Architecture on Foot: Wild Cantilevers and Socialist/Utopian-inspired Housing

Kind of funny how when one design approach pops up in one locale (Amsterdam)...

...it can also be found in another (Berlin):

It's one thing to have a ridiculous cantilever - though neither of these approach that of The House on the Rock - but to my eye the bonus here is the off-angle, which separates it even more from the form beneath it.

An earlier hang-over example (from 1997) is MVRDV's WoZoCo (aka "The Oklahoma"), social housing for the elderly. Its cantilevers were of a more practical nature: by projecting volumes out over the street it became possible to increase the number of units in the building to what was required (100) without sacrificing the quality of interior space for the elderly: the initial design fell 13 units short.¹ Clever and cool. This Rotterdam-based firms seems to have cantilevers on the brain.

But by far my favorite example of social housing-with-cantilevers is the reknowned example, from the Amsterdam School of design, the worker's palace housing project from 1919, known as Het Schip ("The Ship"):

This was part of a Socialist-inspired movement to provide housing for the poorest of Amsterdam's residents. This is part of a half-dozen similar projects in an area along the bay to the northwest of Amsterdam's center. Looking at the work of the School one suspects there was some back-and-forth between Frank Lloyd Wright and members of the Amsterdam School; and that "Socialism" may not be the bad word here that it is in America.