Shown here and on page 3 are three workshops and twelve homes - responses to the site's five types of environment:

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TYPE 1-1: DE LOODS - USE OF THE UNTRANSFORMED SHED

The shed as an undifferentiated enclosure. This functionally undefined shed is equally sufficient for its original use for entrepot storage as for its new use as the enclosure of a fabrication workshop. 

Shown here is the most pure example of Type 1. A similar workshop in a similarly undifferentiated portion of the shed (though closed at its south end by the new wall of an adjacent home) can be seen below [Re: LEEN Workshop - EELCO LEEMANS HOME].

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BAS & ROB WORKSHOP (1993--) [bays 51 to 53]

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TYPE 1-2: DE LOODS - TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SHED INTO WORK-SPACES
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MARIJKE SMIT FURNITURE WORKSHOP (19##--) [bay 25]

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WILMER PAINTING STUDIO (19##--) [bay 28]

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TYPE 1-3: DE LOODS - TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SHED INTO HOMES

Three out of the 5 homes built inside De Loods are shown here. They illustrate three different ways of organising the relation of home to location.

Alma’s, the earliest of the three homes, treats the shed-space as an ‘open site’ to build on - her house is a developed stage of the tented camp that was its inception. Unlike the other two examples, the ‘house-like’ part: its heated living/bed room, is not identical with a portion of the Shed itself, but is a box within the enclosure; the primary space of the shed is thus never conquered and digested as ‘home’. She prefers this ‘exterior’ solution, the contrast of sealed home and ‘open’ shed: (ALMA: “You couldn’t see the interesting things in De Loods under an ugly ceiling”).

Grace’s home is the opposite of the first, filling its site to the almost total physical and mental exclusion of its origin. It packs a narrow 8m slice of Shed with such dense convoluted routes of such strangely linked places, so fascinatingly encrusted with objects, that one can become lost inside it and (as in a dream or story) forget its location and lose sense of size and orientation.

Eelco’s well-made conventional wooden house excises a rectangular 2-bay section of the shed between the usual cement-block walls - unusually however these can be seen from without, like the facades of a row-house. It is entered through a scavenged ‘cottage-door’ approached along a flag-stoned ‘garden-path’ wending between machines across a large fore-court of unredeemed workshop (itself entered through a steel door in De Loods’ road front). At its rear one exits through a 'back-door' into a small 'back-yard'. The dwelling can thus be more completely appraised as an object: a ‘house inside a shed’ (almost a ‘whole-house’ version of Alma’s living-room 'box').

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THE FIRST HOME-BUILDING INSIDE DE LOODS

In January 1983 much of De Loods was rented to companies for store-space; there was one squatted studio-space [Paul], and several people now occupied the rail-workers house.

The first time De Loods was squatted with the intention of building homes in it was January ‘83 when a group of five (a single and two couples) came from a neighbourhood squat, soon to be destroyed. As it turned out only two of this group succeeded in forming a home beyond the ‘break-even point’: up to which the investment can be defeated by memories of comfort!

The group took a 6-bay wide space (24x10m), next to Paul’s enormous studio, divided from it by the ubiquitous polythene-curtain (of all squats’ first-stage of territory differentiation). It was very cold - they collected building materials and left (into accommodation courtesy of the neighbourhood squatting group) - returning in April to find a new squatter building with their materials, they helped him and replaced them from the skips of the Houtmann renovation (an ex-squatted warehouse on Van Diemensstaat). 

That summer the four remaining (the single man had left) camped in tents inside their space - built a WC and shower (water piped through a 40m hose from a still-functioning De Loods WC), and two cement-block walled top-less living-enclosures. Before the winter they capped these ‘boxes’ with timber-stiffened board ceilings and installed heaters. The group dispersed however: one couple left and the other separated, dividing the space and ‘living-boxes’ between them - one of these is described below.

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ALMA LANGEVELD HOME (1983--)  [bays 19 to 21]
[Quotes are Alma's]

Alma has continued to differentiate her living-space around the core of its initial (8m x 4·5m x 2·4m high) box-like inner room. This functions as a separate warm and comfortable ‘house’ within the ‘outside’ space of the voluminous enclosure of her portion of the shed, where other domestic needs/functions are grouped along a kind of ‘street’, continuous with its entrance-passage.