Thrilled we proceeded to the array of “Cube houses of Rotterdam”, the famous architectonic experiment of Piet Blom in which form, aesthetics and spatial configuration and effects take upper hand over functionality of the buildings, on our way to Amsterdam. From a distance we could see the string of cube houses of Rotterdam straddled above roads and intertwined amongst themselves, each tilted at an abnormal angle of 55 degree. Great things occur only when there are challenges. Cube houses narrate the story of such a challenge which in the 1970s, the city planners of Rotterdam in the Netherlands had encountered. Two small pieces of land on the northwest and southeast sides of Blaak Street in Rotterdam zoned as residential had to be somehow connected. Architect Piet Blom had a creative solution to this problem and thus came up this idea of building a pedestrian bridge atop the busy road using 38 regular cubical units and two larger cubes supported by hexagonal pillar.
I approached the urban cluster with an apprehension about how the function of a house would actually fit into a tilted cube without much compromise. Luckily an owner who has opened his house as a Show Cube Museum (Kijk-Kubus) gave us a chance to take a tour around and through a fully furnished Cube House. From the ground level, we took a narrow staircase to reach the first floor, which consisted of a tiny, triangle-shaped room functioning as a living room and a kitchen. A flight of stairs took us up to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, and then to the top floor which is a small free space, used as a garden , a green lung for the urban house.
The cube house museum displayed all that is required for the functioning of a small house hold. Each space was exhilarating, though the narrowness of the spatial volume created a kind of claustrophobia at times. The minimalism brought in for every bit of space within the house was exciting to the onlooker in spite of it reminding some of the everyday challenges the residents might face, such as procuring fitting furniture for a structure without straight walls and also psychological acceptance of slanting walls. A panel exhibited the detailed drawings of the cube house and I noted that each house sprawls to about 100 sq mts of area of which almost quarter of floor space had to be left unusable because of its specific alignment and form. Despite all this the visit to Kijk-Kubus was indeed a remarkable one filling one’s mind with a youthful energy as I found everything about it was really exciting, fresh, and vibrant…. Felt happy to realize that it is not just the Architect in me who went through these emotional upheaval but also my companions Dr. Pushpa Maliekal a post Doc from KU Lueven and senior official at GSK, her husband Siju Joseph an Electrical Engineer and MBA at Atlas Copco and their 8 year old little princess Alexia…..
We walked out of the cube house alas to read the short poem by the Architect himself:
He’
wat is dit?
Is dit nou
een paleis
of is dit
een kermis?
(Translation –
Hey,
what is this?
is this
a palace?
or is this
a carnival?)
Memory of 22nd September 2018
Stories of my experiences of Architecture 