The historian Philippe Ariès has equated the end of the presence of children in the city with a shift towards the ‘anti-city’: ‘The strong sociability of children within the city, and the shared use of urban space between children and adults have thus continued throughout the 19th century, before the pushback of children to the fringes of the city eventually overcame resistance, at the same time as the urban space was transforming, exploding’ [1]. The modern movement in architecture confirmed this trend through its functionalist approach to the city, divided into areas dedicated to single functions—life, work, leisure and transport, to use the language defined by the Urbanism Charter of the fourth CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) assembly held in Athens in 1933 [2]. Rising against this latest approach, and in an attempt to fight back the erasure of children from cities, Aldo van
Eyck (1918–1999)—a member of Team X [3]—presented to the tenth CIAM held in Dubrovnik in 1956 a set of four panels titled Lost Identity, in answer to the question of the danger to children posed by the city, as shown in the first panel. This article intends to review each panel and shed light on their meaning by drawing from Aldo van Eyck’s texts [4], which brilliantly illuminate the process of the man who, between 1947 and 1978, built more than 700 playgrounds throughout the city of Amsterdam.
The first panel poses the existence of a ‘problem’: ‘a city without the child’s particular movement is a paradox.‘ The paradox in question is the disengagement of children from the city, even in spite of the fact that children, unlike citizens (i.e. adults), self-actualise ‘through’ elements intended by the city to compel them [5]. These elements don’t have on children the same detrimental effects that they have on adults. This lost identity is therefore not that of the child in the city, but rather that of the adult in the city—and the child is the guide for the adult to recover it. As he put it in a conference in 1962: ‘a child is effectively in a mirrored situation to the city. It is inevitable, but of course it doesn’t happen without conflicts’ [6]. The second panel presents a ‘symbol towards a partial solution’: snow. As Aldo van Eyck explains in several of his texts, when snow covers the city, the city rediscovers the child and the child rediscovers the city [7]. Hence the necessity to ‘design something for the child that would be more permanent than snow, but that would also be less profuse, something which, unlike snow, elicits the child’s movement without hindering other essential urban movements’ [8]. The goal in this case was to remedy the fleeting nature of snow, yet retain its capacity to abolish the differentiation of spaces it covers, in order to overcome the divide between centre and periphery, which confines children to the fringes of the city.
When Aldo van Eyck produced these panels, he had been working for nearly a decade in the urban planning department of the city of Amsterdam, where he was responsible for developing playgrounds in each of the city’s districts. As an extension of this work,
he identified vacant plots (where demolished homes had left holes in the urban fabric) and interstices too small to allow any construction. Systematically, he photographed them before his playgrounds were built, then took another photograph from the same angle once the work had been completed. The third panel states this clearly: these playgrounds are fortuitous, ‘incidental’. This should be understood in the sense that they do not disrupt the continuum and the fabric of the city. Their virtue lies in their status as intermediary zones, in their play on the notion of threshold, rather than rupture or enclosure. Here, we are reminded of the ‘the greater reality of the doorstep, the threshold and the in-between’ [9], which Aldo van Eyck hoped would inform the CIAM’s historical introduction.
The fourth panel reveals the origin of the shapes of the play elements featured on the third: his playgrounds, consisting of simple, non-figurative, geometric elements, be it sandboxes with thick edges, round posts placed inside or around them, climbing bars or dome- or tunnel-shaped rounded frames, are all inspired by art—and stand in stark contrast with the stereotypical shapes of the American playground (sandboxes, swings, slides, etc.). Aldo van Eyck designed a number of simple shapes which bring to mind the formal language of artists he knew and admired, such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Richard Paul Lohse and Joost van Roojen [10]—Aldo van Eyck was also very close to artists of the Cobra group and although his work around play does not share their taste for the informal, it does share the same appeal for childhood and a clear inclination towards primitivism. Van Eyck added that ‘the artist, essential ally of the child, is there to lessen the conflict.’ [11] We might be misled to think that he is merely referring to the conflict between the child and the city, but this would be overlooking his primitivist approach to childhood. The architect holds childhood to the
status of a model for thinking anew the relationship of adults with the city. The architect, inspired by the artist, must allow the child to realise the harmonious relationship with the city of which the child is capable, and ensure that the ‘journey’ that is childhood is not travelled ‘by night’ [12]. By presenting the child with forms free from attributions to play, that do not limit his movements to functions, and by opening up play areas within the city, the child is once more at the centre, and can fully be a model for the adult, inspiring in them a new relationship to the city.
[1] Philippe Ariès, Essais de mémoire: 1943–1983 (Essays on memory: 1943–1983), Paris, Seuil, 1993, p. 248
[2] Le Corbusier gave it its final formulation in The Athens Charter, first published in French 1957.
Cf. Eric Mumford,The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928–1960, Cambridge, M.I.T. Press,2000
[3] Together with Jaap Bakema, George Candilis, Rolf Gutmann, Peter and Alison Smithson, Bill and Gill Howell, John Voelcker, Shadrach Woods.
[4] The texts in question are those of Chapter four of a compendium of his written works:
Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947–1998, edited by Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, SUN Publishers, 2008
[5] Aldo van Eyck, “When snow falls on cities”, in ibid, p. 108
[6] Aldo van Eyck, “Sur le design des installations de jeu et l’aménagement des aires de jeux” (On the design of play equipment and the arrangement of playgrounds), in Vincent Romagny (dir.), Anthologie. Aires de jeux d’artistes, Infolio, 2010, p. 99
[7] Aldo van Eyck, “When snow falls on cities“ et “After a heavy snowstorm”, ibid., pp. 108–110
[8] Aldo van Eyck, “After a heavy snowstorm”, Ibid.
[9] Robert McCarter, Aldo van Eyck, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 77
[10] Aldo van Eyck was also very close to the artists of the Cobra group. His playful work certainly does not share their taste for informality, but it does share their attraction for childhood and a real tendency towards primitivism.
[11] Aldo van Eyck, “When snow falls on cities”, op. cit., p. 108
[12] Aldo van Eyck, The Child, the City and the Artist. An Essay on architecture. The in-between realm, Amsterdam, SUN Publishers, 2008, p. 19.
We would like to thank Tess van Eyck Wickham and the Aldo+Hannie van Eyck Foundation for their kind permission to publish the four “Lost identity” panels.
This article was published in SCAU Architecture (ed.), Time to Play, SCAU-Archipress éditions, 2024