Spherical houses weren't a great idea.
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2024
- The Bolwoningen, in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, are experimental architecture: the surprising part is that people still live there.
Local producer: Jasper Deelen
Camera: Jeroen Simons
Thanks to @NotJustBikes for the Rotterdam cube house footage
A lot of my history research for this video is based on the 2019 book "Experimentele Woningbouw in Nederland 1968-1980: 64 Gerealiseerde Woonbeloften", by Barzilay, Ferwerda and Blom: experimentelew...
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Thanks to Jeroen for letting us film inside his home: and please remember, if you're ever nearby, that these are homes and not a tourist attraction!
O R B House
O R B House
O R B House
O R B House
ALL PRAISE THE O R B HOUSE! (respectfully and from a distance)
Imagine Tom Scott just randomly showing up at your house and he starts explaining it
That would make for a fun comedy skit. A family living in a unique home who constantly bothered by UA-camrs and documentarians in their yard filming. Tom Scott getting chased out of there with a garden hose.
LMFAOOO
@@Doug-89"Go be a UA-camr somewhere else" - the house owner screamed.
@@Doug-89go watch unfinished London with Jay Forman. He does the Tom Scott thing but he puts in jokes like that
😂
“What if we made a house that was 75% stairs?”
We have some nice small builds but there's NO bathroom on the kitchen/main level. It's downstairs in the bedrooms. For a senior or even a busy mom with kids, it's weird as there was room for it!!
Too bad they didn't put a spiral staircase in the center of each home.
Now that I’m older I see that stairs are increasingly problematic. Having to go up and down multiple odd-shaped stairs to go from room to room would be a problem.
Nah, the stairs ensure you're getting a minimal amount of workout. A large majority of the elderly are getting far too little exercise to stay healthy.
@@porkcutlet3920odd-shaped stairs present a balance problem, it's very easy for elderly people to fall and rather dangerous when they do
@@amoureux6502 cause they don't work out enough (just joking)
Those stairs are all houses in the entire netherlands. It's 1 floor apartments that not have them
@@porkcutlet3920 I tried the strengthening my legs walking, climbing. Doesn't work with every old person.
The architects dream is the engineers nightmare, but once in a while the artists win
Making them as two half spheres out of liquid materials then joining them together actually seems quite efficient though that is from a modern perspective, it would have been a lot harder in the 1980s, especially from a small temporary factory. I reckon we could do them well and cheap today and I would like to see someone make the attempt.
@@Voltaic_Fire at 1:04 he states they were the last houses to get the subsidy in 1984 so the tech won't have been too outdated
Finally a house made for mums
this scenario became true in helsinki, "kiasma"
became 3 times as expensive after they built it. just to fix all the flaws.
my nephew lives in one.
Believe me, you do not want to live in one.
a waste of space.
You have to take into account that the walls are not flat, square. So if you put a couch against the wall, you loose a lot of space. And you aint got much.
These ridiculous contraptions thought up by a lunatic are a waste of space.
You may not change the exterior much, so drilling more holes to get more ventilation. Forget about it.
These are like the LEM on the moon's surface.
If they are blasted by the sun, just imagine....
One wonders if the sense of neighbourliness that's mentioned is partly fostered by the fact the houses are so weirdly difficult to live in: if you've just moved into a spherical neighbourhood, you probably have a bunch of issues and questions and even in the age of instant online searches, your neighbours are still going to be the only real place you can get answers.
It's as if you suddenly developed a very niche interest that's also dominating your everyday life.
Shared adversity fosters friendships.
Almost as if humans evolved to live in small groups all facing the same adversities.
It looked like the kind of walkable space that would foster community.
@@jimcrelm9478 Sphere houses this street, cube houses the next street, pyramid houses the next street, then repeat. World Peace Achieved1!!
I remember my dad talking about this idea as a kid, his biggest confusion was furniture. You’d have to either waste space or buy only curved appliances. Unless you want your kitchen in the middle of the house.
Moral of the story: If you couldn’t get people to buy this in the 90s, nobody will.
Well, I‘m just imagining a room where you have the kitchen-furniture from the walls to the middle of the room and then you can walk outside, maybe have a curved table just for three people on the walls.
I can imagine it working, if well designed.
They work okay if they are BIG domes. The small ones not so much...
Yet they’re all lived in
could work... like make an island type of thing. Still a lot of wasted space though.
Even if you do find curved appliances and furniture, it all has to be curved at exactly the correct degree for it to actually utilize the space effectively.
I always admired the Dutch for their eagerness to experiment with architecture, city planning and organizing traffic. They came up with some very interesting, innovative and well performing solutions. In these regards the Netherlands are a role model. Although there are also some quirky things like spherical houses: If you don't give unconventional ideas a chance then you'll never make progress.
I laud experiments and thinking-outside-the-box but NOT when you make other people pay for it. Public works should be as efficient as possible, not playing around with money that isn't theirs. The latter leans toward tyranny.
@@Mereologist Then please stop using the internet. It's the result of people playing around with money that wasn't theirs and it wasn't as efficient as possible.
