kaleidoscope

how can intimacy be created without walls?

Kaleidoscope: The Intimacy of the Moederhuis

Build a wall. A wall to slice space, to convert space. A wall to create a here and a there, a now and a later, an inside and an outside. A wall is a plane. Such is the floor underneath our feet. Such is the ceiling above our heads. A wall draws edges. Edges of inclusion, edges of exclusion, of seclusion. An unstable margin between two worlds. A wall is a limit. A limit is a line. A line is ambiguity, either close-by, seized in transparency, or further away, trapped in distant opacity.

A limit is to be crossed. And when this happens, the line becomes thicker, deeper. The line becomes a threshold. And the threshold becomes space. The space of the doorstep. The space of transition. A momentary space where exteriority fades into interiority, where urbanity morphs into domesticity. The space of a place in a state of becoming. The threshold of hospitality.

Forty years have passed since the completion of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s Moederhuis, located on the Plantage Middenlaan in the heart of Amsterdam. Here, a house is a topography of elemental shapes mediated through a kaleidoscopic reciprocity. A geography of rainbow hues lost in a labyrinthian clarity. They, architects, crafted a citylike house out of a houselike city; a converging territory for the virtuality of the world and its many corporealities. They, outsiders, became actors of a shared intimacy. We, visitors, meet his mind on a borderline, in the space between his and our time. For architecture is the right place and homecoming is the right occasion.