The lift-dwelling and the ring-dwelling are two prototypes of the MAISON FLEXIMUM, a city apartment with a maximum flexibility achieved by its ability to adapt. This flexibility operates between the boundaries of a physical minimum and an intuitive maximum: FLEXIMUM.

In the fourteen different homes I have had in the Netherlands over the past twelve years, I was invariably forced to adapt. It was the dwelling that dictated 'how I was to live'. At moments of change in my life the places I lived in proved unable to accommodate those changes. As a reaction, I developed a concept for what I considered to be the ideal home. This was to be place where I, not the house, could decide what spatial and functional form my living environment was to have; the home would have to continually adjust to suit the changes I was going through, yet ultimately it has to have an urban context as my world is indelibly linked to that of the city.

In the present climate, home consumers are demanding more and more individuality, and getting it too. The upshot of this is that the following generation is confronted with a freeze-frame of how their predecessors lived. If there is any flexibility to speak of, then it is in the use; the house itself remains unbending. What fascinates me is that objects for use are more and more often made to be adapted - chairs, beds, bicycles, tables and lighting, for example, can be tweaked and tuned to suit the user. There is, by extension, the intriguing tendency to use free-standing furnishing units such as kitchens and sanitary capsules. This trend of increasing adaptability is carried through to the apartment itself. I undertook a series of studies into historical and other examples of 'flexible' homes, current examples of one-off city apartments, the domestic requirements of a wide range of city-dwellers, into possible applications of techniques such as hydraulics, screw jacks, flexible ducting and suchlike for the benefit of movable floors, relocatable wet services and adjustable transport. The two prototypes, lift-dwelling and ring-dwelling, allow not only for adaptability inside, from which present and future residents can profit, but outside too. This makes the Maison Fleximum eminently suitable for insertion in the city streets. It offers a whole new range of possibilities for future dwelling patterns and enriches the city as a result.

Place of education: AvB Amsterdam
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Arthur Wortmann, Pieter Bannenberg, Wim Kloosterboer, Dolf Dobbelaar & Joost Hovenier