Aldo Van Eyck: Writings

摘要

"Van Eyck to me is a significant architect. He's more than significant, he's a great architectural mind who has had little opportunity," said Louis I. Kahn in a 1972 interview. Kahn first met van Eyck at the 1959 Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) meeting at Otterlo, the Netherlands, and recalled that van Eyck "made a speech about the meaning of a threshold just before you enter a room. It was magnificent, because through this, you could build a whole architecture."1 In Kahn's two statements, we may discern the outline of van Eyck's importance to twentieth-century architecture and the dual paths of his influence. At the time of Kahn's interview, van Eyck had, in fact, realized only a small number of buildings, including the Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam of 1955-60, the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague of 1964-69, and over seven hundred children's playgrounds in the city of Amsterdam, built starting in 1947. On the other hand, van Eyck's writings and lectures, published here in collected form for the first time, have had a profound impact far beyond that of his modest number of major built works.