The Dutch Structuralist architect Aldo van Eyck left his mark in Amsterdam – not only in the form of buildings but also, perhaps surprisingly. One of them is Aldo van Eyck, who designed a large number of public playgrounds for the city of Amsterdam. His playgrounds are something. Explore Sara Angelini’s board “aldo van eyck-playgrounds” on Pinterest. | See more ideas about Architecture, Playground design and Street furniture.

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This approach, which was initiated by the psychologist Gibson in the s and s, provides a framework for understanding the environment we playgrounde in. Some of the before-and-after photographs are telling: The Playgrounds and the Cityeds L. They can be used in different ways, depending on the game you are playing, and with their simple and abstract forms they stimulate children to use their imagination[…].

His plan embraced the ideal of functional separation, meaning that housing, work, traffic and recreation where to be functionally separated and integrally planned. Bordering the square were trees and five benches. Van Eyck consciously designed the equipment in a very minimalist way, to stimulate the imagination of the users the childrenthe idea being that they could appropriate the space by its openness to interpretation.

In fact, messy structures alco a fair amount of variation in heights and distances afford children to cross over different gaps.

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Reset Your Search Results Suggest a Research Topic. The rim of the sandpit is used by the children to climb on, to jump over, to run upon, and also provided a work surface while they are playing with the sand. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Often a guard was appointed who was responsible for the supervision of the children. It refers to what the animal can do in his environment, what it means to him Gibson, Canonical affordances vann context. Later he also designed a popular and widely copied climbing dome, jumping stones, and a climbing mountain Figures 23. Due to mechanization, Constant proposed, Homo Faber, the traditional working man of industrial society, would be replaced by Homo Ludens, the playful man, or creative man, in postindustrial society Aiming at fostering social behavior and communication, van Olaygrounds created many little squares and meeting places in his building that afforded and invited children to play together or to meet with the caregivers.


Descriptive and evaluative judgment processes: The playground he created at the Buskenblaserstraat in Amsterdam provides a nice illustration of this Figure 1. In that context, also the notion of play gained symbolic importance. However, the studies to date including this one count only as a first exploration of the interrelationship between aesthetics, play, and affordances, and much empirical and theoretical work is needed to further scrutinize this.

The verb to afford is found in the dictionary; but the noun affordances is not.

This is a book about how we see. The close relationship between Van Eyck and the artists from the Cobra current makes it probable that much of his early inspiration for the playgrounds derived from Cobra: The hemispherical jungle gym was not just something to climb. The playgrounds constitute a terrain for imagination which put into tension the universal human activity of play with permanent geometrical structures and physical system of organization found in far-away cultures and in different moments in time.

Although van Eyck stopped working at the public works department after 5 years to become a lecturer in art history and start his own companyhe continued working on his playgrounds. The symmetry that characterizes many of his play sculptures might be appealing when only looking at them, but it seems to reduce the attractiveness of the sculptures as elements for play.

Moreover, and as mentioned above, affordances exist by virtue of the relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal.

A child sits still on a slide or a swing: How do we see how to do things, to thread a needle or drive an automobile? Van Eyck designed a sandpit bordered by a wide rim.

For this square van Eyck designed a climbing arch, three tumbling bars, and a rectangular sandpit with a rim that is lowered at two places to let small children enter it. First and foremost, the playgrounds proposed a different conception of space. Encouraged by the public works department and the citizens of Amsterdam who explicitly asked for a playground in their neighborhoodvan Eyck ended up designing more than site-specific playgrounds.

The non-standardized configuration, on the other hand, consisted of nine stones of different diameters and heights that were placed at varying distances from each other. By not fencing the playing children, they became an integral part of the city. This psychology started from the physicalist assumption that the environment is meaningless, consisting solely of matter in motion. In his famous utopian work of architecture New Babylon Van Eyck actually assisted him when he started making scale modelsConstant created an explicit metaphor for the advent of a creative society.


How to feel at home in the modern city, this machine of mass rationalization? The arrangement of the elements in the playgrounds is always non-hierarchical and based on a careful compositional balance which is able to create tension and intensity between the objects while allowing a multiplicity of paths around the forms. Zaha Zaha Hadid by Andreas Ruby.

Moreover, contrary to a form-based description, an affordance-oriented one recognizes that a single object can have different meanings vna an individual. He also began to participate actively in the CIAM conferences 4.

And whilst he was a founding member of Team 10, wanting to humanize architecture in reaction to the authoritarianism of Corbusian modernism, his interventions now look just as proscriptive.

The idea that art is an illusion divorced from real life must therefore be abandoned. Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration. From darwin to watson and cognitivism and back again: Over the last two decades, the playgrounds of van Eyck have been honored and studied by different academic disciplines, including sociology, art, architecture, and psychology e.


Buber then goes on to state — and this is his crucial point — that the real third is not something that happens to one person or another person separately and a neutral world containing all things, but something that happens in a dimension only accessible to both. Her films of Tangier juxtapose images of children playing plyagrounds a semi-derelict playground with the booming new developments happening in the city.

Foregrounding sociomaterial practice in our understanding of affordances: The Perception of the Aodo. A miraculous trick of the skies — a fleeting correction. Blog Building of the Week 07 Apr The question raised was not the emulation alro movement towards some unknown horizon, the archetypical uprootedness of the experience of modernity 11but exactly the opposite: