I’d seen the cube houses of Rotterdam before, many years ago, and remembered I’d been quite fascinated by them. So when I found myself in Rotterdam for a travel blogging conference earlier this year, I couldn’t resist going back to see them.
It’s strange how memory works. Sometimes you see something years later and can’t believe how tiny/plain/insignificant it is compared to your memories of it. Of course it’s all relative to the things you’ve seen since. That boat you thought was so huge only looks tiny now because you’ve since seen some truly enormous boats. That colourful church with all the paintings? Yeah, it doesn’t look that colourful anymore, but that’s because you’ve seen some really stunning Russian and Greek churches filled with breath-taking icons. Those Wagon Wheels you used to get in your lunchbox? They only seem … no scrub that, they really have got smaller (and no-one’s going to persuade me otherwise on that).
I still remembered the cube houses as being something special, unusual and the kind of place definitely worth a re-visit since Instagram hadn’t been invented when I first saw them. So I was expecting them to look good. And of course because I was already expecting them to look good I wasn’t expecting to be wowed by them and if anything, thought I might be disappointed with them second time round.
I caught the metro to Blaak Station. Coming up the escalator I hoped the houses wouldn’t be too difficult to find. Then I got to the top and … yeah, I wasn’t going to miss those! They were just there, right in front of me. I remembered them as being a few houses around the edges of a central courtyard. This was so much more than that. I even started to think that maybe more had been built since my first visit. But no, there’s always been this many. How could I have forgotten that ? My memory had definitely played a trick on me, but not in the way I’d expected.
There’s been a lot of regeneration since I was last here and so the area itself looks different and there’s now the stunning Markthal (an indoor food hall with fantastic murals covering the walls) just across from the station, but the cube houses are the same as they ever were. It’s just I’d completely forgotten there were so many and what an impact on the eye they make when first seeing them.
There are actually 38 of the regular cube houses and two super-sized ones, one of which has been turned into a backpacker hostel. Together they form a ‘village’ with a ‘street’ as well as several wider open spaces reminiscent of town squares.
They were designed by structuralist architect Piet Blom (1934-1999). Structuralism, which developed in the 1960s, had integration and coherency at its core. This way of thinking about urban living was the antithesis to the preceding movement of functional architecture which had an ethos of segregation as well as functionality.
Blom’s motto was ‘Living under an urban roof’ and when tasked with designing high density urban living he looked to the villages of the past for inspiration. He believed that ‘every space and every individual is a part of the whole’ and that every aspect of life should be possible in an urban housing development.
Blom designed his cube houses (kijk-kubus in Dutch) to not only make an architectural statement, but to make the most of a limited amount of space. The main part of each house is a cube that is tilted and placed on a hexagonal pillar. The cubes are tilted because that is meant to give more space inside so it’s a way of building high density housing without compromising on space. I’m not sure how well this works though because the unusual shape means a lot of the space is unusable (or difficult to use effectively).
From looking around inside the house that is open as a museum I realised that only someone who embraces minimalism and limits their possessions would cope with living in one of these cubes. This enforced minimalism goes a long way to making the houses appear spacious. Anyone with ‘stuff’ (like me) would be driven crazy by the lack of storage in a cube house and it would constantly look cluttered. A smaller apartment with regular walls would enable much more storage and a much calmer living space.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Leaving the station I crossed the road and climbed the wide steps leading up to the cubes. At road level a long concrete block houses businesses. The houses sit on top – another example of maximising space for high-density living. Blom’s idea of creating an urban ‘village’ was to have living and working spaces co-existing and interspersed with communal outdoor spaces.
The line of businesses looks ugly and the busy road cuts through it. The cube houses above form a bridge across the road. Maybe it’s because of the ugliness of the road and the business block that the first impression of the contrasting bright yellow houses above is all the more striking. I doubt that was intentional though.
I stopped on the stairs as the first communal space opened out in front of me. A few people were around; some were tourists, but others looked as though they lived or worked here. Plants were scattered throughout the open spaces, but I never felt as though I was in a garden or park. Although I liked the complex it all felt very concrete and kind of oppressive. I think the jaunty angles actually added to that feeling. The buildings seem to be coming out at you, looming over you, encroaching on your space. In a built-up area towering walls might give a feeling of claustrophobia, but they also feel solid and restrained. The very walls that impose are also the prison guards keeping the buildings back. Here the walls don’t fulfill that role. It seems like the buildings have no restraints as they lean out towards you impinging on your personal space.
I wouldn’t be happy in any concrete jungle of apartment blocks (though I have lived in one in the past), so maybe that’s why I felt like this. However, even though I felt this way, if I had to choose between living in a straight-walled, over-crowded complex or one like this with its jaunty angles and sunny yellow, I would probably go for this one despite my misgivings over the walls having no sense of personal space.
