Book Review: Aldo van Eyck Writings, 2 volumes
Aldo van Eyck - Writings, 1 & 2 + DVD [Vol. 1: The Child, the City and the Artist & Vol. 2: Collected Articles and Other Writings]. Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, eds. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij SUN, 2008. 238 pp + 744 pp.
Space & Culture has previously posted on innovative architects (for example, here and here), and on youth perspectives on urban design (e.g. here).
Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999), the son of a Dutch poet, grew up in the Netherlands and the UK and studied architecture at the ETH Zürich. Apart from the built work, he is best known as one of the founding members of Team 10, as an influential teacher of architecture and for his activities within the group CoBrA. A two-volume compendium of his collected writings and a DVD, all in English, displayed in a neat box, now present us the architect-writer.
One volume includes a collection of his articles, texts and statements, which are categorized by the editors either thematically or as published in the Dutch magazine Forum. The topics range from “Advocate of the avant-garde in postwar CIAM, (1947-1953)”, “Cobra”, “Playgrounds” to “The Problem of Number”, “Polemics on postmodernism” and “On architects and other artists”, and others. The book is supplemented with a short biography, his major projects and buildings, a chronological list of his own writings as well as the ones on Van Eyck by other authors. The illustrations, some in black and white, others in color, include photographs of himself often portrayed together with his wife as well as his artist and architect colleagues, sketches, plans and diagrams, and altogether give a good impression of the time and the context of Van Eyck’s writings.
The other volume, The Child, the City, the Artist, written in 1962, is now, for the first time, published in its entirety. As the editors explain in the introduction, Van Eyck wrote the book during his Rockefeller fellowship in the United States, and it was to make available his thinking on architecture in writing. We can ask what the characteristic of Van Eyck’s approach to architecture is and why it took almost a half-century to finally publish his book. The reason for both might lie in its very unusual nature. Instead of identifying and discussing specific topics in architecture and urbanism at that time — for example, the housing problem, the reconstruction of the city, urban growth, etc. — Van Eyck in his writings reveals a very personal, idiosyncratic and poetic world view that deeply affected his architectural thinking. The book is divided into eleven chapters and there is no particular sequence of thought or consecutive themes going through the book as shown by such headlines as “Imagination Unhusked, The Image of Ourselves, Something More Permanent than Snow”, “Design Only Grace Open Norm, The Humble Magnificence of a Great Achievement, Disturb Order Gracefully Outmatch Need”, “Some Starting Points and Steps towards a Configurative Discipline.” The writings result in a patchwork of thoughts, reflections, comments and a compilation of works by some of his contemporary colleagues, such as Van den Broek, Bakema, Piet Blom, Kenzo Tange and the Smithsons.
The patchwork format has the capacity to portray Van Eyck’s unique, poetic understanding of architecture, but at times it has an alienating, disturbing effect on the reader. Van Eyck’s critique of a purely rational and functional architecture is inherent but never explicit. He never condemns the protagonists of heroic modernism but advocates for a more humane modern architecture instead. He takes the reader on a search for the very nature of architecture, which he believes to be found in children, because only they still have the “original view” of the world that allows them to identify the true problems and needs of humans. He suggests architecture be the built experience of homecoming and thus (re-)introduces perception, meaning, nature and culture as determining parameters for the human concept of architecture and urbanism. The editors leave open, in the end, the question of why this book has never been published while Van Eyck was still alive. The book was founded on the very belief that childhood and art are the key to the problems in architecture and urbanism. During childhood we communicate the very truth of human existence and the artist would be an advocate of common men to finally put this truth into reality. Perhaps the world was not ready for such a concept when the book was conceived and it still appears that it is certainly not today.
Reviewed by: Ruth Baumeister, Institute for the History of Arts, Architecture and Urbanism, University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands
-Ondine