There comes a time in family life when the kids need their own rooms.One solution is to add on. Rarely, though, does your averagemiddle-income household hire one of the world’s leading architects todo the job.Until last year, Sjoerd Didden, a theatrical wig maker, and hispartner, Ghislaine van de Kamp, a former theater designer, raised theirtwo boys in an open-plan loft on the third floor of Didden’s wigworkshop, a former garment factory in central Rotterdam. In truebohemian fashion, a transplanted garden shed served as the kids’bedroom. “But it was a very nice shed,” van de Kamp says with a laugh.Notideal, though, once their oldest, Jan, became a teenager. The couplewere mulling over this problem when they remembered what an ambitiousarchitect friend told them when they first bought the place: theyshould move onto the roof. At the time they scoffed. Now, a decadelater, they called the architect to remind him of the idea, expecting abrushoff. In the intervening years the friend had become, as van deKamp puts it, “a star.”Winy Maas is indeed a star. Like Rem Koolhaas,whom he worked under before he set up the firm MVRDV with twocolleagues in 1991, Maas is a famous polemicist for a new vision ofurban life. MVRDV’s signature “obsession” — the word Maas usesfor it — is density: the idea of using urban space intensely to createa sustainable future. Worldwide, MVRDV has implemented this in massivesocial housing developments like Silodam in Amsterdam and Mirador inMadrid. Why, then, would he want to take on their little project? Butfor Maas it was the kind of thought experiment he loved. “Before weeven finished our sentence, he had started drawing,” van de Kamprecalls.The result, Didden Village, is literally a blue-skysolution to the Didden family’s problem. It is an architecturalpalimpsest, a new structure added to an old one, in line with MVRDV’smission to make existing spaces work harder. The “village” consists ofthree bedrooms built on the roof: a big room for the parents and twosmaller, semi-detached ones for the two boys, each a distinct houselikeshape and separated symbolically by what Maas describes as “a mainstreet.” The whole represents both the connections between the familymembers and their need to go their own ways. Each bedroom isaccessed by its own private spiral staircase — light wooden structuressuspended from the metal frame that Maas laid over the original roof.Ending just short of the floor below, the stairs appear to floatmagically downward. The boys’ two staircases entwine DNA-like aroundeach other; a climbing rope hangs down a tube in the middle. From theirplatform beds the boys can open windows in the opposite slopes of theroof to talk to each other at night. “It’s weirdly logical,” van deKamp says. “Maas sees a problem, and he solves it.”Theblue-painted exterior was also Maas’s idea. “It connects it to thesky,” he says. Sjoerd Didden admits to having developed a ritual ofstepping out onto the roof every morning to brush his teeth in theblueness. “And then the day is starting well,” he says.Maas’sdeliberate childlike house shapes combined with the dazzling blank blueplanes create the impression that you are living inside a CAD drawingrather than a real house; it’s as if the house is still in a constantprocess of being imagined. “Exactly that,” Maas says, delighted atanother’s interpretation. “No more, no less.”Just as delightfulis the fact that the building is currently grabbing more headlines thanany of his firm’s multimillion-dollar projects. “It’s so funny,” Maassays. “The smallest project has the widest attention.”
www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Style-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin