DWELLING AS ARCHIPELAGO

We now turn our attention to the analysis of the first of two case study dwellings. House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms was designed by Juliaan Lampens in 1964, and built between 1966 and 1967 for Gerard Vandenhaute and his family, who continue to inhabit the dwelling to this day. Lampens was born in 1926 in De Pinte, close to Ghent in the Flemish region of Belgium. After studying at the Higher Institute for Art and Vocational Training of the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture in Gent, he founded his own architectural practice in Eke, in 1950. Alongside his architectural office, Lampens taught at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, holding the position of professor between 1985 and 1991. House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms is located in the village of Huise, Belgium, on a strip of land sandwiched between a quiet country lane and a vast cornfield, in a predominantly rural context. Lampens designed the interior of the house within a square footprint of 14 x 14 metres, which was laid 1.5 metres below the level of the road and that is accessible by foot, via a winding path. The dwelling is defined by its completely open-plan living space that is contained under a continuous concrete roof slab, referred to as a baldachin.⁹ Two staggered solid concrete walls running east to west delimit the private dwelling from the public road. The remaining three facades of the house are dominated by full-height glazing with recessed frames, which allows the surrounding landscape to flow directly into the interior of the dwelling uninterrupted.

Regarding the spatial organisation of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms, the interior can essentially be described as one continuous open-plan

‘archipelago’¹⁰ where geometric elements suggest the potential usage of space.

A combination of fixed ‘anchors’, which take the form of distinct architectural elements that demarcate necessitous activities in the form of the toilet, bathing and cooking areas, together with moveable furniture elements are used to delineate both static and flexible programmatic areas of the house.

Two concrete cylinders, the first 1,5m in diameter with a polished finish and the second 3,2m in diameter with an exposed timber shuttering finish, rise from the concrete floor to a height of 1,9m in order to provide visual privacy to the sanitary areas. As a way to define the cooking area, suspended concrete planes drop down from the ceiling to just below eye-level forming a skylight

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Figure 5.03 House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms entrance, Juliaan Lampens, 1967

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Figure 5.04 House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms plan and section, Juliaan Lampens, 1964

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Figure 5.05 House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms cooking area, Juliaan Lampens, 1967

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and a ‘baffle’ to help contain and extract foul air. Moveable wooden furniture elements form ‘sleep hutches’, work stations, and seating areas that can be arranged in several locations around the house to define territories for the individual family members, within the dwelling interior.

The interior of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms can be considered as a landscape in its own right, where the various fixed and flexible elements define inhabitable territories within an archipelago. The spatial organisation of the dwelling challenges, what Lars Lerup refers to as, “the four pillars of the Western home: the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom and the living-room.” (Lerup, 1977, p. 145) Even though there are defined places such as the toilet, a place to bath and a place to cook, they are continuations of the surrounding space. The result of this is that the entire floorplan of the building can effectively be considered as a living room. This continuous archipelago of inhabitable objects and interstitial living spaces is a concrete representation of Lerup’s notion of the ‘domestic landscape’. One of Lars Lerup’s central criteria for the success of architecture is its ability to provide opportunities for ‘creative’ inhabitation. “This is a process of ‘identification through appropriation,’ where they see themselves, more or less clearly, in the built setting.” (Lerup, 1977, p. 166) The appropriation of space within House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms is largely self-curated through the inhabitants’

utilisation of the moveable furniture elements within the interstitial places, located between the three fixed ‘anchors.’ These geometric ‘anchors’ serve as ‘landmarks’ within the open-plan layout that require a certain level of interpretation with respect to how one may appropriate them. The moveable

‘sleep hutches’ also require ‘creative’ appropriation given their potential to be placed in several territories within the house that results in differing dwelling experiences for a variety of occasions over time.

At this juncture, it is productive to make a distinction between ambiguity and neutrality in relation to spatial programming, in particular when one discusses the open-plan layout of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms. Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation, neutrality, on the other hand can be understood as a lack of engagement. In spatial programmatic terms, one could argue that ambiguity suggests an active engagement with the inhabitant, where distinct spaces are interpreted

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11. An in-depth comparison between Le Corbusier’s ‘promenade architecturale’ and Josef Frank’s ‘house as path and place’ is undertaken in chapter 7: “A Picturesque Dwelling.”

and subsequently appropriated actively, in a variety of ways. Neutrality, on the other hand, suggests a passive engagement with the inhabitant, where indistinct space can become difficult to appropriate due to a lack of programmatic intimation. The vague ‘open-plan’ spaces that Stephen Bates criticises in the chapter, “An open plan of rooms” from the book, “Papers 3:

Sergison Bates Architects” (2016), can be thought of as archetypal examples of neutral space, within the context of the domestic interior. In contrast, the open-plan layout of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms with its characteristic fixed ‘anchors’ and moveable furniture elements that intimate interpretive appropriation, within the intentionally composed interstitial spaces, exemplifies an ambiguous open-plan domestic landscape.

