Its basic form is a 4x4m box lined with carpets for insulation. Built for him in a fortnight with scrap materials as a spontaneous gift from two british ‘buskers' who were staying in the city. Since then he has used it not only to live in but as a site for a pictorial ‘object-collage’ which extends from its billboard-like facade into a forecourt edged by a kind of wooden ‘rockery’.

Though the little house is in the garden of Maria Goudsblom's boat, there was apparantly opposition from some De Loods residents: the house "is ugly"... it's "just a box" (the taste-police are even here!).

Of the three houses this is the most ambitious, personal, and expressively complex; yet economically practical in its means. Not only is the whole house made of scrap or cheap ‘seconds’, its construction is as straightforward as need, technique and material allowed. She is always testing and extending it, practically and aesthetically.

For 1½ years Jolien rented a boat on Westerdok. With eviction imminent (and two children: 4 and 9) she decided to build a house on the quay beside the boat and cleared a space back to the loading-platform of De Loods. After 2½ months of research (she had no building experience), planning (she drew the framework), and collecting materials (from the usual city demolitions and the “barges for large waste”), construction began on 30 April 1991 (“Queens Day”).

The house is about 9m long: a 6x4m living-room and a narrower 3x3m children’s’ room, the difference more than made up with a 2m veranda. Building commenced with large wood joists placed across three rails of the dock’s crane-railways - the gaps between filled with tarred sheets of polystyrene insulation (dumped nearby De Loods just when needed) and a plank floor laid on top. On the edges of this base a quite flimsy frame arose, and was bridged across with roof ‘joists’: planks nailed to the sides of the uprights, joined and stiffened with spacers - the whole light structure needed the slabs of wall to stiffen it. The roof (pitched down to the rear) is ply-boards (2nd-hand), then polystyrene insulation and tar-paper over all. The rear wall touches the loading-platform of De Loods (with an ingenious water-seal between). “How simple it can be to construct a solid house!...but as you know its not too simple to find out what is simple” [Re: Jolien's explanatory notes].

It seems that the house resulted as much from opportunism and luck as from organisation: finding, noticing, and precise unconscious measuring (the ‘co-incidents’ that are familiar from the accounts of many of these improvisers) - “It was really magical how almost no materials were left over and things turned up when needed during building.”.

The house “grew all at once and things turned up when needed”. A man brought two slabs of planks towed behind his canoe: “they fitted the back-wall exactly” (other walls were filled ad hoc with ply and planks). The veranda floor was also found as two large slabs and its PVC roof was in a nearby skip. At the Central Station she saw a dormer-window (quaint ’faiery-medieval’ style) behind building-site wire: saved as a model for copying - the other ‘originals’ were being hurled from the roof by ’restoration’ workers...they carefully lowered one for her (probably the only authentic survivor from this familiar city eyesore now adorns her house): a precise fit in another window’s opening! Her desire for a “special” front-door was quickly satisfied by the Harlammerdijkstraat church conversion; its medallion plaque was skip-found soon after.

She remembers that the objects that adorn it and those simply left around for use “seemed to grow with the house”. Here unity is achieved, not only on the level of (subliminal) aesthetic sense and via the order of realising needs (growing from the larger and most physical to the outermost layer of personal mnemonic-objects); but also because everything (even kitsch, eg: the porcelain plaque’: supposed to give its owner a sense of participation in ‘refined-taste’) is levelled in value, brought into the egalitarian association of ‘junk’. Thus their individualities as objects mutually relate without divisions of ‘status’ obscuring their fascinating differences of substance and appearance, function and intention.

Only one De Loods resident objected to her building there. Men living on nearby boats “didn’t offer to help, they just bet on my failure - now they respect me”.

