aldo van eyck

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Aldo van Eyck – The Playgrounds and the City Liane Lefaivre, Space, Place and Play – or the interstitial/cybernetic/polycentric urban model underlying van Eycks’s quasi-unknown but nevertheless, myriad postwar Amsterdam playgrounds”, (in Aldo van Eyck- The Playgrounds and the City, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, exhibition catalogue, 2002) The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) started his career in 1947 in postwar time Amsterdam with a large number of playgrounds (over 700 were built until 1978) in different places in Amsterdam city. He shared with many artists of the time the same desire for a new playful and informal society. The sitespecific playgrounds were made with simple means and objects, frames for climbing, a sandpit, a group of circular concrete blocks – objects that are not in themselves anything but an open function to stimulate a child’s imagination and free movements. The increased interest in children in art and culture was part of a much broader social and cultural current centered on the child. Durgerdammerdijk, northeast Amsterdam, 1955, 1957

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Aldo van Eyck The Playgrounds and theCityLiane Lefaivre,Space, Place and Play or the interstitial/cybernetic/polycentric urban model underlying van Eyckss quasi-unknown but nevertheless, myriad postwar Amsterdam playgrounds,(inAldo van Eyck- The Playgrounds and the City, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, exhibition catalogue, 2002)The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) started his career in 1947 in postwar time Amsterdam with a large number of playgrounds (over 700 were built until 1978) in different places in Amsterdam city. He shared with many artists of the time the same desire for a new playful and informal society.The sitespecific playgrounds were made with simple means and objects, frames for climbing, a sandpit, a group of circular concrete blocks objects that are not in themselves anything but an open function to stimulate a childs imagination and free movements. The increased interest in children in art and culture was part of a much broader social and cultural current centered on the child. Durgerdammerdijk, northeast Amsterdam, 1955, 1957 Zeedijk, Amsterdam -Centrum, 1955, 1956Working methods and theoryEycks idea of design to a given urban setting, rather than working with pre-conceived assumptions, has parallells in other fields in postwar time in literature, cinema, politics, philosophy or science reacting on a priori concepts and abstract principles of methaphysics whether they were researchers in philosohy of ordinary language, existenstialists, phenomenologists or mathematicians, whatever disagreements, they shared one thing: they approached their problems as embedded in real cirumstances, lived-in conditions, experienced cases, immediate contexts or situations.Eyck s strategy was to stick to the general anti-establishment situational spirit of the time, especially Sartres writings with categories Nothingness and Being to which van Eycks distinction space and place can be seen as a parallell. They both rebelled against the idea of grandiose, top-down, authorative systems.Eycks playgrounds are one of the most original contributions to architecture, urbanism and art in postwar time. He is the best place-maker ever with the playgrounds but they have been a secret during the 2000th century when architecture profession was not able to percieve them because they were so immaterial. Dijkstraat, Amsterdam centrum, 1954Van Eyck coined at that time, among other catch words that now is standard in architectural discourse , the shocking distinction between space and place and the inbetween, the last one borrowed from Martin Buber ( book I and Thou, 1923). Van Eycks defintion on space became important to Henri Lefevbre concept abstract space, Marc Augs non-place of supermodernity, Rem Koolhaas junkspace and generic city. (Koolhaas, 2001:721-742,743-757) (I am exploring more of v Eycks thinking and concepts of the twin phenomena the in-between realm , placeand occasion etc below.)He changed the Dutch cityscape. In the early 2000th centurys tendency toward a dissolition of these places and the rise of a new anonymous, sterile alternative space only one kind of urban planning was acceptable : top-down planning. CIAM (Congrs Internationeaux d Architecture Moderne) used different words for this kind of planning: for instance Le Corbusier la cit Radiuese; Hilberseimer Grosstadt Arkitektur and v Eesten funktionele stad

Le Courbusiers impersonal hand over his model for the Cit Radieuse, 1937 (top) van Eesterens prewar birds eye view of Amsterdam, 1934 (below)In the aftermath of WW2 , the one major change that effected this top-down thinking about cities was to turn top-down thinking on its head and adopt an approch that was . ground-up, dirty real, situational . Van Eycks playgrounds was the first real alternative to CIAM-style urban planning. He formed the group Team Ten with the collegues Alison and Peter Smithson, Gian Carlo de Carlo , Schadrach Woods, George Candilis and Alexis Josic.Eycks strategy is the strategy of the interstitial and the polycentric as opposed to the strategy of the masterplan of CIAM.

