Incremental urbanism
Introduction
Aldo van Eyck (Driebergen, March 16, 1918-Loenen aan de Vecht, January 14, 1999)[1] was a Dutch architect. He was the son of the poet Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck. Aldo van Eyck lived in London from 1919 to 1935, when his father was sent there as a journalistic correspondent. He began his training at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, and later at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. He graduated in 1942, but remained in Switzerland until the end of the Second World War, approaching avant-garde artistic circles around Carola Giedion-Welcker, a historian of art and literature.[2] In these years he married his fellow student Hannie van Rooijen, an architect with whom he founded a studio in 1983, from which date they worked together.[3] They had two children.
In 1946, he moved to Amsterdam, where he worked in the Municipal Department of Public Works until 1951, when he became independent. He was a professor at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1958, and later, a professor at the Technical University of Delft from 1966 to 1984. He was also editor of the architectural magazine Forum, in the years 1959-1963 and 1967.
He was a member of the CIAM, and co-founder of Team 10. Aldo van Eyck defended the need to enrich the most orthodox functionalism "Functionalism (architecture)") of the Modern Movement "Rationalism (architecture)"), represented in the Athens Charter, incorporating new variables that considered the context in all its geographical, climatic, social, economic and political dimensions, betting on the ideas of identity and belonging or considering the change and growth of cities, among others. others. His position as co-editor of Forum magazine helped him disseminate the opinions of "Team 10" in favor of a return to humanism in architectural design.
Aldo van Eyck received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1990.
Family
Son of the intellectual, poet and philosopher Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck") and Nelly Estelle Benjamins, a woman of Jewish and Latin origin who had grown up in Suriname, a country to whose lively and exotic character she remained emotionally anchored for life.
Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck came from a Calvinist Puritan family that combined prosperous living circumstances and cold, sad religious practices. But he turned his back on his parents' faith since he was a child and looked for a substitute in literary culture. Nelly Estelle Benjamins had grown up without religion having much weight in her life and, although she finished her education in Europe, her temperament had hardly been affected by the bourgeois conventions of the Old World. Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck found in it the basis for understanding between life and art, ideas on which he worked.[4].