During the "hunger winter" of 1944 in Amsterdam, over 20,000 people died of starvation. Many of the city's trees were cut down, and the interiors of abandoned buildings broken up for fuel. When peace came this most beautiful and urbane of cities was in urgent need of large-scale reconstruction. In the years following the end of hostilities in Europe, modern architecture had an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate a socially minded, urban flair. The consensus today is that in most places it failed. The young Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck was one of the earliest critics of the mechanistic approach taken by his modernist colleagues to urban reconstruction, arguing that its year zero approach crushed existing networks and the parochial loyalties of pre-war neighbourhoods.
The failure of architecture and planning to recreate forms of urban community and solidarity has come to haunt post-war Europe, as so many acclaimed housing estates, new towns, or newly designed urban quarters, whether on the outskirts of Paris, Stockholm, Newcastle, Frankfurt or Milan, have succumbed rapidly to vandalism, disrepair and residential flight. Schemes for "urban renewal" are now as regular a feature of European city life as carnival season, Gay Pride Week or the arrival of spring.
Van Eyck saw this coming. In 1947, at the age of 28, he went to work for the Office for Public Works in Amsterdam, and as his first project built a small playground (speelplaats) on the Bertelmanplein. While many of his colleagues were keen to start with a housing development or a new street plan, he had been encouraged to think seriously about play provision by Jacoba Mulder. Mulder and Lotte Stam-Beese were the first two prominent women planners in the Netherlands and had already completed the popular Beatrixpark in Amsterdam before the war. Delighted with the popularity of the playground, van Eyck designed over 700 more such play areas throughout the city over the next 30 years.
The Dutch, as we know from the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the tradition of kinderspelen paintings, have always regarded children's play as a training ground for citizenship. As Simon Schama pointed out in The Embarrassment of Riches, these popular genre paintings often showed children playing games against a background featuring the town hall or other civic buildings. Such settings were intended to evoke the civic or public virtues to which the properly brought-up child should be led. The close relationship between game-playing and the development of the moral judgement of the child has also been one of the great themes of 20th-century developmental psychology.
Van Eyck, however, was less concerned with the public virtues of play as with the opportunities created by these new street-corner playgrounds for re-establishing local networks of solidarity and mutual recognition. Along with many other European intellectuals of his time, he had been profoundly influenced by Martin Buber's book, I and Thou, first published in Germany in 1923. Buber's eclectic mix of Jewish theology and existentialist individualism struck a chord with many intellectuals who were fumbling for a vocabulary to resist the ideological and technological triumphalism sweeping much intellectual and political life, especially in the form of large-scale social planning.
All human development, Buber insisted, was a reflexive process based on the reciprocity of relations and social roles: our students teach us, and our works form us. There were lessons here for architects, van Eyck believed, and it was in promoting and shaping the daily "encounter" or "inbetween-ness" of social space that architecture could humanise cities and create public trust. As Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis note in their 1999 biography, Aldo van Eyck-Humanist Rebel (Uitgever IJ), "his emphasis was on buildings as a means for creating relations between people rather than as goals in themselves."
The connectedness and playfulness of the city that architects and planners so often failed to achieve was inadvertently sometimes brought about by the weather, especially a heavy fall of snow. Van Eyck was fascinated by the way that a prolonged period of snow allowed children to become "temporarily lords of the city." In a memorable phrase he asked architects to conceive a way of designing city spaces which gave children a sense of freedom which was "more permanent than snow." The network of play spaces and street corner havens which he designed in Amsterdam still significantly shapes the layout of the residential areas of the city. Indeed, this tradition has been revived with the woonerf (play street), a Dutch word and design concept which has become part of the vocabulary of planning departments throughout the world.
Van Eyck also gained an international reputation for designing buildings. His most famous remains the Burgerweeshuis (Orphanage) constructed between 1955 and 1960 in the south part of Amsterdam. He created a miniature city for children consisting of eight separate zones, each serving a different age group, each with its own inner courtyard. Most of the campus was single-storey served by a labyrinthine internal street, and entrance was gained through a discreet inner courtyard. Gone completely was the idea of an orphanage as a severe public building with a forbidding entrance-way. The design also challenged the Benthamite model of the all-seeing panopticon as the most efficient form of custodial institution or instrument of state morality. In his work-room on site, van Eyck had pinned up an aerial photograph of a North African kasbah, regarded as the inspiration for the internal layout of the orphanage. (Lefaivre and Tzonis draw attention in their book to the similarity between the staggered modular ground plan of the orphanage and the grids and lozenges of Mondrian's masterwork Victory Boogie-Woogie.)
