Cube house

Cube houses are experimental residential structures designed by the Dutch architect Piet Blom, first built in Helmond between 1974 and 1977 and then, in a larger cluster, in Rotterdam in 1977. Each house tilts a cube on its corner and rests it atop a hexagonal pylon, producing walls angled at 54.7 degrees under a design concept Blom described as living as an urban roof, intended to maximize interior space while keeping ground level density village-like within a city. The houses are built of reinforced concrete hexagonal bases supporting wooden frames clad in fiber-reinforced cement panels, with each roughly 100 square meter apartment arranged over three levels, a triangular living room on the first floor, bedrooms and a bathroom on the second, and a pyramid-shaped top floor lit by eighteen windows, though the angled walls leave about a quarter of the interior area unusable. The Rotterdam cluster comprises 38 standard cube houses plus two larger super-cubes above the Blaak metro station, one of which now houses a museum, hostel and art gallery.