‘The twelve houses form an integral part of a soundproof embankment along a secondary road from Diependaal, an exclusive residential district in the woods of Hilversum. Despite its inhospitable setting and the clients’ initial scepticism, the futuristic, not to say fantastic, design of the houses attracted users who bought their houses of the drawing board, several years before delivery.
Without what is in effect a screen of houses, allowing the level of ambient noise to be brought down to acceptable limits, the rest of the urban design plan for Diependaal would never have seen the light of day. The project’s congenital, altruistic handicap justified the atypical solutions eventually proposed by Nio and his associates in the face of the client’s reservations. So for example the answer to the darkness at the back of the plot was to cantilever out the living room at the first floor level. Moreover, not everyone considers the lack of a garden to be a drawback, and a terrace can be a sales argument, even in suburbia.
In Hilversum, as in any fantastic setting, a house can be both a cavern and a giant, a term that could just as easily refer to the block of flats opposite. The residents are all explorers who are just passing through, threatened by poisonous rays and nostalgic for a place of peace and unspoiled nature that only a handful of neo-modernistic architects, obsessed by the American subculture and pessimistic prophecies, still dare to denounce publicly.’
