The flat I live in now has a charm of it’s own. Build in the sixties, when the architects still used the concrete recipes and outer wall thickness customary for flak towers and bunkers in WW2.[1] Knowing this, the interior designers used construction rubble[2] for the inner walls and hid it all under some garish colors[3] and modern plastics like linoleum.
All in all an interesting mix — especially when you consider the master-builder who was obviously high on LSD when they erected this thing. A line that is parallel to the floor is not necessarily parallel to the ceiling and there are weird supporting structures all over the place. Most of the walls are also not parallel — or straight for that matter and I’m not yet convinced that we actually have one right angle anywhere.[4]
I noticed this all years ago. When I first moved in I was highly motivated and decided to draw a great floor plan. Finally — after days of measuring — every conceivable length, width and hight was accounted for, but when I finally sat down to enter everything in the great computer programTM I was using, I noticed the unspeakable. This flat was so crooked it was distorting space itself.
Now Georg has the same idea I once had — map this non-Euclidian geometry in a puny program build to help modern day architects realize their unimaginative ideas. But to make it easier he went to the magistrate and requested the building blueprints. Turns out some walls were moved some time ago and the plan also indicates these changes.
Wait the scale must be wrong, this plan does not fit the measurements written on it.
Snicker
No this must be a mistake — if they move the wall to make the room bigger, the length of the room must also increase.[5]
Sometimes I can even hear his sanity begging him to stop, but the voice is getting weaker and weaker. Now when his insane laughter wakes me up at night and I see him hunching over the floor plan with this wide grin, I just go back to sleep and say to myself: just till October — you can make it Alexander.
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When we were renovating the bath the construction workers destroyed their hydraulic hammer — twice! ↩
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I know because I nearly knocked down a wall when trying to hang a picture once. ↩
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I’m talking violett, neon green and bright orange here. ↩
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I’m not kidding — ask Julia who helped me renovate this monster! ↩
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They actually made the room bigger on the plan, but reduced the indicated length and it is the real length of the room now. ↩
Seems to be a problem of the sixities/seventies. The flat I live in in Germany has the same features, but in a milder version - the layout of the rooms is NEVER a rectangle, always a rhomboid of some sort… At least the floors are parallel to the ceiling.
Sometimes it feels like living in a "Hundertwasser" building, only the floors are more or less flat - which is already a huge improvement
Maybe the flats could be rented out to some tourists for much money as inspired by Hundertwasser
Add a few reflecting tiles on your walls and plant a tree in your bathroom and it might work out.
We had mold — before we renovated. I wonder if this counts too