@@drCox12 Will the money come back if I stop using it? No? So this wasn't a really bright retort, was it?
@@MereologistDoesn't matter. The same is true for the houses: If people move out the money won't come back. Your point is void.
@@drCox12 Which is why I never said nobody should be allowed to live in those houses. Please follow along, scooter. I know thinking is hard for you.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term 'housing bubble'.
Very very true. Now we just need new ones built in Phoenix AZ or Florida during future bubble… but we will not keep them in good condition for decades after a bubble. (I always remember driving past a roof failed into a home in West Phoenix in about 2010 in a community finished in about 2009)
🤣🥳🥳🥳🥳💥💥💥🎯🤟📢📢📢
Haha 🍾
There's no popping this one
😂🎈
My parent's house has a rounded staircase, resulting in the surronding rooms having one rounded wall. I can only image how difficult it is to find fitting furniture with spherical walls
Nothing off the shelf will fit nicely in those rooms, you would either have to make it yourself or hire someone to make it for you.
Beanbag Chairs mostly.
One of the reasons the sphere houses don’t work is that you still have to use furniture designed for squares. If there was furniture for circle rooms it could work
@@Pointlessusername-zr3jy For every possible radius?
@@Pointlessusername-zr3jy would have to have for standard radius.. and that would work for cylinder shapes only too, this are spheres, on different heights you have different a vertical radius... but beside the furniture issue, what I read this houses also often have weird ways light falls and sound propagates.
I grew up in this neighborhood and it's so great to see these houses getting international attention. Also, Jeroen is right: It is a great and friendly neighborhood with everything nearby. It was truly a blast to grow up here as a child.
aan media aandacht geen gebrek kim 😆 gemiddeld 2-5x per jaar. en dan heb ik de toeristen niet meegerekend die met bussen tegelijk komen aanwaaie haha
I don't have a round house but i have a semi-cylindrical bedroom and while it's harder to furnish, I still love it. There's something about the softening effect the shape gives to the space that makes it feel cosy
Curved walls and ceilings are aesthetically calming. My 3 dome earthship in Denver also uses passive solar and geothermal allowing for natural air movement with minimal added energy costs.
No reason you couldn't get a square house and round it out if you wanted to waste the space to get softer features
It's charming how one would expect the lasting appeal of these homes to be all about their uniqueness, but in truth some of the appeal comes down to very mundane reasons such as "it's near the shops" and "the community is nice."
It's the simple things in life.
what is mundane about being near shops and being in a nice community?
They are so small that only singles and 'recently living together and looking for something else' are living there. You will not find that in a normal neighborhood. So it's a little bit like student housing. You meet and greet in the outdoor area, because they have no balcony nor garden.
And yes, they are next to a bus stop, an excellent bicycle route to the center, and all daily shops are just a three minute walk away.
They are social housing, sophisticated macro-biotical culture can be found in other projects. No handmade furniture that adapts to the uniqueness of the shape, but second hand Ikea.
@@Cavlo I just looked it up, and I remember now that there is more than one definition for "mundane." I meant it as in "commonplace" and not as in "boring." I tend to enjoy mundane things, so I often forget about the negative definition.
@@Cavlo Because being near shops and having a nice community has nothing to do with the design of the home itself.
Thank you camera person for focusing on the cat, your services don't go unnoticed.
👍👍
sure wasn’t missing meals
I second that😺
I have to say I loved that.
@@wandery2k I think it was pregnant.
Round shapes are much softer to the eye, but are total hell to furnish and they waste incredible amount of space.
This way we might actually have a good compromise: a square home with massive half-dome solarium. Good view, perfect location for hoarding all the plants, having guests, meditating, fiddling with your laptop when the rest of the house allows you to efficiently take on boring, but practical tasks.
“Even if you measure, it’s no guarantee things fit”
I’m going to use this regularly in life now. Thanks, guy
Love that you included the local term "bolbewoner". Fun fact: this term is a pun on the word "holbewoner" which is dutch for caveman.
Might possibly work in English as "concaveman"
@@aelolulahhhhh that's such a good word!
@@aelolulnice, hahahaha. That certainly captures the Dutch word play!
@@aelolul Genius!
@@aelolul lmao that's exactly what I was thinking.
These are houses from a future. Not THE future, just A future.
A past future.
I see what you did there
Retrofuturism.
@@obsidianjane4413 The tomorrow that never was.
@@jamesvanlandingham9296 Its kind of funny (sad) how we see it like that now, but at the time, it was just considered novel and innovative.
The neat thing is that spheres have the largest volume to surface area ratio possible of any shape, so I’m not surprised at how warm it is inside.
That would imply it would be colder. Q = hA(T-T0) where h is convection coefficient, T-T0 is temperature difference, A is area, and Q is heat. As area goes down, Q goes down.
@@mechwarreir2 You have misunderstood the formula. The Q there would be heat flow out of the object (the house in this case), not the temperature inside the house. So Q denotes the rate of thermal energy lost to the environment. As A goes down, Q goes down, which means it's easier to keep the house at a higher temperature than some other house with a higher surface area.
