Facade of Ceramic House All Photos by Studio RAP / Riccardo De Vecchi

Studio RAP is an architectural design company that brings computational design innovation to clients. That means parametric design and bespoke 3d printing, very experimental it’s part architecture, product design, fashion even.

Along with co-architects Gietermans & Van Dijk they have created in 2022 Ceramic House, a reimagined facade of a 19th Century dutch brick house. Studio Rap here have taken this dutch universal design palette and twisted it in a way both matching and at the same time almost unrecogniseable. They have taken the brick and ceramic materials and given them the appearance of a living fabric.

Technically although it looks like a brick facade gone crazy its ceramic brick tiles mounted on stainless steel cassettes on steel substructure. A rainscreen facade instead of a solid one, with the steel cassettes acting as a visual mortar.

The game played here is lovely, the tension between the existing architectural expression and a new one expressing itself is delicious.

Ceramic House is on the street P.C. Hoofstraat, itself a 19th C bourgoisie re-interpretation of the dutch canal house street. It’s also nice to see it here on the same street where MVRDV ’s Glass Brick Facade with the material of glass bricks is an earlier example trying to do the same thing. Thus a high end extremely experimental design conversation has appeared in an otherwise fairly non-descript street.

Experimental high fashion in design is lurking here playing a game with itself accepting as few constraints from the existing city fabric and totally breaking a few others.

⚲ location: 52°21’39.1”N 4°52’57.4”E

Some concept sketches below of the 3d printed facades.

Meander from the Air Photo by Anders Portman

Meander is an Apartment block in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl some 18 years ago in 2006 as a winning international competition entry but only finished in 2024.

It compromises of 115 apartments, gardens, a wine cellar, a spa, a movie theater, and yoga studio on an infill site in the Töölö neighbourhood of Helsinki.

I think the project was stuck until a new developer took over the site and they resurrected the Meander development.

After acquiring the Meander property, Newil&Bau restarted the design process in cooperation with Steven Holl Architects and its Finland-based partner office ARK-house Arkkitehdit. via

The Architect Stephen Holl’s connection with Helsinki and Finland is strong. He designed the Kiasma museum in Helsinki in 1998, his first museum commission and was awarded the Alvar Aalto medal that same year. After 18 years his second project Meander was finished in late 2024. At the beginning of 2025 I went to see it with a couple of friends.

Meander Sketch by Stephen Holl

Meander I guess refers to the plan completely the buildings parti a meandering line through a thin rectangular site which thickens out on the side that directly faces another apartment block. Here is the part which provides the largest block of apartments. From there the building takes a walk and thinning out as it goes, ending up floating above the entrance to the underground parking level.

Meander PlanSketch by Stephen Holl

The plan makes for a slightly strange layout, a double loaded corridor turns and becomes a single loaded corridor but enclosed so that it’s hidden from the elevations and so of no help to cross ventilation for those single loaded apartments. The contractor reports an approximately 50% lesser carbon footprint¹ to a conventional apartment building which at a guess is probably mostly the work of an earth heating system. There is a two floor pedestal which encloses the shared spaces and some split level warehouse style apartments. The balconies of the single floor apartments above extend out and form a continuous and solid glass outer skin to the internal timber orange cladding behind. From the North to South sides the building also steps down at a smooth angle noticeable when you see the roof from the side.

Plan of Meander

So programmatically the building is nothing special. Where I think it does shine though is the way Holl has formally with the plan of the building made the design. The strong curved folded plan makes for slightly enclosing open courtyard spaces on both long sides of the building. This really works on site, a feeling of enclosure without it actually being enclosed. A constantly changing outlook as you move and a little bit of protection for the apartment terraces. It’s really nice and works.

Section of Meander

Moreover the tapering building is pulled off really nicely the effect being it is a good proportion at its highest meeting the opposite apartment block but has tapered really nicely to almost a point where its south facade is wide enough for only a path and car access. So the apparently arbitrary meandering plan actually gives a strong formal elegance to the whole building while addressing well the problems of the thin enclosed site.

Some details follow Kiasma, Holls rough timber shuttered concrete is also here. A nice light touch of the plan shown as a handle on the main doors. The soffit of the balconies in a contrasting yellow, a Töölö staple of colorful balcony soffits continued here. The external glazing doesn’t hide exposed steelwork to support it or ventilation ducts puncturing it, still thats not enough to spoil the facades.

I like this building more than Kiasma. Holl’s formal artistic response really sets this building in it’s site and it makes a lovely addition to an otherwise interesting block.

⚲ location: 60°10’38.7”N 24°54’54.4”E

Meander from the Courtyard Photo by Anders Portman

The Book

I saw a reference somewhere online to Yuiri Slezkine’s The House of Government and thinking it was a book about a single building a giant 1931 block of flats in central Moscow opposite the Kremlin I ordered my kindle copy and started reading. I had no idea it was an 1100 page work covering the birth of Bolshevism and its first death in Stalin’s Great Purges. A heavyweight work of History. In my ignorance I couldn’t have been more right or more wrong as it turned out. It is basically about one large apartment block and it’s inhabitants. But also because of the nature of the building it’s really about the birth life and death of the revolution which just happens to be able to be well mapped out onto bricks and mortar.

