In 1993 a young professional couple with two toddlers and a large suburban lot in Naarden, a town less than half an hour's drive southeast of Amsterdam, approached Ben van Berkel to design an unusual house. They envisioned it as progressive and innovative in every way possible. More than that, they wanted a kind of building that “would be recognized as a reference in terms of renewal of the architectural language.” Before settling on the architect, they spoke to several candidates, including Rem Koolhaas. They chose van Berkel who five years earlier, together with his then-wife Caroline Bos co-founded their eponymous practice, because as he told me, “I went to the site and studied it carefully and already had ideas about what I called the four quadrants of the landscape. I knew what kind of house it would be. I could see clearly where different rooms would go, how they would be shaped, and how they would relate to each other.” The couple couldn’t resist. Yet, there would be no rush on the project which took five years to complete, most time was invested in its design, going through many iterations and refinements, all based on the Möbius loop.
By the time the house was completed in 1998, the founders relaunched their practice as UNStudio, becoming one of the most talked about firms in the field. Naturally, christened the Möbius House, the dwelling has turned into an instant sensation. It was widely published and the following year it was even included in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled, The Un-Private House. Here is how it was described by the show’s curator, Terence Riley, “This architectural loop produces a continuity and integration of living and working areas. The concrete and glass exterior of the house, too, seems to fold back on itself: from one perspective the glass is a skin slipped over a concrete house; from another, the building is a glass house framed by concrete.”
Even though the project remains one of the tiniest in van Berkel’s prolific career, it proved to become his most important work, a manifesto of sorts. It served him as an organizational model that he later employed in many of his much larger creations. “I still believe that architecture needs to be defined through its organizational principles — the way you experience architecture, how you walk through it, and how it unfolds in front of you is the essence. I never believed in image-making from the outside. Architecture needs to come out of its spatial organization.” He explained.
The house also became the product of its time which is when the office bought its first computer specifically to work on the design of this project. Even though the initial drafts were freehand sketches and hand-made models, by the time technical drawings were being developed, in 1995, computers were in use. The parametric design was still in its infancy. It was also in 1995 when Columbia University started its famous paperless studio. Van Berkel was teaching there along with Hani Rashid, Stan Allen, Greg Lynn, Jesse Reiser, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo. 3D modeling tools were still unavailable as a product and had to be developed by offices. Van Berkel was part of the new wave of architectural thinkers. He explained, “We started this dialogue: What new tools could be used to bring new visual effects to architecture? How could such tools stimulate and envision the new role of a contemporary architect? How could new tools give architects new creative freedoms? How could new spatial effects be achieved? That’s what you can taste in the design of the Möbius House because conceptually it is a house that anticipated 3D computer modeling tools and it was refined once these tools became available.”
Listening to van Berkel took me to another conversation I had with Rashid back in 2015. It helps to understand better the creative energy at Columbia at that time. He spoke with passion, “We were young rebellious architects, turning the world on its head. We were obsessed with fusing drawing and modeling into a single entity. Our quest became drawing on a model and modeling the drawings. The new digital tools enabled us precisely that.” The spirit of experimentation was in the air. A couple of years later Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao exploded the most audacious expectations of what kind of architecture was possible. Asymptote Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Reiser + Umemoto, Foreign Office Architects, and NOX were among the pioneers who used parametric design to achieve groundbreaking complexity.
“It was a very exciting time. We were playing and testing how computation design could be manipulated by parametric variants. It was a very special moment for parametric design, very fresh and very promising.” Van Berkel told me. I asked him about the origin of the idea to incorporate the Möbius loop into the house. Where did it come from? He responded, “From my interest in mathematics, science, complexity theory, chaos theory, and topological surfaces.”
VB: Was the Möbius House the first project in which you used the Möbius loop?
BB: It was. Later it was used again and again. Mercedes-Bentz Museum in Stuttgart was perhaps the most well-known example.
VB: What are your favorite moments in the house?
BB: I particularly like one cantilever over the entry below as it leads to the master bedroom. That’s the moment of suspension where the landscape opens up in a very spectacular way. Suddenly, you step into the landscape through the house.
VB: Is there anything you want to add?
BB: You know, in the past architecture experienced such phenomena as the New York Five, Post-Modernism, or Deconstructivism. I think Deconstructivists were the last architects who were recognized as a like-minded group. But what about parametric architects? We had our moment too. Yet, we were never portrayed as a movement of sorts. Perhaps this could still happen, in retrospect.
