Aldo van Eyck

Product Information

There he looked at, studied and deliberated on the planning of the city at both the large and small scales and on many layers and was assigned to design the public playgrounds for Amsterdam’s children. It was a city-wide project that enabled him to start the development of new thinking and experimental forms for a more inclusive modern architectural and urbanistic language. Ideas about play haven’t changed much since then,” says Nicola Butler, chair of Play England, who co-authored the charity’s Design for Play guidance in 2008 – and then discovered that Allen had written a pamphlet of the same name in 1962, outlining almost identical principles. “The more objects that children can actually manipulate themselves, the more enjoyment they will get out of a playground.” Buildings as deferential and fragmented as this do not stand strong enough to contribute to the essential dialogue of street, but here any such formal weakness is compensated for by the strong colours’ In 2014 it was declared a National Monument, but the masterpiece of Dutch structuralism has become obsolete and abandoned. Unlike the abstraction of “dwelling” as a concept, the doorstep was a physical reality. It was an actual step, that children sat on, while a parent talked to a neighbour. It could be a fort or a mountain. It was a bridge, too, between home and the street, between family and something bigger. It was the launch pad to the outside world.

Imagine being on a flat and featureless desert. There is no escape either from the sun that beats down by day and the cold wind that blows by night, or from the gaze of any marauder who may pass. Then imagine that in this desert is a vertical plane a few paces long and a few paces high – a wall. During most of the day there would be shadow on one side or the other; at night there would be some shelter from the wind from most quarters; and it would be possible to hide from the view of passing marauders. Oversimplification of form and detail is still a serious failing of most modern architecture. Yet what should be critical is not so much a limited vocabulary of forms, as the discipline with which they are deployed (hence the deep attraction to Modern architects of frugal, even ascetic, purposefulness of vernacular buildings). And just as a building or space must communicate its use, to be usable, so must individual elements or details suggest use – again it is ambiguity that allows creative interpretation. The best Modern architects understood this and to them the challenge was to communicate without resorting to familiar conventions with their predictable interpretations. Within such a discipline there is no reason why architecture should not enrich its language to redress the balance upset by the oversimple and abstract language of early Modernism. Wherever architecture goes from here certain discoveries and disciplines of Modern architecture deserve to be retained.

This first project, although enthusiastically received in Noordwijk, did not get the approval of the executive board in Paris, largely because in making the program for ESTEC had underestimated the space needs of the facility constantly expanding. As a result, the program for the restaurant, library and conference center nearly doubled by adding a number of new office spaces, forcing the relocation of new additions to the large developing area southwest of existing buildings near From the main entrance to the complex down the road. The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary; but the noun affordances is not. I have made it up (p. 127; italics in original). The building is located on the southern outskirts of Amsterdam, IJsbaanpad 3B, Holland, an area that at the beginning of the 20th century was influenced by the South Plan proposed by H.P. Berlage for the extension of the city. It was located between the A10 motorway and the Olympic Games Stadium in 1928, on a flat lot without neighboring buildings. But from compulsive action in the modern age we achieved more alienation than liberation. We no longer see truth as something to be grasped in external facts, but as something to be uncovered slowly inside ourselves. We are less interested in doing anew than in seeing anew. Continuity is no longer hampering but is essential to depth, to the joy of discovering new nuance in what was always there. So today we are searching for an architecture that is more stable, and physically and symbolically richer. We want again a density of materiality and meaning that can be engaged in reverie as much as in physical action. Street urchin

The construction of the pavilion is a careful 2D drawing exercise. Six parallel walls almost 4 meters high are placed with a distance of 2.5 meters from each other. The walls bend, forming semicircular spaces, and the sudden cuts transform this simple pattern into a sophisticated spatial device. Until its reconstruction, this work stood as a model of paper architecture. Im Jahr 2014 wurde es ein nationales Denkmal, aber das Meisterwerk des niederländischen Strukturalismus dort ungebräuchlich und verlassen gefallen erklärt. For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on. There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need to be emphasized here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e., meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus, an affordances-based description of the environment “includes” the animal ( Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this, describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an animal points to the functional significance this environment has for the animal. It refers to what the animal can do in his environment, what it means to him ( Gibson, 1982).

A big part of his life was going against the grain, being in opposition to the mainstream, whatever that was: mainstream Modernism, mainstream CIAM, mainstream Team X or mainstream Postmodernism (the latter most famously in his Rats, Posts and Other Pests rant at the RIBA in 1981). The Amsterdam Orphanage was truly a city for lost children. The building (now the Berlage School of Architecture) is a low, one- and two- storey beehive-like structure, a sequence of clusters in which children can invent by way of play and exploration a sense of community in the absence of a family, a place of chance encounters and of the imagination. Much publicised and debated when built, it was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair until taken over by the Berlage School in recent years. The small domes form a grid that extends evenly throughout the building so that the general pattern can be read at each point. Along the axial lines of this grid, pillars, architraves and solid walls mark a series of well-anchored and enclosed spaces: the adjacent lounges and courtyards, the party room, the gymnasium and the central courtyard. While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country.