The Playgrounds and the City
van Eyck, Aldo (2002).
NAi Publishers; ISBN 9056622498.
In the last few years, several major U.S. cities have shown a renewed interest in becoming more child-friendly. The decade-old Boston Schoolyard Initiative has improved the play offerings and environment of nearly 100 schools throughout the city, developed using a bottom-up approach to collaboration among city agencies and community groups. Denver is in the midst of implementing a Playground Master Plan, engaging the public through a comprehensive survey on public perceptions of the need for play facilities. In New York City, through Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative, 300 schoolyards are being converted through a participatory design process into public play spaces so that every citizen is within ten minutes’ walk of a city park.
These playground projects owe a great deal to the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999), who designed hundreds of urban playgrounds from 1947 until 1978 and created a template for spaces and equipment that is still in evidence in his native Europe and here in North America.
If anyone needs a primer on creating cities where play is part of the urban fabric, he or she would do well to peruse Aldo van Eyck—The Playgrounds and the City, which details the process and effect of his work in Amsterdam.Edited by the curator Ingeborg de Roode and the architectural historian Liane Lefaivre, this book of essays, drawings, and photographs was created to accompany a 2002 exhibition of van Eyck’s work at the Stedelijk Museum. But the 128-page book stands alone as an engaging exploration of how an influential young Dutch architect came to reshape postwar cityscapes from the playground up.
In 1947, at age 28, van Eyck began working with Amsterdam’s Department of Public Works. The city’s postwar landscape was pockmarked with vacant lots and teeming with children, but offered few formal play facilities. With the encouragement of his boss, Jakoba Mulder, Van Eyck set about to create a small public playground in every neighborhood. Uniquely for the time, these play spaces were interstitial; land was not cleared for the special purpose, but instead the playgrounds were built within the usable framework of a working city.
Born out of change and transience, many of van Eyck’s playgrounds were built in voids left by the demolished houses of Amsterdam’s deported Jews. His designs transformed these and other leftover spaces into a polycentric network of more than 700 playgrounds. His design palette of sand, concrete forms, and simple climbing structures were arranged according to his artistic vision and his belief in children’s capacity for imagination. Amsterdam’s density of playgrounds created the equivalent of stepping stones for children to safely move through and explore the city. As the number of playgrounds in Amsterdam increased, they formed a universe of places that children could identify as their own. Parents begged: “‘Let our children have a playground. They need it badly!’” (59).
After the Second World War, the needs of children generated significant interest among modern designers and planners. Van Eyck approached urban design with the well-being of children in mind, but he saw children as part of a communal fabric, and his playground programs were created through a collaboration between city officials and neighborhood residents. This bottom-up, participatory process was in part a reaction to modernists who were promoting comprehensive master plans for idealized cities. The playgrounds van Eyck and his colleagues created for the children of postwar Amsterdam shaped the city, but were also shaped by the city.
The editors of The Playgrounds and the City have focused on two primary aspects of Aldo van Eyck’s work—his artistic vision and his precedent-setting approach to urban design. The exhibition at the Stedelijk, which featured drawings, letters, photographs, and architectural renderings, was designed to present van Eyck’s work in an art-historical rather than strictly architectural context. The exhibition venue was extremely fitting: van Eyck was one of the few architects to have been associated with the museum as an exhibition designer and as an artist who exhibited on his own right.
Artistically van Eyck was influenced by his partners and fellow members of the rebellious Cobra movement. This international group took inspiration from primitive art, folk art, children’s drawings, and the paintings of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. While van Eyck was working with the city bureaucracy, he was designing provocative art installations at the Stedelijk, commissioning public art—such as Children Asking Questions, a mural painted in the former city hall by Cobra founder Karel Appel that was hidden from frowning public eyes for a decade—and writing and lecturing in defiance of Le Corbusier and other modernists promoting an authoritarian, standardizing approach to the “Functional City.”
When describing the layout and components of van Eyck’s playgrounds, the editors borrow from the terminology of art history. As if looking at a Klee painting, they describe a “focal point,” usually marked by the sandpit, that was “always out of alignment with the [geographical] centre” of the space. The result was “an asymmetrical situation” kept in “dynamic equilibrium” with a “composition” of play elements in geometric shapes (88).