@@greenorange752 if the house is underground then it has more insulation around it so it would be easier to keep warm than one above ground that has a smaller surface area. The material it is made of is important too, a sphere made of steel won't be as warm as a well insulated wooden house with foam insulation.
@@greenorange752With a smaller surface area to volume ratio, it will transmit less thermal energy from one side to another. That will make it cheaper to heat in winter and cheaper to air condition in the summer. However, the ratio of livable/usable volume to volume of the total sphere is debateable depending on how one defines "livable/usable" and the ratio will vary with the diameter of the sphere since smaller diameters with more curvature per linear length are less usable.
@@HepCatJack You lose heat to the ground, too, and since the earth and/or water are going to be at least 20 times denser, you will lose much faster from conduct. The main advantage is no convection since there wouldn't be wind. However, insulation is so much better that this is quite minor.
Really would have liked to see more footage of the inside of these
Same but I’m thinking it was more of privacy or it really was just like that.
The designers certainly had balls to put them forward as a design.
_Edit: I am very pleased with the puns and jokes I've inspired here, complete with pun-ctuation._
The engineers must have found a few rounding errors, but once it started rolling there was no stopping it
Considering the drawbacks of living in these houses, the designers didn't quite manage to square the circle.
Get out 😀
I guess you could say circle, circle, circle, sphere, sphere, sphere, ⭕️ 😉
🤦♂
I can understand the common claustrophobia problem. The issue is that the inner walls of the upper floors always lean in - looming over the occupant. The eye follows this up as it constricts further - it's the feeling of falling into a hole and watching the sides cave in on top of yourself.
I almost wish you hadn't described that so well! 🤢
🤨
I was expecting "the houses tended to roll downhill and into rivers."
Maybe they should have put the living room in the bottom half of the sphere so that the walls lean outwards. The bedrooms and bathroom could go at the top since I think the leaning in walls wouldn't be so much of an issue - they might make the bedrooms feel more cosy
The feeling could have been mitigated by overhead storage bins, like on tubular aircraft cabins.
@@bluemountain4181Nah they should have gone with the cylinder shape from the beginning. While on paper it should have less inner volume for the same amount of building materials, it has more usable inner volume. And you can now mount a balcony on the outside thanks to the vertical wall.
We toured those cube houses in Rotterdam. Tiny rooms, had to constantly climb stairs to get to the next room, and all those crazy roof angles gave me vertigo when I stepped out onto the tiny balcony.
In the mid 1960s America was enjoying a Geodesic Dome house craze. Almost all them were built on private property out in the country. People built them, themselves, from kits or from instructions. Inspired by the designer Buckminster Fuller, who invented them. The American counter culture embraced them,....so called Hippies, often were involved. I have a friend who built his in 1970. They were a real challenge since most houses are built in squares and rectangles, with right angles. They are fun but there is a lot of wasted space, and conventional things like windows and furnishings have to be adjusted to fit within the interior. I was in college at the time, and anyone taking art & architecture at the time collaborated in building them, most for fun spaces to meditate within. Some became greenhouses, & other uses. Residential zoning prevented them from being built in conventional neighborhoods. They were perfect in rural settings, or out on private lands in the country.
"Enjoying" is a generous term. More like the buyers sobered up and thought: "That was a bad trip."
Meanwhile, those single-story ranch-style homes built in the Depression Era are worth their weight in gold nowadays.
@@Cyraxior Good point. In the very beginning, before the reality of dome home life was fully understood, it was exciting to live in, and own a dome. After a year or two, the reality of a dome home, became less appealing. Since everything had to be custom fitted, raising the cost of everything.
My question is: do you put the kitty litter box on the ground floor, or somewhere in the sphere?
I lived in a yurt for 8 years - it was fun but it also had wasted space since furniture is rectangular (unless custom built) and had to be away from the walls. Still, living in the round was lovely for a time. Now I have a rectangular log cabin and it's also lovely and everything fits.
They're also rather difficult to heat, from my understanding.
Architect: Humans were not meant to live in a box, they shall live in spheres.
Humans: I have claustrophobia
The housing bubble: You shall live in a tiny box, because you can't afford anything more
The bubble house: You shall live in a tiny sphere, because why not.
What is a sphere, but an edgeless safety box?
@@jimbob3332A miserable pile of secrets.
@@B_Skizzle Enough talk, have at you!
@@jimbob3332a fish bowl
I used to live in Den Bosch, a few minutes away from these circular homes. I’d always pass by them on my way to school, and always wondered why they were there. Cool to see you covering these houses, and an interesting reason for them being built! Amazing video
Me too 🤜
I lived in one😂😂
Another Dutchie! They also have a cool suspended circular cycling path above a roundabout suspended by wires which one of my docents worked on for the calculations.
Edit: That one of in Eindhoven, but still North-Brabant I guess.
fellow boschenaar!
Amazing video? I wouldn’t call it amazing.
