The Playgrounds and the City by Aldo Van Eyck, Ingeborg de Roode, and Liane Lefaivre, eds.

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2009) ISSN: 1546-2250 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 decadeold 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 peruseAldo 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. 369 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). 370 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...