The "OD119" is the students house I lived in during my stay in the Netherlands. It is a registered National Monument on the corner of the Oude Delft and the Kloksteeg in Delft, the Netherlands. I am fascinated by the variety and quality of spatial sequences and the layering created through history. Other factors, such as laws and regulations and the resulting ad-hoc solutions as well as the current inhabitants, namely young, creative and energetic students are highly influencing the current appearance of this building as well.
The building is situated on a narrow and long parcel and has organically grown from the front part of the house to ultimately cover the entire place. At present one still refers to the "Voorhuis" and the "Achterhuis" each with their individual staircases. Every Floor has its own kitchen and bathroom/shower, and there is one central commons room adjacing the bike shed on the ground floor. Despite the long corridors resulting from the narrow parcel, almost every part of the semi-public circulation space gets light from a different orientation due to a variety of irregular exterior openings.
One likes to speculate about the stories behind the clash of forces taken into absurd dimensions on various places in the house. The standard green and beige colors stretching all over the interior due to a monumental preservation law; A stucco ceiling and a fireplace that are cut in half by a later erected wall; The only bathtub of the house that can only be accessed if walking through the smallest kitchen; The trim of a doorframe that extends further along the wall until it touches a corner; The antique wholewood crafted railing on the back stairs covered with layers of paint and and clothes; A disused voided furnace, now containing a fridge and a gas cooker; And the layers of sometimes disused electrical and telecomunications cables and their apparatures or the variety of water and sewage pipes stretching over the entire house like a spiderweb, blending into the exisiting walls with the same color as if they were a new type of ornament.
The spatial configurations can be read with a portion of humour and add to the production of strange, unforseenable daily situations. This enriches the notion of dutch student life. But an additional layer has invaded this particular house along with the students. A kind of all over graffiti culture reaching from painted brick walls to exchange of fiddling messages on the markerboards act as physical extension of online forums. Comments, poetry and new house rules are posted on different locations, mostly commented and extended or modified by other inhabitants.
Most individual rooms are higher than wide, thus the space is used in three dimensions. Practically everybody sleeps in a loft bed, still having plenty of workspace below. But three-dimensionality stretches beyond the individual rooms to the organization of the house at large. Split levels and double heights result less from deliberacy than from the constant modification and reorganization of the interior over history. This questions the role of authorship and the designer. It seems that organically grown structures within certain restrictions and contexts can create unforseenable qualities and layers of lecture and interpretation.
