Aldo van Eyck's polymathic genius has inspired both praise and jealousy, writes Patrick Lynch

摘要

The recent publication of the collected writings of Aldo van Eyck follows some excellent scholarship by Francis Strauven and Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis. Strauven's biography (Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Architectura & Natura) is really an intellectual history, and traces the influences on van Eyck, from the William Blake-loving headmaster at his school to the artistic and cultural figures that he met while stranded in wartime Zurich. Lefaivre and Tzonis have also written a sort of existential study in character (Aldo van Eyck: Humanist Rebel. Inbetweening in a Postwar World, 010 Publishers), and you gain the impression that if he had not studied architecture van Eyck would have made a brilliant writer or academic, but then he was these things too.