Platform on architecture, interior design and landscape architecture
I just returned a week from a vacation to my family in Curaçao, there I was reminded of what an entrance can be. The transition between outside and inside is not an afterthought there, but a way of life. The ‘porch’ is not a residual strip; it is welcoming, meeting, chilling, family. You don't just enter a house, you arrive.
When I came to study in the Netherlands, I learned something different. A housing hall must be efficient. As small as possible. No waste of square footage. Optimize the GLA, maximize the GO. The front door and the space behind it are not ritual, but logistics. Throughput. Cost control. And somewhere we've come to think that's normal.
We design homes as if everyone lives the same. The hall is minimal. The kitchen is open. The living room is the heart. The staircase is efficiently positioned. We optimize square footage, calculate GLA/GO ratios and squeeze the floor plan into an economically balanced whole. Functional, logical, rational. But logical or functional for whom?
The Netherlands has long since ceased to be a homogeneous society. Our streets are diverse. Our schools are diverse. Our food culture is diverse. But our housing plans? They are strikingly uniform. That's not a coincidence. That's a design choice.
In many cultures, it is natural to remove your shoes before entering a house. The entrance there is not a residual zone, but an essential filter between outside and inside. A place of transition, of delay, of ritual. Yet we design the hall as a minimal traffic space: just wide enough for a coat rack. Efficient, but culturally not universal.
Space embodies values. The open kitchen reflects an ideal of transparency. The small hall suggests that outside and inside need hardly be separated. The standard bedroom size assumes a particular family model. What we call ‘logical’ is often the translation of dominant living patterns. And efficiency is not a universal tool in this regard. It has become an ideology.
We in architecture like to talk about encounter, inclusiveness and diversity. About representation in juries and on stages. But how inclusive is our architecture itself? Do we design homes that leave room for multi-generational families? For informal care structures? For religious customs? For other ideas of privacy and collectivity?
We will be building hundreds of thousands of homes in the coming years. Right now we are establishing how the Netherlands will soon live. This is the time to question the standard. Not by labeling target groups, but by thinking more fundamentally: can we design more flexibly? Can entrances regain meaning? Can interspaces exist without being immediately cut out?
Architecture has always had the ambition to anticipate social change. Perhaps we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: are we designing for the society that is and will be, or for a society that was once dominant?
Perhaps it is time for our floor plans to become as diverse as our streets.
