09/03/2024
Aldo van Eyck (March 16, 1918 – Januari 13, 1999)
Aldo van Eyck had an enormous influence on post-war architecture in the Netherlands. This was mainly due to his role as an architecture teacher in Amsterdam and Delft, as an animator and leader of Forum and Team Ten and as a tireless writer of polemics. Van Eyck does not leave a large oeuvre. However, his most famous designs: the Burgerweeshuis and the Mother House in Amsterdam, the Sonsbeek Pavilion in Arnhem, the village of Nagele in the Noordoostpolder, the Moluccan church in Deventer, Estec in Noordwijk, the Padua psychiatric institution in Boekel and recently the Court of Audit in The Hague, are without exception milestones in post-war architecture and urban planning. Let's zoom into three of his works: Nagele, Burgerweeshuis and ESTEC.
The work of Aldo van Eyck is considered part of structuralism. Drawing on insights from anthropology, the structuralists proposed that underlying patterns of social relationships and human behaviour could provide a basis for architecture. This avoided the sterile and technological expressions of orthodox modernism. Van Eyck hated the pursuit of effect, mannerisms in architecture without being based on a function, and superficiality. 'I never mention criminals by their full names'. This is how he started the glorious, humorous and hilarious lecture during Indesem 1987, the two-year International Design Seminar of TU Delft. Van Eyck shows, as he calls it, 25 images of the most terrible architecture one can imagine, buildings by Leon K., Philip J., Richard M. and (especially) Robert V. It is just an example of his brilliant view on architecture and his skill with language and playing the audience.
The village of Nagele is one of a series of ten. The Noordoostpolder is a land reclamation project in the Netherlands, new agricultural land on the former seabed. Most villages and residential areas in the centrally located Emmeloord were designed in the 1940s and 1950s by representatives of the Delft School. The key to this conservative, traditional movement was Prof. M.J. Granpré Moliere. Van Eyck takes a completely different approach with the urban design for Nagele (1954). A large, park-like space is centrally located. The four main functions of living, working, traffic and recreation are separated from each other, and each has a clear place in the village, according to the principles of Nieuwe Bouwen and structuralism. A wide park-like tree belt has been planted around Nagele. Nagele is now praised as unique, because there is no other village in the Netherlands where all the important architects of Nieuwe Bouwen worked together to create an 'ideal village'. Light, air and space were the adage. In addition to Aldo van Eyck, Gerrit Rietveld, Cornelis van Eesteren, Mien Ruys, Jaap Bakema, Lotte Stam-Beese and Mart Stam also worked on the design. It is highly questionable whether the Dutch National Cultural Heritage Agency does justice to Aldo van Eyck's contribution in Nagele by promoting the village as an example of Nieuwe Bouwen.
In the 1950s and '60s, many architects worldwide adopted the ideas of Nieuwe Bouwen or The International Style. The Forum architects oppose this and introduce structuralism. The group included Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck, Herman Hertzberger, John Habraken and Piet Blom. These architects got that name because of the magazine "Forum" that they published. They mainly oppose the uniformity of New Construction, because neighborhoods with sunny houses and large apartment buildings have the same character everywhere. Van Eyck was very critical of the General Expansion Plan for Amsterdam by Cornelis van Eesteren (Forum 7, 1959), with whom he had worked in Nagele. Aldo van Eyck wrote with the aerial photo of the AUP: "Rarely have the possibilities been wider – Rarely has a profession failed so much."
Van Eyck demonstrated the power and subtlety of structuralism with his Burgerweeshuis and later with Estec. The Burgerweeshuis was built in the years 1957-1960, on the outer edge of Amsterdam South, right next to the Olympic Stadium. Frans van Meurs, then director, told the architect “A home (to be designed) that radiates the possibilities that children will be able to live within and develop to the possibilities inherent in them”. “What is not required is a large, heavy building, which, due to its massive building volume, gives the impression of being a house where the children are locked up and cut off from the world. The opposite is desired, namely a friendly, open home, which, through its external, playful form and its internal, pleasant, proportional layout, creates a feeling of being at home and safe for the children who will stay there.” It is precisely that which Van Eyck has brilliantly translated into architecture. It is a small settlement, consisting of a multitude of mutually shifting building volumes, which unite with each other in a friendly urban cohesion. It is architecture that, precisely through the poetic expressiveness with which it responds to its program, also gives shape to an important cultural vision. The idea of relativity, which manifested itself simultaneously in art and science around the turn of the century, means that the coherence of things does not lie in their subordination to a central, dominant principle, but in their mutual relationships. In this reality there is no longer an intrinsic center, but a complex, dynamic polycentric system. The concept of “twin phenomenon” constitutes Van Eyck's poetic interpretation of relativity. It is the elementary connection in which two complementary, opposite parts relate to each other in the right tension and thus form a balance. It is the prototype of the non-hierarchical, purely reciprocal relationship.
In the architecture of the Burgerweeshuis, the “twin phenomena” are expressed in the relationship between inside and outside, between open and closed, light and dark, circle and square, concave and convex, filled and void, dynamic and static, central and distributed, part and whole etc., etc. The Burgerweeshuis is a building that, in its structure and form, brings reconciliation to a multitude of polarities. It is several things at the same time, as science has shown that energy sometimes manifests itself as light and sometimes as a particle. It is simultaneously house and city, compact and polycentric, one and diverse, clear and complex.
With the office building and conference complex for ESTEC in Noordwijk, Aldo van Eyck repeated this approach decades later, but now with a different visual language. The visual language of the Burgerweeshuis emerged from an experimental confrontation between Classicism and De Stijl. It yielded a more complex, more inclusive, intelligent order, within the chosen constraint of the orthogonal system with recognizable trigonometric shapes. At ESTEC, architecture is freed from the orthogonal. There is indeed an organizing principle, but it is less obvious. With the introduction of the hendecagonic column (see image), constructed from 11 slender round steel tubes, freedom is created with subtle changes in direction. A continuous space has been created, with widenings and narrowing as in an urban morphology. The structure of the connected spaces and the construction are reminiscent of cathedrals from the Italian Renaissance. My teacher and then employer, the late Joost Meuwissen, once made the brilliant comment on a design issue: “But then we make the facade less symmetrical?” Van Eyck goes one step further at ESTEC, this is a poly-symmetrical design. And Aldo also jokes about that (just turn the book...).
The architecture is also less rigid than the Burgerweeshuis in terms of choice of materials. The collaboration with his wife Hannie, also an architect herself, literally brings colour to the project. Her colour scheme for the steel construction of the low-rise building reinforces the organization according to function and orientation to daylight. No raw concrete here, but a facade of warm Iroko with zinc roofs and an interior with many wooden panels. The conference room in particular evokes associations with the work of Alvar Aalto in terms of atmosphere, daylight, materials and design language. The European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk has an icon with the timeless, layered architecture of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck.
Sources:
Dutch architecture – Koen Kleijn et al. - Atrium 1995
https://www.archined.nl/2014/05/architv-indesem-87-aldo-van-eyck/
Nagele; a reconstruction area of national importance, no. 10 - National Cultural Heritage Agency 2015
https://www.joostdevree.nl/shtmls/structuralisme.shtml
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_(architecture magazine)
Aldo van Eyck's Citizens' Orphanage – Francis Strauven – Stichting Wonen 1987
Dragon in the Dunes – Liane Lefaivre & Alexander Tzonis – Stichting de Beurs van Berlage 1989
