Playgrounds in Amsterdam.
‘In the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible’
Huizinga
‘ If cities are not meant for children, they are not meant for citizens either.’
Aldo van Eyck.
Aldo Van Eyck was trained as an architect in Zurich between the two world wars. He was very much a part of the modernist movement signing up to the CIAM manifesto. However he was sceptical about the ways the modernist ideals were being implemented becoming wary of the modernist ‘machine’ approach to urban re-development.
He spoke quite early on in his career about the dangers of sweeping away whole districts to create, in their stead, a mass development of high rise housing built according to strict modernist principles.
With the benefit of hindsight, this seems to us a self evident truth. The idea of the total remodelling of Amsterdam to replace it with a modernist city is appalling to us now. But for a young unknown architect to speak out against the popular school of the day showed great resilience and foresight.
Van Eyck believed that Modernist architectural concepts could start immediately and on a small scale, rather than waiting until whole of a areas of city could be demolished and rebuilt.
He thought of this as ‘Inbetweening’, making seen the overlooked spaces. Giving waste space a use.
He was interested in developments on a human scale focusing on a ‘Play, Work, Life’ approach to communities.
Later in his career he created many large design projects, among them an orphanage building in the centre of Amsterdam. This was based on polygonal units, a much repeated motif in his work. The building was described to me by a woman who spent time there as a visiting social worker as being some-what impractical but feeling gentle and welcoming for children.
However, it was in the small works that Aldo Van Eyck tested and developed his humanist radical theories.
He designed playgrounds.
Then as now, this was a sphere of design largely ignored as being too superfluous and insignificant to be prestigious. ‘He believed play spaces were a legitimate art form’ (Solomon)
Until this time, official playgrounds within the city of Amsterdam had been private and access was restricted by membership. This. despite the work of Huizinga in the writing of ‘Homo-Ludens’ (1938 in the original Dutch) and a integrated history of children at play within the whole community as demonstrated by Simon Schama through his exploration of Dutch ‘Kinderspelen’ painting.
Amsterdam was in process of recovery from the Nazi occupation. The Hungerwinter 1944-45 had compounded the privations of the occupation and marred the joy of the liberation of Amsterdam. Many thousands of children were orphaned and displaced and huge numbers of child and adult refugees in the city placed an intolerable strain upon available resources, especially as the harvests had failed that summer and no food was being imported to the city. Some survived only by eating tulip bulbs some by scavenging for scraps on the street. 20,000 people died of starvation.
In the light of this deprivation it is not surprising that there was a move to look to the needs of children, just as there had been in Copenhagen where the first adventure (junk ) playground had been created during the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s.
Van Eyck was inspired and encouraged by the Head of the Design Section for the Office of Public Works in Amsterdam, his manager, Jakoba Mulder . She had already restored the Beatrixpark following the liberation of the city, reclaiming it from the Nazi functionalist and propagandist re-branding. She suggested the plan of creating a small, open access, public playground in every neighbourhood of Amsterdam.
So it was that In 1947 Aldo van Eyck designed what was to become the first of this network of playgrounds, a small experimental site in the Bertelmanplein. 20×30 meters in size and surrounded by Amsterdam school style housing, the playground was designed as a simple, understated affair with a concrete moulded rectangular sandpit with what was to become the Van Eyck trademark broad topped walls, tumbling bars, ample room for free play and trees and benches for shade shelter and comfort. (The square was added to by Van Eyck in 1975. It was presumably at this stage that stepping stones and a polygonal steel tube climbing frame was added to the site.) The project was a success, as early photographs show.
The City Council were so delighted with the positive responses from the local community that they reserved a million Guilders to build several more of these playgrounds.
Van Eyke went on to design at least 733 other playspaces over the next 30 years in Amsterdam, though it is hard to pin the figures down as many were undocumented.
The majority of the spaces that he designed were on sites requested by small neighbourhood communities who had seen successful playgrounds around the city and who wanted the Department of Works to create for them something similar of their own. This was a scheme supported and funded by the Municipality. I have found no information about the cost of individual sites.
