Aldo van Eyck 1918-1999 - Dutch architect - Obituary

Architectural Review, The, March, 1999 by Peter Buchanan

Aldo Van Eyck's death robs Dutch architecture of a courageous and humanist champion.

Aldo van Eyck was a key figure in twentieth-century architecture. Though not prolific, he designed some seminal buildings, most notably Amsterdam's Municipal Orphanage (19551960) and the Hubertus House for single mothers (1973-1978), also in Amsterdam (AR March 1982). The former shaped the ideas of a whole generation of architects around the world; the latter, though dense with ideas, was influential more locally He also played an active role in CLAM, as well helping to replace it with Team 10 in which he was a dominant member. He was a mentor/teacher and polemicist/theorist whose impact was felt way beyond the Netherlands. Noted architects whose design approach owes much to him include Herman Hertzberger, the late Theo Bosch, Lucien Lafour and his son-in-law Julyan Wickham. Even Robert Venturi, an equally influential architect, cites van Eyck as an influence on his rather different approach And as editor of the magazine Forum from 1959-1963 and again in 1967 he produced landmark architectural publications.

Van Eyck had also been a living link to the first generation of Modernists, not just architects but also artists and writers, many of whom he got to know in his extraordinary life. These contacts, and his studies of modern art, literature and science were important: his recurring criticism of modern architecture was that utilitarian functionalism betrayed the larger Modernist project which was about consciousness. Thus he also linked back to the very origins of architecture as he visited tribal cultures to study their impulses into built form. From these contacts he acquired modern and tribal art which he studied for its formal insights.

P. N. van Eyck, Aldo's father, was a distinguished poet and journalist who in the latter capacity was based in London from 1919 to 1935. So although van Eyck was born in the Netherlands in 1918, he grew up and went to school in England. After studying building technique in The Hague he studied architecture from 1938-1942 in Zurich where he remained until the war ended. While there he married a fellow student Hannie van Roojen and became friendly with Carola Giedion-Welcker, art critic wife of the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion. The Giedions were catalysts in van Eyck's early encounters with the avant garde in all fields.

Returning to Amsterdam in 1946 he worked for the municipality designing a series of children's playgrounds, which he continued to design, along with exhibitions and some residential projects (the latter in collaboration with Jan Rietveld), long after setting up his own practice in 1951. During this period he was central to the Cobra movement of artists and a member of the Dutch CIAM group 'de 8 en Opbouw'. An active but increasingly disaffected participant in a number of CIAM congresses, he was a co-founder of the seminal Team X in 1954 along with Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis and Alison and Peter Smithson.

Designed a year later, the Amsterdam Orphanage was taken as a prime exemplar of Team X's ideas, as well as of van Eyck's theories of 'dual phenomena', 'in between realm', 'threshold', 'con figurative' disciplines and so on which he elaborated in Forum and his teaching at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture (1954-1959). His interest in the last of these disciplines spawned a whole school of Dutch architecture, Structuralism, an approach which Herman Hertzberger applied more consistently over a long period than did van Eyck (who did not see himself as a Structuralist). Key travels during this period were trips to Dogon villages (1960), Taos Pueblos (1961) and visiting professorships to the US. He was later a professor at Delft from 1966-1984.

Because his best known works are the Orphanage and the Hubertus House, van Eyck's 'humanist' approach (an appellation to which his Dutch critics, like Rem Koolhaas, have given negative connotations) has been characterized as particularly suited to institutions for the unfortunate. Although another of his very best buildings is the extension to the Padua House psychiatric hospital at Boekel (1980-1989 AR February 1990), this is unfair for he built fine works of several sorts, two of the very best being churches.

While still in practice by himself he designed several inventive houses, and built some of them; but the best of his other works are the Catholic Church for Pastor van Ars in the Hague (1963-1969), the temporary sculpture pavilion at Sonsbeek (1965-1966) and the PREVI housing in Lima, Peru (1969-1972). He built the Hubertus House during a partnership with Theo Bosch (1971-1982) when the two of them were responsible for replanning and some of the new buildings (mostly housing with shops below) in the Nieuwmarkt district of Amsterdam. In practice with his wife Hannie since 1983 he built the ESTEC conference and dining centre and an office block at Noordwijk (1984-1989, AR February 1990), the Moluccan Church in Deventer (1983-1992, AR January 1985), the Tripolis office complex in Amsterdam (1990-1994) and Auditor's Office in The Hague (1992-1997).