Ground-up post-war approach to the city: Map with planned interstitial playgrounds making a polycentric net, Jordaan district , AmsterdamPlaygrounds was in the architect Henri Lefevbres taste as he also shared the same rebellious, noncomformist, ground-up thinking and played a crucial role in shaping architectural sensitivities the following 25 years. InCritique de la QiutidienneLefevbre argued that the ordinary, forgotten, everyday areas on the periferi of the metropolitan city were priviliged places of poetic experience and social life. It was published the same year as v Eycks first playground 1947 and have great similarities in feeling.What v Eyck came closest to, in his combining the top-downand grund-up models, was Norbert Wieners cybernetic theory of self-regulating organisms constantly adjusting themselves in response to new inputs andlearing from their evolving contexts through feedback loops, through a process calledinbetweening. In the playgrounds this inbetweening is highly complex , bringing together different people, but also different formal canons and different urban strategies.There are many faces to this inbetweening of top-down and ground-up thinking. For instance in the formal compostional elements in v Eycks playgrounds that is a combo of classical and anti-classical architectura forms , a hybrid way. Some of the playgrounds were classical some anticlassical. Like the one at Mendes da Costahofadopting the rigourous classical geometry of French formal garden and the playground at Saffierstraat, similar to Mondrians artworkDiamond compositions. Mendes da Costahof by v Eyck , 1957, 1960 and Diamond composition, Mondrian, 1925 and Saffierstraat, playground by v Eyck, 1950, 1951Another kind of formal poetics at work in the playgrounds was an attempt to express thegenus loci,no matter how rough, irregular or unpolished. The uniqeness with Amsterdams playgrounds, compared to other cities, is that they are interstitial , inserted with the living fabric of the city. Each has its own unique configuration, where only the site comes into play. They are all sitespecific asymmetrical, blob-like, contorted, fractured, broken.The searching for genus loci is always associated with irregularity or roughness of real forms, originally from the 1800th centuries romantic movement. Reality has always been dirty and messy, dirty real. V Eyck wrote to the Director of Public Work of Amsterdam 1951 and declined to prettify the bare firewalls surrounding the playgrounds, preferring the positive aspects ofplastic reality of their roughness. V Eyck was close friend with the artists Asger Jorn, Coreille och Karen Appel of the artist group Cobra (1949-1951).The Dijkstraat playground(1954, picture above): concieved within the context of the site , it gives a frame to urban life. As opposed to postwar monuments by Piacsso, Moore etc , the playground learns from its context. It is one of the first site-specific sculptures of the postwar period. In density of meaning and impact on the urban setting, it brings to mind the type of urban sculture that Richard Serra, James Turell and Christo were to build, but 20 years later.In addition, it is one of few cases where the same work can be two things- urbanims and sculpture, simultanelously . These works are readable in both registers. They overlap completely. The 4th issue of magazine Cobra coincided with the Steduijk exhibition of autumn 1949 devoted to the theme of childhood- another instance of inspiration coming bottom-up rather the top-down. In major cultural role reversal the child became a model for the adult in the naif , child-like Art Brut works by Jean Dubuffet and Joan Mir, postwar -expressionists.Eyck means that the painter Jackson Pollock was a tremendous influence on architects at the time. Peggy Guggenheim exhibited him in her Venicevilla.A broad rethinking the concept of childhood took place in postwar time, in many cultural expressions the child became empowered as never before, spread into the social sciences rapidly. First sign of change was perhaps the revolutionaryThe Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care(1946) advocating extremely liberal , non-authorian approach to child-rearing.This new postwar importance to children also shaped representations of architecture and urbanism to a certain extent. Kevin Lynch based much of his research in the 50s on studying it and child drawing onThe Image of the City(1960).

Homo LudensEycks playground also reflected a deep-seated cultural continuity in Dutch culture: kinderspielen,childrens play , represented in readibly urban settings , is a topos in Netherlandish painting and Northern humanistic culture back to 1600th century. The ubiquity of children in Dutch painting are not putti or immortal children but real isanother side of same tradition: children in paintings put in topograhpically meaningful settings, town hall view tex, to evoke the civic and public virtues to which the correctly brought-up child should be led. The paintings are scenes from the interior of the Dutch mental world. it filled a practical purpose to instil republican values into children from an early age and bring them into the fold of the reality of civic life in bourgeois society. most efficent way to this learning process was in a play setting.Cor van Eestern , old top-down CIAM- functionalist, who hade made no provisions for playgrounds in his Extensions Plan for Amsterdam of 1934, became devoted ground-up situationalist, actively dedicated to placing 1958 kleuterspeelplaatsjes or small playgrounds for the little ones in post war projects Slotermeer. As head of City Deveklopment for the city of Amsterdam after thewar he radicallay changed his approach because of the Amsterdam playgrounds.Without abandoning the idea of top-down planning, he began to learn from particularities and irregularities of left-over interstitial places in the existing fabric of the city and to work with them instead of overlooking them.So what a young architect had started in 1947 became official policy- every block that wanted was equipped with a playground. The solution of playgrounds was clearly linked in the mind of v Eyck to the issue ofurban density. In the densely populated neighborhoods , the best solution emerged to be to set up temporaray, smaller playgrounds. The playgrounds became a constant theme in his planning activities and explains probably the quality of life in these neighbourhoods. He also specified the importance of playgrounds concieved as ephemeral and evolving rather than as fixed and static. He said they should be included in a way that is not more than temporary. One must mark the playgrounds clearly in the interstitial space that is intended for play.For v Eyck chilhood was the same as theludic , the idea was part of the debate of the time. H. Lefevbre used the marxisitic concept of alienation , to outline the thoery of everydayness,le quoitidien, built on the humble and repetetive aspects of life as opposed to those aspects of the world of production or consumption. Levfebvre claimed the right to the city as a place of pleasure and enjoyment. The city as the locus of festival. His purposewasto oppose everday life and re-organise it until it is as good as new, its spurious rationality and authority unmasked and the antithesis between the quotidian and the Festival( Lefebvre 1970:205-206).OBS!But he held there was more to the playgrounds than frivolity: the profound belief in the civilising function of play. The first ones were placed very often in voids of Amsterdam where the houses of deported Jews had stood. Filling them with life in the face of these facts was a redeeming and therapeutic act, a way of weaving togehther once again the fabric of a devastated city, to overcome the agony of the war through play.Cybernetic, participatory urbanismThe playgrounds arose within a semihierachal, semi-anarchiac, highly participatory process involving many people over decades: a cybernetic process, ground-up, top-down, interrelating a mass of agents, each a crucial role, imposs to disentangle from each other- v Eyck only the most well-known because most vocal, mediagenic. Without the top of the Public Works department and the citizens of Amsterdam and more the playgrounds wouldnt have been what theybecame.Allthese people were all rebells like v Eyck, and like him with a cause. In all cybernetically defined phenomena there are difficulties to say about a moment when it all started. There are chain reactions and coincidences.Next to the concept of the situation that defines a new approach to architecture comes concept ofchangeability, transience. Time understood as part of the aesthetic apprecitation of a work of art is linked to the multiple idea of views and movement.( a canonical book of modern architecture:Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion , 1941). For the playground time was a concept defining a design product asa work in progress or in process. The city is therefore a temporaray phenomenonans so were the interventions of the architect in it.Polycentric netThe most original and significant aspects of the playgrounds is the net-like or web-like quality they assume as a whole. They are as a constellation, a scheme made up of situationally arising units the playgrounds bound to time, accident and circumstance. The idea of the city as an open-ended pattern removes the duality of interior and exterior space the 700 playgrounds can be seen like mondrians starry sky paintings, in which he moved away decidely from classical closed , monocentric composition towards an open, anti-classical compositional strategy based on randomely distributed polycentric galaxy of nodal points. playgrounds emerging in the cracks and interstices of the city and overlaid upon the existing urban fabric are also forerunners of the interstitial approach of the city of Kevin Lynch that he called knots of density which he proposed to link through a polycentred net. Lynch and v Eyck shared the opposition to the CIAMidea of a single central, monocentric heart of the city or core.