No comprehensive mapping of these spaces was ever undertaken as they ‘were not a part of an a-priori plan.’ Rather, they ‘made use of the holes of the urban fabric’. The only maps that exist are from around 1957 they show fewer than 100 playgrounds. However several of the sites were documented, photographed from high neighbouring attics, before and after the work. These offer a glimpse of the astounding impact of the work of this man which was replicated through out the city and its growing suburbs*******(Aldo Van Eyck. Humanist Rebel. Inbetweening the Postwar years. Lianne Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis. 1999)
In some ways his work on playgrounds is lost and unknown. Today, the design literate in Mokum ( literally ‘The Place’ the Yiddish name for Amsterdam,) know his name from his large buildings, but are unaware that it is his work which gives them the places in which they still play with their children. In an interview with parents sat in a Van Eyke playground in the Vondelpark, parents were surprised to learn that Van Eyke had designed the space. They all knew his larger works well, and had found then difficult to work in. But they found the playground perfectly suited to purpose.
The sites that were chosen for playgrounds were sometimes grand spaces in parks, (the Vondelpark alone has four Van Eyck play places). More often they were scrap yards, derelict spaces and SLOAPs (Spaces Left Over After Planning,) between roadways and the gaps left by the houses that had ‘belonged to people deported during the war which had been scavenged for fuel’. Here I realise the thinness of the translation that I am working from. Solomon in conversation with Lefaivre, 2003 ‘ Where spaces held tragic meaning, such as the empty lots, where deported Jews had once had their homes, Van Eyck tried to initiate a firm and hopeful sense of beginning.’ In bold terms, families transported to concentration camps by the Nazis were paid tribute through the creation of play spaces for the children that survived them. ‘Rather than calling up the past, he laboured to re-establish the present.’ (Solomon).
Many playgrounds were integrated into the traditional Amsterdam squares in the middle of housing blocks in the older parts of the city, and where suburban communities were being created, Van Eyck designed playgrounds into the courtyards between the medium-high rise blocks mimicking the success of the town house squares.
It was very much in Van Eyck’s mind that this was an offer to all sectors of a neighbourhood. So his playgrounds do not look like ‘deserted amusement parks when the children are gone.’ They ’become places that make sense to adults, places of rest or encounter’. He refers to the matter of taking care of the sites. ‘There is no supervision there. It should not be necessary…..You may see ladies in fur coats letting their dogs roam in the sandpits. However, by contrast the people of the Jordaan*.. have accepted the playground as their collective property and work to keep it clean together.’(* The Jordaan is a district near to the heart of Amsterdam- Van Eyke refers to it at a time when it was a place of low income households, with a strong sense of community.)
He said in 1962.’ In Amsterdam we… have used up ( by building playgrounds,) all the places in the inner city that might have been used for playgrounds. Between the Playgrounds we have created a more finely-meshed network (of play places). It might be said that there is no more to be done. But we want to make the network even denser by combing the city again and this time finding places that are just big enough for a single play apparatus. The opportunity for the child to discover its own movement as an integral part of the city; the city is also a playground.’
What was his design philosophy?
