Kreuken

To be fair it's already there now, and it's been there for a while too. The house, yes, that too, but also the part behind it. The extension, the house behind the house: an annex of all sorts of places, rooms, different windows, materials, niches and chimneys. Nooks and crannies. Lots of different places, that's for sure. Technically aged and kind of unpractical, that too. No beloved relationship between the building and the garden. Little dialogue with the broad building in front of it. Even more, all the little places didn't seem to suffice and because of that, part of the programme has started to spill into the corridor, which was too big and doing close to nothing there anyway. So we build again, but better. Re-building. Repeat-building.

The facade is inclined, so the new rear facade is also inclined. On top of that a roof, and on top of the roof a carpet of moss. Seven meters between both neighbours is a little too much for a classic roof construction without supports, so we'll have to do something different. For starters we'll need a straight line along the back facade. Then two trusses that start to fold the roof. A crinkled roof. Straight lines and slanted lines form a ruled surface. The roof gets a first crinkle along the garden, which makes it nice and sturdy. The garden facade is fully glazed, big parts of it can be pushed in both directions. A second crinkle pushes the roof up near the kitchen. Lots of light, deep into the old house. From the garden, the new extension seems like some kind of distorted greenery. From the inside, an higgledy-piggledy cabin. A cabin in the city.

Inside a piece of furniture we find a bench, a bookcase and a kitchen, all pieced together. The piece of furniture suggests zones in the spacey extension without enforcing them. A sliding door hangs from a truss. Beyond, in the historical house stands a new wall. It resembles the piece of furniture, but it also features patterned glass. The edge of a new room. And beyond that room, another wall. In between those two walls is a space, a place for silence and study, somewhere halfway between the house and the extension. The stairs in the corridor also gets a new wall with patterned glass. The old, big corridor becomes lots of new places. It learns from the former extension. Skylight falls through the truss, beneath the crinkle, deep into the corridor. The garden ajar.

A new, crinkled extension full of ambiguous rooms, places without borders, places that change form. A house and a cabin, with reading, sitting and cooking; the food, the books and the garden. With nooks and crannies and windows. The gardens life partner, but the house’s mistress.