Global Inspiration: Floating Bricks House

The Floating Bricks is a project that arose from the fascination for residual flows, but also in response to the aesthetic application of brick slips as if it is a traditional brickwork wall.

Many producers of building products have standardized their processes in such a way that they produce their product in the most efficient way. The remaining materials are recycled again. For example, wrongly cut glass, chipped panes or remaining pieces of glass go into the glass container and are processed again into glass, faulty produced bricks are crushed and used in another brick or used as road fill.

Can these residual flows not be applied directly? Can we intercept these flows and change the production lines of the producers? Are we able to come up with new products and create new value for these mostly high-quality materials?

With the Floating Bricks we combine these two residual flows. On the one hand Qbiq wall system rejects that don’t fit their module size and on the other hand left over brick slips from Wienerberger.

Our brain fills in. We think we know what we see. If we see bricks, we expect brickwork with cement joints and we will see that. With the Floating Bricks you will initially see a brick wall. The moment you get closer, you discover that there are no cement joints holding the wall together. Every brick floats in the air, together they form that solid brick wall. We created a façade element that brings the illusion of a brick wall, but turns out to be transparent. With this principle we build an archetype house of about 2 by 3 meters with a roof under 45 degrees. A black painted steel frame form the contours of the house. The Floating Bricks panels are clamped in the glass with punctured inner tires, collected at local bike shop.

The front facade of the house can be fully opened with two doors, in the house you can sleep in a bed or in the mesh under the attic. The ordered glue dots between the glass and the bricks appear as a sixties wallpaper on the interior of the house. To ensure privacy you can close the curtains made from recycled PET bottles.

At this moment Floating Bricks House is part of the Culture Campsite in Rotterdam, where you can sleep in architectural objects.

The Floating Bricks House can also be used as meeting room in an (industrial) office space, as garden house, as storage space, as cottage house. The house is standing on short posts and is lifted 40 cm above the ground, so wherever the house is based the landscape or floor can continue underneath the house.