Housing

The 12 basic needs

After thousands of years with all different styles of architecture all ended up in the most simple form of the cube! The same form as the saltcristal and as dead as the Dead Sea and as uninteresting as possible! But also the experience of utmost freedom! Freedom to play with cubes, connecting and disconnecting, inventing your own interior, colours and furniture, materials and lights. And that’s exactly what happened afterwards! In the time that Mies van der Rohe build skyscrapers and Rietveld built his Mondriaan home, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the magnificent house on Falling Waters connecting inside living and outside nature.

And Herman Herzberger opened up the cubes to each other in the great office building of Centraal Beheer in the Netherlands so that people could meet each other and work together. From cubic cells towards open structures! And it was then that architecture could go forward seeking new lines and forms.

Although worldwide experimenting in the most different directions, new directions become clearer and clearer in the organic architecture, where connections between spaces are designed by tangents, as we also can recognise in the world of plants. Mathematically we’re not working anymore with lines and curves and corners (first degree) but with tangents (called second degree) that connect one direction with the other. One of the most beautiful buildings chosen by the public in the Netherlands was the headquarters of ING Bank in Amsterdam, also prizewinning as the lowest energy-using building of the world at that time!

Frank Lloyd Wright – Falling waters

Herman Herzberger – Centraal Beheer Apeldoorn / Netherlands

Alberts en Van Huut – ING Bank Amsterdam