Mobius House

Responding to the fluctuating patterns of modern domestic life, the Mobius House is a provocative formal and spatial experiment.

Swaddled in a pleasantly rustic site to the north-east of Amsterdam, the Mobius House is an experiment in modern, fluctuating domesticity orchestrated by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos. The partnership is now working under the auspices of a wider creative collaboration known as UN Studio and the point implicit in both this and the organization of the Mobius House is that things change - architectural practice, family life - giving rise to different and more diffuse ways of living and working.

Van Berkel and Bos clearly relish this sense of the radical, even wilful alternative. An earlier project for an Amersfoort suburb (AR October 1996) reinterpreted the traditional patio house to create a hermetic bunker in the flat polder landscape. Here, the requirements of a young couple's domestic and working lives are mapped out and then crystallized in a crumpled skew of concrete and glass that has somehow fetched up in an idyllic, Arcadian forest.

The organizing principle for this unconventional dwelling is the endlessly repeating Mobius strip. The familiar twisted figure-of-eight whose one continuous side appears to be two sides is appropriated by van Berkel and Bos as a theoretical template to convey how two people can live together yet apart, meeting at certain points which become shared spaces. Although not a revelatory practice in itself (as most buildings go through some form of initial diagrammatic design phase), van Berkel & Bos increasingly use diagrams as a means of exploring and developing alternative typologies.

The clients are a husband and wife who both work at home. Their separate work areas are folded and meshed into the other spaces of daily life. Unlike the traditional single-family home's explicit functional and social distinctions, the spaces of the Mobius House are like a continuous piece of intertwined ribbon that has no beginning and no end. Work, family, social life and individual space are all allotted their place in the loop structure. Movement through the loop follows the pattern of a typically active day. The notion of overlapping spaces and planes also extends to the main materials; crisp planes of concrete and glass alternate and change places, adding to the sense of fluid, surprising dislocation. Concrete is transformed into sculptural elements of furniture and glass walls become internal partitions, simultaneously defining and revealing space.

Although the interlocking edges of the Mobius strip suggest the formal organization of the building, the mathematical model is not literally transferred to the architecture. The angular, jutting geometries bear little physical resemblance to the smooth Mobius curves, but the model makes its presence felt in an abstract way, through circulation, play of light, spatial organization and the movement of the occupants through their house.

The generative circuit begins, nominally, at the entrance hall incised into the long south flank. Off this space, compacted into the house's overhanging prow, are a studio for the male occupant and the main bedroom. The route runs parallel with a long glass wall on the south side, bisecting the kitchen and meeting room, to the main dining and living spaces that occupy the house's east end. From here, the circuit runs back on itself and up to the first floor, past another studio and an enfilade of children's bedrooms, before finally winding back down to the entrance hall. Along the route, wall planes dissolve and fracture to reveal changing views of the surrounding forest and a modern garden designed by West 8.

The Mobius House is an undeniably particular and provocative response to client, programme and site, but it is not an easy building to come to terms with. Its complex, fragmented form has more in common with an inhabitable sculpture or Expressionist film set and its stark materiality and spatial perversions do not conform to conventional notions of gentle, informal domesticity. But perhaps this is the point. For the Mobius House's intrepid clients and their equally intrepid architects, the building represents a leap into the future. Like architecture, the family is in flux. The strait-laced certainties of the villa or terraced house are giving way to new forms of living and Van Berkel & Bos' vision of domesticity as scenography is one response to the unpredictable and convulsive pressures of change. Whether it will be loved or held up as an exemplar in fifty years' time is impossible to say, but for the present it provides its young occupants with a suitably fashionable lifestyle armature.

Architect UN Studio/Van Berkel & Bos, Amsterdam

Project team Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, Aad Krom, Jen Alkema, Caspar le Fevre, Rob Hootsmanns, Matthias Blass, Marc Dijkman, Remco Bruggink, Tycho Soffree, Harm Wassink, Giovanni Tedesco

Landscape consultant West 8

COPYRIGHT 1999 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group