Parts of the famously off-kilter “cube houses” project constructed back in 1984 to a design by architect Piet Blom in Rotterdam, Holland, have been transformed into new homes for 21 former prison inmates by Personal Architecture. The old, oddly angled complex has been updated with skylights and an internal light-well to allow more natural illumination, offering stronger “visual connections” between floors.
Alas, internal safety netting on the newly opened vertical shafts lend the interior an ironically prison-like feel, and the radiating hexagons of the building’s original floorplan — about which Personal Architecture could do very little, if anything, in their renovation of the structure — cruelly resembles the cell-like layout of a penitentiary. But the rehab nonetheless does a lot with Blom’s flawed source material, and will be interesting to watch over the next few years to see how it performs. [Personal Architecture via designboom]
Pictures: Ossip van Duivenbode, René de Wit via Personal Architecture