Borneo House Plot 12

MVRDV Architects – Borneo House Plot 12, (Borneo-Sporenburg), Amsterdam, 1999

The Borneo Sporenburg area (east of the city of Amsterdam) is a former dock area. Adriaan Geuze from West 8 Landscape Architects designed the Borneo Sporenburg area in a kind of old-fashioned neighborhood like "De Jordaan" in the west of the center of Amsterdam. The 60 townhouses of Borneo are based on the canal houses of Amsterdam. Plot 12 is one of two projects by MVRDV. These two houses were designed to achieve maximum spaciousness and versatility in a limited footprint.
The Borneo plot 12 house was designed as an experiment, adapting the project to the allotted width of 5 meters and depth of 16 meters. Due to the narrow plot and the fact that only half of the width is used, the result was a private alley and the narrowest house imaginable: only 2,5 meters wide.
The method of dividing the territory into strips, used in the original West 8 plan, is realized here in its most extreme form.
The half that was built along the "alley" has the entire length and height of the facade in glass, while the front and back were left completely closed. This fully glass facade faces the "alley".
The strip is a composition of extremely varied spaces. The interior and exterior spaces are one: an extremely narrow house becomes an extremely wide house. The alley accommodates three elements: a storage block whose roof slopes to the street and provides a parking space; and two closed volumes, a block for the guest room with bathroom and a block that provides extra width to the two studio apartments on the first and second floors. The last two volumes hang from the glass facade, closing the exterior space and enlivening the alley.
Source: https://www.mvrdv.nl