Bossche bollen: reception center for refugee aliens

When writer-journalist Arjen van Veelen returned to Rotterdam in 2018 after a years-long stay in the United States, he noted that a “revolution that is not in the history books” had taken place. Not only the port of Rotterdam but the entire city had become gripped by efficiency thinking, he said in an interview with NRC about his book Rotterdam. An ode to inefficiency. In this he compares Rotterdam's neoliberal 'efficiency thinking' with that of the regime of the nameless totalitarian country Blocksthe dystopian novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk from 1931.

In Bordewijks Blokkenland the all-powerful Council has replaced all old religions with the 'religion of the square', with efficiency as the only god. The entire population has been accommodated in new cities, with 'residential squares' and 'labor squares', which have been 'very effectively placed next to each other', writes Bordewijk. Opponents of the square religion have been in prison for decades. They don't have a bad time there in their square cells. As 'spare entertainment' they may even, as 'voices from the past', occasionally address the ten members of the Council and other officials. One of them has only one subject: the sphere. 'How you have built up your cities like blocks of blocks, laid out your borders like squares, your streets like lines!', he accuses the Council. 'You push the idea of ​​the block to its excesses, you are the cubists of practice.'

The religion of the square is inhumane and against nature, the voice from the past explains again and again. 'The block is your god and yet you cannot reverse nature. I only have to touch my round skull to feel that what lies inside seeks perfection in circle, disk and sphere. The sky stands above you like a dome, the universe around you is a sphere. Oh, the glory without end, the plane without angles, the body without planes! The world order strives for the sphere. I see the city of the future as a city of domes. If you want to serve, the sphere serves.'

Security and privacy

In the early 1980s, praise for the ball was heard again, this time in the real Netherlands. Just like the voice from the past Blocks the globe-obsessed artist Dries Kreijkamp (1937-2014) believed that humans were not born to live in blocks of blocks. “Ultimately we come from a sphere, we live on a sphere, why wouldn't we live in a sphere?” Kreijkamp said in a TV interview about the sphere house he designed in Vlijmen in which he himself lived. A detached bubble house not only offers the security of a womb, but also more privacy than a terraced house or an apartment house, he explained. An additional advantage was that, according to him, a bubble house was energy efficient.

Kreijkamp was not thrown in prison. On the contrary, the Bolbouw company received a government subsidy as part of experimental housing construction for the construction of fifty social housing units in Maaspoort, a suburb of Den Bosch. Kreijkamp saw the ball house as an alternative to the terraced house of which there are now more than four million in the Netherlands. But nothing came of the plans for bubble houses in Almere and Rotterdam. It remained with the 'Bossche bollen', completed in 1984, which still looks like a reception center for alien refugees among the ordinary brick terraced houses in Maaspoort.

Tiny house

The fact that no more were built undoubtedly has to do with the bubble houses themselves. They cannot be called a success. For example, the construction costs (92,000 guilders) were higher than expected because, among other reasons, the spheres were not made of polyester but of glass fiber reinforced cement for fire safety reasons. They also turned out to be much less energy efficient than expected and cracks appeared in the fiber cement shortly after delivery, resulting in leaks.

Moreover, the spherical houses have become smaller than Kreijkamp originally wanted and, unlike his own spherical house in Vlijmen, they have been placed on a concrete cylinder with a diameter of 3.2 meters. The information board at the ball houses in Maaspoort states that they have a diameter of 5.5 meters and a total floor area of ​​55 square meters. But this is the result of an incorrect calculation, because the spherical houses in Maaspoort have a surface area of ​​no more than 35 square meters, including the hall on the ground floor.

With such a small floor space, the bubble house is a tiny house avant la lettre. But the sphere turns out not to be the ideal shape for a mini house. Behind the front door in the concrete cylinder is a steep concrete spiral staircase to the bedroom with one round pivot window on the first floor. The room is so small that there is only room for a double mattress on a raised concrete floorboard that serves as a bed. The floor of the kitchen-diner, with four south-east-facing windows, is located exactly in the center of the sphere. But since part of the floor space is lost to a bathroom with toilet and a stairwell, the kitchen-diner has an area of ​​approximately 18 square meters. In addition, hollow walls in the bubble house are extremely inconvenient. Bookcases and wall furniture are taboo and hanging curtains in front of the windows requires a lot of skill.

For example, Kreijkamp's ball houses have not become the alternative to the terraced house and the belief in the efficient square still prevails in Dutch housing construction.

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