His mother had a special hand for plants, she knew how to provide them with the natural conditions for their best development. Regarding the education of her children, Nelly also believed in children's innate instinct to learn naturally. That is why Aldo van Eyck went to a different school that was close to his home.

First, he was formed in an anti-authoritarian co-educational society school where teaching did not aim for all children to conform to a collective model but rather to be guided by their own impulses for their personal development and mutual cooperation. The school was largely outdoors in a natural setting. Here Van Eyck discovered his creative talent and explored his different forms of expression, King Alfred School").[9]​.

He later continued his earliest education at Sidcot School in the United Kingdom,[10]​ which was also not at all conventional, although the study of those subjects that the young man liked less but were considered important in his basic education such as Latin, mathematics and physics was reinforced. There he began to be interested in poetry, philosophy and also architecture.

In 1935, at 17, he began his training at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, a technical secondary school, since, for some administrative reason, his English public school did not give him access to the Technical University of Delft and he was forced to take the long route by first studying three years as an architectural draftsman in order to later access higher technical studies. Aldo was disappointed by the mediocre level of the school. His companions, much younger than him, lacked interest in cultural matters. The teachers were authoritarian and their way of leading the class was opposite to what I was used to. This experience was humiliating for him but in a short time he found a way to cope with it in the purest formal English style.[11]​.

In 1938, he entered the ETHZ where new horizons in architecture opened up for him. The school, far from being authoritarian, proposed from the first year a curriculum more oriented towards design practices than pure academic study. Van Eyck found Zurich a welcoming city, inclined towards democracy, with a tolerant and open character. He graduated in 1942, but remained in Switzerland until the end of World War II.[12]​.

After graduating, Aldo van Eyck married his fellow student Hannie van Rooijen in 1943, with whom he later founded the studio A+H van Eyck Architekten BV in 1983. During a time when he did not yet have commissions as an architect, he did specific work for other architects in public competitions. On occasions he and his wife worked as extras for the theater.[12]​.

In Zurich he became interested in avant-garde art and the Van Eyck couple met Carola Giedion-Welcker, an illustrious art historian belonging to the less conventional upper class of Cologne, wife of the historian Sigfried Giedion.[13] She brought them closer to avant-garde artistic circles since she personally knew many artists and writers, with some of whom Aldo came to exchange concerns and thoughts. Van Eyck certainly found more complicity in Carola's thoughts on art than in those of her husband, whose work Space, time and architecture[14]​ he considered disappointing, since despite dealing with interesting issues in a promising way, it did not reach exceptional conclusions.[15]​ What interested Van Eyck about avant-garde art was the new vision of the world it offered in which clichés were broken, the veil of external appearances was pierced abstracting them. In avant-garde art, the aim was no longer to reproduce the visible but to make visible the latent, original and elemental present in objects and subjects to reveal them in their paradoxical totality, with their most absolute grace and vigor.

Through the Giedion couple came the first small commissions, such as the refurbishment of Dr. Loeffler's office. After graduating in 1944, his friend and fellow student Felix Schwarz"), with whom he shared great admiration for the Dutch architectural style Nieuwe Bouwen, joined forces to jointly participate in an international competition for the first time, carrying out a project for a school. But the project was immediately discarded.

In 1947 he obtained, under the recommendation of the Giedion couple, a position as an employee in the Amsterdam Public Works Office under Cornelius Van Eesteren"), one of the most prominent defenders of modernism at the CIAM International Congress of Modern Architecture of the prewar.[16]

Van Eyck took the opportunity in this position to experiment. Instead of looking for a commission to work on post-war standards in large-scale projects, she chose a problem not common at that time, a humble park on Bertelmanplein.[17]​ The initial idea had been proposed by Jakoba Mulder,[18]​ a member of Van Eesteren's team and one of the first female urban planners in the Netherlands. This proposed escaping the traditional gardens and providing the parks with recreational furniture and sandboxes. After the success of Van Eyck's first work in developing Mulder's initial idea, this experiment became the norm for him and he went on to make no less than 734 parks in the next 30 years.

