Qualla: Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CumulusNL, CC BY-SA 3.0. Peter Schunck did not want walls. He wanted his clothes and carpets and bedding to lie out in the open, as if the customers were wandering through a Mediterranean market and not a department store in a Dutch coal-mining town. So in 1934 he hired a young architect named Frits Peutz, who had been studying Bauhaus and the new factories in Rotterdam, and gave him an impossible brief: build something so transparent that the difference between inside and outside disappears. What Peutz drew, and what concrete contractor P. Knols built for 184,500 guilders, was the Glaspaleis, a seven-story glass cube on thirty mushroom-shaped columns that the people of Heerlen took to calling, almost immediately, the Glass Palace.

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Image: CumulusNL | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: The Palace for the People

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Peters, CC BY 3.0 nl. Heerlen in the 1930s was a coal town. Working-class, growing fast, and self-conscious about the gap between its smokestacks and its ambitions. Peter Schunck was a fabric merchant who had traveled across Europe collecting architectural magazines and visiting department stores in c...

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Image: Henry Peters | CC BY 3.0 nl

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: More Transparent Than the Bauhaus

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photograph by Dirk van der Made, CC BY-SA 2.5. The trick Peutz pulled off was structural. Each floor sits on mushroom-shaped concrete pillars that get narrower as you climb, so a beamless slab can spread out above them and catch daylight from any direction. There are no load-bearing walls inside the building. The glass curtai...

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Image: Photograph by Dirk van der Made | CC BY-SA 2.5

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: Patton, Pizza Hut, and Decay

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul van Galen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then came the long middle act, which almost killed the building. During the Second World War, the Glaspaleis was bombed three times and somehow kept going; American Generals Patton and Simpson used it briefly as a headquarters, and afterwards French maquis resistance fighters tre...

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Image: Paul van Galen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: Saved by a Workgroup and an Architect

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Romaine, CC0. In 1993 a man named Nic Tummers started a small workgroup called Werkgroep Behoud Glaspaleis. The architect Wiel Arets, a Peutz admirer, founded a foundation to save the building. An alderman, Seijben, took up the cause inside the city council. In 1995 the Glaspaleis was declared...

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Image: Romaine | CC0

Glaspaleis: A Glass Palace Built for Miners: Window on Culture

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DirkvdM at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Glaspaleis reopened on 1 September 2003. Today it houses Heerlen's public library, an art gallery called the Stadsgalerij, an architecture center, restaurants on the ground floor and in the penthouse, and the connecting music school where 2,900 students rehearse. A quarter of...

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Image: DirkvdM at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0