Sarina Lee Assignment 1.2 Project Name: Double House / Casa Doble en Utrecht Architects: Bjarne Mastenbroek and Winy Maas (MVRDV) Project Date: 1995-1997 Project Location: 124 a/b Koningslaan, Utrecht, The Netherlands Project Size: 300 square meters Clients: Koek and Wesseling Families Two-family House (or 'Double House') 124 a/b Koningslaan Utrecht The Netherlands Bjarne Mastenbroek and MVRDV 1997 As the name of this project suggests, the house is designed for two families. Originally, it was meant for two business people but due to financial constraints, they found another couple to pool their resources in order to make this project possible. Instead of simply splitting the site into halves for each of the two families, the architects designed the houses to be interlocked together three-dimensionally in order to have bigger living spaces that almost stretch across the entire width of the site. One of the living rooms occupies the entire first floor while the other occupies the second floor. Both families have equal views of the exterior from their living room and both have their own entrances, one at the front of the building and one at the side. Although the families get their own spaces within the house, the garden at the back of the house is shared. Due to budget restrictions, the exterior of the house is clad with plywood. With time, the house's exterior reddish brown color that appears in most of the magazines and books fades away into a grayish brown. This may have been caused by lack of maintenance and the wear and tear by Mother Nature. The rest of the material for the exterior is glass. The way the architects located the glass and wood panels defines the space within by using glass for more communal spaces and having wood panels to hide the more private spaces. [1] Biography: Bjarne Mastenbroek: (1964) studied in Delft; after that he worked as an architect at Mecanoo, in Delft, and for Enric Miralles in Barcelona. Together with Dick van Gameren he started in a new office in 1991, joining 'De Architecten groep' in 1993. They were winners of the Europan 2 competition. In 2002 Bjarne Mastenbroek started his own office. [2] Biographical Information on Winy Maas Below Architects: De Architectengroep loerakker rijnboutt ruijssenaars hendriks van gameren mastenbroek bv: Bjarne Mastenbroek, with Floor Arons and Michiel Raaphorst MVRDV: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries with Mike Booth, Joost Glissenaar Structures: ABT Velp Client: Koek - Wesseling Families Country: The Netherlands Location: Utrecht, Koningslaan Project date: 1995-1997 Project size: 300 m2 The home is located in a row of isolated houses at the edge of Wilhelminapark. The facade of the house reveals the subdivision, intersection and complexity of the space it encloses, presenting as its facade a graphic structure reminiscent of the geometries of Theo van Doesburg in an apparently arbitrary arrangement which is a paragon of free architecture. The outer surface plays with transparency and opacity, alternating different types of glass with panels of dark-painted plywood which hide what glass would reveal: the most private parts of the house. One house may give up volume to the other house next door on one floor, only to take it back on the next level. Only a cross section fully reveals the special nature of this project: different "pieces of space" fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, making up a single whole with the spatial continuum of its interior projected on its faade, like Le Corbusier's early project for the villa in Carthage. The smaller of the two homes, on the left as seen from the road, has its kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, separated by the stairway; a small mezzanine on the next floor overlooks the rooms below and leads into the living room. The bedrooms are on the next floor up: the only closed rooms, along with the bathroom on the top floor, which offers access to a little hidden rooftop patio. The home next door is larger, with an entrance, garage and guestroom on the ground floor; the first floor is completely open, and contains the living room and kitchen; the second floor with its two bedrooms is much smaller. Above this more rooms of various sizes take back space from the house next door. The rooftop patio is accessed by a withdrawing ladder. The project was originally conceived in cross section. The original idea was a simple vertical subdivision of the volume of the lot; but step by step, the homes gradually intersected, tied together in a box of glass and wood. In the end, spaces were interwoven without blending together, borders were shifted floor by floor, and alignments were exchanged until the architects settled on this final solution. The dividing wall between the two apartments weaves back and forth like a snake, stretching the possibilities of reinforced concrete to their limit. [3] [4] MvRdV biografia biography 19911 Oficina de Arquitectura y Urbanismo fundada por Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs y Nathalie de Vries 1991/- Office lor arChiteclure and urbilr'1SIll loenled by W