Elegieën

Strekken III

A terraced house unlocks its underused potential and becomes a semi-detached home.

Something peculiar is going on. The house behaves like a terraced one, but on one side no neighbour will ever arrive because there’s a street. Playing it safe, the house keeps that exposed façade entirely closed. A missed opportunity, as the house is rather dark. And there’s more potential still: between house and street sits a slender strip of construction that belongs to the same property. For no good reason, the house has shut itself in. Time to take off the blinkers.

We introduce a new façade. For the first time in its life, the house becomes semi-detached. The façade is a thick band: too narrow for full rooms, too deep to be just skin. More a kind of cabinet. This cupboard gathers all the small functions, freeing up the generous spaces behind. The entrance moves to the side: a cloak cupboard, a staircase, a desk, a guest toilet. From street to garden, light and views flow uninterrupted. Nothing stands in the way. It is cleared, ordered. It rains, but no matter.

Oester

A mezzanine with a glamorous outside and a welcoming inside.

A window we can no longer reach, and no space for a drawing table. The room is double-height. A staircase, edged with complex figures, proudly parades upward. The window and the drawing table are resolved in a single move: we build a bridge between the existing mezzanine and the window. A mezzanine on a mezzanine. An Escherian alliteration. The bridge becomes a place to stay. It fans out, from narrow to wide, shaped opportunistically by the points it needs to connect.

The bridge must find its place among the other elements: the tall space with its light, views, and light fixtures. The staircase with its inevitable balustrade. Repetition, but altered. The balustrades resemble each other like variations within a single obsession. Different generations of the same family tree.

Being on the mezzanine is not the same as being in it. The alliteration gets a nuance: there’s an outside and an inside. Like an oyster, both sides of the shell are different. The outside is glossy and refined, the inside warm and sheltering. Seen from below, the mezzanine is a jewel in the space. Once you're on it, you’re actually inside it. The world closes in and becomes small in the same way a campfire does.

Kunsthut

Mirroring greenhouse as a place of residency for an artist

The firmament convulses and compresses darkly, but for now raindrops are held off. In the field there's a cabin. In-between the tall grass, over the bridge and the mossy water, a shape distinguishes itself. It's a greenhouse, but then again it's not. The greenhouse is the cabin. The greenhouse imitating the house. Gestalt. From a little chimney rises white smoke, a peace offering towards the clouds. The greenhouse, or cabin, seems to be a drawing of white lines on the landscape. Thin aluminium profiles, typical for greenhouses, you can find them also further down the road, painted white. Light, but also present. But in-between the lines, something weird is going on; the landscape's there, but distorted. Crooked and incomplete. The glass panels are mirroring. The landscape that's been cut away by the silhouette of the greenhouse is being reconstructed, but all wrong and wry. The greenhouse seems to be like a mirage or the vision of a drunk. It’s not transparent and therefore not absent since total transparency seems physically unattainable, but in a distorted way it’s present in the landscape. It dresses itself with the landscape and cuts out pieces. A broken kaleidoscope.

Over the bridge, paths marked but clean cut grass, now at the edge of the room. The greenhouse rests on a green undercarriage. Lifting hooks are welded on, four of them, visible in the tall grass. Caterpillar tracks can still be seen on the ground. On one side of the greenhouse: a sliding door. Through the door. A boarded floor stretches out and here we find some white profiles again. A repetition of the white lines and the landscape. The landscape is everywhere. This time through the glass panels, transparent from the inside. The meadow, the plain, the creek, the path and above, the dark clouds and the shy white plume. In a corner there's a bed. For one person. Or two, if emotions can make it from the clumsy. In front of it, right next to the door, a wood stove. Next to the stove cleaved wood is stacked. There's also a little worktable, near the bed. All around: paintings, pedestals with sculptures, paint and varnish splatters on the wood. The paintings are suspended on the designated rails, in the same formal language as the greenhouse, they are after all also standard greenhouse-elements; they can be simply placed at any desired location. The glass behind some of the paintings has been plastered. With a crude brush, the strokes are clearly visible, the landscape glimmers through. A temporary filter, washes off just like that. In the roof some of the panels can be opened to prevent the accumulation of heat. But not now. Now it's raining. The weeping drops, an extra deforming layer on the image of the surrounding landscape. There's also a canvas, when unfolded it shields the room from bright sunlight. But not now. Now it's raining.

Just like the room has a double, ambiguous relationship with the landscape; in the same way it's not neutral in relation to the art it’s carrying. It's not exposing the art neutrally, like a white museum wall. The exposition garden around it isn't doing so either for that matter. Even the white of the plastered glass has a minimum of texture, of life. It is ever a bit there, even when you're looking through or against it. It's the public cabin for displaying, but also the private cabin for living. People gather in it to look to the art -but also the landscape- and when they go away again, the artist retreats in it -with his art- and when he's contemplatively smoking a cigarette through the open door or reads a book on the side of the bed, near the stove, it rains. And always there is the white and always there is the landscape.

CASE 4: Wolk

The realisation of a characterful canopy for a single-family home.

An inverted cloud. A cloud that keeps you dry instead of wet. A cloud that offers shade at times, but also lets in the light. Pink instead of grey. Hollow instead of full. A quirky object drifting low over the garden.