Wiel Arets was born on 6 May 1955 in Heerlen, Netherlands to Wiel Arets (1929) and Mia Heuts (1931). His father was a book printer and his mother was a fashion designer, both from whom he learned respect for the tradition of craft and a love of books and reading. He briefly studied engineering, and then physics, before ultimately deciding on architecture. He divides his time between Chicago, Maastricht, Berlin, Amsterdam and Zürich, living and working in each city. He is married and has two children. Arets’ work is generally characterized by a minimalist, geometric and austere approach that responds to local contingencies in a flexible way, with Arets explaining:

As a student Arets undertook extensive research in the archives of Peutz’s office, eventually producing the monograph ‘F.P.J Peutz Architekt 1916-1966’ (1981) and an accompanying traveling exhibition. After graduating from the TU/e in 1983 Arets travelled extensively throughout Russia, the United States and Japan. While in Japan Arets visited and interviewed several prominent architects including Fumihiko Maki, Kazuo Shinohara, Itsuko Hasegawa and Tadao Ando, later publishing these interviews and articles in the Dutch architecture magazine de Architect. Arets first garnered international architectural attention with the completion of the Maastricht Academy of Art and Architecture in 1993, described by Kenneth Frampton as:

In 1991 Arets published his first theoretical text, ‘An Alabaster Skin’, in a monograph of the same title. The text merged Arets’ fascinations of his studies and early career, including: cinematography, photography, the ‘city’, technology of the 20th century, the membrane or skin of a building, biology and the act of cutting and editing (in regards to cinematography), as well as the Postmodern architecture of the 1980s. Greg Lynn interprets the piece as so:

In 2004 Arets completed the library of Utrecht University, situated in the Uithof area of the campus designed by OMA which dictated a strict orthogonal requirement for all buildings. The library’s exterior glazing is screen printed with an image of bamboo shoots created by the photographer Kim Zwarts, returning as a tactile imprinted surface pattern on the library’s interior prefabricated concrete panel walls, which are painted black. This ‘tactility’ has since returned to more of Arets’ projects in the form of imprinted-concrete or screen printed glass exteriors. Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA remarks of the library:

In 2011 Arets’ studio won an international competition to design the IJhal at Amsterdam Centraal Station, part of the city’s plan to revitalize the waterfront by reconnecting it to the river IJ., and recently finished construction on the Allianz Headquarters in Zürich, Switzerland.