主人之一的 Sjoerd Didden 說已經漸漸養成一個習慣，每天早上會走到屋頂上的那片藍色空間去刷牙，看著與天空連成一片的藍，一天的開始感覺很好。
Sky Lark
By WILLIAM SHAW
Published: July 6, 2008
There comes a time in family life when the kids need their own rooms. One solution is to add on. Rarely, though, does your average middle-income household hire one of the world's leading architects to do the job.
Until last year, Sjoerd Didden, a theatrical wig maker, and his partner, Ghislaine van de Kamp, a former theater designer, raised their two boys in an open-plan loft on the third floor of Didden's wig workshop, a former garment factory in central Rotterdam. In true bohemian fashion, a transplanted garden shed served as the kids' bedroom.
「But it was a very nice shed,」 van de Kamp says with a laugh.
Not ideal, though, once their oldest, Jan, became a teenager. The couple were mulling over this problem when they remembered what an ambitious architect friend told them when they first bought the place: they should move onto the roof. At the time they scoffed. Now, a decade later, they called the architect to remind him of the idea, expecting a brushoff. In the intervening years the friend had become, as van de Kamp puts it, 「a star.」
Winy Maas is indeed a star. Like Rem Koolhaas, whom he worked under before he set up the firm MVRDV with two colleagues in 1991, Maas is a famous polemicist for a new vision of urban life.
MVRDV's signature 「obsession」 — the word Maas uses for it — is density: the idea of using urban space intensely to create a sustainable future. Worldwide, MVRDV has implemented this in massive social housing developments like Silodam in Amsterdam and Mirador in Madrid. Why, then, would he want to take on their little project? But for Maas it was the kind of thought experiment he loved. 「Before we even finished our sentence, he had started drawing,」 van de Kamp recalls.
The result, Didden Village, is literally a blue-sky solution to the Didden family's problem. It is an architectural palimpsest, a new structure added to an old one, in line with MVRDV's mission to make existing spaces work harder. The 「village」 consists of three bedrooms built on the roof: a big room for the parents and two smaller, semi-detached ones for the two boys, each a distinct houselike shape and separated symbolically by what Maas describes as 「a main street.」 The whole represents both the connections between the family members and their need to go their own ways.
Each bedroom is accessed by its own private spiral staircase — light wooden structures suspended from the metal frame that Maas laid over the original roof. Ending just short of the floor below, the stairs appear to float magically downward. The boys' two staircases entwine DNA-like around each other; a climbing rope hangs down a tube in the middle. From their platform beds the boys can open windows in the opposite slopes of the roof to talk to each other at night. 「It's weirdly logical,」 van de Kamp says. 「Maas sees a problem, and he solves it.」
The blue-painted exterior was also Maas's idea. 「It connects it to the sky,」 he says. Sjoerd Didden admits to having developed a ritual of stepping out onto the roof every morning to brush his teeth in the blueness. 「And then the day is starting well,」 he says.
Maas's deliberate childlike house shapes combined with the dazzling blank blue planes create the impression that you are living inside a CAD drawing rather than a real house; it's as if the house is still in a constant process of being imagined. 「Exactly that,」 Maas says, delighted at another's interpretation. 「No more, no less.」
Just as delightful is the fact that the building is currently grabbing more headlines than any of his firm's multimillion-dollar projects. 「It's so funny,」 Maas says. 「The smallest project has the widest attention.」