Imagine having the whole downstairs of the sphere as a massive bed
I freaking love seeing a video about these houses. I actually live just down the street and tried applying to love in one of them myself!
Several cultures used to have round houses, but they have a fatal flaw. If you need to expand the house for some reason, it too much of a hassle with round shapes... while with a square house it is simple to build another square besides it and put a door between the two...
You could connect one house to another with a round tunnel bridge and then you wouldn't need a door, but it already looks quite tight for expansion.
@@DragonballZTimemaybe if you have the space
European logic vs african logic.
@XmrcaptainbobX African logic is having the largest non-natural structure on the continent being a termite mound until colonisation
@@BulkernatorKerb ever heard of the pyramids
"Humans were not meant to live in a box."
*Proceeds to build human hamster wheels*
It’s not even a hamster WHEEL; it’s literally a hamster BALL 🤣🤣🤣
lolololol
When I use that sentence myself I mean igloos, tippi’s, yurts etc. Round and natural spaces used by indigenous people. And living in that I experienced myself that it is way healthier then living in square spaces.
But I would never came up with this concept from the video😅 Feels with this like it’s missing the point.
Yea, something only the Dutch could pull off . lmao
fr
love how honest and yet content and positive this resident is.
beats being homeless =)
They needed to build a lot of cheap houses and they chose the MOST DIFFICULT SHAPE TO CONSTRUCT??
I like that the quiet part of "people weren't meant to live in boxes" was apparently "they're meant to live in spheres".
I mean, we all do live on a giant sphere so.........close enough, I guess? 😅
Style of words over substance gets people in trouble.
@@brumels1570And sometimes it gets them grant money.
Never understood the argument anyway. Square housing has been the go to for millennia across all cultures, from North Africa to south east Asia and Central America, I think people just like to assume it’s western and wanna be edgy contrarians so they act like “square house bad”
@@geraldwashington6588 But, in some sense, isn't the idea of a spherical house _less_ edgy?
That pronunciation was actually quite well done Tom, groetjes vanuit Nederland ❤
Quite sad they let him get away with using Den Bosch, instead of 's Hertogenbosch, because that probably would have gone much worse
@@daylen577 Doesn't even go well off for plenty of native Dutch speakers either to be honest. 😅"Schet hoge bos"
The Dutch guy sounded almost Australian to me.
@@TLguitar His English sounded quite South East England, to me. Perhaps he spent time there for a few years picking up the language as he went along.
@@Thurgosh_OG It's not quite like the typical accent Dutch people have when speaking English, true.
That quote at 0:26 was actually really well pronounced!
Also, gotta love Tom visiting my hometown! Especially since my name is also Tom....
I will miss these video's so bad, but I'm looking forward to Tom Scott's new projects!
round houses are a great idea for hurricane areas. they just need to be designed and built by an architect.
also if you make them bigger and make the inside square furnishings will fit.
I live in the neighbourhoid of these "bolwoningen". Three friends of mine used to live there. They left because of the fact that they started a relation (or, in one case, became parent) and for two people, these houses are simply too small.
Having said that, they all were happy living in their bulbs. Green scenery, and for a relatively small amount of money they lived in detached houses. Which are normally very expensive over here.
Plus the community feeling.
For a one person household, lots of people wanna live there. Especially musicians, because, well, unattached. So a failed project? Not at all.
But quite clear why they didn't build more. All that space and money so that just one person can live in one is not very economical.
I don't think they look that bad at all, they have a specific purpose and that's perfectly fine.
Groetjes vanuit de maaspoort😂
@@Ailieorz Facts.
Another nice touch for musicians I think is about the noise 😂
I have to compliment Tom for his excellent pronunciation of "Men weet niet wat men mist" at 0:25!
I am Dutch and have lived in The Netherlands all my life, but I have never seen these "bolwoningen" anywhere... I did not know they existed, while the cube houses shown at 0:57 are famous.
I am from Den Bosch and didn't know these houses exist... Feel ashamed now.
Oops, I should have scrolled a little further before commenting myself. I said literally the exact same things you did! Interesting how it's such a small country yet there's so much that just goes on behind the scenes that we don't know about.
ja foei! 😅😂😂zijn er best veel hoor die nog nooit van de bolle hebbe gehoord,je bent zeker niet de enige :) zijn vreemd genoeg buitenlanders/toeristen van alle uithoeken van de wereld die de bolle kenne. vraag me soms echt af van,HOE DAN!? van china,tot amerika,van rusland tot nieuw zeeland,het het allemaal al eens voorbij zien komen. hoe vind men zo iets vraag ik me dan af haha@@TomRoes
You been Tom'd, my brother. Welcome aboard.
Turns out, he didn't study linguistics for nothing
Thankyou for blessing the internet with this interesting house design :).
yw :)
It actually looks better on the inside than I expected.
Tom: Check out these spherical houses, an incredibly architectural experiment.
Me: Kitty!
For all we know there are outtakes from this video where Tom is also going, "Cat. Cat. Must film the cat."
Timestamp?