Despite their modest scale, the parks have been his most significant contribution as an architect. It is through these that Van Eyck sought a humanist alternative to the functional modernism of the CIAM- International Congress of Modern Architecture. It is thought that, in this way, he was the first to consciously conceive and implement a new development model in post-war urbanism, which in the 60s would be called incremental strategy, which sought to accommodate the immediate needs of the user, exploiting the opportunities offered by the immediately available locations. Their achievement was to transform urban fabric sites abandoned after the war and give them daily use for children.

In this way Van Eyck turned upside down the CIAM's way of approaching the reconstruction of the city, which in its planning from a massive and large-scale perspective, had ignored a multitude of abandoned minor spaces between the existing buildings.[19] These sites until then had simply gone unnoticed by the profession and tended to remain waiting for a future large-scale urbanization plan.

In these projects there is also the idea of ​​evolution over time. The location of the new parks would not respond to an a priori plan, but rather were a direct response to popular demand. These Van Eyck parks would be the precursors of what in the 60s were called 'popular parks' which invited citizen participation.

Van Eyck was also the first to introduce into his works the point of view of a user that had normally been ignored: children. He made it conscious of avoiding that they fell to the periphery of attention. Children are a group that appears repeatedly in his work, from the playgrounds to the municipal orphanage of Amsterdam, the schools in Nagele or the Hubertus house. It is revealing that his only book, published posthumously, is titled The boy, the city and the artist.[20]​.

Between 1947 and 1978, Aldo van Eyck, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Department of Public Works, developed a network of play spaces intervening in 736 empty plots with the aim of remedying the devastation of the post-war context, emphasizing play and childhood as a way of activating places with a negative historical charge through the specialized design of what became known as Playgrounds.[21]​.

Van Eyck's park scheme reflects in an updated way a well-established cultural continuity, a Longue durée phenomenon of Dutch culture. As Simon Schama expresses[22]​, the 'children's play' or kinderspelen of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or Pieter Brueghel the Elder, represented in recognizable urban locations, has been a motif of Dutch painting and northern humanist culture since at least the sixteenth century.[23]​.

The theme Kinderspelen brought to Van Eyck's mind the phenomenon of metamorphosis that occurs in the city after a snowstorm.[24] The city is taken over by the children, who become for a moment 'the lords of the city'. For Van Eyck, snow was 'a great trick of the heavens' that offers the child joy and justice. That is why he addresses architects and authorities asking to conceive something for children more permanent than snow, which offers them the possibility of moving freely in the city. The architect did not give details of what this new urban design system should be like, but he did indicate that it was important that it not be something isolated, but rather a regular pattern implemented throughout the city.[25]​.

Le Corbusier had already considered leisure as another function to include in city planning[26]​ but, unlike him, Van Eyck accepted the restrictions and surrounding conditions of the most everyday Amsterdam.[27]​.

The design perspective approached by Van Eyck in a concrete location rather than a preconceived ideal location is typical of the way many other people approached their respective fields in the postwar era, be it literature, film, politics or philosophy. Just as Van Eyck criticized ideal large-scale planning, Sartre[28] accused the grand philosophical system of suffering from the illusion of immanence, and encouraged the young postwar generation to engage with the world and its own unique situations. Another book that has influenced sensibilities in the field of architecture in the same sense is Critique de la vie quotidienne[29]​ by Henri Lefebvre.

The innovative design of Amsterdam's parks emerged in the context of a multitude of ideas including "situation", "time" and "play". But a fundamental idea that inspired Van Eyck was the philosopher Martin Buber and his most important work, Ich und Du[30]​ - 'I and you' (1923). Van Eyck began reading his work as a student in Zurich.[31] It is to Buber that he owes the concept das Zwischen, which he translated into English as inbetween, and in Spanish we could say intermedio, space between two or more. In it we find the idea of ​​dialogue as essential and determining the good life. Buber identified three types of dialogue: first, "technical" dialogue, which occurs with the intention of obtaining information, an instrumental act; second, the “monologue” dialogue, masked as dialogue. Finally, the "genuine" dialogue, with the intention of establishing a living mutual relationship between "I and you." This can happen through a simple smile in absolute silence. For Buber, what counts in genuine dialogue is the inbetween, or space between two. It is a fundamental condition of the human being. In fact, one person considers another as another, as a distinct being, with whom he or she is capable of communicating in a world that is common to both and that transcends the individual world of both.[32]​.

