BM House

Belgium, and particularly Flanders, has a very curious liberalism in building. Property-own¬ing and building are a national preoccupation, with freedom from regulation as the rationale. Ribbons of construction stretch from village to village and from town to town. Ribbon devel-opment alternates with housing estates in the country areas; it is impossible to convey a gen-eral picture of the housing estates. Then there may be open fields, or a large country estate with a grand house, with lawns and parkland. And, rarely, the occasional forest.
The Flemish countryside is more generally identifiable as open plains of meadowland and streams, alternating with small-scale woodlands. The latter include natural woodland and culti-vated plantations, which are sometimes hardly distinguishable from one another. But between them there is always some more building. Much vilified in Flanders itself, and found strange outside Flanders. It has thoroughly degraded the landscape. There is no spot from where one cannot see a building or hear human activities. This is true, but at the same the question arises as to whether this too cannot be appreciated as landscape. Building as landscape. A question for which no answer is yet in prospect, but which could conceivably give a new slant to the prob¬lem situation (whether real or imaginary).

There is more to be said about the BM House besides its round or circular or annular shape. The drawing of the ring is merely the outcome of other real kinds of fascination.

The house is situated in a wooded landscape allotted to housing development. Understandably, many other houses preceded this one, in most instances by a long chalk. The BM House is one of the last to win a place in this landscape.
Beech trees—beautiful, mature, tall beeches—make the location. They can be relied on for leafy shade in the summer and colour in the autumn.

It is a dilemma, this place. It’s a place you’d rather leave as it is, but it’s also a place you’d love to stay in. Looking at the garden. From a settee. From the bed I lie on. The table I eat at. That is the starting point. The beech trees. Al¬ways in view.

A settee, a table, a bed. Actually those are rooms, rooms with windows. A cascade of rooms. One after another. Crossing through the garden of beeches. And I look one way or anoth¬er; everyway, in that garden. I walk around, from one room to another. The house is round.

But the house isn’t actually round. Not only be¬cause that wasn’t the idea, but one room after another and then finally forever. The house is po¬lygonal. Each room has its own perspective; call it a frame. The next room changes angle. But a given room has a different angle of view when it looks out onto the surrounding garden from when it looks at the three beeches enclosed by the rooms. The rooms stand between the beeches and the beeches stand between the rooms.

The house is contained between two horizontal slabs and the rooms alternate with an equal number of vertical slabs. Slabs, because they are concrete. Carefully dimensioned. Careful¬ly textured. A texture which makes concrete no stranger amid this place of beech trees. Formwork planks can be stapled together, and alternate with the grain of rough panels. But it is always a natural texture, like bark, that forms the nature of the beeches. Windows alone are the division between garden and room. Large windows; wide views.