houses played and still an important role in my work. i rebuilt several hosues and still am rebuilding opur present house. a house is normally considered as a place to live, as a place to be, to invest money in, to design or to sell. the houses is have in mind deal with different issues, in particular with the ideas on which designs for, shall we say, functional houses are desigend and built.
so far i have been able to realise a number of, shall we say, unfunctional houses. i know the word is not good, but here in this context it is necessary to differentiate from the functional houses. in the future i hope to realise some others as well. the ideas for the unfunctional houses are from the end of the eightis and beginning of the nineties. now and then new ideas pop up.
the first project was a kind of full scale model of some ideas, meant to be used later in a design for a real, i.e. functional house. the installation took place in “Theater de Unie”,Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1990 ( see www.gercbout.com/output/the_crate_house). m ore or less it was a kind of architectural model that could be used as a basic idea of how to design and organsie a new type of house. building that model with crates was fun and made it possible to see in reality how everything looked and felt when you could walk through. the building took place in a nummber of hours. it was great to do. the project formed a ncie transition from the mdoesl i made meant for functionla hosues, to the projects i am working on now
for quite some period i have done my best to find a place and a crew to get my plans for a hosue of frozen water realized. thisp roject consisted of a huge block of frozen water, in which all openings were interconnected. i investigated the possibilities in iceland, northern finland and northern japan, met with much enthusiasm, as the project migth look like a diamond, but have so far been unable to get it realised. see: www.gercbout.com/output/a_house_of_frozen_water
the transparent dream project in turku, finland is another project that forms part of my series of houses. the project is turku is more or less a full scale wirefram. you can get in, you can walk around, but from a distant of some meters it is not always clear whtehr the housee is some kind of virtual projection or a real model. see www.gercbout.com/output/a_transparent_dream/
for a japanese competition i conceived of a house of names: names of those who inspired me. the names were sued to build the house, including the table with chairs. two pictures frepresent the project. in one the house is seen as a sputnik flyi ng aorund the world and one in clse up from the inside. the idea is very simpe that ideas from others are very important as sources of inspiration but not as do' s and do not' s or as dogma. i like the rietveld schröder house because it is the only kind of house that was made that way. i hated the story that mondriaan or van doesburg even painted fresh tulips that someone brought so make them fit in his house.
more houses are planned. to get one of these plans realzied it is essential however to find a good place and a supportive crew. as soon as these are available, i will start.