Een gat in de lucht I

It wasn’t intentional. The attic was meant to be a cocktail bar with a spectacular view. It was turned into an office, now subdivided and withered after many years of service. All is covered. Now and then the apartment shows its true colours: the characteristic curtain wall. The noble radiators. The concrete skeleton. The space is dark and musty. You can’t get out, there’s no terrace. It won’t be a cocktail bar, yet a spacious city apartment.

People change. Sometimes they do things they weren’t planning to. Which changes their needs over time. The apartment must respond to these evolving needs. We are looking for the intelligent ruin, architecture built for this life and all those to come. A primordial form.

As is often the case, removal becomes an act of making things possible. Here, shaped somewhat by coincidence and constraints, in the form of a trapezium.
A patio, a hole in the structure, a hole in the sky. Then something happens in and around the hole. Light enters where there used to be darkness. Wind whirls through. Rain and snow fall in. An internal terrace appears, from nothing. It attracts things and makes things possible. As people begin to do new things, new possibilities emerge.

The mainly open floor plan willingly adapts to what remains. The oddly shaped layout is subtly divided into three strips by the existing concrete beams. The void has nestled itself in the middle, near the kitchen, the vertical shaft, and the entrance. The floor is tiled. The wet spaces, such as the toilet and bathroom, are grouped in one strip next to the shaft. The same tiles continue here. The rest of the plan is open, and so are the possibilities.