Aldo van Eyck

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There he looked at, studied and deliberated on the planning of the city at both the large and small scales and on many layers and was assigned to design the public playgrounds for Amsterdam’s children. It was a city-wide project that enabled him to start the development of new thinking and experimental forms for a more inclusive modern architectural and urbanistic language. We live in an era in which there are not many carefully constructed playgrounds. We don’t like what we see. Have we—city decision makers, architects, designers, parents, friends —forgotten to be critical? The restaurant that is defined by an octagon with four slightly projected arms is accessed through the ground floors of the new towers. The restaurant offers a wide variety of areas, some oriented to the outside, others more intimate, some on ground floor others in height. On the outside, the set of vertical towers, lined with prefabricated Iroko wood panels that fit the floor-to-ceiling windows, look more like a cliff than a traditional office building. The wooden panels are topped by a copper band, coinciding with the restaurant.

Allen had been inspired by a trip to Denmark in 1945, where she saw the work of architect Carl Theodor Sørensen. His skrammellegepladsen, or junk playgrounds, were visions of creative chaos, made mostly by children themselves. She helped set up 17 trial junk playgrounds in the UK, equipped with makeshift treehouses, walkways, nets, ropes and rubber tyres. The very first, at Lollard Street in London’s Kennington, is still going strong. 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). Im Jahr 2014 wurde es ein nationales Denkmal, aber das Meisterwerk des niederländischen Strukturalismus dort ungebräuchlich und verlassen gefallen erklärt. It’s all designed, says Emery-Wallis, “for proper risk-taking and getting dirt under your fingernails”. It might look more expensive than your average council KFC, but 80% of the materials were scavenged from Olympic leftovers. As for the increased dangers, she says Play England has a rigorous assessment system that measures the risk against benefit. “You’ve got to have a sense of risk and excitement,” she says, “otherwise we’re cosseting our kids in a bubble-wrapped world.” Make it your own’ … teepees and a pirate ship in Diana’s memorial playground. Photograph: Andrea Jones/Garden Exposures Photo LibraryThe] notion of an individual, a child, who is all by itself with the world of objects is a completely artificial abstraction. The individual is not simply thrown into the human world; it is introduced into this world by the people around it, and they guide it in that world (p. 135).

The Amsterdam Orphanage was truly a city for lost children. The building (now the Berlage School of Architecture) is a low, one- and two- storey beehive-like structure, a sequence of clusters in which children can invent by way of play and exploration a sense of community in the absence of a family, a place of chance encounters and of the imagination. Much publicised and debated when built, it was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair until taken over by the Berlage School in recent years. 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. In each of the four main circulation spaces, the restaurant, winter garden, library and conference rooms, a star-shaped ceiling rises above the lower roof, each ascending towards a pyramidal shape peak Different and variable configuration of large skylights. The inside of the dynamic folding roof creates the most important element of different spaces, wood entrechapado smooth surfaces combined with other grooved, which impart a warm color to all rooms. Imagine being on a flat and featureless desert. There is no escape either from the sun that beats down by day and the cold wind that blows by night, or from the gaze of any marauder who may pass. Then imagine that in this desert is a vertical plane a few paces long and a few paces high – a wall. During most of the day there would be shadow on one side or the other; at night there would be some shelter from the wind from most quarters; and it would be possible to hide from the view of passing marauders.A big part of his life was going against the grain, being in opposition to the mainstream, whatever that was: mainstream Modernism, mainstream CIAM, mainstream Team X or mainstream Postmodernism (the latter most famously in his Rats, Posts and Other Pests rant at the RIBA in 1981). His designs seem somehow underwhelming compared with his vivid, lucid and poetic writing, which even 30 to 60 years later is still strikingly relevant. While some of the early texts have a preachy side, with all the desperation and hope for salvation connected to sermons, many of his later lectures and articles are more polemical, sharp and witty. While Van Lingen and Kollarová lament the slow disappearance of these playgrounds, and urge city decision-makers, architects, designers, parents and friends to be critical of the new ones replacing them, the authors of Orphanage Amsterdam seem to shy away from taking on a more critical position. They claim that the ‘orphanage is also a building that, despite its not unproblematic history, continues to be viewed favourably as one of the very few really significant buildings in recent history’. But why it was problematic and why it’s still seen as significant, is left unsaid. This perspective was initiated in the 1980s and 1990s by a number of authors (e.g., Heft, 1989, 2001; Hodges and Baron, 1992; Costall, 1995; Reed, 1996; Ingold, 2000; for some recent developments see, Rietveld, 2008; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; van Dijk and Withagen, 2016; van Dijk and Rietveld, 2017). A central tenet of this approach is that the use of objects (and their affordances) always takes place in and is largely shaped by the sociocultural environment. For example, we learn about the affordances of objects from and through other people. To elucidate this point, Costall (1995) quoted Leont’ev (1981).

The building is located on the southern outskirts of Amsterdam, IJsbaanpad 3B, Holland, an area that at the beginning of the 20th century was influenced by the South Plan proposed by H.P. Berlage for the extension of the city. It was located between the A10 motorway and the Olympic Games Stadium in 1928, on a flat lot without neighboring buildings. Die Gebäude wurden mit Stahlbetonplatten und Ziegel sowohl undurchsichtig, dunkelbraun , durchscheinend wie Glas. Die Böden sind aus Beton.

Acknowledgments

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’