I was not prepared for the size and scale of this book. For it’s epic nature both as a detailed reconstruction of the moment of revolutionary history or of its personal histories all intertwined and related back to The House of Government building itself. It’s a majestic work of History and maybe almost a literary masterpiece.

Yuri Slezkine has researched and captured both big and small lives involved. The details and the grand sweeps. It is enchanting to see laid out so clearly just how strange the revolution was. How middle class, sectarian, literary and insular. How cultish.¹

Mapping the Russian Revolution onto an apartment building whether or not as a metaphor is a big move. In Owen Hatherley’s review of the book in The Guardian he points out that Slezkine has made this trick before in his earlier essay The USSR he already explicitly referred to communist multiculturalism by way of an architectural metaphor of the thinly subdivided “kommunalka” flat.

So this is a trick or blueprint already used by Slezkine. Here it serves two purposes it allows him to jump in and out of the lives of the inhabitants all higher up party officials. Making use of diaries, personal recollections etc he can move around an apartment floor ringing on different door bells, or opening up personal diaries and interviews. This allows him to weave the story he wants to tell in with the personal stories of those very actors in the scenes he describes. Novels and plays are also widely are quoted illustrating the internal psychology of the revolution as it were.

But it also allows for a way to superimpose a greater scale when wanted. Here this apartment block serves as the vessel/metaphor for the Bolshevist birth, life and death cycle. External Historical events reflected directly in the lives of the inhabitants.

Be careful the detailed histories will engulf you, and although at the beginning I enjoyed them they quickly started to wear me out. Perhaps too the book tops and tails the whole story of revolutionary Russia a bit too much. The subjects of the book that live in the House of Government are upper level apparatchicks but not the very top, Lenin and Stalin are reported second hand. Also the peasants and factory workers are not represented here they are the people that the revolution happens to.

The Building

House on The Embankment photo source

But what about the building Itself? The House of Government more or The House on the Embankment ² as it is more widely known sits on the opposite bank of the Moskva to the Kremlin in the center of Moscow. It was designed in the late 20’s by the architect Boris Iofan for the Soviet elite to live in and finished in 1928.

Iofan was a Russian who had emigrated to Italy in 1914 and while there had joined the Communist party came back to Russia in 1924. Famous for his Palace of the Soviets competitions there is much written about him.³ He famously sketched out the House of Government in 1926 on the floor of Alexi Rykov’s flat ⁴. Rykov was the Premier of the SFSR who helped get the giant commission controversially at the time without a competition.

The construction of the building started in 1928 did not go smoothly and ran over time and budget. But at the beginning on 1931 the first residents moved into their apartments.

The giant block of flats was a mini neighbourhood to itself;

Halfway between bourgeois individualism and communist collectivism, it combined 505 fully furnished family apartments with public spaces, including a cafeteria, grocery store, walk-in clinic, child-care center, hairdresser’s salon, post office, telegraph, bank, gym, laundry, library, tennis court, and several dozen rooms for various activities (from billiards and target shooting to painting and orchestra rehearsals). - Yuri Slezkine ⁵

It was the largest residential building in Europe at the time a group of many units connected around three courtyards over 50m in height and about 12 floors high. With a 1,300 seat theater and a 1,500 seat cinema also included.

On 1 November 1932, 2,745 people lived in the house: 838 men, 1311 women, and 596 children. -via

It’s design encapsulated the change of attitude to architectural design at the time. The revolution changed so much about Russia and Architecture and design was no exception. The constructivist style was the child of revolutionary thinking and it started with the modernisation of politics, industry and also the family which would eventually be swept away.

But like all cults after the revolutionary phase comes a phase of retrenchment and certain norms reassert themselves. This time mirrors the transition of communist style from Constructivism to a neo-classical post-modernism. The House of Government sits across both these styles somewhat uncomfortably, it has presence and charisma but maybe not much beauty.

House on The Embankment source

Conclusion

For Slezkine the building encapsultes the revolution houses it physically and metaphorically.

It was the vanguard’s backyard; a fortress protected by metal gates and armed guards; a dormitory where state officials lived as husbands, wives, parents, and neighbors; a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.

In the great purges of the 1930s and 1940s some eight hundred people were evicted from the building and some three hundred killed.

Nowadays the Russian Empire grinds slowly on, eating itself while attacking it’s neighbours. The House of Government’s current residents are more likely pop stars and tv presenters than government officials but still the current upper-middle class living in luxury as the world around them slowly smoulders.

⚲ location: 55°44’41.1”N 37°36’40.9”E