PietMondrian,Composition No.3, 1917, Gemeenetmuseum den HaagEycks playgrounds have historical significance not only as individual design cases but also as alternatives to prewar CIAM practices as critical events opening a new window onto new potentials of place where there had been nothing before but a void and empty space.Francis Struven, senior lecturer in architecture theory at the University og Ghent, writes in the same book about vEycks work.Eyck was more and more convinced that it should be regarded as the authentic basis of the 2000th century: a new era of simplicity and clarity, a new culture in which the recurrent, time-hallowed opposites would be reconciled in a cheerful way. v Eyck recognised that architecture by L Courbusier and Rietveld had played a vital part in the construction of that new culture, but that their obsession with standardisation and industrialisation had gradually alienated them from the origin. (66) v Eyck therefore wanted to link architecture to its avant-garde roots again. He was not like his collegues interested in carrying out functionalist achievements to all kinds of building projects on large-scale. He wanted to do experimental research on the elementary sources of architecture to explore the potential of architecture as a language more in the light of the achievements of the avantgarde.He thought the various expressions of the avantgarde were based on same fundamental intuition:the idea of relativity, which had been manifest in art and science since the beginning of the century. This meant an opening up a reality where things no longer are subordinated to a central principle, butin relation to each other, a reality not dominated by a fixed center, but where all standpoints are of equal value. This made the world revealed as a complex , polycentric ensamble where things are autonomous but intertwined through purely reciprocal relations. The relations are as important as the things temselves. To experiment practically with non-hierarchical compositions in which different things are related to one another on the basis of equality, v Eyck had the playgrounds in Amsterdam as his ideal field of operations.His design for these sites are based on elementary components of visual language. From Mondrian he derived an syntactic insight into how different things can be brought to equilibrium. But he was not satisfied with purely geometric elements without association in that he was inspired by work of Brancusi, Arp, Sophie Tuber in their synthesis of organic growth and crystalclear geometry- this shows in the playground furniture (as seen above in the playgrounds) that he developed- archetypical construcitions with powerful simplicity evoking different associations.Relief rectangulaire, Sophie Tuber,1936, Kunstmuseum, BaselSandpit solid yet soft, open body that could assume different geometric shapes, circle, square triangle; a polygon with inscribed circle or vv. Beside there were often a number of small, solid elements: cylindric blocks of concrete 65 cm diam. placed in a row/group, used as seats, to gather around or jumpingstones . These were in contact with thin metal ones, tubular climbing bars , high, in groups marking a spot or demarcated territories. plus a large metal arch in three segments with spokes with convex and concave sides could be used for many things: passage, crossing, stopping place, gymapparatus.Allelements were stable. Climbing arch, Fredrik Hendriksplantsoen, Amsterdam-Oudwest, 1959 and Stones for jumping, Zaanhof, SpaarndammerbuurtHe didnt like to make pay objects like imaginary animals because they dont belong to the city and shut down the imagination rather than activating it. He thought they may be fun in a fair but they are not suiteable elements of the city cause they are not real enough. A play object has to be real like a bench is real cause you can sit on it. An alluminium elefant is not real, it cannot walk and is unnatural in the street . The primal elementary forms have un urban character and stimulate the imagination and are not tied to any function but evoke different use andunexpectedones.They offer means for children to discover things for themselves.Eyck brought the play objects together in constantly changing compositions each forming a specific response to the given situation. The neighboroud were consultated by the Site Preparation dep. of Urban Development regarding the size , shape and context of the unique site in question but also regarding the often complex network of underground piping that had to remain accessible for maintenance. Each of them aimed at the achievement of the same basic intention: to relate the different components, small and large, light and heavy, to one another as equal elements and thereby to articulate the given space as a location with a character and a face of its own, a place in which the space marked out by the things is as important as the things themselves. How did he achieve this? He introduced a focal point to create a somewhere and connect things to one another. The focal point, usually marked by sandpit, did not usually coincide with the geometric center of the site. It was always out of alignement with that center but never to the extend to lead attention out of the site . The result was an assymmetrical situation that was brought into dymanic equilibrium by the placing of other elements. for example in the first sandpit Bertelmanplein (1947)the sandpit was 4 m north of center reinforced by benches. A second spot was marked art a distance diagonally in relation to this large form, 10 by 7 meters, by three climbing frames: an arrangement that created two open spaces in the other diagonal direction.

