Within the many years after the Second World Conflict, many countries confronted the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure whereas additionally having to accommodate a fast-arriving child increase. The government of the Netherlands bought extra creative than most, placing money towards experimalestal housing tasks begining within the late 9teen-sixties. Hoping to happen upon the subsequent revolutionary type of dwelling, it finished up funding designs that, for essentially the most half, strayed none too removed from established patterns. Nonetheless, there have been genuine outliers: by far essentially the most daring professionalposal got here from artist and sculptor Dries Kreijkamp: to construct a complete neighborhood out of Bolwoningen, or “ball houses.”
The thought could recall to mind Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which loved a level of utopian vogue within the 9teen-sixties and seventies. Like Fuller and most other imaginative and prescientaries, Kreijkamp labored beneath a certain monomania. His needed to do with globes, “essentially the most organic and natural form possible. In any case, sphericalness is eachthe place: we reside on a globe, and we’re born from a globe. The globe combines the most important possible volume with the smallest possible surface space, so that you want minimum material for it.” The 50 Bolwoningen inbuilt ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, guesster often known as Den Bosch, have been fastly fabricated on-site out of glass fiber reincompelled concrete. It wasn’t the polyester Kreijkamp had at first specified, however then, polyester wouldn’t have finaled 40 years.
Since they have been put up in 1984, the Bolwoningen have been continuously inhabited. In the video on the prime of the submit, Youtuber Tom Scott pays a visit to one in every of them, whose occupant appears reasonably satisfied. (It appears they’re “cozy” within the wintertime.)
Like geodesic domes, their spherical partitions make it difficult to make use of their theoretically generous interior house efficiently, not less than without commissioning custom-made furniture; leaking windows are additionally a perennial problem. Whereas every Bolgaineding can comfortably home one and even two simple-living people, solely essentially the most utopia-minded would try to lift a family in one in every of them. As with other spherical or circular dwelling designs, expansion could be physically impractical even when it have been authorizedly possible.
Used as social housing by the native government, the Bolwoningen now take pleasure in a professionaltected historic status. (As properly they could, given their connection with the artwork and indusstrive of Dutch glassblowing: it was whereas working in a glass factory that Kreijkamp first started professionalselytizing for spheres.) And in contrast to most aesthetically radical housing developments, they haven’t gone to seed, however slightly obtained the necessary majortenance over the many years. The result’s an attractioning neighborhood for these whose life are go well withed to its unusual structures and its contained bucolic setting, of which you may get an thought in the strolling video tour simply above. By the point Kreijkamp died in 2014, he perhaps felt a certain diploma of remorse that mass-produced globular properties didn’t show to be the subsequent huge factor. However he did reside to see the emergence of the “tiny home” transferment, which ought to retroactively undertake him as one in every of its leading lights.
Related content:
The Life & Occasions of Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome: A Documalestary
The Utopian, Socialist Designs of Soviet Cities
Watch an Animated Buckminster Fuller Inform Studs Terkel All About “the Geodesic Life”
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