@@DavidCowie2022 1:39
And 3:47 😺
Me: that cat is almost as round as the houses
Imagine how hard it is trying to put furniture in a spherical house
I guess you need a bunch of squares
I imagine that's the primary issue, perhaps only second to having four levels and such a large fraction of space spent on stairs. Having briefly visited the 60s and 70s, I remember seeing "natural" soft-side things like bean bag chairs and macrame; maybe the designer assumed these things. "Squares are for squares, man!" One more layer of culture shock.
try raising a kid, no corner to place them in when they were naughty
@@Hans-gb4mvrofl
In a society that lives in boxes this is a pain in the ass indeed. As someone who doesn't need much furniture having a few custom pieces of furniture wouldn't be too bad
I lived in Davis California and there was a student housing project built on a half sphere concept called the Domes. It was quite inexpensive to build associated with student managed gardens, acomon kitchen area, and set up as a co-op housing model with shared meals by members.
Built in 1969 it's been entirely paid off with the profits going to the
Improvements and maintenance. There has been very few issues after 55 years...although the University considers that the low cost of $200/month is disparate with the $1000+ they charge for other dorms.
People built custom furniture, shelving, desks, beds etc. They added decks, swings,
It's still.massively popular. You should check it out for an alternative viewpoint.
And of course people have lived in domelike structures for tens of thousands of years.
i live in the netherlands myself and i have genuinely never heard of these spherical houses. Cool video!
They are ironically an example of how good gardening and trees make an area very nice. All the other houses around the are bigger for good reason but if only they had such rich space then they would be stellar.
Such a green oasis
But only in summer or warmer climates. In european winter, everything is dead and depressing.
@@Gebieter put a bird feeder up and you can watch all the birds in front of your window
@@Gebieter That's what evergreens and sculptures are for.
I've toured the cube houses in Rotterdam. Because they're tilted, the interior floors are hexagonal, and there are no vertical walls. They're visually striking and completely impractical.
I can only imagine the dust that collects itself behind any furniture... It literally has a slide, which it just needs to slide down and gather...
The sphere makes total sense in a vacuum because in a vacuum it is very efficient use space but on a two dimensional plane the square is a more efficient use of space because you can pack squares tightly together. But you cannot pack circles together well, you’re not taking advantage of all the space available.
Is nobody going to address that massive unit that slides across the screen at 1:40 ?? 🥵
thank u for that
As a dutch person im very happy for the very good pronunciation of the dutch sentence. i have never heard a english speaker speak it this good
It wasn't really that good
@@NaleksuhIt was the best Dutch I've ever heard
My Dutch never got much beyond Ik spreek Nederlands!
That sentence was crazy good
@@Naleksuh It really was. Helps that there was no "sch" or "oe" or "ui" in it :p But the pronunciation was very good.
I could have rented one, when they were build, but saw a few problems an apartment next to it didn't have.
- stepping out the front door you are 'on the street'. No balcony, no garden, no bicycle shed.
- in the upper dome (living/kitchen) the area with full standing height is small, floor goes on four feet but you have your head against the dome. It's simply too small. And much inside is just the stairs.
- they were in a public park, nosy and curious people walking around day and night. Trees were as thick as my middle finger back than, so no privacy at all.
So I rented the apartment with view on these spheres, and never regretted it.
Inhabitants slowly claimed a 'little sitting outside area' and some garden around the base. Much later they got a shed after a much needed renovation (leaking windows, mold on the inside, algae on the outside).
That thing about the ceiling coming in on your head on all the edges reminds me of living in places with loft conversions. Half the upstairs room floor space is only good for cupboards or very low shelves, but certainly not for living in.
How much do they rent for?
@@Firstoff-el1kj In 1984 same price as a two room apartment in social housing. But energy costs should be lower. Now they will do about € 500 a month I guess.
All problems that could have been foreseen and planned for.
@@kaitlyn__L That's true. Many box houses have that problem in the upper floor. I had a friend with an apartment like this and I hit my head so many times.
Is nobody going to mention the CHONKY BOI at around 1:35 ?? Thats a big chonky boi
Q: "how much living space can we waste?
Dutch people: "Yes"
You pronounced "men weet niet wat men mist" like a pro!
I always thought round houses would be good, but I envisioned them to look and be built like the ones you see in Dragon Ball. Half sphere in the ground, not a ball in a stand.
lmao me too, but apparently there is houses like that irl, just rarer I guess :/
Dome-house. In Japan, they also have created these. I like that special feeling in a round room and not happy about living in boxes since decades now.
You can find IRL examples by looking for Dymaxion houses or geodesic dome houses. There is almost always some issues with laying out and furnishing the interior.
I think the more common 'round house' is a cylinder section. Walls straight up and down, but following a circle on the ground rather than a rectangle. Sut seen in the remains of Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNB went to rectangles). Crannogs, rondavels, Atlantic roundhouses, pallozas, African round huts. Typically with a conical roof.
Plus tents like teepees or yurts.