Bertelmanplein, Amsterdam -Oudzuid, 1947 , the first playground of v EyckThe Zaanhofplayground (1948)with 4 retangles in different sizes without a center , each rectangle with different play situation, a circular sandpit, three climbing bars, seven jumping stones and a roundabout, in a pattern of four areas whose positions were all in relation to one another. The areas were marked by four rectangular floors of white concrete paving stones that formed a strong contrast with the brown brick paved surface of the square. Each of these four different floor surfaces was placed off center, marking a center of its own, and their connection with each other were in the centrifugal movement that they combined to evoke. Irrespective of their different sizes, they combined as equal elements in a sort of windmall-sail pattern. On the border areas accomodated benches. The 8 trees indicated the normal axial lines of the location served to bring out the degrees of non-alignment and off-centredness more clearly. playground Zaanhof, Spaarndammerbuurt, Amsterdam, Oudwest, 1948

Playground at Jacob Thijsseplein 1949-50Jacob Thijsseplein 1949-50 was based on different compostional techniques: relation of the different elements by means of axes. He decide to lay out the northern half as a public garden and the southern part as a fully paved square and to fit a limited number of relatively small elements into the whole surface. He planted rows of trees to reduce the square.The regular positioning of the trees reinforced a latent geometry of axes that determined the position of the play objects and the benches. This concerned not the axial lines of the tree trunks themselves but the interval beteween them. These lines related the space between the trees to the focal points of five spots which were marked by round brick surfaces contrasting with white concrete paving stones of the square.Aldo v Eyck,The Child, the City and the Artist,2008These are hisown writings from 1962, but they were not published until 2008 posthumously. In the book he resumed most of the themes he had developed up to 1962. A mix of theory, poetry and manifestation/protest against authoritan culture and a passionate speech for reality unveiled by avant-garde art and science, his view of relativity and its interpretation in terms of architecture, the concept of the in-between realm, the reciprocal identification of house and city, the time dimension in architecture and urbanism, that is, a revaluation of the architecture legacies of the past including the primitive cultures.The writings show a most original architectural theory which played a seminal role in the second half of 2000th century. v Eyck took an uncommon critical attitude to CIAM and the prevailing functionalism. He developed in writing and work an authentically modern and humane architecture. The architecture of the time was thoughtless in a euphoric process while he conducted more of a fundamental reflection on architecture, revitalizing it and put it back onto its avangarde-roots which it seemed to have lost. Through personal contacts with many of the leading artists of the avantgarde from Cubism to Dadaism, Constuctivism to Surrealism he realized that these movements had components from the same culture movement that brought to light a new world-view or even new reality a culture of gladness and brightness, which he saw as his life-task to implement in the field of architecture.He introduced new notions into architectural thinking: identity, the in-between, place and occasion, reciprocity and twin phenomena, which opened new structural insights into potential qualities of the built environment. His writings were a strong influence on the european and american architectural discourses. He had difficulities in finding a publisher which made him write articles and let the manuscript circulate in many photocopies.Its aim is to develop a truly contemporary and human concept of architecture and urbanism based on the achievements of contemporary thinking in art and science. At the same time it is meant as acounteraction to the dominant technocratic planningthat tends to disintegrate existing cities while producing alienating ones.He does not discuss the theme in linear way but from each others viewpoints a dialectic unfolding theconfigurative discipline, a new approach aimed at the development of genuine contemporary urban structures. This was the synthesis of his reflection on architecture andurbanism.Itformed the theoretical basis of a new architectural movement: the Dutch structuralism with architects such as Piet Blom, Joop van Stigt and Herman Hertzberger.v Eyck starts with the child viewing it as the paragon of fresh human potential, as the perpetual and always new return of elementary human faculties: imagination andcreativity.WithT.S Eliot he sees the child as a symbol of origin which includes its end, as a promise of a full human existence. He proposes this as a criteria for true urbanity. Cities are only human if designed for children : If they are not meant for children they are not meant for citizens either. If they are not meant for citizens- ourselves- they are not cities.Imagination which reveals itself through the child, is an essential human capacity, it is a prerequisite for the development of both art and science.He makes an introduction to the 2000th cent. avant-garde through statements by prominent pioneers from Cezanne to Kandinsky, Mondrian to Breton- all give a different account on their particular explorations into the new reality. Then v Eyck unfolds his own vision of that reality in remarkable essays. He states that what all these poineers had in common was that they burst the barriers of rationalism: they tore down the barriers all right, those between outer and inner reality, between object and subject, mass and space, between head, heart and abdomen; between what can be ascertained by the limited senses and the vaster reality only imagination can graspthey have left us with an expanded universe, have succeded in detecting its rytm, tracing its outline.In Einsteins theory of relativity this vaster reality proves to be the unity of space, time, matter and energy no longer referring to separate entities but are the fundamental space-timecontinuum.Whenimagination gains access to this, reality is percived as a dynamic flux, as a complex of interacting energies. This new view opened up wonderfulperspectives.Thepercieved energy has not an intrinsic center but consists through reciprocal relations. Elemenatry opposites that belong toghether. Nature is no longer seen as an objective reality external to the subject. Subjectivity is part of the energies of the space-time continuum.Matter and mind are of the same nature and interact. The subject is assigned an essential role in the actualization of the new reality: the subject penetrates space and time, opens them to make them accessible to the human mind.Eyck explores the implications of these insights and investigatesthe interrelations betweensubject, space and time. He explores how time and space can be entered or interiorized and the consequences in the field of architecture. Starting with investigating how relations take place, from Martin Buber`s philosophy of dialogue* , he concieves of a relation as an in-between, a place where different things can meet and unite or wherethe common ground where conflicting polarities can again become the twin phenomena.