For Van Eyck, architecture consisted of the construction of the realm of the in-between, buildings and places as environments that sustain and enhance dialogue between people, a principle that guided his lifelong commitment to an architecture of community. The alienated post-war mass society, which had become detached from human ties, what Van Eyck and his colleagues called the society of large numbers, was perceived by their generation as a basic problem that architects had to address. The parks were the prelude to this task.[32]​.

Aldo van Eyck today represents a prototype of the post-war generation, the generation that gave rise to the culture of rebellion that would mark the 1950s. Aldo Van Eyck represented this spirit in architecture.[33]​.

He took part in an international group of young architects with modern ideas who contributed to rethinking architecture and urban planning after the Second World War, breaking with the 'functionalist', 'rationalist' and 'mechanistic' conception defended by an older generation of modern architects who dictated the post-war reconstruction schemes - Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion - and in favor of a return to humanism in architectural design.

They met often to share and discuss their different points of view and thus evolve their respective projects. It was in July 1953, at the IX International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), in Aix-en-Provence when, convinced of the need for change with respect to the current principles defined in the Athens Charter,[34] four young architects, who were quickly joined by others, decided to take charge of the organization of the next congress: number that catapulted the group to international fame, which was the last and most controversial step in a process that had been fermenting for a decade. Van Eyck was the most controversial and it was he who gave voice to the discontent in Otterlo, reproaching the fact that, although never before had the opportunities for the architectural profession been as fantastic as during the 1950s, they had been wasted in such an unfortunate way.[35]

Doctoral theses read in Spain:.

His mother had a special hand for plants, she knew how to provide them with the natural conditions for their best development. Regarding the education of her children, Nelly also believed in children's innate instinct to learn naturally. That is why Aldo van Eyck went to a different school that was close to his home.

First, he was formed in an anti-authoritarian co-educational society school where teaching did not aim for all children to conform to a collective model but rather to be guided by their own impulses for their personal development and mutual cooperation. The school was largely outdoors in a natural setting. Here Van Eyck discovered his creative talent and explored his different forms of expression, King Alfred School").[9]​.

He later continued his earliest education at Sidcot School in the United Kingdom,[10]​ which was also not at all conventional, although the study of those subjects that the young man liked less but were considered important in his basic education such as Latin, mathematics and physics was reinforced. There he began to be interested in poetry, philosophy and also architecture.

In 1935, at 17, he began his training at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, a technical secondary school, since, for some administrative reason, his English public school did not give him access to the Technical University of Delft and he was forced to take the long route by first studying three years as an architectural draftsman in order to later access higher technical studies. Aldo was disappointed by the mediocre level of the school. His companions, much younger than him, lacked interest in cultural matters. The teachers were authoritarian and their way of leading the class was opposite to what I was used to. This experience was humiliating for him but in a short time he found a way to cope with it in the purest formal English style.[11]​.

In 1938, he entered the ETHZ where new horizons in architecture opened up for him. The school, far from being authoritarian, proposed from the first year a curriculum more oriented towards design practices than pure academic study. Van Eyck found Zurich a welcoming city, inclined towards democracy, with a tolerant and open character. He graduated in 1942, but remained in Switzerland until the end of World War II.[12]​.

After graduating, Aldo van Eyck married his fellow student Hannie van Rooijen in 1943, with whom he later founded the studio A+H van Eyck Architekten BV in 1983. During a time when he did not yet have commissions as an architect, he did specific work for other architects in public competitions. On occasions he and his wife worked as extras for the theater.[12]​.