The importance of landscape cannot be overstated when it comes to the architecture of Julian Lampens and in particular the design of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms. The architect has stated that, “the Landscape is the first commissioner and the last operator” (Van Den Berghe, 2014, p. 20), of each and every project. House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms becomes part of its surrounding environment through its integration into the slope of the site, seamless full-height glazing, and the choice of materials which patinate to become part of its natural context. A blurring in the threshold between interior and exterior space is also encouraged through the use of geometric elements on the outside that mirror those inside to delimit programmatic activities in the landscape surrounding the house. “The landscape streams into the house, very briefly resides there in a moment of rest, and then smoothly streams back out.” (Van Den Berghe, 2014, p. 39) The positioning of the structural walls in long linear lines together with the regular rhythm of the window frames initially suggest an ordered configuration to the dwelling.

However, the asymmetry in the composition of the fixed ‘anchors’ throughout the dwelling breaks any perceived geometric order. The distribution of

these landmarks within the archipelago draws comparisons with the

picturesque and the importance that it places on the connections between a relational field-configuration of objects. The layout of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms also recalls the picturesque found in Josef Frank’s relational field-configuration of places to explore, as opposed to the prescribed processional sequencing of Le Corbusier’s ‘promenade architecturale.’¹¹

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Figure 5.06 House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms exterior, Juliaan Lampens, 1967

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Through the radical spatial organization adopted for House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms, thresholds between private and communal spaces within the house have been diminished or removed completely. There is almost no acoustic or olfactory privacy between the bathing area, the toilet, and the moveable ‘sleep hutches’ within the dwelling. The architect has been strongly defensive of this decision, which was made in close collaboration with Mr Vandenhaute during the development of the design. “Living together is something rational. If a couple decides to live together, that’s a rational decision. Agreements are made. So it is with an open-plan house. The residents make clear arrangements as to whom, what and when. In that way, father, mother and children can each lead their own lives and can do so together under one suspended roof.” (Lampens & Campens, 2011, p. 13) House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms takes on the form of a settlement, where the family can be viewed as a community, in which private territory has to be established through the appropriation of objects within a communal domestic landscape.

For example, it has been observed that the moveable furniture elements are utilised to form temporary spatial divisions that establish places which can provide a greater level of privacy within the dwelling.

In terms of adaptability, Lampens has created a dwelling which allows for both adjustability in the day-to-day life of the inhabitants, as well as, programmatic flexibility over a longer period of time that can respond to changing lifestyles. “The human scene that unfolds under the baldachin is variable over time, thus nomadic by nature.” (Van Den Berghe, 2014, p. 39) The wooden cupboards, for instance, have been moved over time, following the changes in domestic life of the Vandenhaute family. House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms’s spatial organisation, with its fixed and moveable objects that facilitate temporal partitioning creating momentary ‘places’ in which to dwell, is quite radical when compared to the archetypal house from the functionalist cannon, where specific activities are consigned to individual rooms that are sized and proportioned accordingly and separated from one another with partition walls, corridors, and hallways. Jo Van Den Berghe writes of House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms, “The house is nomadic in its outer appearance and in the inner experience of its daily use.” (Van Den Berghe, 2014, p. 39) From this perspective, House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms is considered as nomadic architecture due to its ‘absent presence’ in the landscape, while of greater

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significance to this discourse, its inhabitants are themselves considered as nomads that are able to establish a multitude of territories within the dwelling over time.

House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms could well be described as an archetypal example of Brutalist architecture, while also taking strong cues from the Second World War bunker aesthetic typified on the northern coast of Belgium. The sparse material palette used in the house is restricted to exposed concrete, with two differing surface finishes, wooden furniture, black painted metal window frames, and simple off-white curtains. The exposed concrete finish on the exterior walls and roof eaves has absorbed the surrounding landscape and nature through a patina of moss and lichen.

One could argue that the Brutalist aesthetic is rooted in both the immediate geographical and historical context in which House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms was designed and built. Juliaan Lampens has spoken about his interest in the architecture of the remnants of the Second World War defences, which are scattered around Belgium. “The bunkers of the Atlantic coast are for Lampens the most beautiful examples of brutalism: ‘the integration with the sea and nature is just perfect.’” (Lampens & Campens, 2011, p. 6) House Vandenhaute-Kiebooms also represents a literal bunker from the anxiety of the outside world, which was present during the period. At some level, the dwelling is also characteristic and symbolic of the post Second World War / Cold War obsession with an architecture of paranoia, yet that still strived for a Modernist utopia.

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12. Cathelijne Nuijsink and Ryue Nishizawa discuss at length the role of ‘roji’, historically, within a contemporary context and specifically, their influence on the spatial organisation of Moriyama House (Nuijsink, 2012, pp. 130-139).

13. This privatisation of the public domain, and in particular the loss of ‘roji’ has been expediated by the

introduction of American style concrete villas after the Second World War, which typically occupy the full building plot, thereby removing traditional inhabitable interstitial places. (Nuijsink, 2012, p. 134)