Aldo van Eyck: Seventeen 18–19 Playgrounds traces what remains of Van Eyck's radical Amsterdam playground programme through the observations of two researchers who spent hours at these sites, speaking with children and parents, mapping the spaces that survive in the contemporary city.
About This Book
Between the 1950s and 1970s, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999) designed hundreds of playgrounds across Amsterdam — spare arrangements of metal structures and concrete elements conceived to cultivate children's autonomy rather than prescribe their play. This book began as a mapping project at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and evolved into something more attentive: a field study of the surviving spaces, gathered into notes, photographs, and reflective texts. For architects and urban designers interested in child-scaled space, post-war urbanism, and the long afterlife of modernist public infrastructure, it is a rare document — quietly methodical and alert to what these places still mean to the people who use them.
Key Features
- 128 pages of fieldwork notes, photography, and critical observations from surviving Van Eyck playground sites
- Edited by Denisa Kollarová and Anna van Lingen, with texts by Francis Strauve, Tobias Krasenberg, Paul Lappia, Jonáš Verešpej, Harm Stevens, and Tess van Eyck
- Research originating from the Graphic Design course at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
- Published by Oreri, 2015
What You'll Discover
- How Van Eyck's deliberately simple structures — metal and concrete — were designed to leave space for children to define their own play rather than have it determined by equipment
- Which of Van Eyck's playgrounds remain embedded in Amsterdam's contemporary urban fabric, and what their continued use reveals about the durability of his design thinking
- The methodological approach of Kollarová and van Lingen: on-site observation, conversation with users, and mapping as a form of architectural research
- Multiple critical perspectives on Van Eyck's playground legacy, including a contribution from Tess van Eyck, gathered into a compact, field-note format
About the Author
Denisa Kollarová and Anna van Lingen developed this research as students in the Graphic Design course at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Their methodology combined site visits, user conversations, photography, and video documentation to produce a record of the surviving Van Eyck playgrounds.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 128
- Dimensions: 114 × 162 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9791280674203
- Publisher: Oreri
- Publication Date: 2015
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers with an interest in post-war public space, researchers studying Van Eyck's legacy, and anyone concerned with how modernist infrastructure ages into — or out of — everyday use.