Cube Houses

Piet Blom's iconic tilted cubes near Blaak station

Address Overblaak 70
Phone +31 10 414 2285

Piet Blom's tilted cube houses near Blaak station are Rotterdam's most photographed buildings. Each cube is a house rotated 45 degrees and balanced on a hexagonal pylon. One unit, the Show Cube, is open to visitors so you can see how people actually live in these seemingly impossible spaces.

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A story
Piet Blom's design brief was to create "a village within a city". Each cube represents a tree, and the forest of cubes is meant to form a village. Of the 38 cubes, two were reserved for public functions and the rest were sold as homes. When the first residents moved in, they discovered that roughly a third of each floor area was unusable due to the tilted walls — but found the floor-to-ceiling windows with their vertiginous views more than compensation.