Aldo van Eyck

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In 1946 he and his wife moved to Amsterdam, where he joined the Public Works Department, for which by the time he left in 1955 he had designed over 60 playgrounds in the interstices of the city. They set out on a series of travels to Africa, to pursue his lifelong fascination with non- European cultures. He became intimately involved with the Cobra group of artists.

In the autumn of his life, Gibson developed an alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale. A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as follows. All sensations, when they take artistic form, become immersed in the sensation of light, and therefore can only be expressed with all the colours of the prism. Das Gebäude am südlichen Stadtrand von Amsterdam gelegen, IJsbaanpad 3B Bereich, Holland Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts wurde von H. P. Vorschlag der Süd-Plan beeinflusst Berlage für die Erweiterung der Stadt. Er war unter der Autobahn A10 und das Stadion der Olympischen Spiele 1928 auf dem flachen Land ohne benachbarte Gebäude. The floor is a continuous flat surface covered with dark gray carpeting, with stone pavers on the doorways towards the exterior. In the lining of the walls, both interior and exterior, also used large wooden panels with openings for vertical windows. Iroko wood was used in the exterior. Oversimplification of form and detail is still a serious failing of most modern architecture. Yet what should be critical is not so much a limited vocabulary of forms, as the discipline with which they are deployed (hence the deep attraction to Modern architects of frugal, even ascetic, purposefulness of vernacular buildings). And just as a building or space must communicate its use, to be usable, so must individual elements or details suggest use – again it is ambiguity that allows creative interpretation. The best Modern architects understood this and to them the challenge was to communicate without resorting to familiar conventions with their predictable interpretations. Within such a discipline there is no reason why architecture should not enrich its language to redress the balance upset by the oversimple and abstract language of early Modernism. Wherever architecture goes from here certain discoveries and disciplines of Modern architecture deserve to be retained.

Structure

His designs seem somehow underwhelming compared with his vivid, lucid and poetic writing, which even 30 to 60 years later is still strikingly relevant. While some of the early texts have a preachy side, with all the desperation and hope for salvation connected to sermons, many of his later lectures and articles are more polemical, sharp and witty. The interior shows the influence of various styles such as Art Nouveau and finnish postwar architecture, as well as the anthroposophical vision of Rudolf Steiner. Steel and paint are closely allied: one tends to forget this, taking it for granted. Ships, railway engines, motor cars, bicycles, bridges-a host of things-are painted and repainted for protection according to custom, tradition or, if they happen to be pipes, like those which run up, down, along and across the Beaubourg, just for fun: for where there are no pipes there is no fun!’

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary; but the noun affordances is not. I have made it up (p. 127; italics in original). With the exception of the conference rooms that for acoustic insulation were made in reinforced concrete, the rest of buildings were raised with painted steel and wood. The Amsterdam Orphanage was truly a city for lost children. The building (now the Berlage School of Architecture) is a low, one- and two- storey beehive-like structure, a sequence of clusters in which children can invent by way of play and exploration a sense of community in the absence of a family, a place of chance encounters and of the imagination. Much publicised and debated when built, it was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair until taken over by the Berlage School in recent years.Ideas about play haven’t changed much since then,” says Nicola Butler, chair of Play England, who co-authored the charity’s Design for Play guidance in 2008 – and then discovered that Allen had written a pamphlet of the same name in 1962, outlining almost identical principles. “The more objects that children can actually manipulate themselves, the more enjoyment they will get out of a playground.” He taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1959 and he was a professor at the Delft University of Technology from 1966 to 1984. He also was editor of the architecture magazine Forum from 1959 to 1963 and in 1967. It’s all designed, says Emery-Wallis, “for proper risk-taking and getting dirt under your fingernails”. It might look more expensive than your average council KFC, but 80% of the materials were scavenged from Olympic leftovers. As for the increased dangers, she says Play England has a rigorous assessment system that measures the risk against benefit. “You’ve got to have a sense of risk and excitement,” she says, “otherwise we’re cosseting our kids in a bubble-wrapped world.” The building is located on the southern outskirts of Amsterdam, IJsbaanpad 3B, Holland, an area that at the beginning of the 20th century was influenced by the South Plan proposed by H.P. Berlage for the extension of the city. It was located between the A10 motorway and the Olympic Games Stadium in 1928, on a flat lot without neighboring buildings.

He had a classic but unconventional education in England, first at King Alfred School in Hampstead London (1924–32) and subsequently at Sidcot School in Somerset (1932–35), both were progressive schools where the arts, literature and the humanities were highly placed.

Spaces

Interestingly, and contrary to the above-mentioned studies on aesthetics, Sporrel et al. (unpublished) also observed that the children reported that they found the non-standardized configuration slightly more beautiful than the standardized one. This seems to suggest that the principles underlying the aesthetic judgments are different when children were to look at objects (as in most studies on aesthetics) than when they were to play on them. What is even more interesting, though, is that Sporrel et al. (unpublished) found no correlation between the children’s aesthetic judgments and their reported joy of play. Apparently, there is no relationship between how beautiful the child found a configuration and how much she enjoyed playing on it. This suggests that although designers might be concerned with the aesthetics of their play elements, the perceived aesthetic is not of overriding importance for the children who play on them. Concluding Remarks For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on. There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need to be emphasized here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e., meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus, an affordances-based description of the environment “includes” the animal ( Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this, describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an animal points to the functional significance this environment has for the animal. It refers to what the animal can do in his environment, what it means to him ( Gibson, 1982). The metallic structures of the arches are painted in three different shades of orange, red, purple, blue, or green, reserving the yellow for the columns and beams more illuminated, around the outer edges and at the top of the higher spaces .