When space is scarce and that we would still like to enlarge his house, there are solutions. But when you live in town, there is rarely room to create an extension to his dwelling. So here is a novel solution that came straight from Rotterdam in Holland to build a house on the roof of a building. The result is truly stunning. It remains only to love the blue area. But that’s another story. There comes a time in family life when the kids need their own rooms. One solution is to add on. Rarely, though, does your average middle-income household hire one of the world’s leading architects to do the job. The result, Didden Village, is literally a blue-sky solution to the Didden family’s problem. It is an architectural palimpsest, a new structure added to an old one, in line with MVRDV’s mission to make existing spaces work harder. The “village†consists of three bedrooms built on the roof: a big room for the parents and two smaller, semi-detached ones for the two boys, each a distinct houselike shape and separated symbolically by what Maas describes as “a main street.†The whole represents both the connections between the family members and their need to go their own ways.
