the Crate House

I was invited by the Rotterdam Art Foundation in 1990 to make an installation in “Theater de Unie” in Rotterdam. The installation would stay open to the public for 3 x 12 hours, from Friday afternoon to the following Sunday afternoon.

The Crate House was conceived following a series of models for potential houses and formed the link between my work as an architect and my work as an artist. Originally it was presented with a sketch and a scale model showing all of the necessary elements for making the “building”.
As an architect I have to consider all kinds of issues in order to make a house livable. As an artist those issues are irrelevant.

The shape of the house, the way it looks and the way it is organized are interesting elements for me. In that respect, the Crate House has visible elements that potentially could be used by future inhabitants.

The green wall might be the kitchen, the yellow round element the bathroom, the staircase and the floor might perhaps be used as sleeping areas; these are all possibilities but not requirements.

The process in developing the Crate House largely influenced my later projects. There would be no more sketches, only models to visualize ideas three dimensionally at the start of a project.

The model would make clear to others how a structure might look but not how it should look. More specifically, the models were no longer precise: they had no scale or any kind of reference.