*Martin BubersGestalt gewordene Zwischen:van Eyck points out that Buber does not consider the in-between to be a makeshift construction between two mutually exclusive alternatives- individualism and collectivism- but as the place wheredas echte Dritte(the true Third), the fundamental human reality consisting of both individuality and community-one man and another man, man and his fellow man- can flourish.The real third is a real dialogue, a real embrace. a real duel between people. And it is crucial the the real third is not something happening to one person or another person separately in a neutral world containing all things, but something that happens between both in a dimension only accessible to both. On the other side of the subjective, on this side of the objective, on the narrow borderline where you and I meet lies the in-between realm.(fromAldo van EyckThe Shape of Relativity, F.Struven, 1998)The twin phenoma, an original concept of van Eyck`s, stems from the insights that the polarities percieved in space-time continuum (such as subject and object, inner and outer reality, small and large, open and close, part and whole) are not conflicting, mutually exclusive entities but distinctive components, two complementary halves of one and the same entity and a true entity is always twofold. The in-between is not to be considered a negligible margin but as important as the reconciled opposites themselves. (Heraclitus) Being the moment wherecontrary tendencies come into balance, it constututes a space filled with ambivalence, and so space corresponds to the ambivalent nature of man. The in-between is space in the image of man, a place that like man, breathes in and out. (Close to Heraclitus ideaof two mutually exclusive conditions that simultaneouslymeetin every part of life as shown in all his fragments but especially in fragment 26 show that they meet in a place , the living human being as the place, as the important space in-between, see my websitehttp://www.stillalive.eu/eng3.htm)The twin phenomena and the in-between consitute van Eycks most elementary form of the non-hierarchical, reciprocal relation. They are the primary material of his architectural poetics and lie at the root of his orginial concept of urban coherence, his maxim: A house is like a small city if its to be a real house- a city a large house if it is to be a real city .The mutual identification of house and city evokes the unfolding of many other twin phenomena such as unity-diversity, large-small, far-near, simplicity- complexity.Architecture should interweave them into a tissue of reconciled polarities, an urban fabric that constitutes a built counterform for the social twin phenomenon of individual- collective. In such an urban fabric the mild gears of reciprocity will create a pleasant climate to a man in balance. The emptiness and monotony of current modern planning will be out of the question. The in-between will extend into a whole realm, an articulated in-between realm that contains the human mind throughtout the whole fabric to make man feel at home whereever he goes. In this sense v Eyck defined architecture as built home-coming.The new relativistic conscience also implies thinking of timein the image of man.Time should also be interiorized to become accessible to the human subject. van Eyck therefore borrows thenotion of durationfrom Bergson. Duration is the lived through time when man experiences and participates fully , when his associative awareness charges and extends perception rendering it transparent and profound through memory and antcipation. in duration the present is not ephemeral instant but a time-span where past and future merge, an in-between where yesterday and tomorrow meet. Through duration time becomes accessible and gains an interior where the subject feels at home, where it experiences a sense of being present within the present.It is with this kind of time that space should be charged in order to be a real place.Place in order to be a space where man feels at home must also include duration, not only a space that intermediates between here and there but causes a simultaneous consciousness of past and future- a space like man himself is imbued with memory andanticipation-only then can it attain human meaning and can become a place with a specific identity. van Eyck also wanted torevaluate the rythm of the natural cycles- day and night, the seasons, ages of man.He opposed the usual design practice that sees natural phenomena as a hindrance and seeks to elimininate their effects, and he advocates the development of a new sensibility for the meaning and the qualities they imply.the time has come to take rain as rain, wind as wind, snow as snow, coldness as coldness, night as night, and make something of them for the benefit of the citizien. He wanted architecture to exploit the postive potential of these phenomena in order to recieve meaningful places.The interiorization of time opens up to a new perspective on history and culture, a much more constructive attitude than the then prevailing. v Eyck, inspired by anthroplogist Ruth Benedict, was one of the first moderns to concieve the past as a collective memory, in the relativistic continuum, a gathering body of experience. This experience will be all the richer when it uses abroad range of cultural sources, when the mind opens to a diversity of visual values, eastern, western etc. regarded as distinct frames of reference, with own standards but of equal validity.The Image of Ourselves Eyck says he is concerned with 3 realities :-the child, the city , the artist it may prove possible to open the mind a little further to the reality of each one taking the other two as a medium in each case: To begin with the city in order to comprehend the artist brings us face to face with the child- ourselves. To begin with the child to understand the city brings us face to face with the artist- ourselves too. and 3: To begin with the artist in order to understand the child brings us to the city.- ourselves again. Each can be identified by the other. We encounter ourselves each time.We cannot concieve of civilization today if we withdraw the child ourselves from its built counterform: the city.And we cannot come to terms with the city if we cut ourselves away from the force that humanize them:imagination, and there is no imagination without the artist .The home of the three symbols the child, the city , the artist is the in-between realm.van Eyck understand the childhood as a symbol upon which cities could rest again, a symbol from which it could regenerate.The discovery of childhood is a sign of shifting accent from man to life, from reason to imagination. It means that children are gradually being acknowledge as children and childhood as a full-fledged form of life, an integral part of society, physically indispensable and spritually inspiring. Most importantly it indirectly reinforces our conviction that without the constructive force of imagination we cannot solve the problems facing us today. This means that the re-entry of creativity on the scene of everyday life. Contemporary artists are the first ones to recieve inspiration from the child. the relation child and art is vital, both ways. The child will rediscover the city and vv. unless both child and artist are given the place they diserve the society will remain the sterile construction it is today.v Eycks says if decay and disintegration were proportionally counteracted by constructive effort, if common sense took imaginations hand, cities would perhaps still represent a postivt mirror of societys aspirations and needs.What the child needs is what we need-just that:places where we can BE what we really ARE: children unto ourselves, from birth to death somewhere. To establish somewhere is the task for architects.(from a poem by v Eyck) Provide something for the human child more permanent than snow- if perhaps less abundant.