In Zurich he became interested in avant-garde art and the Van Eyck couple met Carola Giedion-Welcker, an illustrious art historian belonging to the less conventional upper class of Cologne, wife of the historian Sigfried Giedion.[13] She brought them closer to avant-garde artistic circles since she personally knew many artists and writers, with some of whom Aldo came to exchange concerns and thoughts. Van Eyck certainly found more complicity in Carola's thoughts on art than in those of her husband, whose work Space, time and architecture[14]​ he considered disappointing, since despite dealing with interesting issues in a promising way, it did not reach exceptional conclusions.[15]​ What interested Van Eyck about avant-garde art was the new vision of the world it offered in which clichés were broken, the veil of external appearances was pierced abstracting them. In avant-garde art, the aim was no longer to reproduce the visible but to make visible the latent, original and elemental present in objects and subjects to reveal them in their paradoxical totality, with their most absolute grace and vigor.

Through the Giedion couple came the first small commissions, such as the refurbishment of Dr. Loeffler's office. After graduating in 1944, his friend and fellow student Felix Schwarz"), with whom he shared great admiration for the Dutch architectural style Nieuwe Bouwen, joined forces to jointly participate in an international competition for the first time, carrying out a project for a school. But the project was immediately discarded.

In 1947 he obtained, under the recommendation of the Giedion couple, a position as an employee in the Amsterdam Public Works Office under Cornelius Van Eesteren"), one of the most prominent defenders of modernism at the CIAM International Congress of Modern Architecture of the prewar.[16]

Van Eyck took the opportunity in this position to experiment. Instead of looking for a commission to work on post-war standards in large-scale projects, she chose a problem not common at that time, a humble park on Bertelmanplein.[17]​ The initial idea had been proposed by Jakoba Mulder,[18]​ a member of Van Eesteren's team and one of the first female urban planners in the Netherlands. This proposed escaping the traditional gardens and providing the parks with recreational furniture and sandboxes. After the success of Van Eyck's first work in developing Mulder's initial idea, this experiment became the norm for him and he went on to make no less than 734 parks in the next 30 years.

Despite their modest scale, the parks have been his most significant contribution as an architect. It is through these that Van Eyck sought a humanist alternative to the functional modernism of the CIAM- International Congress of Modern Architecture. It is thought that, in this way, he was the first to consciously conceive and implement a new development model in post-war urbanism, which in the 60s would be called incremental strategy, which sought to accommodate the immediate needs of the user, exploiting the opportunities offered by the immediately available locations. Their achievement was to transform urban fabric sites abandoned after the war and give them daily use for children.

In this way Van Eyck turned upside down the CIAM's way of approaching the reconstruction of the city, which in its planning from a massive and large-scale perspective, had ignored a multitude of abandoned minor spaces between the existing buildings.[19] These sites until then had simply gone unnoticed by the profession and tended to remain waiting for a future large-scale urbanization plan.

In these projects there is also the idea of ​​evolution over time. The location of the new parks would not respond to an a priori plan, but rather were a direct response to popular demand. These Van Eyck parks would be the precursors of what in the 60s were called 'popular parks' which invited citizen participation.

Van Eyck was also the first to introduce into his works the point of view of a user that had normally been ignored: children. He made it conscious of avoiding that they fell to the periphery of attention. Children are a group that appears repeatedly in his work, from the playgrounds to the municipal orphanage of Amsterdam, the schools in Nagele or the Hubertus house. It is revealing that his only book, published posthumously, is titled The boy, the city and the artist.[20]​.

Between 1947 and 1978, Aldo van Eyck, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Department of Public Works, developed a network of play spaces intervening in 736 empty plots with the aim of remedying the devastation of the post-war context, emphasizing play and childhood as a way of activating places with a negative historical charge through the specialized design of what became known as Playgrounds.[21]​.

Van Eyck's park scheme reflects in an updated way a well-established cultural continuity, a Longue durée phenomenon of Dutch culture. As Simon Schama expresses[22]​, the 'children's play' or kinderspelen of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or Pieter Brueghel the Elder, represented in recognizable urban locations, has been a motif of Dutch painting and northern humanist culture since at least the sixteenth century.[23]​.

