Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times
“I fell in love with a space
between two buildings from different periods,” Jakub Szczesny, the
Polish architect, said. “I decided to make a link.” More Photos »
Multimedia
Mr. Szczesny, who belongs to a collective called Centrala, which is
devoted to experimental architecture, got the far-fetched idea of
building a house in the incredibly thin gap between them. “I fell in
love with a space between two buildings from different periods,” he
said. “I decided to make a link.”
Mr. Szczesny, 39, began to imagine an ideal resident for the home, and
settled on Etgar Keret, an Israeli writer whose reputation for producing
collections of very short stories, like his most recent “Suddenly, a
Knock on the Door,” marked him as someone accustomed to working within
tight parameters, and whose Jewish heritage and Polish roots offered a
moving connection to Warsaw. (As a child during World War II, the
author’s mother smuggled food past Nazi checkpoints just steps from
where Mr. Szczesny hoped to build.)
When Mr. Keret, 45, received a call from the architect, he was initially
puzzled. “This guy with a very heavy Polish accent said he wanted to
make a house in proportion to my stories,” he said. “It sounded like a
prank.” But Mr. Szczesny flew to Tel Aviv, where the author lives, and
proved himself sincere. And Mr. Keret liked the idea that his family
would reclaim a home of sorts in Warsaw.
Last week, after more than a year of bureaucratic tangles and
engineering challenges, and with the crucial aid of a crane shipped in
from Germany, Keret House opened its doors — or door. At just four feet
across at its widest, and a mere 28 inches at its narrowest point, it
may be the world’s thinnest home.
“It was a fantastic set of impossibilities,” Mr. Szczesny said of the
planning and construction. “We had heart attacks, one after another.”
The palpitations began when Mr. Szczesny had to determine who owned that
appealing void between the buildings. Wola, the district that contains
the Keret House, controlled the space, and local officials helped the
architect navigate the permit process. But then, city heating pipes
discovered under the site caused months of delays and necessitated a
redesign.
The final design makes use of a light steel frame built out of small
modules that screw together. Local steel companies, busy putting up
shopping malls, had no interest in the small, complex job, Mr. Szczesny
said. He ran into more trouble finding machinery that could work in such
narrow confines. Finally, he found a company willing to build the frame
and a German crane to slide it into place.
What is Keret House like inside? Raucous parties are unlikely to happen there.
The kitchenette is three feet wide (though that might not faze New
Yorkers), with a miniature sink and a sliding door that conceals one of
those cramped airplane bathrooms. The second floor, reached by a ladder,
holds a bed whose dimensions do not encourage overnight guests.
The downstairs living area is the skinniest spot in the house, 35 inches
wide. But a claustrophobe can take comfort that it also has the highest
ceilings and “gets plenty of eastern light,” from one of two windows,
Mr. Szczesny said. The architect used semitransparent plastic for the
roof, rather than concrete, to bring in additional light and create a
sense of space.
Mr. Keret, who flew to Warsaw for the opening, thinks of the house as
the domestic equivalent of one of his stories: small but complete. “It’s
something that is very, very compact,” he said. “But it has in it all
the stuff that a house needs.”
The author said that he plans to stay in the house, at least overnight.
“It seems fitting to try to create in it,” he added. “The house will be a
portal to all kinds of artistic initiatives.”
By Polish law, Keret House is too small to be a residence. It has been
classified as an art installation, to be owned and administered by the
Foundation of Polish Art. Mr. Szczesny and Mr. Keret plan to select
artists for residencies of five to seven days.
Now that Keret House is complete, Mr. Szczesny said with relief, “I’m going to get drunk for the first time in my life.”
The home’s namesake took a more sober view. Shortly before his
grandfather’s death during the war, Mr. Keret said, he told his mother,
“You must stay alive so our name will survive.” She left Poland for
France and then Israel, where she still lives, and has never been back.
“For me, it’s a kind of metaphor for my family reclaiming a place in
Poland,” Mr. Keret said. “In this place where they killed our family,
there will now be a house called the Keret House.”
Like the house itself, he added, “We are like somebody who pushed their way in.”
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