POINT ZERO

NIO architecten designed the ‘POINT ZERO’ in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Description from the architects:

This houseboat is located in the blind spot of Amsterdam. Where the idyllic little river ‘de Holendrechter’ crosses the broad A2 motorway, the houseboat is moored. A seemingly impossible spot that could have come out of a book by Ballard: on the one side the lovely landscape of water, little boats and reeds and directly on the other side the deafening scene of the motorway, trucks and, at night, the accompanying pale, yellow light. It is a spot where light is never turned off, just like sound. This is also an impossible spot legally, because the boat is actually not supposed to lie here, it is being tolerated, until its occupant passes away.

This houseboat is located in the blind spot of Dutch house building. Architects always nurse hopes that the people who are looking for different types of housing – in empty offices, industrial buildings that have become obsolete (lofts), old farms, holiday homes, caravans and houseboats – will gain the upper hand a little bit more and that the typical housing format which is frozen in the brains of the estate agents, will start to melt. But highly likely this houseboat is once again an example that the gap between specific individual living desires and the serial development of house building with its accompanying rules, is too big to fill.

This houseboat is located in the blind spot of architecture. All architectonic references have been soaked off, peeled off, reduced, until something remains that does not know so well what it is: possibly something amorphous, maybe still something defined. Not that this makes it insecure or unhappy, on the contrary, it cultivates its ambiguity deep into its interior. No form or function wants to be sure of itself and has become unrecognizable in relation to the inevitable furniture. Just like the houseboat itself in relation to architecture.