@@TheAndreArtus Actually one of the ways to handle the space is to put up a wall across about a third in and put wardrobe behind that and bed in front and same thing for a living room with a kitchen behind a bar kitchen that acts as a room divider.
I have to believe this was not about efficiency or cost effectiveness. It was some art appreciating official's pet project.
they'd quickly go from small to extremely large depending on the radius. I bet big enough for an additional floor. or a spacious ceiliing on the top floor and it would be huge. Another 10ft to the diameter and I bet it would be golden.
Creating a whole art grant because "you don't know what you're missing" is startlingly wise!
That is a man who understood the assignment.
Very dutch actually. A lot of world leading infrastructure in the netherlands has it's roots in that mindset.
And know whe have the best rijtjeshuizen of the whole world. Our rijtjeshuizen are simply the best.
It's taking a risk with other people's money. Even more morally doubtious if it's about art instead of basic needs. It can produce results, but only after diverting resources away from other areas which could also have produced results, so these things have to be done very carefully and with consideration.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716but I feel like this kind of thinking is becoming more and more a thing of the past
"Humans were not meant to live in a box"
Builds a smaller inefficient spherical box.
I would never imagine to see my own house and village in a drone shot in a Tom Scott video!
As a Dutchy i just gotta say, Scott your pronunciation is on point! Really shows you put the effort in. Hope you're doing the same in what ever you're doing now!
Loved the feline guest star! And so kind of Jeroen to share the inside of his home with the world.
yw :)
Never thought I'd see my home in the background of a Tom Scott video. Great video as always and cheers from Den Bosch!
Mooiste stad op aarde!
Same. Empel Represented in background
Your pronunciation of 'Men weet niet wat men mist' was really good!
“Humans weren’t meant to live in a box”
“Interesting, what are they meant to live in?”
“A ball”
I've always really loved the architectural mindset of "people are not meant to live in boxes", but it's really funny to me that that Kreijkamp decided to replace the cube with another perfect geometrical shape and also gives a nice amount of nuance to the statement, from these houses I learned: "humans are not meant to live in geometrical shaped houses", which explains why Gaudi's buildings are so adored.
maybe I'm weird but I love straight walls.
When space is a limitation (city life), is there any design that maintains an internal temperature, and couldn’t be described as a box (Even ignore financial limits)?
I suspect we were meant to live in boxes 😂
Gaudi Arquitechute had a lot of geometrical components on them ,things like tesselated surfaces on walls and floors ,the arches and curves are sections of diferent kind of volumes , it's more organic with less straight lines but still with high components of geometry in the shape and in the placement of the elements like the simetry
@@NikoMoraKamu I think I’m interpreting “box” as an engineer which (ironically?) is a more abstract definition: an arrangement of 2D planes (walls) to fully enclose a 3D space. A box with curvy walls is still a box.
Boxes were inadequate thus he decided egg
I live near one of the two spherical houses in Poland. The city officials had a problem with calculating the area of a circle for tax purposes.
But… but there’s a formula…
@@scifisyko Yes but the formulae assumes an empty floor. Stair locations are not taxable in many places as you do not live in a stairwell and cannot make proper use of that area.
Has to depend where they want to take the measurements. I don't imagine there was any problem if they were using the tiny footprint to calculate area.
@@Nempo13subtract the area of the stairwell from the area of the circle.
@@Nempo13 That isn't that hard to account for, though I find that kinda strange because its not like you can live in most of the spaces of a house exclusively, and where I live "cant make proper use of the area" is generally half the area of the house due to extensive flooding during snow melt and summer rain. Well, that is assuming your goal isn't to collect every disease like they're Pokemon.
For a good second when this vid appeared on my home page, I thought Tom's back
As a blind wheelchair user they look like a really bad time for me personally but I like the coziness of the roundness
i think part of the claustrophobia in these is how acutely aware of your confines the rounded walls could make you. if you live in a small, square house like everyone else, its a little easier to trick yourself into believing your space isnt as small as it is. but once you see a rounded wall, you know exactly where the limits of your space are. also, having a rounded wall intrude into your air space where a straight wall wouldnt is definitely a factor
It is also a lot harder to put in a big window. Not impossible but very expensive, even more back than.
So you just have few of these round windows, they don't give you the amount of light that you need to make it feel spacious.
@@roland9367 If you look at the rooms again...they are tiny. No amount of window or light is going to change how tiny that is. The bedrooms are also in the bottom half of the ball. So there is less floor space but more space by your head, which means less storage and less room to move, that ultimately also hurts a feeling of space.
The only shape humans have adjusted well too other than a square box, is a triangle one as we just use the low roofed areas for beds and storage where someone wouldn't need to stand anyway. Pyramids also are easily lived in. Hex domes can work but they are almost always waterproofing nightmares. Smooth domes ARE complete nightmares for waterproofing.
@@Nempo13 Yes I'm not denying any of that. I just mean that the small round windows are making it even worse.
@@Nempo13 Pyramids sound like an excellent idea! Very stable structure and easily lit with one overhead light. Storage around in the inside perimeter and instead of siding; shingles.
