Name: Spherical houses weren't a great idea.
Uploaded: 2025-04-09T10:25:03.000Z
Duration: 4 min 10 s
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程度の副詞

After the Second World War, the Netherlands had to build a lot of new houses, not just to repair damage, but to handle the population from the post-war baby boom.

様態の副詞

And the housing they built was, well, it was pretty much all the same, most of it built quickly, cheaply, and to one of a few similar designs.

So in 1968, the Dutch government's Ministry for Public Housing and Spatial Planning started to offer grants for experimental architecture.

Because, to quote the government ministry in charge, men weet niet wat men mist.

Maybe they'd find a way to radically improve housing for everyone.

A lot of the experiments were very tame, you wouldn't really notice them as you walk through a city, they just use different materials or organize the rooms or houses differently.

And they actually did find ways to build better homes.

Some of the experiments were the sort of stark brutalist work that you might expect from 1960s or 70s architects, interesting to look at, not always great places to live.

Some of those became quite famous, like the cube houses in Helmond and Rotterdam.

One of the final experiments to get the subsidy was built in 1984, and it was very strange indeed.

The Bolwoningen, the sphere houses, sit in Den Bosch in the south of the country, according to the designer, artist Dries Kreijkamp, humans were not meant to live in a box.

It's not very spacious, but depending on the person, like, I personally don't have claustrophobia.

But I have heard it from other people that they have experiences of claustrophobia when they enter in the house.

Kreijkamp was more a designer than an architect.

The experimental houses are livable, and they're still used as social housing where the local government is the landlord.

Because the trees, the shell of the house gets green pretty quickly, once in the five or 10 years, they do a complete cleaning of the houses.

Anything inside the house, that's all for yourself, except for proper maintenance like the boilers and that kind of stuff.

Or if the windows are leaking, because that's one of the biggest problems we have, on a good rainy day you can basically swim in your living quarters.

The first floor is where you enter in the house.

The second floor is for sleeping quarters, then you go another stair and then you get to the bathroom and the shower.

And then you have the upper floor, which is the living room, the kitchen.

If you have a lot of stuff, you have to adapt because there's very limited room, so you have to use every inch.

Even if you measure, it's still no guarantee that things will fit.

The two halves of each house were built in a temporary factory on site here and then connected together.

These are made from glass fiber reinforced concrete with 10 centimeters of rock wool insulation between the outer and inner hull.

If it's 20 degrees outside, then it becomes 25 inside.

So we cover the windows, we're always looking forward to the winter really.

During winter it's quite nice and comfy actually, like I can't complain.

Maybe if these plans continued, the third or fourth generation of these houses would have worked well, but not only did they have problems, they also proved just too expensive compared to the economies of scale for traditional housing.

Recently, these houses were added to monumental status, so they get a little bit more care.

They can't be demolished, but that's only on the local level, not governmental level, at least not yet.

The surprising thing for me is not that these houses exist.

There's a lot of weird houses out there, I've visited a few of them.

What surprised me is they're still homes, they're still lived in.

They've not been converted to hotels or short-term lets or quirky tourist attractions.

And they're not sitting disused and broken.

The dreams of the space age didn't all come to pass.

And it turns out that there are good reasons for that, but some people still do.

It's nice to live here, it's it's peaceful, the shops are nearby, you got a park next to your house, you can ice skate in the winter.

We have good neighbors, we do hang out, we do chat with one another.

And you get used to it, it just asks a lot of adapting to it.