Heerlen; Limburgish: Heële is a city and a municipality in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is the third largest settlement proper in the province of Limburg. Measured as municipality, it is the fourth municipality in the province of Limburg.
Heerlen forms part of the city-region of Parkstad Limburg, an agglomeration with about 250,000 inhabitants and encompassing 8 municipalities. It is to the east of Maastricht and north of the German city of Aachen.
After its early Roman beginnings and a modest medieval period, Heerlen became a centre for the coal mining industry in the Netherlands in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, architect Frits Peutz played a major role in shaping the city as we know it today. His most famous design, and a distinctive building in the city centre, is the so-called Glaspaleis (Glass Palace), listed as one of the world’s thousand most architecturally important buildings of the 20th century.
Among the educational institutes in Heerlen is Hogeschool Zuyd, which is a University of Applied Sciences with branches in Heerlen, Sittard and Maastricht. Also based in Heerlen is the administrative office of the Open University of the Netherlands (Open Universiteit or OU in Dutch), which is a university for distance learning with tens of thousands of students throughout the Netherlands. Heerlen was also the location of the now-defunct University of Theology and Pastorate (Universiteit van Theologie en Pastoraat or UTP in Dutch), which had to close down due to lack of students. Jokingly it was said that Heerlen was the location of the biggest (OU) and the smallest (UTP) university of the Netherlands.
The city’s best-known architect is Frits Peutz. His legacy consists of at least 10 landmark buildings in Heerlen. In 1935 Heerlen’s most famous landmark building, the Glaspaleis, was built next to the medieval church in the centre of the then modest town. It was commissioned by the merchant Peter Schunck and it was quite an extraordinary step for this conservative businessman to ask the young Heerlen-based architect Peutz to design the new Schunck department store. It is one of the most outstanding examples of early Modernism in The Netherlands but it was only recognized as such at a fairly late stage (after it had been badly maimed). In the 1990s it was added to a prestigious list of the world’s 1000 most important buildings of the 20th century created by the International Union of Architects (only 13 buildings in the Netherlands are on that list). It encouraged the city administrators to buy the dilapidated building and make plans for its renovation. The renovation has now been completed and it now houses several of the city’s cultural institutions, including a museum of modern art. The renovated Glaspaleis has become a symbol of the revived Heerlen after the closing of the coalmines.
Although many interesting buildings were demolished around 1900, some older buildings still exist in the centre of Heerlen, for instance, a Romanesque style 12th-century church (Pancratiuskerk), and a former prison tower from around the same period (Schelmentoren).
Other buildings worth mentioning are a Neoclassical chapel (Grafkapel de Loë built in 1848, the only remaining Neoclassical building in Heerlen), and a former mansion annex pharmacy, left in almost the same state as after its 1801–1828 expansion (Huis de Luijff).
