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Turning Architecture Upside Down
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17020 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1990 |
1,981 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
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For sheer originality, indeed perversity, Piet Blom's architecture is in a class of its own. Single handedly he has revolted against the concrete slabs of postwar Rotterdam, creating new housing as fantastic in conception as Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona or Guimard's Metro entrances in Paris.
The first sight of his development at Overblaak turns conventional views of architecture upside down. Indeed, his apartment block, Blaaktoren, has almost literally been stood on its head as all the arches of the windows point down, not up. But the truly surreal part of the complex is the cluster of cube houses (pole houses he calls them), which are so disorienting that you have to stand still for several minutes before you can begin to work out how anyone can live in such a place.
The essential concept is very simple - a tilted cube resting on a hexagonal pillar containing the entrance and staircase. It might almost be a modern reinterpretation of Holland's classic building type, the windmill with its crossed sails.
More mischievously, it brings to mind the famous nursery rhyme:
There was a crooked man,
And he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked style.
He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house.
It is this remarkable combination of high-minded experimental living with an unabashed sense of fun that makes the pole house precinct such an engaging place. Standing in the piazza beneath, I began to feel that the houses were looking at me and in some way were alive. The bright yellow fronts are like faces - the arrangement of windows suggests noses and eyes-perhaps with a trim little Dutch bonnet tied around them.
When your gaze shifts to the clusters of windows at the corners of the cubes they have the look of insects' eyes. This is partly because the windows on the upper slope are a matching pair, rather taller than they are wide, like the eyes of a fly.
Continuing the analogy with nature, the color of the sloping fronts suggests the soft, smooth yellow underbelly of a crab, while the rougher-textured brown roof forms the shell. The more your peer up, the giddier you became. Your eyes roll around like the air bubble in a spirit level, looking for a horizontal line.
The next dizzy-making trick comes with the fire gangways running between the roofs of the houses: The "doors" opening onto them lean back at a crazy forty-five degrees. To open the door requires a superhuman push.
What everyone wants to do is to go into one of the houses and see what kind of life they offer. Happily one of the new owners realized this and has opened his house for a charge of two and one-half Dutch guilders - just over a
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