@@Canadian_Eh_I pyramids are also small on the inside, tent-like beach house are nice thou, A frame two flat walls
In Dresden once stood the so-called "Kugelhaus" (spherical house). It was built 1928 and designed by Peter Birkenholz. It had five stories including space for exhibitions and a restaurant. Unfortunately the nazis deemed the building "non-german" and it was demolished in 1938.
Shame really, but then i noticed you said Dresden... there wouldnt have been much left in a couple of years anyway
Nazis had no balls?
Might be for the best that there be one fewer spherical building in this world though
Didn't know the nazis did anything good
Well... true. That area in particular has been completely obliterated. @@Caddoan
As Jeroen implies: ice skating is a big deal for the dutch. They say: "Als het kan moet het" (if you can, you must)
I think a spherical house can be good but it has to be big enough.
Spherical rooms must be a nightmare to furnish.
I live about a 3-5 minute bike ride from them and always found them interesting, I'm stoked that you visited and really surprised to see such stunning shots of my neighbourhood!
I love that the Dutch give travelling times in bike ride/minutes - 90% of the world would have described that as "a 10-15 minute walk" 😁
I live about the same distance from these. The drone shots were, indeed, amazing to see.
@@Tsnafuand some use actual "distance" to convey distance .
@@delayedcreator4783 sometimes time/method is a lot more accurate than exact distance. A mile on a city street is not the same as a mile up a mountain or across an estuary
@@Tsnafu stuck in traffic and the time method becomes unusable.
With experimental architecture for homes, schools, and churches in my area, they all seem to have problems with roofs and windows. A school that was built by an inovative architect had to have the roof replaced with a more standard flat roof. This was after a couple of decades of patching the problems. The architect was very upset, but a school needs to be functional without costing so much money from institution funds.
That's because the old ways of the good ways, experimentation is nice but there's a reason why over the course of Ten Thousand Years the same designs keep popping up in every culture
This is true for museums, government buildings, concert halls and most anything else experimental. Frank Lloyd Wright's homes have problems. Frank Gehry's buildings have practical problems too, like a building in Los Angeles that reflected the sun into a neighboring building, making that building awful to be in.
That's the best spoken Dutch I've heard from Brits in a while!
I remember this from a tv program for children when I was 6 or 7. Really fun to see it again.
An architectural professor told his students to "go ahead and design a round building and get it out of your system". They seem like good ideas in theory but in the real world they don't usually work out.
They don't even seem like good ideas in theory lol. Aside from looking cool, I can't see a single advantage.
Oh it's easy, all you need to do is make it about 3x the size of the same building in square form and you're set ;-) Then you can build little square rooms inside it.
@@alexseguin5245 A sphere encloses the most volume for least amount of surface. Curved walls/roofs are also much stronger than flat. I actually still like the idea. Checkout a company called monolithicdomes. Still a niche market so they may still be impractical. zyeborm in comment below has a point.
It works...on Mars
Having lived in houses without walls and floors that are very square, I can only imagine how hard finding effective furniture is for these houses!
I seem to recall reading that non-rectangular buildings pose a big problem that the original architects never consider: all of the furniture, appliances, or belongings humans use indoors are also rectangular. I mean, you can do it, but you have to redesign not just the walls, but literally everything else that you bring in there too.
No, all the furniture is just built in with the exception of appliances. No different to living on a houseboat or in an RV.
@@krashd you can see in this very video that is not the case. There's lots of unused space existing awkwardly between the regular furniture. (2:20)
my soul leaves my body a little bit everytime i know Tom Scott is retiring soon
As someone with claustrophobia, I immediately felt it when it showed the inside 🤣.
Jeroen is a fine gentleman for letting you film in his house
yw
I knew someone who lives in a similar house in Central Texas, USA. They called it a bubble house, it was more half-spheres than full spheres. Multiple half-spheres connected for more room; they called it the Bubble House, which was very apt. I think it was concrete poured over frames, rather than manufactured (the family supposedly designed it), and the insulation was good, I definitely visited it during a Texas summer and didn't notice anything wrong. In fact, it felt very cave-like and cool, if I remember correctly. The parents were very artsy and unique; they also drove a horrendous bright gold PT Cruiser because they said they never lost it in a parking lot!
„Human where not meant to live in a box“
„People get Klaustrophobie in my House Design, it’s not for everyone“
Makes sense Jeroen, makes sense…
Stopping the video 30 seconds in to let you know your dutch pronounciation is super good!
Space on the ground floor is uniquely valuable compared to upper floors, but these sit on tiny stands like gumball machines. They went through a lot of design effort just to steal that ordinarily free space from the residents for style points.
Put a euro in the slot, turn the knob, then a 100kg gumball tumble down the stairs. 😅
If these were cylinders they probably wouldn't be too bad
That guy's accent is *amazing*. Northern England somewhere, plus Dutch. I could listen to him talk all day, just to try to figure out exactly where in the UK it's rooted.
I know right? It’s amazing how some phrases leap out.
I was thinking the same. Fascinating accent indeed!
