Hybrid Catalogue House

A house as an idea

A Hybrid Catalogue House is as mobile as its inhabitants, because this house has no fixed construction plan. Depending on the location and the needs of the residents, it looks different. It consists of a skeleton made of metal rods that is easy to transport and assemble. Just like in a catalogue, the buyers then choose local items, materials and craft techniques that they would like to be used for finishing the house. In Beijing, this could mean using renewable bamboo or applying the ancient craft of building sturdy scaffolds from bamboo canes. In Argentina’s coastal city of Ushuaia, you could collect driftwood from the beach and use old alpaca wool blankets as protection from the drafty wind. And in the Malagasy capital Antananarivo, a facade of palm leaves could offer protection from the sun. The founders of Refunc, Denis Oudendijk and Jan Körbes, built the first Hybrid Catalogue House at Futurium in Berlin. They turned beer tables into walls, removal blankets into insulation and clipboards into the facade.

Mobile living

Jan Körbes knows very well what it’s like to travel with his house and live in a confined space. In The Hague, where Refunc’s office is located, he and his team built a so-called tiny housefrom an old fodder silo that had been standing on a Dutch farm for a long time. With much creativity and many second-hand objects, Jan set up a place for living and working on 14 square metres. One day – because his daughter was living in Berlin and he needed to be there frequently on business – he loaded the house onto a trailer and transported it to Berlin. Currently, it’s standing at the Center for Art and Urbanistics in Moabit.

With his silo house, Jan demonstrates how we could be living in the future: in more than one place, globally connected, and working from just about anywhere. We could store music, books and photos in the cloud. Items that cannot travel with us would become less important. At the same time, we could use whatever we find to build our personal retreats. Mobile tiny houses such as the silo house or the Hybrid Catalogue House can offer a first glimpse of mobile living in the future.

Anything can become anything

The construction of the house also points to another important vision of the future: the circular economy. The idea of a circular economy involves using things and materials for as long as possible without turning them into waste. That’s one of the specialties of Denis and Jan from Refunc. They love giving new life to old things. They use ventilation shafts to build beach chairs for an exhibition, rented folding chairs to assemble an arena and concrete slabs from the construction sector to build an urban lounge. What’s so special about their projects is that they always keep the future in mind. What happens once the exhibition has ended? What if the arena is no longer needed? Or the lounge closes? The items are simply returned to their original functions. No waste is generated.

This way of thinking is still a real exception today. No less than 37 per cent of all waste generated in Europe comes from the construction industry. Until now, too little thought has been given to the future of materials in construction. In the future, houses that can be dismantled could produce far less waste. When they’re no longer needed, they can simply serve as sources of raw materials. Some architects are demanding that, in the future, we only build according to the cradle-to-cradle principle. That is, only using materials that can be reused and don’t produce any waste.

A world without waste

With their work, Refunc want to change the way we look at the things around us. We can learn from them to use the things that already exist to build almost anything we need. This circular way of using resources gives the things around us ever-new functions. Waste ceases to exists. Constructing houses from beer benches and removal blankets – as Denis and Jan have done – is just the beginning of a new way of building and living. The idea behind this: in the future, anything can become anything.