Cube houses in Rotterdam Holland during the night by Bart Ros

Cube houses in Rotterdam Netherlands Holland during the night.

In the 1970s, architects wanted to make hospitable housing estates with the participation of residents and other users as a reaction to the large-scale and grey modernism of the post-WWII reconstruction architecture. Piet Blom, structuralist and adept of Aldo van Eyck, assumed that large-scale structures should be built to measure by constructing them from small-scale recognizable elements. The basic idea of building on columns so that the space under the buildings could remain public came from Le Corbusier. The first three cube houses were built in 1974 and 1975 on the Europaweg in Helmond, as a preview for a larger project, which was realized in the following years. The 18 houses of the follow-up project surrounded the theater 't Speelhuis, forming an architectural whole.

The Cube Houses in Rotterdam are 38 cube-shaped pole houses and 13 company cubes at the Blaak near the Old Harbour. They were built between 1982 and 1984, after an initial presentation of the plans in 1978. Piet Blom's design is a variant of the Helmond cube house in a slightly larger size grid,[1] the one-high viaduct is officially called the Overblaak, but the entire complex is known as the Blaak Forest. The cube houses are built in the shape of a tilted cube on a pole, and are also called pole house or tree house.