, and landscapes. Studio Hartzema makes use of storylines, arithmetic exercises, models, variant studies and fundamental research. Clear visualisations and the concreteness of interventions serve as tools. Tools for collecting and sharing ideas before, during, and after designing something concrete like a building or something intangible like a region, and everything in between. An analytical way of imagining allows us to recognize the success of an idea and communicate it to the client and his environment. Innovation is not an end in itself. Rather, the search for the contemporary and future-proof translation of successful spaces and environments and placing them in the context of the assignment. Where the danger of any innovation is the chance to lose the wisdom that had been put into the development of the idea up to that point, building on the many constants in human needs is the essence. What works well will last longer.