Carel Visser,Two Birds, 1957The Story of a Another Idea has its roots in the soil of a great idea, the idea the Riot carries: relativity.The culture of particular form is approaching its end, the culture of determined relations has begun. Piet Mondrian 1937 in Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art.Life is a continous transformation and the new culture is one of pure relations. Piet Mondrain 1937Simplicity is not a goal in art but one reaches simplicity in spite of oneself, by approaching the real sense of things.Constantin Brancusi 1937Whether matter or mind, reality appears as continous change. It becomes or dissolves, it is never something finished.Henri Bergson 1945Quivering Absolutes the theory of relativitySpace, time, matter and energy are no longer impregnable absolutes mechanically related in an objective world exterior to the mind, for science has at last stripped them of the armour that safeguarded each from the other. It is up to the mind to throw off its heavy armour now and its true to say that the antagonistic isolation of these notions cannot be broken until it does, for until then will each of them open the door to the other and become multilaterally permeable.Thanks to some sensitive men that actually cast the weight of determinism aside that the doorways to relativity were discovered in the first place. We have on the one hand therefore four alien notions facing an excluded mind, and on the other a continuum of a single notion incorporating the mind. Fundamentally these constitute 2 utterly irreconcilable attitudes: the former is exclusive, a viscious circle; the latter is inclusive, a spiral.What is important is that in the actuality of daily existence space , time matter and energy where they maintain their validity as 4 separate interrelated notions the mild gears of reciprocity upset the static hierarchy within which all things are stratified at the expense of their real identity, profoundly affecting our appreciation of them, of their multilateral meaning of the space between and around them, and of temporal experence.v Eyck is concerned with themutual conceptwhich led to not only the revolution of space, time, matter and energy in the scientific world but also to an analougous revolution of many other isolated, impregnable and antagonistic notions in the world of art and other creative fields..He uses the word relativity to cover the totality of this mutual concept/attitude beyond the Einsteinian connotation.The blending of the mind with what is still generally supposed to exist irrespectively of it- an objective exterior world impervious (tt, ogenomtrnglig) to the impulse of concept- has interiorized the latter. Mans troublesome subjectivity no longer troubles the objectivity ofreality.Thecontrariety of subject and object ismitigated.Atmost subjectivity can now only be identified as a degree of objectivity andvv.Theold schism art- science is gone v Eyck wishes this were understood!(47)V Eycks critizies the lack of fulfilling the insights of his forerunners in what he called the Riot: in spite of the fact that in painting , scuplture, poetry and music, time , space and energy have been interiorized in terms of the human subject, the mutual attitude which conditioned this great change has been successfully expressed in every creative medium, space and time are still approached as exteriorized absolutes, especially by architects and planners. The impact of their revaluation has been generally both arbitrary and superficial, effective primarly in the formal sense, that is aesthetically. Some implications were regimented into a set of rigid principles straight away and extended into built form. But in this way the implications were mishandled and deflated and reduced once more to the level of absolutes, becoming sterile and lose all affinity to the great spiritual dimension to which they once belonged. Architects fail to open their minds to other than aesthetic implications, mostly derived wholesale from painting and scuplture (constructivism, suprematism, neo-plasticism and Bauhauss derivatives) , or social implications sentimentalized. Architects are still unaware of the profounder implications of relativity which alone can impart full and lasting content to a revaluation of space and time in terms of architecture: he means those implications that have extended the horizon of mans inner world.Architects still tend to remain antagonistic in imagination and to those regions of reality that lie beyond the scope of the limited senses and thus elude the coarse mesh of rational estimation. The imponerable (det oberkneliga) is taken for quicksand, so they step on hard rock but fail to understand why such hard rock gives way (ge efter) as it always does. They are attracted to the dress but not the to the body of a great idea ( they are wary of the magician as he actually effects transformation, and attracted by the juggler because he merely affects it. ) They flirt with some of the isms that seem to them comprehensible excluding those that shed light on the realm of poetic association and the real perplexities of the mind, the inner world. They turn to technology lika schollboys, hail material progress with naive confidence and fall into the trap of eclecticism.The handful architects involved in the Great Riottore down the stiffling barriers, layed low hitherto impregnable absolutues and unmasked the wornout hierarchies that prop (stttat) the society. (48)He points out the necessity of giving each articulated place a fuller experience potential in terms of intellectual and emotional association, recollection, anticipation and intrinsic multimeaning for these alone can impart depth to visual experience and render the impact of architecture truly caledioscopic.. In this architectually transposed reality man will perhaps again discover himself standing face to face with himself in a more feasable environment. This will also effect the concept of the past and what man has developed for himself from age to age and place to place for time has aquired depth and with time space: past, present and future should henceforward be reciprocally active in the mind.The In-Between Realm, Place and Occasion, a home for the Twin Phenomenav Eyck follows Martin Buber: individualism sees man only in relation to himself, whilst collectivism fails to see man at all. Both conceptions grew out of the same human situation , both lead to frustration, isolation and despair. Netiher leads to the totality of man for only between real people can there be real associations. Both are equally abstract and hence unreal. The fundamental reality of man is one man to another man- man and his fellow men. Modern individualism is an imaginary structure, thats why it fails.There is only one reality between real persons , what Buber callsthe real thirdwhich is not a temporary substitute but thereal bearer of that passes between real persons. the real third is a real dialogue, a real embrace , a real duel between real people. This real third happens between two personss in a dimension only accessible to both, not to one person or another person separately and in a neutral worldon the narrow bordeline where you and I meet lies the in-between realm.This v Eycks says leads him tothe doorstep concept: as long as we keep balancing between false alternatives( collectivism and individualisms) like a tightrope dancer shifting sideways along a thin wire in a void we shall continue to miss the mark. But he means the doorstep symbol(from the concept of entrance (neither inside nor out, public nor private), it becomes his basic spatial metaphor and evoked the inbetween realm ) is rich enough to sustain a kind of archietcture and planning in general which is certaintly more valid than the kind we have got used to during the last 30 years ( that is1930-1960).He means architecture has to extend the narrow borderline, persuade it to loop into an articulated in-between realm. Architectures job is to provide this in-between realm by means of construction, that is to provide, from house to city scale, abunch of real places for real people and real things. In-between awareness is essential, to detect associative meanings simultaneously. .The meaning of every real articulated in-between place is essentially a multiple one, we will have to make it do