The Initiation of Centraal Wonen Delft While the main movement of Centraal Wonen was developing strategies on how to turn their visions into an alternative form of housing, multiple subgoups appeared who wanted to realize their own projects. One of these groups established themselves in Delft around 1969. Their approach and most notable steps leading to the final project are discribed in the following chapter. The First Community The first initiators of the CW movement in Delft where a group of around 15 people that had grown graduatly. Cor Langedijk, a sociologist, was one of the these initiators and was later joined by further interested individuals, such as the journalist Lex Veldhoen. In 1973 the group was joined by Flip Krabbendam and Astrid Wiebenga, who at the time were architecture students in Delft and, apart from being interested in designing for such a residential community, also wanted to live this way themselves. (Krabbendam, 2013) The participants came from different backgrounds but were all united by the ambition to establish a collective place of living, that presented an alternative to the conventional nuclear family. Lex Velhhoen, for example had previously lived in a Kibbutz in Israel. Together with Flip Krabbendam they also visited collective housing communites in Denmark in order to take home insights that could be applied to CW Delft.
Figure 7:
community dinner in the early years of the project
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