Developed through constant experimentation with form and play value, van Eyck’s original play elements serve as precursors to the playground equipment familiar to us today: “Rectangular and round frames for climbing, a grouping of circular concrete blocks for jumping from one to another—objects that are not anything in themselves, but which have an open function and therefore stimulate a child’s imagination” (7). Van Eyck’s playgrounds had an added value as public art, and even when emptied of laughing children, their spatial equilibrium created meaningful places for adults to rest or meet on their way through the city.
Drawing his design vocabulary from site-specific features—old walls, window patterns—van Eyck created place-based architecture situated in the “realm of the in-between” (24). Just how many of the hundreds of playgrounds attributed to van Eyck are truly the work of his office is a matter of interpretation. He opened his own practice in 1951, and in the late 1950s the city of Amsterdam sought to mass-produce playgrounds based on van Eyck’s original design elements without his characteristic in situ layouts. “Aldo van Eyck had changed the Dutch cityscape to a much higher degree than he ever knew” (25), the editors of The Playground and the City write.
Lafaivre, a Canadian architectural historian and theorist, outlines the evolution of how van Eyck defined “in-between space” through references dating back to sixteenth-century Dutch landscapes and comparisons to contemporary essays, such as Rem Koolhaas’ “Junkspace” (2001) and “Generic City” (1994). De Roode, the curator of industrial design at the Stedelijk, created the larger project “Design for Children,” which provides a framework for both the Stedelijk exhibition and the book. Other contributions to The Playgrounds and the City include the editor and architectural historian Francis Strauven’s critique of the architect’s design process, the geographer Lia Karsten’s challenge exhorting contemporary city and playground planners to continue in van Eyck’s footsteps, and an interview with Aldo’s wife, Hannie van Eyck. A full chapter of The Playgrounds and the City presents a selection of letters written to Amsterdam’s Department of Public Works during van Eyck’s tenure.
Perhaps the book’s most animated feature is a series of black-and-white photo essays from the 1950s and 1960s. Full of poetry and humor, these images of everyday scenes along Amsterdam’s streets and playgrounds capture time and the delightful motion of van Eyck’s stationary play objects. In a chapter entitled “Innocence Reborn,” other images, such as Oscar van Alpen’s Boy in Sack and Hank Janker’s Wayward Youth portray children’s remarkable capacity to transform and invent new uses for common objects.
In one of van Eyck’s architectural treatises he marvels that after a heavy snowfall, Amsterdam’s children became more visible—taking over the city with sleds and snowballs. In response, his colleagues at Public Works encouraged him to design networks and play elements “more durable than snow” (84).
Unfortunately only a handful of van Eyck’s signature playgrounds have endured in the neighborhoods of contemporary Amsterdam. Many have disappeared beneath residential and commercial developments created for the baby boomer generation. These adults were the very children who originally had populated the playgrounds in great numbers—and whose activities are recorded in the book’s photo essays.
These urban transformations surely would have dismayed van Eyck. As Hannie van Eyck, who collaborated with Aldo, laments to de Roode: “[He] thought it was a great pity that the car took up so much parking space. The children have gone and the cars have taken their place” (15).
The same situation, of course, holds true for our cities today. While the circumstances of play may have changed significantly—with “stranger danger” and the rise of digital entertainment—the need for free and spontaneous play in well-designed spaces remains. Exciting new plans underway in the U.S. hold the promise to deliver on this need. New schoolyards in New York City, for example, are being designed by landscape architects working with teams of students, teachers, and planners from the Trust for Public Land. (My firm is contributing a science-themed agenda for these playgrounds.)
Clearly the lesson from van Eyck’s Amsterdam is that to create a truly child-friendly city, urban planners and designers must include a constellation of interests—policy-makers, community activists, commercial interests, and parents—in the decision-making process. The benefit is not only communal input, but ownership in the life of the city. Aldo van Eyck—The Playgrounds and the City illustrates very clearly how van Eyck and his colleagues endeavored to cultivate a physical urban culture in which the interests of children successfully grew into the active workings of a living city.
Reviewer Information
Jane Clark Chermayeff founded her firm, Jane Clark Chermayeff and Associates LLC, to focus on visitor-centered exhibitions and creative environments for learning. An educator and exhibition developer, Jane held positions at the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian's Design Museum, where she was the first Director of Education. With Jane Clark Chermayeff & Associates LLC, she has developed an international portfolio and noted expertise making complex subjects accessible to diverse audiences through multimedia exhibits and programs.