Walking round the complex it was easy to tell the tourists from the residents. And not just because we tourists were the ones with cameras. No, a far more telling sign was the way tourists all walked with their heads turned up, eyes gazing above rather than straight ahead.
I wandered to the end and back taking photos and gazing upwards just like the other tourists. Then I paid my 3 euros and went to the museum.
As well as being reminiscent of a village, the houses also represent trees with the whole coming together to form a forest. The hexagonal ‘trunks’ of the houses contain storage and staircases. There are two different styles – one only has external staircases. The external staircases lead to a gallery where one can walk between houses. The houses with the external stairs don’t own the storage space in the pillars as it’s given over to tiny shops and businesses. The residents in these houses have their storage elsewhere in the complex.
Entering the cube on the first floor you see the main living space. This is the kitchen, living room and eating area. It’s open plan and the walls lean out. Having walls that lean out or in (or in the case of the middle floor, both out and in) plays havoc with choosing furniture. Most furniture has to be specially designed and built in. The sofa, for example is built along the wall rather than being a stand-alone shop bought sofa. It provides quite a decent sized seating area, but I couldn’t imagine it being too comfortable for sprawling out on watching a film or reading.
In the compact kitchen the worktops are a decent depth. This is because they have to stretch back to reach the wall. The cupboard space beneath is not so big though. Because the wall is much further in at floor level than at counter level the cupboards can’t have nearly as much depth to them. There are no upper cupboards on this wall, just a few shelves on the one straight wall.
Because of the angle of the walls and windows, Blom called this level the ‘street house’. Balancing yourself (it can be a bit disconcerting) to peer out of the windows you look directly down on the street below.
The second floor which lies across the centre of the cube is the largest and is where the bedrooms and bathroom are. This has walls that lean out at the bottom and in at the top. The windows are in the walls that lean in and through them you can see the sky. Blom called this floor the ‘sky house’.
In the museum house a wall has been taken down on this floor so visitors can make a circuit of the floor without having to backtrack. Again there is minimal storage, but there is room for beds. The bathroom is tiny. The only straight walls in the cubes are those encompassing the trunk through which the staircase runs to the top of the building. In the museum house this straight wall has been lined with shelves on the middle floor.
A narrow staircase, more like steps, leads to the top floor. This was named the ‘tabernacle’ by Blom and is a small room with a lot less head space than floor space due to the walls leaning in to form a point over the centre of the room. The room has windows all the way round through which there are great views of the rooftops of the other cubes and of part of the city. With all its windows this room is like a conservatory or greenhouse and on the hot day I visited it was sweltering in there. No-one who came up could stay more than a few minutes and everyone remarked on the heat as they reached the top of the stairs. I wondered if the opposite would happen on a cold day and would the room be too cold to stay for more than a few minutes. In a house where space is at such a premium it seemed a shame that what should be a pleasant space might be unusable for a lot of the year.
Leaving the house I wandered back through the cubes looking for the ‘star’. I’d seen pictures of one particular part of the complex in which if you look up the cubes lean in to form a star shape against the sky. I found it right at the far end. There are stairs here leading down to the road and the harbour. Looking up I could see the star shape quite clearly. Getting a good picture was another matter though. I couldn’t reach out far enough from the stairs to capture a perfect star and so went to the bottom. Here I could stand in the middle among the tables and chairs of a bar. There was a wire stretching above my head with a light in the middle and there was no way I could get a photo without this in it. Other people don’t have this in their shots so either it’s not usually there or I just never found the right spot. I’m still quite pleased with my ‘star’ picture though.
On my way back through the complex I checked out the hostel. I could only see the communal areas which looked nice, but pretty normal. I wondered if the dorms had leaning walls and how bunk beds would fit in if they did.
The other large cube is apparently also a kind of hostel, though in this case it’s for prisoners who are coming towards the end of their detention and being rehabilitated back into society. I wondered if the people living in the cubes would have a NIMBY approach to this, or by their very nature of being the sort of people wanting to live in this kind of space would they quite like the idea of yet another function for Blom’s idea of social integration through architecture?
The cube houses are fascinating and well worth a visit if you find yourself in Rotterdam. It’s not just the unusual architecture that makes them so interesting, but the philosophy of social cohesion and integration that lies behind the design of the complex. Maybe next time I should stay in the hostel or in the house that’s listed on Airbnb to give myself a better idea of what it’s like to live, cook and sleep in a cube house.
What about you? Do you think you could live in a cube house? What’s the most unusual residential architecture you’ve come across? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Like this? Read these next:
Cute Houses of Scalloway
A Tale of Two Castles
Skansen Open-Air Museum
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