‘Just as one places a bench because one wants to sit, a lamppost because one wants to light the street, a news-stand because one wants to buy newspapers,, I am putting a playdome there because children want to play.’ AvE (1962)**
Aldo Van Eyck used ‘Relativity’ as one of his compositional techniques. Relativity ‘concerns a reality in which connections between elements are determined by their mutual relationships rather than by a central hierarchical ordering principle.’ * He intended no element within a playspace to have supremacy over any other. Sandpits, from the very first experiment on Bertelmanplein were set wildly off centre with tumbling bars on a diagonal line. Each element has space to be used and explored by many children at once and many times over. Watching the spaces used by children it would seem that his awareness of the relativity of the elements within the playground does affect the way that the children use the space. Although their attention is maintained by each element, the spaces in bet
Playgrounds ในอัมสเตอร์ดัม'ของเล่นวิญญาณ อารยธรรมเป็นไปไม่ได้'Huizinga'ถ้าการเมืองไม่ใช่สำหรับเด็ก พวกเขาจะไม่ใช่สำหรับประชาชนอย่างใดอย่างหนึ่ง'Aldo van EyckAldo Van Eyck ได้รับการฝึกอบรมเป็นสถาปนิกในซูริกระหว่างสงครามโลกทั้งสอง กำลังมากเป็นส่วนหนึ่งของการเคลื่อนไหววิธีลงนามเพื่อประกาศ CIAM อย่างไรก็ตาม เขามีความเกี่ยวกับวิธีการอุดมคติวิธีการดำเนินการระมัดระวังวิธีบุกเบิก 'เครื่องจักร' การพัฒนาเมืองใหม่กลายเป็นเขาพูดค่อนข้างเร็วในในอาชีพของเขาเกี่ยวกับอันตรายจากการกวาดไปทั้งอำเภอเพื่อสร้าง ในการนี้ การพัฒนาโดยรวมของหมู่บ้านสูงขึ้นที่ระดับบุกเบิกหลักเคร่งครัดด้วยประโยชน์ของ hindsight นี้ดูเหมือนว่าเราความจริงด้วยตนเองที่เห็นได้ชัด ความคิดของ remodelling รวมอัมสเตอร์ดัมเพื่อแทนที่ ด้วยเมืองบุกเบิกเป็นไฮเราขณะนี้ แต่สำหรับสถาปนิกที่รู้จักหนุ่มพูดกับโรงเรียนยอดนิยมของวันพบความยืดหยุ่นดีและมองอนาคตVan Eyck เชื่อว่า แนวคิดสถาปัตยกรรมวิธีสามารถเริ่มต้นทันที และในมาตราส่วนขนาดเล็ก แทนที่รอจนกว่าทั้งหมดของพื้นที่เมืองสามารถรื้อ และสร้างใหม่เขาคิดว่า นี้เป็น 'Inbetweening' ทำเห็นช่อง overlooked ทำให้เสียเนื้อที่ใช้เขามีความสนใจในการพัฒนาในระดับบุคคลเน้นวิธีการแบบ 'เล่น ทำงาน ชีวิต' เพื่อชุมชนในอาชีพของเขา เขาสร้างโครงการออกใหญ่มาก ในหมู่พวกเขามูลนิธิสงเคราะห์เด็กสร้างของอัมสเตอร์ดัม นี้ถูกตามหน่วย polygonal แปลนมากซ้ำในงานของเขา อาคารถูกอธิบายให้ฉันเป็นผู้หญิงที่ใช้ขณะที่มีผู้ปฏิบัติงานสังคมมาเยี่ยมเป็นกำลังใจมาก แต่ความรู้สึกอะไรบาง และต้อนรับสำหรับเด็กอย่างไรก็ตาม ได้ในงานขนาดเล็กที่ Aldo Van Eyck ทดสอบ และพัฒนาทฤษฎีของเขารุนแรง humanistเขาออกแบบ playgroundsแล้ว ว่าเดี๋ยวนี้ นี้เป็นทรงกลมของการออกแบบส่วนใหญ่ถูกละเว้นเป็นการไม่จำเป็น และสำคัญให้เกียรติเกินไป 'เขาเชื่อว่า พื้นที่เล่นมีรูปแบบศิลปะถูกต้องตามกฎหมาย' (โซโลมอน)จนถึงเวลานี้ playgrounds ทางภายในเมืองอัมสเตอร์ดัมได้ส่วนตัว และการเข้าถึงถูกจำกัด โดยสมาชิก นี้ แม้ มีการทำงานของ Huizinga ในการเขียนของ 'ตุ๊ด-Ludens' (1938 ในดัตช์เดิม) และประวัติรวมเด็กที่เล่นภายในชุมชนเป็นการสาธิตโดย Simon Schama ผ่านเขาสำรวจจิตรกรรมดัตช์ 'Kinderspelen'อัมสเตอร์ดัมมีขั้นตอนการกู้คืนจากการยึดครองของนาซี Hungerwinter 1944-45 มีเพิ่ม privations ของอาชีพ และความสุขของการปลดปล่อยของอัมสเตอร์ดัม marred หลายพันคนของเด็กที่กำพร้า และหน่วย และขนาดใหญ่จำนวนเด็ก และผู้ใหญ่ผู้ลี้ภัยในเมืองอยู่ต้องใช้การนำมารวมตามทรัพยากรที่มีอยู่ โดยเฉพาะอย่างยิ่งกับ harvests ที่ได้ล้มเหลวที่ร้อน และอาหารไม่ถูกนำเข้าไปยังเมือง