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Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground
By mo
Created 10/10/2009 – 16:38
Sat, 10/10/2009 – 16:38 ? mo
Hier een artikel geschreven voor een catalogus van een expositie in Madrid [1] over tuidelijk ruimtegebruik,
in dit geval de speeltuinen van Aldo van Eyck. Lijkt redelijk onschuldig, maar blijkt vrij verstrekkende en
radicale materie te zijn. Situationisten, provo's en dergelijke komen er ook nog in voor. Met dank aan
Marina van den Bergen.
Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground
Merijn Oudenampsen
In 1947, the architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam, on the Bertelmanplein. Many
hundreds more followed, in a spatial experiment that has (positively) marked the childhood of an entire
generation growing up in Amsterdam. Though largely disappeared, defunct and forgotten today, these
playgrounds represent one of the most emblematic of architectural interventions in a pivotal time: the shift
from the top down organization of space by modern functionalist architects, towards a bottom up
architecture that literally aimed to give space to the imagination.
 
 Immediately after the war, Dutch cities were in a state of dereliction. The housing stock was falling
dramatically short in both quantitative and qualitative terms, which combined with a dysfunctional
infrastructure, presented planners with the situation of an outright emergency. On top of that, this ravaged
urban context was soon to be confronted with the birth peak of the postwar baby boom, whereas almost no
space for children was available, neither inside nor outside the house. At that time, some playgrounds
existed in the city, but almost all of them were of a private nature and based on membership of the
fortunate few. Van Eyck's playgrounds, initially build on temporarily unused plots of land, can therefore be
seen as an emergency measure, but they had a significance far beyond that of a creative solution in a time
of need.
 The Functionalist City
Postwar urban planning in the Netherlands mainly consisted of a rushed and economized implementation
of the prewar ideals of the modernist movement grouped around the CIAM (Congrès International
d'Architecture Moderne), mostly identified with the work of modernist architects like Le Corbusier, Giedion,
and Gropius. In Amsterdam, Cornelis van Eesteren, longtime president of the CIAM, was to implement his
General Extension Plan (Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan – AUP) of 1934, one the first modern urban
masterplans to be based on extensive statistical forecasts of demographic and transport developments 1[2].
His plan embraced the ideal of functional separation, meaning that housing, work, traffic and recreation
where to be functionally separated and integrally planned. This was the basic premise of the large-scale
construction of new postwar neighborhoods in the fifties such as Buitenveldert and the Westelijke
Tuinsteden, resulting in the well known open housing blocks with large amounts of light, air, greenery and
monotony.
But the agenda of functional separation also resulted in the conclusion that Amsterdam's economic center,

the CBD, had to be further expanded and the old city had to be ?opened up? to traffic. This vision was
radicalized in the sixties, when the entire city clogged up due to the explosive rise of car traffic, and city
planners introduced a plan for an entire network of metro lines and highways cutting through the old fabric
of the city. What was on the agenda in the sixties was a tabula rasa makeover of Amsterdam's 19 th
century ring of popular and derelict neighborhoods, the Jordaan, Nieuwmarkt, Oostelijke Eilanden,
Weesperbuurt and the Pijp 2[3]. A wholesale urban modernization wave that would form a 20 th century
version of the hitherto unrealized Hausmannisation of Amsterdam, much like Robert Moses famously
implemented in New York with his parkways and causeways. The Dutch planners, however, never got that
far. They were soon to find a huge protest movement on their way that effectively poured sand in the
machine, and finally defeated what was by then called the 'urban bulldozer' 3[4]. Aldo van Eyck played an
important role in defining what would follow.
 The Break with CIAM
Van Eyck's path and that of the functional modernist school were initially one and the same. When he
started on the playgrounds, Aldo van Eyck worked directly under Cornelis van Eesteren, who was in
charge of Amsterdam's urban development department until 1959. He also began to participate actively in
the CIAM conferences 4[5]. However, the perspective on urban space that van Eyck developed through his
playgrounds, would lead him to become one of the most fervent critics of the functionalist tendency that
dominated the CIAM movement until then. In 1953, a critical group of young architects formed within the
CIAM, van Eyck was one its most vocal members. "Functionalism has killed creativity?, van Eyck stated in
an article in Dutch magazine Forum, ?it leads to a cold technocracy, in which the human aspect is
forgotten. A building is more than the sum of it's functions; architecture has to facilitate human activity and
promote social interaction? 5[6]. In 1959, this critical group was in charge of the organization of the 11th
CIAM conference at the Dutch town of Otterlo, where they did nothing short of declaring CIAM for dead 6[7].
By that time the CIAM had already lost much of it's momentum. Out of the organizing group of the Otterlo
conference emerged a new platform: Team X. The influential Dutch members, van Eyck and Bakema,
were to replace the old rationalist and functionalist approach for a new, modular, and participative
architecture under the label of 'structuralism' 7[8]. Looking back, we can see that the ingredients for this shift
were already present in the playgrounds.
Between 1947 and 1978 Van Eyck designed hundreds of playgrounds, first as part of the Department of
Urban Design and later on (in 1952) for the municipality and from his own office. In the first eight years he
designed 60 of them and after that many more, the last ones almost in batches in the post-war new
districts. Of all of them, 700 in total, 90 survived into the 21st century with their original layout. The first
playground for Bertelmanplein was a test case. Van Eyck designed a sandpit bordered by a wide rim. In it
he placed four round stones and a structure of tumbling bars. The pit was placed in the north corner of the
square, diagonally across from three tumbling bars. Bordering the square were trees and five benches.
The playground was a success. Many designs followed and, depending on the site, Van Eyck deployed a
number of compositional techniques. For him the playgrounds were an opportunity to test out his ideas on
architecture, relativity and imagination. Relativity in the sense that connections between elements were
determined by their mutual relationships rather than by a central hierarchical ordering principle. Instead, all
elements were equal: the playgrounds designed by Van Eyck were exercises in non-hierarchical
composition. 8[9]. Van Eyck also designed the playground equipment himself, including the tumbling bars,
chutes and hemispheric jungle gyms, and his children tested them. To him, play equipment was an integral
part of the commission. Its purpose was to stimulate the minds of children. The hemispherical jungle gym
was not just something to climb. It was a place to talk and a lookout post. Covered with a rug, it became a
hut. These sandpits, tumbling bars and stepping stones were placed throughout the Netherlands.

