Advocating a new set of architectural concerns for postwar society, Aldo van Eyck belonged to the long tradition of Northern European experimentalism characterized by an attention to detail and craftsmanship coupled with a profound social commitment. His oeuvre comprises a vast array of tectonic ideas worked out within the programs of socially relevant structures, contributing greatly to modern architectures moral core.

Van Eyck was born in Driebergen, the Netherlands, on 16 March 1918; spent his primary and secondary school years in England; and took his architectural training at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich. After a stint in the Dutch army, he returned to the Netherlands and found employment in the Public Works Office (then under the direction of Cornelius van Eesteren), charged with the task of refabricating the war-ravaged city of Amsterdam. In 1952, he began private practice in The Hague and Amsterdam, in partnership first with Theo Bosch and later with his wife, Hannie van Eyck-van Roojen.

Aldo van Eyck’s introduction to the architectural community at large came during the eighth meeting of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) at Hoddeston, England, where his playground projects in Amsterdam caught the attention of Siegfried Giedion, the organization’s secretarygeneral and one of its founding fathers. Giedion reacted enthusiastically, writing, “These simple elements are grouped so subtly—with a background of the De Stijl movement and modern art which injects some kind of vitamin into the whole thing… (they also) fulfill another function. A formerly useless piece of waste ground has been transformed by an extremely careful layout into an active urban element. One need only provide the opportunity and we—the public, who are also maybe children of a kind—will know how to use it” (see Giedion 1952).

Giedion’s comments confirmed the duality of van Eyck’s architectural paradigm; namely, the coalescence of avant-garde form and a humanistic concern for the ethos of environment, a combination that van Eyck called “labyrinthine clarity.” Not incidentally, van Eyck’s interest in the fine arts was cultivated throughout a long friendship with Giedion’s wife, Carola Giedion-Welcker, a prominent art historian and a champion of Klee, Miro, Mondrian, and others. Through her tutelage, van Eyck maintained a lifelong attachment to aesthetic ideals that would continue to inform his work. His Sonsbeek Pavilion (1966–) in Arnhem, a temporary space for an exhibition of modern sculpture, was a successful use of orthogonal and curved planes used to create a small city within which to literally traverse the presented artistic landscape. Putting architecture in the service of art, van Eyck drew attention to the interrelatedness of the two practices, using contextuality and contiguity to point to the potential enrichment of life through aesthetic means.

The years immediately following World War II saw a radical shift in the direction charted for contemporary architecture. Taking action against the devastation and destruction delivered on European nations necessitated a move away from Utopian functionalism and toward a revitalization of associative perspective and a sense of belonging, and a younger generation of architects, known as Team X, were charged with reorienting CIAM toward these goals. However, whereas key members such as Alison and Peter Smithson maintained strong ties to the formalism of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, van Eyck advocated an approach to architecture that sought to underscore the eternal and immutable realities of humanity’s relationship to built form. By reconciling “twin phenomena,” such as inside and outside, that denied the possibility of easy dialectics, van Eyck sought to identify an “in-between” realm that would, in the architect’s own words, “reconcile conflicting polarities.”

The property of “in-between” was best exemplified by his most celebrated building, the Children’s Home (1957–60) in Amsterdam: what van Eyck called “a home for children in the context of architecture.” Playing with the notion of the module, the orphanage dispenses with traditional organization of space by creating a set of pavilions pinwheeling around a central axis; the resulting plan borrows heavily from De Stijl’s modularity while providing strong diagonals that challenge orthogonal ordering. Surprising occurrences of semiprivate spaces within the confines of the building bring a sense of the outside indoors, and the privacy of living quarters is ensured by their location at the periphery of the building, away from heavily trafficked areas. The result is a series of intimate spaces that adhere through a nonhierarchical yet clearly articulated modular program.

