Housing has been for years one of the most abandoned issues in the contemporary architectural discourse. Recent explosion of the bubble vows for immediate "reality check" of how we live and sustain. Let's meet John Kormeling for whom this topic has been central for years.
Proposal for the Tilburg roundabout is amazing because it is clean and funny but cannot be summed by one single header. In the same time it undertakes serious urban issues like dominance of car-oriented infrastructure, place for a single family house in an urban area, the urban wastelands - How else could you call the big green circle within the circumference of the roundabout. I can imagine that piece of land being an optimal place for a colony of houses that would organically grow within the infrastructure until the point when they would blow the ring away!
John Kormeling produced many projects where his houses landed in different venues and spots round the city. A house built on top of a shopping mall, a Happy Street in Shanghai that is fairly happy. This is it! A great provocation for our happy Eastern European Kulturkreis where single family houses continue to give us illusions of freedom.
Housing is a beautiful topic of many challenges. You have to be investigative, socialy sensitive and precise with economics of solutions. But you don't have to be so much innovative in the first place. Is this the reason why UNStudio doesn't want to really design housing projects? As opposed to their strategies John Komerling with his modesty, wittness and sharpness rises to the position of a personal role model.
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