that our target is multiple meaning in counterbalance.Our natural affinity toward the In-betweenWalking barefeet on a beach by the ocean , water gliding landwards and seawards: you feel reconciled in a way you wouldnt feel if there was a forced dialogue between you and either of these great phenomena. In this in-between realm between ocean and land something happens that is quite different from the sailors nostalgia. There is no yearning for the alternative, no escape from one into the other.You coincide with both because their coincidence is you.nothing wrong with saloirs nostalgia as long we realize he always wants to go home both ways.What we need is to be at home wherever we are. As long home is always elsewhere, there will be no question ofbelonging.We will not be participating but eavesdropping (tjuvlyssna).Architecture need do no more than assist mans homecoming. Van Eyck likes to identify architecture with whatever it can effect in human terms and likes to see itas constructed counterform of perpetual homecoming. Speaking of a house or city as a bunch of places he implies that you cannot leave a real place without entering another if its a real bunch, departure must mean entry.A Home for Twin PhenomenaThe way up and the way down is one and the same thing.(fragment 60, Heraclitus)V Eycks strong critique of modern architecture/urbanism : Not long ago the minds of men moved along a deterministic groove, the Euclidian groove. Then some painters , poets, philosphers and scientists jumped off the groove and rubbed the deterministic patina off the surface of reality and saw wonderful things (Picasso, Klee, Mondrian, Brancusi to Joyce, Le Courbusier , Schnberg, Bergson, Einstein.) They expanded the universe, the inside and outside universe.But society still moves in the old groovemaking only sly use of what these men discovered and worsestill applying on a purely technical and decorative level not the essencebut from gathered experience of it in order to give a pretence of moving more contemporaneusly whilst in reality moving securely and profitable along the old circumscribed groove. When are architects going to join the the riot and stop gnawing at the edges of a great idea? We cannot continue selling the diluted essence of what others spent lifetime finding.Todays architects are not artists as they should be, they are semi-artists which is worse, they are comfortably engaged in something super, but architecture is not semi or super its an art. Especially urbanism has made a very poor show.Others have expanded reality but not architects who have contracted reality and sidetracked the issue of contemporary creativity. While contemporaray art, science and philosophy have for half a century reconciled split polarities through reciprocal thinking, tearing down stifling barriers between them, architecture and urbanism especially has drifted away, paradoxiallyindulging in arbitrary application of what is essentially anti-deterministicand so increasing thickness of the deterministic patina society cherises and defends. The non-euclidian idea is contemporary to all our difficulties: social and political, economic and spiritual. We have failed to see that it alone can solve them and its tragic.Herman Hertzberger,born on 1932 in Amsterdam,can be considered, along with Aldo van Eyck, as the influence behind the Dutch structuralist movement of the 1960s. He believed that the architects role was not to provide a complete solution, but to provide a spatial framework to be eventually filled in by the users. Among Hertzbergers best known buildings are the Montessori school in Delft (196670) and the administration building for the Central Beheer Insurance Company building in Apeldoorn (197072). (Wikipedia 2014-12-16)Hermann Hertzberger ,Space and Learning,2008, in whichhis theories on the learning city and the point of departure in childrens need of space are interesting.Play spaceSpace to play, undesignatedor marginal space, should be present as an evident quality of every residential setting and of the public domain as a whole, as evident aschildrenthemselves.It is impossible to imagine children only could develop their plays in theallocatedplaces with playingequipmentwhich is a place set apart fromeverythingelse in our daily living environment.Everything is narrowed down to one particular purpose as a sign of getting things in order, forfunctionalityandefficiency,theultimate consequence is then that each thing is only suited to that one limitedtask.Thisis a way of consolidating and magnifying the distinction what is good for youngsters, adults and old people. The public realm is in this way split in so many fragments, with separate purposes. Playgrounds andequipmentmay be betterthan nothing, but the single-purpose design is limiting, they give no incentive to be used otherwise.Aldo v Eycks designed playgrounds composed from basic elements do fire the imagination. These areoutstandingexamples and increase the doubts on such facilities.Equipmentfor onepurposeonly presupposes its users to be passive consumers to be satisfied.But daily life depends entirely upon vast numbers of single-purpose facilities. We should constantly question whether we are to continue on automatic pilot this way or at some point be able to decide things for ourselves.One has to see the difference between an appliance or apparatus, and an instrument. Form directed towards a given purpose functions as an apparatus, and where form and programme are mutuallyevocativethe apparatus itself becomes an instrument. An apparatusworks for which it is programmed, that is which it is expected of it, no less but also no more. By pressing the right buttons the expected results areobtained, the same foreveryone, always the same.A musicalinstrumentcontains as many possibilities of usage as uses to which it is put: aninstrumentmust be played. It is up to the player to draw what he can from it within the limits ofhisability.Thusthe instrument and the player reveal to each other their respective abilities to complement and fulfill oneanother.Formas aninstrumentoffers the scope foreach person to do what he has most at heart and above all to do it in his ownway.Forthings to possess the quality of an instrument they must be interpretable in more than one way, enabling them to accept , and reject, multiple uses and multiple meanings; not everyone sees the same or gets the same out ofthem.Sothere needs to be a margin, room for a wealth of experiences contingent in the person, their objective and the situation at hand. If we were to build such play space into everything we designed, we could easily free the city from its tenaciousmono functionalconstriction, which is increasing becauseof the fear of losing control.So its about the spaces ability to be played as an implicit quality of the city, in other words about more informal room between formal designations. We find space for discovery and learning where things are not governed by clarity, such as in only partially defined or undesigned contexts. And this is without even considering obscure spots,abandonedbuildings, forgotten corners, alleyways,buildingsfallen into disuse whose originalmeaning is lost to us.It makes a big difference what kind of neighborhood you grew up in, whether the environment was rife with stimuli or experiences but also whether there were intriguing items in the streets and on the houses that occupied you, puzzled you or opened your eyes to something. Play space is found among what is official and functionally necessary, among the established meaning of specified functions.Neighborhoods that are rich in appeal and associations are the ones full of special places, copses, trees to climb, water, walls or relics of former times and where buildings on the street have elements with play potential such as porches , bays and corners. Everyone has their own examples and memories from childhood, and these may be of lifelong influence. (Hertzberger, 2008:226-227)The Learning CityWe must attend more to the children as a group and make more space for this group that is dynamic and inquiring and not always in step. OBS!!!!As V Eyck in 1962 wrote inThe Child, the City and the Artistthat the unsuitability of the modern city for children calls into question its suitability for everyone.It is children that lay bare the fundamental