This pre-occupation with the vulnerable position of the child in the post-war European city was part of a wider set of concerns, and of artistic iconography. In Roberto Rossellini's film Rome, Open City (1945), Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Miracle in Milan (1950), impoverished, rootless city children feature in central roles, as they also do in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1954), and François Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows (1959) where images of abandoned young people looking direct to camera fill the final frames. In Britain the photographs taken in the early 1950s by Nigel Henderson of working-class life in Bethnal Green, or Roger Mayne's photographs of tenement life in Notting Hill, both highlighting children's street games, had a big impact on architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson of Team 10, an international group of socially minded architects which included van Eyck. The resilience of children's street culture became a motif of architectural education in this period.
Buber's concern with the existential importance of the "encounter" was subsequently displaced by a Sartrean preoccupation with "the situation," a concern with the sheer contingency of being. In this period a number of French intellectuals-including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre and Michel De Certeau-explored new ways of understanding how people experienced daily life in the city. These French critics asserted the active role that the individual played in constructing the city anew each day, going forth to engage with the contingency of events and situations. Lefebvre explored "the social production of space," in which class relations, power, ritual and conflict constructed the experience of space in the city, giving each a specific set of associations and meanings. And Michel De Certeau asserted that "the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language." (The connections between the Situationists and French intellectuals and Dutch artists and architects such as van Eyck and Constant-along with the Smithsons and other radical architects in London-are explored in Simon Sadler's 1999 book, The Situationist City.)
In Britain, by contrast, the most influential figure in this world was Gordon Cullen. His Townscape, published in 1961 and still something of a rule-book on urban design, was devoid of any sociological or phenomenological understanding of how individuals and groups behave, being rooted in the English picturesque tradition of visual composition. For Cullen, townscape was about the art of relationship between lines and forms, light and shadow, figure and ground, the vernacular and the transcendental. If urban life was theatre, then Cullen was principally concerned with the stage sets and the backdrops. Whereas the Situationists on their drifts through Paris and London were attracted to the backstreet alleys, the canals, and the low-life quarters, Cullen favoured sun-drenched Mediterranean squares, fishing quays, and folkloric villages.
Since Cullen, the design and production of urban public space has produced something of a crisis for architecture and urban planning. For the same architectural movement which brought us the "international style" in building design also championed what Mies van der Rohe termed "universal space." Universal space was that which a functionalist architecture left behind when it moved on: long straight lines, hard edges, gleaming surfaces and vast uncluttered spaces, white boxes for museums and glass boxes for commerce. In the same way that one cluster of buildings was separated from another by wide-open paved plazas, in the residential districts different tower block complexes were separated from each other by bleak grass prairies. Prairie planning, as it was called, filled the suburbs and those parts of the city subject to redevelopment with gleaming towers and arid paved deserts, a "landscape delivered in bulk" in the words of French writer François Maspero. From the 1960s onwards this kind of urban landscaping threatened to clone every town and city centre into a scaled-down version of Brasilia.
Money from urban regeneration programmes and even lottery funds is once again being used to create new public spaces in town and city centres in many parts of Britain. Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Sheffield and Wolverhampton are among the cities which have sought to re-invent their national and international images through redesigning their city centres, often as the settings for new museums, galleries and public piazzas. But last year's success story was the redesign of the courtyard of Somerset House in London. In the summer, crowds flocked to admire the new piazza with its elegant peristyle fountains; this winter, the temporary ice-rink has had queues every day. The contrast between the dynastic formality of the historic architecture, and the joie de vivre of the skating crowds-particularly at dusk on a winter's evening-has given back to this corner of London something of its democratic ?lan. With its free-flowing energy and high spirits, ice-skating embodies the spirit of the urban crowd at play. Who could want to stay indoors when the city offers such collective, van Eyckian, moments as these?
