“Modern architecture has been harping continually on what is different in our time to such an extent even that it has lost touch with what is not different, with what is always essentially the same.” Aldo van Eyck

By the time a young Amsterdam architect named Aldo van Eyck began work on his commission for a Municipal Orphanage in 1955, the sails of modern architecture originally filled with the excitement of change and invention were solidly in the doldrums. The masters remained — Wright, Aalto, Mies, Le Corbusier — but as idiosyncratic artists on their personal trajectories, no longer prophets of a new world. And the dumbed-down glass box had begun its inexorable take over while an attenuated and dandified cocktail modernism dominated the press in the work of Ed Stone, SOM, Yamasaki and Philip Johnson, who had just given his “Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture” lecture, targeting history, drawing, and structure as irrelevant back-benchers while calling Wright “the most important architect of the 19th C.” The ebullient adolescence of the avant-garde had dissipated into a torpid adulthood of formal style.

van Eyck was raised an intellectual idealist and he early on developed a passion for aspects of philosophy, art, and architecture that expressed paradoxes of the human condition, resisting neat singular resolutions. He was a world citizen with an early childhood in the Netherlands, a later upbringing in London, schooling in Switzerland, and a family cultural heritage in Surinam. In his lifelong pursuit of a viable living modernism, he was no reclusive bookworm—he was in the trenches, both as a practicing architect and a confidant of the likes of Arp, Rietveld, van Doesburg, Braque, Léger, Brancusi and Tristan Tzara; “the great gang” as he referred to them.

Out of this exposure, he believed the avant-garde offered more than merely a change in artistic style. He felt its most significant contribution to Western artistic/scientific culture was its stance that the relationship between Mankind and Nature was coequal and non-hierarchical. Modern art — and by extension, architecture — expressed, as Mondrian put it, an “equivalence of the dissimilar” where opposite “pure relations,” are uncovered, balanced and ultimately “…reveal the reality that is behind visible things…” (Klee).

As Lefaivre & Tzonis remark in their book on van Eyck, the Orphanage, as it became known, should have received little attention, but upon publication became wildly popular among architects, probably because it successfully integrated architectural opposites previously considered irreconcilable. It mixed Palladian classical composition with anti-classical principles of avant-garde art (De Stijl) and non-Western vernacular (Dogon villages). To this blend, van Eyck added a constant concern of all Team 10 members — what they referred to as the Architecture of Community. Borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Martin Buber, he called it “the in-between.” This attitude, as Lefaivre says, “…placed the emphasis on buildings as means for creating relations between people rather than as goals in themselves.” Inspired by the surrealist poet Louis Aragon, van Eyck felt that “ordinary forgotten everyday areas” in the city should be elevated to “privileged places of poetic experience and social life.” This led him towards architectural models that included contradiction in meaning and a strategy of cellular aggregate space so that however large the development, the smaller scale was always represented. Kasbah and Labyrinth were among his favorite descriptions; they implied anti-hierarchical arrangements, timeless and mythological spaces, and even chaos, which to van Eyck allowed for discovery.

This was an anti-elitist, anarchic approach in which every space in the building/city had the full status of architecture or planning, no matter how ordinary or mundane; an attitude in direct opposition to the Miesian doctrine that so carefully distinguished between “building” and “architecture.” From this stance, Modern buildings and urban design were meaningless and barren. Le Corbusier’s urban concepts of “functional city,” “heart of the city,” and urban “core” were unable to accommodate human paradox and remained shackled to large-scale space plans ignoring the essential role of time. “The material slum has gone,” he said, “... but what has replaced it? Just mile upon mile of organized nowhere, and nobody feeling he is somebody living somewhere.”

In his writings, collected for the first time in this handsome two-volume set (with a DVD of a lecture), van Eyck invokes the viewpoint of a child throughout; a child filled with wonder, delight and humor, naturally rebellious and irrational. Certainly a child’s point of view was far from the canon of modernist theory, marginalized into near oblivion, yet van Eyck chose it as a primary point of view from which to theorize about space; so much so that he titled his own 1962 collection of essays, The Child, the City and the Artist. A typical observation is that after a snowstorm, it is the child who temporarily becomes “Lord of the City”; architects, he thought, should provide “something for the child more permanent than snow.” In fact, one of van Eyck’s major vehicles for exploration was his set of designs for over 700 playgrounds built in and around Amsterdam over a 30 year period.

After the Orphanage and the Sculpture Pavilion at Arnhem, van Eyck’s most significant influence was through two other architects: his colleague Louis Kahn, and his former student, Herman Hertzberger, both powerful teachers and designers in their own rights. Kahn and van Eyck had a long-term dialogue and both of van Eyck’s early buildings (and Hertzberger’s) reflect Kahn’s masonry tectonic of the time, particularly in pre-cast concrete and concrete block. When Kahn made his drawing/ statement about the city, he described it simply as a place where a child could decide what he wanted to be. And both Hertzberger and Kahn embraced van Eyck’s anthropological, anti-hierarchical and non-Western viewpoint in their building and teaching. This non-Western lens (from visiting Dogon villages in West Africa) disclosed dramatic limitations and omissions in modern movement ideals, in particular the detrimental consequences of universal space. As he liked to say, “Whatever Space and Time mean [referring to Giedion’s title], Place and Occasion mean more. For Space in the image of man is Place, and Time in the image of man is Occasion.”

van Eyck was a prolific writer and speaker. He co-edited the Dutch architectural journal, Forum from 1959-1963, was a member of CIAM, founder of Team 10, and remained a tireless teacher, practitioner, scholar and thinker all his life. These volumes collect the entirety of his articles, major talks and writings which prior to this, were often near-impossible to obtain. To architects seeking connections between meaning and form, these thoughts of Aldo van Eyck manage to be both provoking and inspiring, while avoiding academic pedantry. Like Louis Kahn, he believed that only essential timeless aspects of architecture could provide the traction needed to move forward. He was committed to working within the frame of rational modernism, expanding it to include the irrational, spiritual and dualistic facets of human existence; merging left and right brains, as it were. This was, and remains today, a heroic and quixotic goal, given the cultural forces that determine architectural form. Yet, despite this and the lack of commissions throughout his long career, van Eyck never relinquished the idea that architecture had the power to both engage us more closely with, and enlarge our understanding of the world we live in. Buildings, he said, should be “icons of joy, affection and optimism.” And in the few works he was able to build, they were.