WoZoCo Apartments, Amsterdam
When the Het Oosten Housing Association in Amsterdam requested 100 social housing units for the elderly, Dutch architectural firm MVRDV found itself in a fix. Only 87 apartments would be able to meet regulations on adequate sunlight and still fit neatly onsite. Fortunately, uniformity wasn't the architects' top priority. Rather than take up more green space in a garden city threatened by development, they cantilevered — or fastened — the leftover 13 units onto the building's northern façade. The suspended suites look like a series of open, wood-sheathed drawers in an oversized glass dresser. Jutting out of the main block, the lower boxes hang just above street level and the heads of apprehensive passersby. The southern façade is checkered with haphazardly placed windows and protruding balconies like transparent, technicolor containers. But despite their gravity-defying convolution, the WoZoCo Apartments were completed between 1994 and 1997 with "the lowest building costs in Amsterdam," according to MVRDV. "This was the result of inexperience," says the firm's website. "Nowadays we would have told the client that he should increase his budget."