unfitness of an order and layout largely grounded in political and economic interests and therefore primarily opportunist by nature. If we want a city that opens our eyes and contributes to developing and activating people instead of staking everything on a meek, smooth-running, settled life we had better take young people and their needs as a yardstick for public space. The city for children is a better departure-point for the city for everyone.To understand what children may expect of the city as their environment, we must look at what we make through theireyes.Theremay be differences between young and old, big and small, but the word of the child is the same world as that of adults. There is no clear age boundary between child and adult, they are the same animal, dependent on eachother.Theadult is already present in the child and everything you acquire as a child will guide and pursue you as anadult.Noris there a special measure for children nor scale. We all live in the same world and have to climb the same stairs. So childrens needs are illustrative of everyone elses. What is good for children is good for everybody. You never stop absorbing new experiences. The Learning City makes no distinction between children and grown-ups.Learning is like eating and drinking and we all do that, only children are often greedier and tend to drink in everything they hear and see. All the impressions they get, experiences they have and info they acquire are imported into the existing order of the brain. they have to be incorporated into the childs familiar world, expanding andconfirming it to get a better grasp of the world at large. If the brain as an internal city is an impression of the external city, then the ideal external city should have a richly varied environment: a city that is nowhere dull, dry or bleak, nor hermetically defined and ultra safe , but rather a place where you have to hold your ground and watch your step.Of course there are negative experiences to be had in the city, living there means being automatically exposed to these, but all the more reason to counter them with a broad front. A city is a learning City when it arouses our curiosity, draws us in, a place where discoveries are to be made, that invites associations, stimulates thinking. The Learning City is a new paradigm which states that the administrators AND designers of modern cities should focus more fully on other criteria when giving shape tospace.OBS!!! Its not just about purchasing power and consumer activity, but more the contribution public space makes to our development and to an understanding of the world and of each others motives and actions.To this end, the criteria for designing that space have to become less concerned with the shortterm, less hedonistic, lessconsumption drivenand less self-centered. Over time, modern residential areas arebecoming increasingly dominated by relaxation, solitude andsafetyand obsessed with green space. There is little there to stimulate the mind, especiallyfor children.When learning goes beyond a process of adapting children to the world of grown-ups and when all the things we experience passively and actively become a form of learning(when development since the Age of theEnlightenmenthas been seen as the universal motor oflife), the distinction between children and adults in terms of the city is reduced to nil.Even so, children are more vulnerable, less able to see their way there and less able to stand up for their needs and interests. Instead of the current set up where children are expected to adapt to the criteria of their elders, we could take the reverse situation. The space in a city when tailored to its young people gives that city a firmer basis from which to proceed, equipped as it is for a permanent learning process for all inhabitants: a Learning City.The idea of education permanent (learning for life) dislodges learning from the limitations of a fixed school curriculum for a particular age group. This elevates mentaldevelopmentto a universal theme, the daily practice we all deal with, regardless ofage.Thisnot onlyunhitches (haka av) learning from immaturity and opens up the school to all ages but presupposes an awareness of the fundamental boundlessness of learning and ofcontinuousdevelopment. With learning no longer limited by age or time,logicallyyour entireliving space as learning space becomes the spatial equivalent of aneducation permanent. And what we earlier called the public realm is now expanded into a public learning realm.This instructive city makes our surroundings as a whole subservient to the development of everyone by consistently giving priority to the goal of leraning. We can regard the city as a large school in which is embedded all knowledge and understanding that has made thiscommunitywhat it is and with all the links and energies to best fulfill anyambition present. As long as its size keeps it legible, its inhabitants and visitors can generally find their way around well enough and are familiar with the relevant addresses and signals. A city mirrors the world you are essentiallyfamiliarwith and you knowwhere there are things to learn oracquireas well as where not to go.The more you take on board , the more you can handle. Children grow up in areasonable easy-to-read world they can naturally make their own. Once that world grows bigger detachment and alienation sets in. Then you have to keep control over an ever-expanding field of attention, which is the learning process. Nor does that field expand only in terms of surface area but also in depth. You also have to get at what is behind what you are seeing on the surface. We should therefore makeeverythingin such a way that it ismore explicit, explaining itself instead of holding back. If things are to becomefamiliarthey must make it clear why they are as they are and how they got that way. This is toprevent their history being erased, for the simple reason that things get replaced by others that are newer, better, bigger. For it is history that makes clear why things are as they are and what role they once played and that their form was not arrived to at randomHistory also makes us aware that things keep changing, (237)why this is so and whether this really is an improvement. Menaing is stored in the elements constituting the city, in their bricks, their architecture and in the place they occupy. These togehter, along with writings, images and music comprise a collective memory that contributes to a collective awareness and so will ultimately lead to social cohesion. Feelings, occurrences and people are retained and preserved as memories not just in monuments but in places, random objects, buildings or parts of buildings. The Learning City is in fact all about articulating these memories and making them transmissible and able to be read as the map of a communitys memory. All those who shape the city have to realize before anything else that it could all be much more transparent and easier to get at.A city becomes instructive by givingvisibilityto its past, its current situation and its intentions, toshow what it has going for it.Whethervisitoror resident, young or old, you should beable to read its history past and present and theachievementand values that obtain therenow and done in the past, noting their presence, becoming aware of them, familiarizing yourself with them.It concerns the widest imaginable range ofpotentials, experiences,associationsand social contacts.Iflearning to bridge the differences between people and between groups is increasingly an issue inside schools(alongside reading, writing and arithemics) , it should obtain also outside them when fitting out the public domain.. By this is meant not just to play spaces and sports fields: the way schools are transforming into a conglomerate of places should be extended into the public domain. Public space should be more of a traffic flow area: social coherence (sammanhllning) can only be heightened by enhancing the capacity of social space. Not decreasing but increasing the number of places encouraging social relations can do much to diminish antisocialbehavior.Regrettablymoderncities have a lot less to offer here than most older ones which not only have more variety but are much moreaccommodatingandhospitable. (Idem:235-237) (pictures will be published soon)