JOLIEN HOUSE ON WESTERDOK QUAY: FROM PATH (pic 9-93 / to EES) Jolien’s house is the most elaborated (and actively evolving) expression of domestic life and needs on the Westerdok quayside.	JOLIEN HOUSE ON WESTERDOK QUAY: FROM GATE  (pic 9-94 / to EES)	JOLIEN HOUSE ON WESTERDOK QUAY: FROM GATE  (pic 8-95 / to EES)
JOLIEN HOUSE ON WESTERDOK QUAY: FROM PATH  (pic 11-97 / to NE) The final form of Jolien's house: with a yellow windowed extension for her eldest child.	JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT FACADE - FRONT DOOR (pic 9-93 / to EEN)	JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT FACADE - CENTRAL STATION DORMER & DOVE CAGE (pic 9-93 / to NE)
JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT FACADE - CENTRAL STATION DORMER & DOVE CAGE (pic 9-93 / to EEN)	JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT FACADE - NORTH END (pic [damaged] 6 or 9-94 / to EEN)	JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT NORTH END GARDEN - VIEW TO BAY-46 CARAVAN (pic 6 or 9-94 / to N)
JOLIEN HOUSE: FRONT FACADE - N-END OF VERANDA WITH FRONT-DOOR & JOLIEN (pic 6 or 9-94 / to N)	JOLIEN HOUSE: INTERIOR OF MAIN ROOM - VIEWED THROUGH VERANDA WINDOW (pic 10-93 / to EEN) View across main living-room to a mosquito curtained bed corner and kitchen. The sky-light was bought from Arend’s junk-hoard (xmas decor furs its edges).	JOLIEN HOUSE: INTERIOR OF MAIN ROOM (pic 10-93 / to SW) This corner of the main living-room is a fascinating complexity of angles and openings, and of reciprocation between room and outside via the intermediaries of the veranda and the elaborate interface of the Central Station dormer (a kind of show-case for doves: continuous with the outside aviary and divided from the room only by chicken-wire). The three plain windows grouped in the corner present the garden to the room (one via a translucent panda); the thin tall corner one and the open door exquisitely isolate the entrance wall which stands alone like a hoarding, presenting its adornment of shelves, intimate and odd objects, mirror and dressing-table.
JOLIEN HOUSE: INTERIOR OF MAIN ROOM (pic 10-93 / to WWN) The front-door [pic lft] opens directly into the main living-room. The red boarded walls are common interior cladding in Dutch houses (3 pieces came from 3 different sources). The yellow-blue table is a coloured board (‘found long ago’) placed on a small table; the big arm-chair: a ‘family-object’.	JOLIEN HOUSE: VIEW FROM FRONT DOOR - GARDEN GATE & WESTERDOK (pic 9-93 / to W)	JOLIEN HOUSE: VERANDA TO N-END (pic [damaged] 9-93 / to N)
JOLIEN HOUSE: VERANDA & GARDEN WASH PLACE (pic 9-93 / to SSE)	JOLIEN HOUSE: VERANDA FROM GARDEN (pic 9-94 / to EES)	JOLIEN HOUSE: VERANDA WITH PAINTED WALL & FRONT-DOOR (pic 6-94 / to SSE)
JOLIEN HOUSE: VERANDA S-END & GARDEN WASH PLACE & (NEW UNFINISHED) COVERED WASH PLACE & WC  (pic 9-94 / to SW)	JOLIEN HOUSE: GARDEN WASH PLACE  & JOLINE'S BIKE (pic 9-93 / to SW) From the veranda, looking past the washing-up and through the sun-flowers to the water of the dock. This is the year before the wc/washing-machine arbour’ was built (the “very good quality” skipped wc-bowl is located 'on-site' but not yet installed) and all washing is performed outside - plumbing is by bucket. It will all soon be plumbed into an existing dock-discharging storm-drain with PVC piping (bought from Arend, a caravan dweller at the south end, whose specialty is bakfiets-collected junk (a 'bakfiets’ is the back half of a bicycle (fiets) rigidly fixed to a low flat wheeled trolley: used for transporting street-dump and skip finds for use and sale; (at least one, furnished with a small sofa, is a city-centre taxi!)).	JOLIEN HOUSE: (UNFINISHED) COVERED WASH-PLACE & WC AT VERANDA S-END (pic 9-94 / to W)
JOLIEN HOUSE: S-END (pic 6-94 / to NNW)	JOLIEN HOUSE: S-END WALL (OF THE CHILDRENS’ ROOM) (pic 1992 / to N) Why the blue?..."because it rains on that end and the paint was cheap"; the red window was a gift.

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TYPE 4-2: WESTERDOK QUAY - PARKED MOBILE HOMES

Rather permanent caravans are established at both ends of the quay.  As they began to accumulate the home makers in the Shed limited them to the south end in front of the 15 bays of the company's warehouse, and in front of workshops at the N end. Shown here are three examples from the south end (by 11-1997 one of these had grown a house-like extension).

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RED CARAVAN (PLUS EXTENSION) (198#--)  [before Shed-bay 9]