Qualla: Cube Houses

Cube Houses: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmglee, CC BY-SA 3.0. Roughly a quarter of the floor space inside a cube house is unusable. The angles see to that. The walls tilt inward at 54.7 degrees, the ceilings slope toward you wherever you stand, and the furniture has to be either custom-built or accepting of its fate. None of this has prevented people from buying them, renting them, photographing them, or sleeping in them as part of a hostel chain. Piet Blom designed the Kubuswoningen as an architectural argument: that high-density urban housing should still feel like a village, and that the way to get there might be to take a familiar cube and balance it on one of its corners. The argument has been standing in Rotterdam since 1984. Some 38 small cubes and two larger ones, perched on hexagonal concrete pylons above the Blaak metro station, still draw the curious by the busload.

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Image: Cmglee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cube Houses: The Helmond prototypes

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heush, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before Rotterdam, there was Helmond. In 1972 the city assigned Blom an empty site in the center, asking him to fill it with a meeting center. Blom proposed something more ambitious: a hybrid of cultural facilities and housing in which cube houses would surround a new theater, The...

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Image: Heush | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cube Houses: Living as an urban roof

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original: Debot at nl.wikipedia Modification: Cornischong at Luxembourgish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Blom called the underlying idea "living as an urban roof." The ground level stays open for shops, walkways, and the chess piece museum that opened beneath the Rotterdam cubes in 2006. The houses themselves sit above, balanced on hexagonal columns, leaving the public realm clear f...

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Image: Original: Debot at nl.wikipedia Modification: Cornischong at Luxembourgish Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cube Houses: What 54.7 degrees costs you

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul van Galen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The walls and windows tilt at 54.7 degrees, which is the angle you get when you balance a cube on its corner and let geometry do the rest. The total apartment is about 100 square meters, but roughly a quarter is lost to the regions where the angled ceilings drop too low to use. T...

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Image: Paul van Galen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cube Houses: Reinventions

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0. The complex has found uses Blom never planned. The chess piece museum opened beneath the houses in 2006. In 2009 the architecture firm Personal Architecture converted the two super-cubes into a hostel run by the Dutch chain Stayokay, sending backpackers up to sleep in angled room...

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Image: Alexander Migl | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cube Houses: Tilted into the future

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geert C. Smulders at nl.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on the public deck between the Markthal and the cube houses and look up. The pyramid roofs catch the afternoon light. From below, the buildings look like a single enormous geode broken open. From a passing train on the elevated tracks beside the Blaak station, they flash pa...

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Image: Geert C. Smulders at nl.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0