Aldo Van Eyck ad Amsterdam. La strada superficie della vita quotidiana

Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) worked for the Urban Development Department of Amster- dam from 1947 to 1951. After briefly work- ing on planning, he was asked to design playgrounds, one for each neighbourhood of the city. According to Van Eyck, this was the op- portunity to experience a different and alter- native way of facing the growth of the city. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the reconstruction of the European cities, de- stroyed by the bombings, was the main issue, and Van Eyck looked for alternative solutions to the top-down policies which were domi- nant in the first decades of the century and in the post-war reconstruction strategy. Van Eyck’s approach was based on a realistic, adaptive attitude, sensitive to the different conditions and situations of the various sites where he was asked to intervene. His vision behind the development of the playground projects starts from the consid- eration of the city as an “open” structure, and not as a product of a pre-established model. Due to this change of perspective he was a precursor, not only of the following theories of Team X, but more generally of new ap- proaches about the city which focused more on discontinuity, openings, polarities and the “thickenings” caused by discontinuity itself. Van Eyck developed a series of compo- sitional techniques in consideration of the different locations; thus, his playgrounds became an opportunity to experiment his ideas on imagination, architecture and the different ways to build relationships with places. With his playgrounds we witness the metamorphosis from what is called urban space to the urban place. This substantial change in the urban landscape is related to the architectural conformation of space, the predisposition of elements and objects, the presence of active users. This “set of factors” (and not each on their own) contributes to the transformation process, which is physical, at first, and then immaterial, since the notion of place requires intangible contents. Reconsidering these ideas leads us to believe that the design of public open space needs to overcome a deterministic approach in favor of a “mobile” strategy, in which the characters of individual behaviors play a very important role. The playgrounds suggest the introduc- tion of anomalies or deformations in the urban system in order to promote the use of available spaces in unexpected ways, through a transformation process which ac- knowledges the creative action of the users instead of implying predefined rules. Reconsidering Van Eyck experience through a contemporary perspective helps understanding some current phenomena and developing interest in ”uncoded” plac- es, which are commonly excluded from a consolidated taxonomy of urban spaces. This not only reveals new fields of action for the project, but invites us to research devices and categories so as to generate in- novative design experimentations, fertilizing the thought on the city – which nowadays shows evident signs of aphasia.