Aldo van Eyck
(1918-1999)
Aldo van Eyck at the Otterlo meeting
Aldo Ernest van Eyck was born on 16 March 1918 in Driebergen, the Netherlands.
Between 1919 and 1935 he lived in London, where his father was a correspondent
for the Rotterdam newspaper NRC. After studying at the Royal Academy of Visual
Arts in The Hague, van Eyck studied architecture from 1938-42 at the Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule in Zurich where he became acquainted with the international
avant-garde. He remained in Zurich until the war ended and married fellow student
Hannie van Roojen.
In 1946, van Eyck moved to Amsterdam and worked there from 1946 until 1951 for
the urban development division of the city’s Department of Public Works
under Cor van Eesteren and Jacoba Bridgwater. He designed more than 700 playgrounds,
which he continued to design long after setting up his own practice in 1951.
Van Eyck gained international recognition with his design of Amsterdam’s
Municipal Orphanage (1955-60). His best-known works include the Pastoor Van
Ars Church in Loosduinen (1963-69), the temporary sculpture pavilion at Sonsbeek
(1965-66) and the PREVI housing in Lima, Peru (1969-72). He built the Hubertus
House — a house for single parents and their children — during his
partnership with Theo Bosch (1971-82) when the two of them also were responsible
for the urban renewal and some of the new buildings in the Nieuwmarkt district
of Amsterdam. In practice with his wife Hannie since 1983, he built the ESTEC
building for the European Space Agency in Noordwijk (1984-89), the Protestant
Church for the Moluccan Community in Deventer (1991-92), and the Auditor’s
Office Building in The Hague (1992-97).
The Otterlo Circles, click to enlarge
Van Eyck was the wordsmith of Team 10, of which he was a core member from the
very beginning in the 1950s until the very end. At the last CIAM congress (1959)
he presented his ‘Otterlo Circles’, a diagram visualizing his syncretic
approach to design, bringing together the classical, modern and vernacular traditions
in architecture. Other key terms and evocative mottos include the shift from
‘space and time’ to ‘place and occasion’, ‘vers
une casbah organisée’, the greater reality of the doorstep, the
in-between realm, twin phenomena, reciprocity and relativity. Most of his ideas
and concepts are explained in his unpublished typescript ‘The Child, the
City and the Artist’ (1962); key articles by his hand are ‘The medicine
of reciprocity tentatively illustrated’ and ‘Steps toward a configurative
discipline’, both published in Forum, when he was part of the editorial
board, which also included Bakema and Hertzberger, among others (1959-63).
Van Eyck found much of his inspiration in the world of art, notably his contemporaries
of Cobra, and the poetry movement of ‘de Vijftigers’, as well as
in non-western cultures such as the African Dogon which he would visit various
times.
Van Eyck’s effects on the Dutch architecture scene can hardly be overestimated;
two of these are the development of so-called Dutch structuralism with Piet
Blom and Hertzberger as its best-known representatives, and the achievements
of urban renewal, especially in Amsterdam and its Nieuwmarkt district. Van Eyck
taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1959, and he was
a professor at Delft University of Technology from 1966 to 1984. He received
numerous distinctions and prizes among which the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1990.
In 1994 he and his wife were awarded the Dutch BNA-kubus.
Aldo van Eyck died on 14 January 1999 in Loenen, the Netherlands.