Dutch architect Maurice Nio’s Cyclops development of 12 houses embedded in a sound barrier looks like a dozen sleek, aluminum-skinned vehicles emerging from a subterranean speedway. Nio created Cyclops for the purely utilitarian purpose of financing the sound barrier, which was needed to dampen noise for further housing development along the busy road leading to Diependaal, in the woods of Hilversum, a 20-minute drive south of Amsterdam.

With its shiny surfaces, relentless horizontals, and thrusting angles paying homage to speed and technology, Cyclops is a gritty modernist take on streamline moderne. On the other hand, its name refers to a cave-dwelling giant, and inside the houses there’s a curiously cave-like quality. A kind of primal domesticity has been inserted into a totem of technology.

Architects have generally not risen to the challenge of building houses attached to sound-barrier walls, preferring to pretend that the whole undignified situation doesn’t exist: “Sound-barrier houses all look suburban,” says Nio. “But our inspiration was the road. That’s why the houses are like cars. Also, we wanted a strong contrast between the technical solution—the sound barrier and the houses, which we treated as one element—and the surrounding nature, the woods.” The aluminum houses are anchored by the curved, tilted sound barrier, made of a translucent, light-green polycarbonate. “It’s almost like a work of art,” says Nio.

The essential, challenging deformity of the site—its “blindness,” backed up against the uncompromising sound barrier—allowed for opportunities such as cantilevering the fi rst fl oor to catch the light in a single massive eye of window (hence “Cyclops”), and puncturing the floor with portholes so light can reach the dark lower level. “Even the aluminum cladding was a challenge,” says Nio, “because we wanted it glued on, not screwed in place—cars don’t have screws. To really insist on facing challenges in this way is a difficult way to work, because you are not repeating solutions. But it does mean you eventually travel much further.”