I could imagine space being tough without straight walls.
It depends how big it is.
@@codetech5598 true but good space is next to a wall not a curve
@@NATOSucks-lv4zj If it's big enough the curved walls are almost straight compared to a sofa, table, bookcase, etc,
@@codetech5598 maybe if you scale it up...a lot. Which still wouldn't make it practical for homes because we left the entire home size category.
I live in Venezuela and since the 70s the government built tens of thousands of officially protected houses, in fact they sold them as a "do it yourself" kit, they were very small houses with two bedrooms, kitchen, living room and the laundry room was outside the house. The house, you could say that they were adequate except for one detail, the ceilings were very low, I am 1.8m tall and I could place my hand on the ceiling without straining, in the tropical climate those low ceilings made the house uninhabitable during the day, which The people who live in these houses generally have a patio in which they spend the day, because while there is sun the house is an oven, in cities like Barcelona and Puerto La Cruz there are many houses built in the colonial style, in those houses the roofs are no less 4 meters high and there are openings in the roof so that hot air escapes through there and the house stays cool.
In a strange way, the quirks of such houses are so unique that there must be a sense of community amongst the people who live in them.
The moment I saw the opening shot with normal houses I was like: This must be filmed in the netherlands. The houses behind Tom are very typical 80s houses. Not sure if typical Dutch, but I don't recall seeing them elsewhere.
Dutch neighbourhoods and building style are very recognisable. Won't find it anywhere else really.
Yup, very recognisable 80s "Woonerf" design. I haven't seen it anywhere but in the Netherlands. It's funny, but when you end up somewhere in a woonerf, you could literally be anywhere in the Netherlands since they all look the same. From Friesland to Zeeland to Limburg, you'll always find a neighborhood like that in town.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 really tough? The typical dutch "Hanse" style is found all around the northern sea.
I totally get that. in the UK it's similar. I can sometimes even pick out slight differences from houses from England vs the ones here in Scotland.
Try Ibiza or Formentera, I remember seeing them there as a child.
I was positively impressed by your Dutch pronounciation! 😮
Wow that was the perfect resident for an interview. Seems like a real nice down-to-earth guy.
Would've been interesting to see more inside views. I'd love to see how people use furniture meant for right angles in these!
As I can see from the video, fitting curtains on not only a circular window, but curved walls would be challenging! You could see he have circular shades, but doesn’t look as convenient as normal curtains and it seems to be very difficult to have it “half opened”, even probably impossible
@@lokon1979 yes, I noticed these. Seemed very improvised though, not part of a solution someone came up with while planning that house.
Maybe the cameraman got claustrophobic ? From the limited photos of the interiors, you're looking at take apart sectionals (think IKEA in a box) and smaller chairs. The seating is around the circumference, leaving the center area for cabinetry and staircase - roughly 1/3 of the total floor area. They're a great example of form over function and the daft notion that we were meant to live in spheres (thought the designer, Dries Kreijkamp, had his design studio in that oh so unnatural rectangular box thing called an office.
i think the limited inside view has been a privicy choice. thats my best bet@@unvergebeneid
Tom's visited the Netherlands a few times now and each time when he says some Dutch proverb his Dutch seems to have improved :-P This time it sounded very good.
Tom Scott and team thanks for continuing to work on great quality videos❤❤ allways something new to learn
I love these as a concept, such a shame it didn't work out. Pod housing certainly has a future.
Having lived in circular rooms, i must say that not having corners actually helped my depression slightly. Its weird but not having a sharp angle to focus on kept my gaze moving and as a result i disassociated less.
Completely anecdotal but still...
I was just thinking about that. Sharp edges and straight lines are unnatural, so I thought these could be a bit more pleasant than standard box rooms.
To bad that fitting furniture would be a nightmare, you would have to custom make everything at a very high cost. But if done right, it could be nice.
I wonder if you could get most of the benefits by rounding off the corners, a 3d version of the rounded rectangle so popular on screens
Interesting! Thanks for your thought. Id like the same experience for myself but its not possible for me! Haha! I like your username by the way.
Huh, wonder if the issue is the ceiling then. Would cylindrical houses be less bad (though furniture would probably still be an issue)
@@andrasbiro3007 The issue is to feel nice the house needs to be much larger than a standard house i think. Otherwise it'll feel small with the roof coming in like that.
Hi Tom, in Curitiba - Brazil there's a rotating building. Ten floors. Each floor rotates individually. But the building was never inhabited. It's an interesting story worth exploring
Como chama esse prédio?
@@stardustandstripes Edifício Suíte Vollard
What an fascinating folly. I would be interested to see a video on said tower.
How does plumbing work with this design? I cant imagine pressurised pipes or sewage collector rotating with the floors.
@@Boris-Vasiliev Kitchen and bathrooms are fixed in the center. All the other rooms do rotate. There are some videos on YT about the building. Search 'Suite Vollard'
I'll bet all the residents are well-rounded people.
your "men weet niet wat men mist" was honestly very accurate, especially considering the dutch accent is so hard to figure out