Aldo van Eyck Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) was a Dutch architect and one of the most influential critics of postwar functionalism. A member of Team 10 and an editor of the magazine Forum, he argued for an architecture of “place and occasion” built from relationships between parts. His best-known works are the Amsterdam Orphanage, the hundreds of playgrounds he designed for the city of Amsterdam and the Sonsbeek Sculpture Pavilion.

England, Zurich and the avant-garde

Van Eyck was born in Driebergen in 1918 and grew up in England, where his father was a poet and critic. He studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 1938 to 1942, and through the art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker he came to know artists such as Brâncuși, Arp and Giacometti, whose work shaped his interest in elementary forms and in the art of so-called primitive cultures.

The Amsterdam playgrounds

In 1946 van Eyck joined the Public Works Department of Amsterdam, where he began designing playgrounds in empty lots and bomb sites. Between 1947 and 1978 he and the department created hundreds of them, using simple elements such as sandpits, climbing frames, low walls and stepping stones that children could interpret freely. Many survive in Amsterdam today.

Team 10 and the Orphanage

Van Eyck was a founding member of Team 10, the group of younger architects who broke with CIAM in the 1950s, and from 1959 to 1963 he edited Forum with Jaap Bakema and Herman Hertzberger. His Amsterdam Orphanage (1960), a carpet of small domed units around courtyards, became a manifesto of what was later called structuralism: a building like a small city, and a city like a large house.

Sonsbeek, the Hubertus House and later work

The Sonsbeek Sculpture Pavilion (1966), a temporary structure of parallel concrete-block walls with semicircular niches, was rebuilt at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 2006. Later works, designed with his wife Hannie van Eyck, include the Pastoor van Arskerk in The Hague, the Hubertus House in Amsterdam for single parents and their children (1978) and the ESTEC building in Noordwijk. He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1990 and died in 1999.