Aldo van Eyck

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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

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.” 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. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Structuralism and the group of architects who associated themselves with the movement. In 2014, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam dedicated an exhibition to Dutch Structuralism and initiated a study of its history and contemporary relevance. As an alternative to the technocratic planning that characterised post-war reconstruction, the buildings and plans from the 1950s and ’60s resonate strongly with a younger generation of architects and activists who are facing a new wave of large-scale urban developments and the privatisation of public space. The vocabulary of the playgrounds is based on geometric concrete sandpits, which appear like small archipelagos and groups of stepping stones, both massive and anchored in the ground, and lighter structures, arches, domes and frames made of tube steel resonating with archetypes of architecture. The arrangement of the elements in the playgrounds is always non-hierarchical and based on a careful compositional balance which is able to create tension and intensity between the objects while allowing a multiplicity of paths around the forms.Die Gebäude wurden mit Stahlbetonplatten und Ziegel sowohl undurchsichtig, dunkelbraun , durchscheinend wie Glas. Die Böden sind aus Beton. Small scale elaborations were introduced here and there throughout the building. Localised colour concentrations – the small within the large’ From the end of the sixties he went on to apply his approach in the context of historical towns, first in his competition design for the Deventer town hall (1966, another prize-winning but unexecuted project), and then in the renovation projects for the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt and Jordaan quarters (1970), and for the inner cities of Zwolle (1971–75) and Dordrecht (1975–81) – all of them urban housing projects which he developed and executed in association with Theo Bosch (1971–83). His most striking building of that period was the Hubertus House in Amsterdam, a home for single parents and their children (1978–81) which achieved a remarkable integration of a colourful functionalist language within an eclectic context. Das Gebäude am südlichen Stadtrand von Amsterdam gelegen, IJsbaanpad 3B Bereich, Holland Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts wurde von H. P. Vorschlag der Süd-Plan beeinflusst Berlage für die Erweiterung der Stadt. Er war unter der Autobahn A10 und das Stadion der Olympischen Spiele 1928 auf dem flachen Land ohne benachbarte Gebäude. In 1946 the young family settled in Amsterdam where CIAM secretary Cor Van Eesteren, the city architect and planner of Amsterdam, whom Aldo had met in Zürich, engaged him as an architect and designer, to assist in the Urban Development section of the Public Works department (1946–51).

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American psychologist James Gibson developed an ecological approach to psychology. This approach aimed to understand how animals, including human-beings, perceive and act in their environment. As Gibson (1979) started his landmark book The ecological approach to visual perception, In the autumn of his life, Gibson developed an alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale. A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as follows.This is a book about how we see. How do we see the environment around us? How do we see its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures? How do we see where we are in the environment? How do we see whether we are moving and, if we are, where we are going? How do we see what things are good for? How do we see how to do things, to thread a needle or drive an automobile? Why do things look as they do? (p. 1). We all call this view: artistic expression of light-spherical expansion of light in space. In this way, we will have a spherical expansion of colour in perfect accord with the spherical expansion of forms’ In 1946 he and his wife moved to Amsterdam, where he joined the Public Works Department, for which by the time he left in 1955 he had designed over 60 playgrounds in the interstices of the city. They set out on a series of travels to Africa, to pursue his lifelong fascination with non- European cultures. He became intimately involved with the Cobra group of artists. Some of the domes are covered with skylights that allow the entrance of natural light. The rays of light penetrate the semi-dark rooms creating images of great visual interest. Along the main corridors are glass walls that overlook the many courtyards of the building, allowing for beautiful views, in addition to providing light to most areas of the orphanage

In 2014 it was declared a National Monument, but the masterpiece of Dutch structuralism has become obsolete and abandoned. 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. 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. A child entering a playground perceives other children using the equipment and/or is introduced to it by the parents. Especially in the case of young children, parents guide their child to, for example, the slide, supports it while she climbs the ladder, and encourages her to slide down. By doing so, the parents demonstrate the child the function of the play element. Costall (2015) called such a function the “canonical affordance” of the object, to refer to its “single, definitive meaning” (p. 51; see also Costall, 2012) within a social practice. Indeed, when a child uses the slide in another way (e.g., by climbing up via the part that is meant to slide down), many parents correct their children that this is not how they should use the equipment—this is not “what the object was made for” (see also Kyttä, 2004, on “the field of constrained action”).

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The residential units are arranged in a staggered formation, thus allowing each of them to have communication with an individual outdoor space and with the internal street. The result is a polycentric building, with a joint of large and small spaces, inside and outside, in successions of units, sets of 9 modules, each defined in its own right, while it is interlaced rhythmically, also with domed covers in This case greater. With the exception of the conference rooms that for acoustic insulation were made in reinforced concrete, the rest of buildings were raised with painted steel and wood. The floor is a continuous flat surface covered with dark gray carpeting, with stone pavers on the doorways towards the exterior. In the lining of the walls, both interior and exterior, also used large wooden panels with openings for vertical windows. Iroko wood was used in the exterior.