Aldo van Eyck

Product Information

Ever since its introduction, the concept of affordances has proven to be useful to understand the environment and our behavior in it (e.g., Kyttä, 2002, 2004; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Cordovil et al., 2015; Prieske et al., 2015; Menatti and Casado da Rocha, 2016; Withagen and Caljouw, 2016). In his study of the environment of children, Heft (1988), for example, contrasted an affordance-based description of the environment with a “form-based classification of environmental features” (p. 29). The latter refers to our everyday description of our environment. When describing a park, for example, we mention a tree that is in the middle of a grass court, the lake, and the benches at its side. Heft claimed that such a form-based description considers the properties of the environment to be independent of the individuals who use them, and, thus, “provide little insight into the functional, and hence, the psychological significance of environmental features” (p. 36). An affordance-based description of the environment, on the other hand, is relative to the user and puts the functional significance of the environment center stage. Moreover, contrary to a form-based description, an affordance-oriented one recognizes that a single object can have different meanings to an individual. As Gibson (1979) had already emphasized, a single object can afford different behaviors to an animal. For example, a child can sit on a bench, but can also step on it, and jump from it.

Unlike the abstraction of “dwelling” as a concept, the doorstep was a physical reality. It was an actual step, that children sat on, while a parent talked to a neighbour. It could be a fort or a mountain. It was a bridge, too, between home and the street, between family and something bigger. It was the launch pad to the outside world. He had a classic but unconventional education in England, first at King Alfred School in Hampstead London (1924–32) and subsequently at Sidcot School in Somerset (1932–35), both were progressive schools where the arts, literature and the humanities were highly placed. Buildings as deferential and fragmented as this do not stand strong enough to contribute to the essential dialogue of street, but here any such formal weakness is compensated for by the strong colours’

Struktur

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. CIAM’s analytical method of measuring life in the city and land use by density and the mapping of just the so-called four main Functions – dwelling, work, recreation and transport – were considered by Team X to be too simplistic as it did not show the overlapping and intertwining of uses, events or the details of its richness and sensitivity and reasons why certain neighbourhoods had and should be allowed and continue to thrive as an integral part of the developing and expanding urban form. We must understand that art and life are no longer separate domains. The idea that art is an illusion divorced from real life must therefore be abandoned. The word ‘Art’ means nothing to us. We demand that it be replaced by the construction of our environment according to creative laws derived from well-defined principles.” ( van Doesburg and van Eesteren, 1923; included in Baljeu, 1974, p. 147). Die Gebäude wurden mit Stahlbetonplatten und Ziegel sowohl undurchsichtig, dunkelbraun , durchscheinend wie Glas. Die Böden sind aus Beton. 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).

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. While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country. 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 metallic structures of the arches are painted in three different shades of orange, red, purple, blue, or green, reserving the yellow for the columns and beams more illuminated, around the outer edges and at the top of the higher spaces .