บางส่วนรอดชีวิต โดยการกินหลอดทิวลิปบาง โดย scavenging สำหรับเศษบนถนนเท่านั้น 20000 คนเสียชีวิตของความอดอยากนี้มานี้ จึงไม่น่าแปลกใจว่า มีการย้ายไปยังการค้นหาความต้องการของเด็ก เหมือนมีได้ในโคเปนเฮเกนซึ่งที่แรก (เมลขยะ) เด็กมีการสร้างในระหว่างการยึดครองของนาซีในต้นทศวรรษ 1940 โดยVan Eyck ได้แรงบันดาลใจ และสนับสนุน โดยหัวหน้าส่วนการออกแบบสำหรับสำนักงานโยธาธิการที่อัมสเตอร์ดัม ผู้จัดการของเขา Jakoba Mulder แล้วเธอก็คืนค่า Beatrixpark ต่อการปลดปล่อยเมือง reclaiming functionalist นาซีและ propagandist ตราสินค้าใหม่ เธอแนะนำแผนการสร้างแบบเล็ก ๆ เปิดเข้า สนามเด็กเล่นสาธารณะในทุกเที่ยวอัมสเตอร์ดัมเพื่อที่ใน Aldo van Eyck ออกแบบสิ่งที่จะเป็น ครั้งแรกของเครือข่ายนี้ของ playgrounds ไซต์ทดลองขนาดเล็กในการ Bertelmanplein ได้ 20 × 30 เมตรขนาด และล้อมรอบ ด้วยอัมสเตอร์ดัมโรงเรียนลักษณะที่อยู่อาศัย สนามเด็กเล่นออกแบบมาเป็นเรื่องที่ง่าย ฟูจิกับกระบะทรายสี่เหลี่ยม moulded คอนกรีตมีสิ่งที่จะกลายเป็น Van Eyck ค้ากว้างราดผนัง ตามบาร์ ห้องพักกว้างขวางฟรีเล่น และต้นไม้ และม้านั่งสำหรับพักอาศัยร่มเงาและความสะดวกสบาย (สี่เหลี่ยมถูกเพิ่ม โดย Van Eyck ใน 1975 ก็สันนิษฐานว่าในขั้นตอนนี้หินที่สเต็ปและท่อเหล็ก polygonal เฟรมปีนเขาถูกเพิ่มลงในไซต์) โครงการประสบความสำเร็จ เป็นต้นดูรูปถ่ายสภาเมืองจึงยินดีกับการตอบรับจากชุมชนท้องถิ่นที่พวกเขาจอง Guilders ล้านสร้างขึ้นหลายของ playgrounds เหล่านี้ได้Eyke รถตู้ก็จะออกน้อย 733 playspaces อื่น ๆ กว่า 30 ปีในอัมสเตอร์ดัม แม้ว่าจะเป็นการยากที่จะตรึงตัวเลขลงเป็นจำนวนมากไม่เกี่ยวกับเอกสารส่วนใหญ่ของพื้นที่ที่เขาออกแบบมาบนไซต์ที่ร้องขอจากชุมชนเล็ก ๆ ไปที่เห็น playgrounds ประสบความสำเร็จที่นี่ และที่ต้องฝ่ายงานสร้างสำหรับพวกเขาที่คล้ายของตนเองได้ นี้มีแผนสนับสนุน และได้รับการสนับสนุน โดยเทศบาล พบไม่มีข้อมูลเกี่ยวกับต้นทุนของแต่ละไซต์No comprehensive mapping of these spaces was ever undertaken as they ‘were not a part of an a-priori plan.’ Rather, they ‘made use of the holes of the urban fabric’. The only maps that exist are from around 1957 they show fewer than 100 playgrounds. However several of the sites were documented, photographed from high neighbouring attics, before and after the work. These offer a glimpse of the astounding impact of the work of this man which was replicated through out the city and its growing suburbs*******(Aldo Van Eyck. Humanist Rebel. Inbetweening the Postwar years. Lianne Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis. 1999)In some ways his work on playgrounds is lost and unknown. Today, the design literate in Mokum ( literally ‘The Place’ the Yiddish name for Amsterdam,) know his name from his large buildings, but are unaware that it is his work which gives them the places in which they still play with their children. In an interview with parents sat in a Van Eyke playground in the Vondelpark, parents were surprised to learn that Van Eyke had designed the space. They all knew his larger works well, and had found then difficult to work in. But they found the playground perfectly suited to purpose.The sites that were chosen for playgrounds were sometimes grand spaces in parks, (the Vondelpark alone has four Van Eyck play places). More often they were scrap yards, derelict spaces and SLOAPs (Spaces Left Over After Planning,) between roadways and the gaps left by the houses that had ‘belonged to people deported during the war which had been scavenged for fuel’. Here I realise the thinness of the translation that I am working from. Solomon in conversation with Lefaivre, 2003 ‘ Where spaces held tragic meaning, such as the empty lots, where deported Jews had once had their homes, Van Eyck tried to initiate a firm and hopeful sense of beginning.’ In bold terms, families transported to concentration camps by the Nazis were paid tribute through the creation of play spaces for the children that survived them. ‘Rather than calling up the past, he laboured to re-establish the present.’ (Solomon).Many playgrounds were integrated into the traditional Amsterdam squares in the middle of housing blocks in the older parts of the city, and where suburban communities were being created, Van Eyck designed playgrounds into the courtyards between the medium-high rise blocks mimicking the success of the town house squares.It was very much in Van Eyck’s mind that this was an offer to all sectors of a neighbourhood. So his playgrounds do not look like ‘deserted amusement parks when the children are gone.’ They ’become places that make sense to adults, places of rest or encounter’. He refers to the matter of taking care of the sites. ‘There is no supervision there. It should not be necessary…..You may see ladies in fur coats letting their dogs roam in the sandpits. However, by contrast the people of the Jordaan*.. have accepted the playground as their collective property and work to keep it clean together.’(* The Jordaan is a district near to the heart of Amsterdam- Van Eyke refers to it at a time when it was a place of low income households, with a strong sense of community.)He said in 1962.’ In Amsterdam we… have used up ( by building playgrounds,) all the places in the inner city that might have been used for playgrounds. Between the Playgrounds we have created a more finely-meshed network (of play places). It might be said that there is no more to be done. But we want to make the network even denser by combing the city again and this time finding places that are just big enough for a single play apparatus. The opportunity for the child to discover its own movement as an integral part of the city; the city is also a playground.’What was his design philosophy?‘Just as one places a bench because one wants to sit, a lamppost because one wants to light the street, a news-stand because one wants to buy newspapers,, I am putting a playdome there because children want to play.’ AvE (1962)**
Aldo Van Eyck used ‘Relativity’ as one of his compositional techniques. Relativity ‘concerns a reality in which connections between elements are determined by their mutual relationships rather than by a central hierarchical ordering principle.’ * He intended no element within a playspace to have supremacy over any other. Sandpits, from the very first experiment on Bertelmanplein were set wildly off centre with tumbling bars on a diagonal line. Each element has space to be used and explored by many children at once and many times over. Watching the spaces used by children it would seem that his awareness of the relativity of the elements within the playground does affect the way that the children use the space. Although their attention is maintained by each element, the spaces in bet
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..