From country to country and culture to culture, every group of people uses architecture to express their values and identity. When you travel to the Netherlands (also called Holland!), specifically to the city of Rotterdam, one such architectural wonder that uniquely expresses Dutch identity is the Cube Houses.

History and Details of the Cube Houses in Rotterdam

Designed by architect Piet Blom in the mid-1980s (1984), Rotterdam’s Cube Houses are sure to leave casual, as well as educated onlookers’ mouths agape. Hovering relatively high overhead along a pedestrian bridge that spans Overblaak Street, Blom’s design takes the idea of the typical, ground-level structure and tilts that design on its side, forty-five degrees off center. So in addition to floating above the main street as high as the bridge, the houses also appear to be some kind of puzzle, blown up to a gigantic scale!

Mostly yellow with white trim, the houses have a quaint appearance, as they hold taut together, nestled in one next to the other and all at the extremely odd angle. Further extending the strangeness of the design, the thirty-eight tilted houses (plus two additional specialty cubes) also sit upon architectural pylons shaped as hexagons. For those travelers interested in seeing how the denizens of these strange architectural curiosities live (they are really inhabited by people!), one of the cubes is open for touring, as a savvy inhabitant decided to “go with the flow,” opening his home to onlookers and charging a small fee.

Much like a normal home, each of the cubes has a normal entrance on the street or ground level, as well as a kitchen and living area on the first floor, which is triangle-shaped and features windows that open on to the environment below. Bathroom and bedrooms are on the second floor, and on the third level, often times there is a garden. The top area of the pyramid, also triangular, is entirely composed of windows.

Click for more information on visiting the Cube Houses in Rotterdam.
(Image via: Wikipedia Commons)