Aldo van Eyck

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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. Yet such exposure does not necessarily lend spontaneity to action but may render it deliberate. For to be spontaneous requires the reassurance of clearly understood codes and rituals reinforced by familiar conventions and signs in architecture and furnishing. So abstractness in Modern architecture encouraged self-consciousness. It led to either social intercourse as performance, or to withdrawal – both ultimately forms of privatism, of retreat into the private world of the self. The complex encompasses a total of more than 300 modules, all interconnected and grouped around a series of intimate courtyards, with spaces merging into one continuous interior. Seen from above, the low-lying structure seems to spread across the terrain like a virus. An organism for living, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, as an expression of the Structuralist ethos, the movement that promoted a human-centric, self-generating and open-ended architecture. The building is situated near the dunes of the coastal town of Noordwijk-aan-Zee and tulip fields, at Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, near Leiden, Holland and gently spreads up and down the surroundings.

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). This first project, although enthusiastically received in Noordwijk, did not get the approval of the executive board in Paris, largely because in making the program for ESTEC had underestimated the space needs of the facility constantly expanding. As a result, the program for the restaurant, library and conference center nearly doubled by adding a number of new office spaces, forcing the relocation of new additions to the large developing area southwest of existing buildings near From the main entrance to the complex down the road.

We must understand that art and life are no longer separate domains. The idea that art is an illusion divorced from real life must therefore be abandoned. The word ‘Art’ means nothing to us. We demand that it be replaced by the construction of our environment according to creative laws derived from well-defined principles.” ( van Doesburg and van Eesteren, 1923; included in Baljeu, 1974, p. 147). 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 .

This perspective was initiated in the 1980s and 1990s by a number of authors (e.g., Heft, 1989, 2001; Hodges and Baron, 1992; Costall, 1995; Reed, 1996; Ingold, 2000; for some recent developments see, Rietveld, 2008; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; van Dijk and Withagen, 2016; van Dijk and Rietveld, 2017). A central tenet of this approach is that the use of objects (and their affordances) always takes place in and is largely shaped by the sociocultural environment. For example, we learn about the affordances of objects from and through other people. To elucidate this point, Costall (1995) quoted Leont’ev (1981). 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 While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country.Transparency and colours. I have been busy for some years now re-evaluating the notion of transparency in the light of that other notion – enclosure, convinced as I am that architecture misses the mark and evades its purpose by reverting in turn to the one at the cost of the other for little more than stylistic reasons; the fact that my client – an admirable one if ever there was one – desired an open house came just at the right moment, nourishing a notion already growing in my mind: that it would be expedient, both in this particular case and in general, to bypass trying in vain to arrive at the right kind of openness (which presupposes the right kind of enclosure and vice-versa) in spite of, as it were, transparency.