On the edge of Maaspoort, a perfectly ordinary 1980s housing estate in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, fifty white spheres stand on stilts. The street is called Bollenveld — “sphere field” — and walking between the trees you get the feeling that a colony of astronauts has landed just short of the terraced houses. The Bolwoningen exist only here — nowhere else in the world.
A sculptor builds houses
They were designed not by an architect but by the sculptor and designer Dries Kreijkamp (1937–2014). His fascination with the sphere began in the mid-sixties, when he made crystal balls at the Royal Dutch Glassworks. His argument was simple: we live on a sphere, we are born from a sphere — so why not live in one? The box, Kreijkamp said, does not suit human beings; we move in curves and feel more sheltered inside round forms.
He built the first prototype, in polyester, in his home town of Vlijmen. In 1984 the fifty spheres in ‘s-Hertogenbosch followed — funded by the Dutch subsidy programme for experimental housing set up in 1968; the Bolwoningen were among its last projects. One sphere cost about 92,000 guilders at the time — less than €42,000.
How a bolwoning works
Each sphere measures 5.5 metres across, is made of glass-fibre reinforced cement with insulation, and sits on a three-metre cylindrical plinth. The parts were prefabricated in Rotterdam and assembled in a single day. A sphere weighs just 1,250 kilograms — less than Buckminster Fuller’s famously light Dymaxion house.
Inside, a spiral staircase leads upward: storage in the plinth, the bedroom above it, bathroom and toilet in the middle, and at the top the living room with kitchen and the round windows, 1.20 metres across. On paper about 55 square metres spread over the levels; against round walls a good 25 remain freely usable — designed for one- and two-person households. The acoustics are peculiar, and residents like to tell you how one hangs a calendar on a curved wall.
Kreijkamp’s energy argument: of all solids, the sphere has the smallest surface for a given volume. Less wall touches the cold outside air, the house cools more slowly, and the wind finds almost nothing to grip. What is marketed as a tiny house today stood here forty years ago.
From experiment to monument
All fifty spheres are social rental housing to this day, and they have been lived in continuously. When the Eurovision Song Contest 2021 showed a clip from the Bollenveld, things began to move: the city commissioned research into the architectural-historical value and on 19 April 2022 placed the Bolwoningen on the municipal heritage list — as a striking example of so-called Post-65 architecture.
Visit, and you quickly notice these are not museum pieces but homes: wheelie bins by the plinths, gardens growing into the paths — and on one door, above a knocker, the handwritten note “HARD KLOPPEN”: knock hard. The doorbell is evidently a side issue; the humour is not.
Visiting the Bolwoningen
- Where: Bollenveld, 5237 ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Maaspoort district), right by the water. From the station by bus, or about 20 minutes by bike.
- Respect: The Bolwoningen are private homes. They can be photographed freely from the public paths — but not into the residents’ windows.
- From inside: Erfgoed ‘s-Hertogenbosch offers a virtual tour of a bolwoning (link below).
Sources
- Wikipedia (nl): Bolwoningen and Wikipedia (en): Bolwoningen — figures, material, the 1968 scheme.
- ArchDaily: AD Classics — Bolwoning / Dries Kreijkamp — Kreijkamp, assembly, the Dymaxion comparison.
- Erfgoed ‘s-Hertogenbosch: Bolwoningen op de monumentenlijst — the monument decision of 19 April 2022, Post-65, the 2021 Song Contest.
- Bolbewoners wiki — by the residents themselves, and the virtual tour of a bolwoning.