Flexible housing
The housing exhibition ‘Het Wilde Wonen’ (the title is a wordplay on ‘desirable homes’ and ‘wild housing’, i.e. deregulated housing) challenges the architect and client to come up with new, experimental solutions for building customized housing. We designed the row of eighteen low-cost market-sector houses with maximum flexibility and freedom in mind. The standardized core (the ‘boilerhouse’) containing facilities – staircases, hallways, bathrooms, storage room, central heating and optionally the kitchen – provides a functional, spatial and financial structure. Neutral, flexible halls are situated between the cores. The owner has a range of options for its length, width and height. The freedom of layout is considerable: the hall could be treated as a single, large loft or could be divided into several rooms. The original idea was that people would have a camper van parked between the cores and would use their core mainly as a pied-à-terre. The idea was to appeal to the ‘snowbirds’, the new generation of much-travelling pensioners.