Different elements of the playgrounds represented a break with the past. First and foremost, the
playgrounds proposed a different conception of space. Van Eyck consciously designed the equipment in a
very minimalist way, to stimulate the imagination of the users (the children), the idea being that they could
appropriate the space by it's openness to interpretation. The second aspect is the modular character of the
playgrounds. The basic elements – sandpits, tumbling bars, stepping stones, chutes and hemispheric
jungle gyms – could endlessly be recombined in differing polycentric compositions depending on the
requirements of the local environment. The third aspect is the relationship with the surrounding, the ?in-
between? or ?interstitial? nature of the playgrounds. The design of the playgrounds was aimed at
interaction with the surrounding urban tissue. Temporality of the intervention was part of this 'in between'
nature, recreating space through incremental adaptation instead of the tabula rasa approach of
modernism, where the designs had an autonomy of their own, based on abstract data and statistics. Of
course the use of empty plots was also a tactical solution. Because the Site Preparation Service of the
Department of City Development, working together with local associations, wanted to give every
neighbourhood its own playground, they often had to be placed in vacant, derelict sites.
 The focus on how space could be appropriated, stood in clear opposition to the prevailing modernist
conception of space in architecture, most famously formulated by Giedion in his classic Space, Time and
Architecture where he defined the essence of modernist architecture as the merger of space and time,
creating the experience of movement 9[10]. Van Eyck's concerns were of a completely different nature:
?Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place,
and time in the image of man is occasion.? 10[11] The question raised was not the emulation of movement
towards some unknown horizon, the archetypical uprootedness of the experience of modernity 11[12], but
exactly the opposite: how can people make space their own and create a subjective ?sense of place??
How to feel at home in the modern city, this machine of mass rationalization? The transitory playground
was 'place' and 'occasion' combined.
The Playground as Cultural Critique
The playgrounds were not isolated architectural interventions. Somehow the playground is a powerful
synthesis, a distillation of some of the most interesting motives that resonated amongst the last avant-
gardes in that interesting time span when modernism came under heavy fire, but the general
disillusionment of the postmodernist era was nowhere yet in sight. In itself, a playground seems a rather
sweet and uncontroversial undertaking, but at the time, it served as a condensation point of cultural critique.
 In 1949, van Eyck played host to the first exhibition of the Cobra group ? a shortly lived but influential avant-
garde art movement – in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Cobra group drew their inspiration in
particular from children's drawings. They believed that the spontaneity of the child's imagination, untainted
by modern protocol, was one of the privileged sites of authenticity in a society where man was to live ?in a
morbid atmosphere of artificiality, lies and barrenness? 12[13]. The close relationship between van Eyck and
the artists from the Cobra current makes it probable that much of his early inspiration for the playgrounds
derived from Cobra: "On the margins of attention there is always the artist, essential companion to the
child. His function is too decorative", Aldo van Eyck stated during CIAM X, Dubrovnic 1956 13[14]. The Cobra
group dissolved only three years after it was founded, but Cobra members Constant Nieuwenhuys and
Asger Jorn were to reemerge on the stage as co-founders of the Situationist International in 1958.
 In that context, also the notion of play gained symbolic importance. In 1938, the Dutch Historian Huizinga
wrote Homo Ludens 14[15], a book on the historical importance of the element of play in culture; Constant
Nieuwenhuys used the idea as the basis for his critique on urbanism. Much like Aldo van Eyck, he was
deeply critical of the functionalist architecture of the postwar time. Together with Guy Debord, he wrote the
now famous tract on Unitary Urbanism that proclaimed the advent of a society of mass creativity. Constant
believed that, due to mechanization, Homo Faber, the traditional working man of industrial society, would

