Cube Houses

Above a busy road in the centre of Rotterdam, a row of yellow cubes stands on end, each one tipped onto a corner and balanced on a six-sided concrete pillar. Linked edge to edge, they form a jagged canopy over a raised pedestrian street, with slanting walls and windows tilted towards the sky and the pavement below. The Cube Houses — kubuswoningen in Dutch — are the best-known work of the architect Piet Blom, and few buildings anywhere make the familiar idea of a house look so strange.

Blom, a structuralist and follower of Aldo van Eyck, belonged to the generation of Dutch architects who reacted against the large, grey estates of post-war reconstruction and tried to build cities at a human scale out of small, recognisable units. His idea was "living as an urban roof": raise the homes on columns, keep the ground open to the public, and treat each dwelling as a tree, so that together they make a forest — hence the complex's nickname, the Blaakse Bos, or Blaak Forest. He first tried the tilted cube in Helmond, where three test houses went up in 1974–1975 and a cluster later ringed the town's theatre. The Rotterdam version, presented in 1978 and built between 1982 and 1984 on a slightly larger grid, spans the Overblaak viaduct beside the Oude Haven, the city's old harbour. It comprises 38 dwellings plus larger commercial cubes, including two "super-cubes" at either end, one of which later became a hostel.

Each house is a small vertical journey. The hexagonal pillar holds the entrance and stair; above it the lowest level is a triangular living room and kitchen, the middle level holds bedrooms and a bathroom under windows facing the sky, and the apex is a small pyramid-shaped room. The cube is tilted at 54.7 degrees, so walls and windows lean outward and part of each floor can never hold furniture, while the reinforced-concrete core carries a timber frame clad in fibre-cement panels. Most of the houses are privately lived in; one is kept as a show house, and another hosts art exhibitions. Rotterdam, home to Europe's largest seaport, lost much of its historic centre in the German bombing of 14 May 1940, and its rebuilt core has since become a showcase of adventurous modern architecture, of which the cubes are one of the most playful pieces.

Getting there

The Cube Houses stand on Overblaak in central Rotterdam, directly above Blaak station, which is served by metro and by national rail services. Rotterdam The Hague Airport (RTM) is about 5.5 km away in a straight line.