Aldo Ernest van Eyck was born on 16 March 1918 in Driebergen, the Netherlands. Between 1919 and 1935 he lived in London, where his father was a correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper NRC. After studying at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, van Eyck studied architecture from 1938-42 at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich where he became acquainted with the international avant-garde. He remained in Zurich until the war ended and married fellow student Hannie van Roojen.
In 1946, van Eyck moved to Amsterdam and worked there from 1946 until 1951 for the urban development division of the city’s Department of Public Works under Cor van Eesteren and Jacoba Bridgwater. He designed more than 700 playgrounds, which he continued to design long after setting up his own practice in 1951.
[1] Municipal Orphanage (1955-60)
Location: Amsterdam
Function: Education, Kindergarten
[2] Wheels of Heaven Church (1966)
The church was described by Joseph Rykwert who published it in Domus as a design which "exemplified an architecture that expressed itself with an eloquence which moves the spectator by the clarity of a formal statement and through the shock of recognition, a shock which ocurred 'when he has read an order in the building through which he has walked and he has recognised this order as the plan of his being." [Strauven, F., 'Aldo Van Eyck the Shape of Relativity', Architectura & Natura, 1998]
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