Although the school of Dutch structuralism, to which van Eyck’s name is often attached, never really resolved its relationship to the larger conditions of structuralism as obtained in literary criticism and anthropology, van Eyck’s own career drew from both of these disciplines in a more coherent fashion. Throughout his life, he maintained a vital attention to writing (especially during his stint as editor of the Dutch journal Forum from 1959 to 1963), his ideas developing within the fundamental framework of his notion of “relativity,” or the belief that human history unfolds in a way not subordinated to preordained principles but rather through the multivalency of reciprocal relations among people, things, and ideas. In 1959, van Eyck and his wife traveled to Sudan to study the habitats of the Dogon, having already visited the Sahara earlier in the decade. It was there that his notions of the perpetuity of humanity’s customs of existence found their inspiration and justification. Many of the themes arising from his ethnographic research recurred in later projects, such as the Hubertus House (1975–79) in Amsterdam, a home for single mothers and their children that underscores van Eyck’s responsiveness to social needs. A functionalist glass-and-steel recessed entryway ties the new polychromatic structure to an adjacent older building, maintaining the sense of historical order while insisting on the need for growth. Within the structure, lodgings presented as a set of scaled-down row houses provide a sense of familiarity as well as reinforcing the architect’s conviction that functionalism is not the enemy of history but rather has the capacity to expand and enrich one’s understanding of time and place. In 1990, van Eyck was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an award fitting his significant contributions to 20th-century architecture.

NOAH CHASIN

16 March 1918 Born in Driebergen, Netherlands;

1938 Attended the Building School, The Hague ;

1939–43 studied at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich ;

1943 Married Hannie van Roojen :2 children;

from 1946 Member, De 8 en Openbouw, Amsterdam ;

1946–50 Architect for the Public Works Department, Amsterdam ;

since 1947 Dutch delegate to CIAM ;

1948–51 member, COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) ;

1951–55 Lecturer in art history, Enschede Art School, Netherlands ;

1951–66 tutor at an art school, Amsterdam ;

from 1952 In private practice, The Hague and Amsterdam ;

from 1953 member, Team X ;

1956–61 tutor, Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam ;

1959–63, 1967 editor, Forum, Amsterdam ;

1961–68 visiting critic and lecturer: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, School of Architecture, Singapore, University of Trondheim, Norway ;

since 1968 professor, Institute of Technology, Delft ;

1971-82 partnership with Theo Bosch ;

1977–78 guest professor, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich ;

1978–83 Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania ;

1979 honorary member, Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf ;

1981 member, Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, Belgium ;

1981 honorary fellow, American Institute of Architects ;

1982 partnership with Hannie van Eyck-van Roojen from ;

1983 honorary member, Bund Deutscher Architekten, Germany ;

1990 Royal Gold Medal, Royal Institute of British Architects ;

January 14, 1999 Dies in Loenen aan de Vecht, Netherlands.

Groningen, Netherlands: Van de Beek, 1981

Bohigas, Oriol, “Aldo van Eyck, or, A New Amsterdam School,” Oppositions 9 (1977)

Hertzberger, Herman, Addie van Roijen-Wortmann, and Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck: Hubertus House; Hubertushuis (bilingual English—Dutch edition), Amsterdam: Stichting Wonen/Van Loghum Slaterus, 1982

Lefaivre, Liane, and Alexander Tzonis, “Aldo and Hannie van Eyck: ESTEC,” A+U 4, no. 247 (1991)

Giedion, Siegfried, “Historical Background to the Core,” in The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanization of Urban Life, edited by J.Tyrwhitt, J.L.Sert, and E.N.Rogers, New York: Pellegoini and Cudahy, 1952

Nicolin, Pierluigi, “The Web and the Labyrinth,” Lotus International 11 (1976)

Strauven, Francis, Het Burgerweeshuis van Aldo van Eyck: een modern mo nument, Amsterdam: Stichting Uitgeverij, 1987; as Aldo van Eyck’s Orphanage: A Modern Monument, Rotterdam: NAi, 1996

Strauven, Francis, “The Dutch Contribution: Bakema and van Eyck,” Rassegna 52, no. 4 (1992)

Strauven, Francis, Aldo van Eyck: relativi teit en verbeelding, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1994; as Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam: Architectura en Natura, 1998

Zevi, Bruno, “Children’s Home in Amsterdam,” Architettura 6 (1961)

Selected Publications

“CIAM 6, Bridgewater: Statement Against Rationalism” (1947), in A Decade of Modern Architecture, by Sigfried Giedion, 1954

“Dogen,” Forum 7 (1949); reprinted as “The Interior of Time: A Miracle of Moderation,” in The Meaning of Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird, 1969

“Wij Ontdekken Stijl,” Forum 4 (1949) “Het Verhaal an een Andere Gedachte,” Forum 7 (1959)

“What Is and Isn’t Architecture,” Lotus International 28 (1980)

“Aldo van Eyck: Annual RIBA Discourse,” Royal Institute of British Archi tects Journal (April 1981)

“By Definition,” Dutch Forum (June 1982)

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