The theme Kinderspelen brought to Van Eyck's mind the phenomenon of metamorphosis that occurs in the city after a snowstorm.[24] The city is taken over by the children, who become for a moment 'the lords of the city'. For Van Eyck, snow was 'a great trick of the heavens' that offers the child joy and justice. That is why he addresses architects and authorities asking to conceive something for children more permanent than snow, which offers them the possibility of moving freely in the city. The architect did not give details of what this new urban design system should be like, but he did indicate that it was important that it not be something isolated, but rather a regular pattern implemented throughout the city.[25]​.

Le Corbusier had already considered leisure as another function to include in city planning[26]​ but, unlike him, Van Eyck accepted the restrictions and surrounding conditions of the most everyday Amsterdam.[27]​.

The design perspective approached by Van Eyck in a concrete location rather than a preconceived ideal location is typical of the way many other people approached their respective fields in the postwar era, be it literature, film, politics or philosophy. Just as Van Eyck criticized ideal large-scale planning, Sartre[28] accused the grand philosophical system of suffering from the illusion of immanence, and encouraged the young postwar generation to engage with the world and its own unique situations. Another book that has influenced sensibilities in the field of architecture in the same sense is Critique de la vie quotidienne[29]​ by Henri Lefebvre.

The innovative design of Amsterdam's parks emerged in the context of a multitude of ideas including "situation", "time" and "play". But a fundamental idea that inspired Van Eyck was the philosopher Martin Buber and his most important work, Ich und Du[30]​ - 'I and you' (1923). Van Eyck began reading his work as a student in Zurich.[31] It is to Buber that he owes the concept das Zwischen, which he translated into English as inbetween, and in Spanish we could say intermedio, space between two or more. In it we find the idea of ​​dialogue as essential and determining the good life. Buber identified three types of dialogue: first, "technical" dialogue, which occurs with the intention of obtaining information, an instrumental act; second, the “monologue” dialogue, masked as dialogue. Finally, the "genuine" dialogue, with the intention of establishing a living mutual relationship between "I and you." This can happen through a simple smile in absolute silence. For Buber, what counts in genuine dialogue is the inbetween, or space between two. It is a fundamental condition of the human being. In fact, one person considers another as another, as a distinct being, with whom he or she is capable of communicating in a world that is common to both and that transcends the individual world of both.[32]​.

For Van Eyck, architecture consisted of the construction of the realm of the in-between, buildings and places as environments that sustain and enhance dialogue between people, a principle that guided his lifelong commitment to an architecture of community. The alienated post-war mass society, which had become detached from human ties, what Van Eyck and his colleagues called the society of large numbers, was perceived by their generation as a basic problem that architects had to address. The parks were the prelude to this task.[32]​.

Aldo van Eyck today represents a prototype of the post-war generation, the generation that gave rise to the culture of rebellion that would mark the 1950s. Aldo Van Eyck represented this spirit in architecture.[33]​.

He took part in an international group of young architects with modern ideas who contributed to rethinking architecture and urban planning after the Second World War, breaking with the 'functionalist', 'rationalist' and 'mechanistic' conception defended by an older generation of modern architects who dictated the post-war reconstruction schemes - Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion - and in favor of a return to humanism in architectural design.

They met often to share and discuss their different points of view and thus evolve their respective projects. It was in July 1953, at the IX International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), in Aix-en-Provence when, convinced of the need for change with respect to the current principles defined in the Athens Charter,[34] four young architects, who were quickly joined by others, decided to take charge of the organization of the next congress: number that catapulted the group to international fame, which was the last and most controversial step in a process that had been fermenting for a decade. Van Eyck was the most controversial and it was he who gave voice to the discontent in Otterlo, reproaching the fact that, although never before had the opportunities for the architectural profession been as fantastic as during the 1950s, they had been wasted in such an unfortunate way.[35]

Doctoral theses read in Spain:.