be replaced by Homo Ludens, the playful man, or creative man, in postindustrial society 15[16]. The
Situationists took this element of play and developed it into one of their core notions, as Debord would
state: "Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as
fictitious. But the work of the situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come." 16[17]
The situationists, whose themes came to play an important role in the '68 rebellion, developed the notion of
play into a subversive strategy to rebel against modern capitalism and modernist architecture; Le
Corbusiers authoritarian architecture was seen as a form of fascism. With psychogeography and the
famous dérive, they changed focus from ?streets, buildings and businesses? to how ?people inhabit the
city and the collective psychic ambiances they project?, much in parallel with van Eyck's stress on place
and occasion.
 After leaving the situationists, Constant was to play a role in the Dutch spirit of '68. In his later utopian
architecture work New Babylon (Van Eyck actually assisted him when he started making scale models)
Constant created an explicit metaphor for the advent of a creative society. He saw his ideas on mass
creativity materialized in the youth culture of the sixties, where his ideas were taken up by the Dutch
yippies, the provo's, that through playfulness and endless provocation brought the authoritarian spirit of the
Dutch fifties down on it's knees 17[18].
End Battle
In the Netherlands, modernist urban planning and the growing anti-modernist spirit of revolt were to have a
final face-off in the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood in Amsterdam. This was the site where the first of the
metrolines – with a four lane innercity highway on top – was to be constructed, cutting clear through one of
the oldest popular neighbourhoods of the city. Hundreds of students, artists and activists moved into the
empty buildings of the neighborhood, where provo's together with a mix of residents and activists founded
Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt. Years of spirited resistance, and a conclusive violent riot in 1975, lead to the final
surrender of the modernist planners and the politicians who led them: the metroline was finished but the
highway was stopped, and all other metroplans were off the agenda. The new left came to power, the
Nieuwmarkt was saved, and became an inspiration for anti-modernization struggles elsewhere in the
country. A new model for urban development emerged ? ?bouwen voor de buurt? (building for the
neighborhood) – that was to replace largescale modernist intervention for small scale participative projects
in the neighborhoods. The 'structuralist' architectural philosophy of Aldo van Eyck and the group around
the magazine Forum was to become a template for a decade to come. One of the first and most symbolic
of these projects was the redevelopment of the Nieuwmarkt itself, and maybe not so surprisingly, Aldo van
Eyck was the architect to work on it. Here, his ideas on interstitial space, non-hierarchical composition, and
participative planning, led to an architecture that could easily mold into the existing tissue of the
neighborhood. ?Play?, as Huizinga once said, ?is a serious matter?.
 Notes:
 
1[19]Vincent van Rossum (1993) Het Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan van Amsterdam: geschiedenis en ontwerp. NAi
publishers, Rotterdam.
2[20]Gemeente Amsterdam (1968) Voorontwerp tweede nota over de binnenstad. Gemeente Amsterdam,
Amsterdam.
3[21]Bergh & Keers (1981) 'De Binnenstad als Vrijetijdscentrum'. In: Wonen TA/BK, nr 19, oktober 1981, pp. 2-
18.
4[22]Lefaivre & Tzonis (1999) Aldo van Eyck, Humanist Rebel. Inbetweening in a Postwar World. 010 publishers.
Rotterdam.
5[23]Aldo van Eyck (1959) 'Het Verhaal van een Andere Gedachte' (The Story of Another Thought). In: Forum
7/1959, Amsterdam and Hilversum.
6[24]Louis

Kahn (1961) 'Talk at the conclusion of the Otterlo Congress'. In: Oscar Newman, New Frontiers in
Architecture, CIAM '59 in Otterlo. Jürgen Joedicke (ed.), Universe Books, New York.
7[25]W. J. van Heuvel (1992) Structuralism in Dutch Architecture. 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.
8[26]Lianne  Lefaivre & Ingeborg de Roode (eds.)(2002) Aldo van Eyck. Playgrounds. NAi Publishers, Rotterdam.
9[27]Siegfried Giedion (1980/1941) Space, Time and Architecture. The Growth of a New Tradition. MIT Press,
Cambridge.
10[28]Aldo van Eyck, 1959.
11[29]Marshall Berman (1982) All That is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. Simon & Schuster,
New York.
12[30]Cobra #4, 1949, cited in W. Stokvis (1980) Cobra. Geschiedenis, voorspel en betekenis van een beweging in
de kunst van na de tweede wereldoorlog. De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam.
13[31]Aldo van Eyck, 1959.
14[32]Johan Huizinga (1952/1938) Homo Ludens. Proeve eener bepaling van het spelelement der cultuur. Tjeenk
Willink, Haarlem.
15[33]Mark Wigley (ed.)(1998), Constant's New Babylon. The hyper-architecture of desire , 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam.
16[34]Guy Debord (1958) Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, June
1958, Paris.
17[35]Richard Kempton (2007) Provo. Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt. Autonomedia, New York.
 
 
de stad[36]mo[37]
de stadmo
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