12 Aldo van Eyck – Hubertus House for single Mothers, Amsterdam, 1973-78.(Alistair Gardner)

11 Aldo van Eyck – Hubertus House for Single Mothers, Amsterdam, 1973-78.(Alistair Gardner)

offices which are laid out on a tartan grid, but the real success of the spaces themselves depends on the way in which they are interpreted by the building’s users:

         What we must look for in place of prototypes which are collective interpretations of individual living patterns, are prototypes which make individual interpretations of the collective patterns possible.22

         At Centraal Beheer the basic structure is seen as a “language system” which allows flexibility in its interpretation, whereas individual acts of 

10 Aldo van Eyck – Orphanage, Amsterdam, 1957-60: Upper level plan. (Redrawn by the author, after Aldo van Eyck)

         Due to the repetition of its constructional elements and the strong aesthetic of repeated units,, the scheme still retains the mass-produced quality of many of the early modernist “industrialised” buildings. This problem has been addressed by a former colleague of van Eyck, fellow Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger, who was heavily influenced by structuralist thinking. The key issue for Hertzberger was the problem of engaging with the building user and how to prevent the feeling of alienation implied by the abstract language of syntactic structures. In the Centraal Beheer office building built in 1974, he adopted a similar approach to van Eyck’s orphanage in developing a structural module as a repeatable unit. The units accommodate a series of open-plan

and technocrats have in common) so let’s start with the past for a change and discover the unchanging condition of man.20

         Van Eyck boiled down these formal principles into the concept of “twin-phenomena”, which echoes Saussure’s analysis of language as being fundamentally a system of differences. In van Eyck’s case these differences were based on the qualities of architectural space and were defined as a series of binary terms with contrasting characteristics. These included open-closed, dark-light, inside-outside, solid-void and unity-diversity, all of which, van Eyck maintained, should be seen as inseparable pairs. Architecture should act as the mediator, keeping the dualities in “equipoise”:

         All twin-phenomena together form the changing fabric of this network – and the constituent ingredients of architecture. Though different, each of them, they are at the same time – this is the point – also reciprocally open to each other. Far from being mutually exclusive or independent, they merge, lean on each other. Equality is their cardinal common denominator. Their very essence is in fact, complementary, not contradictory.21

         Perhaps the best illustration of van Eyck’s structuralist method is the orphanage he designed on the outskirts of Amsterdam, completed in 1960. The building shows the possibilities of van Eyck’s “syntactic” approach to architecture, where a complexity of spaces results from a comparatively small number of components. The basic modules that have been developed to satisfy the accommodation requirements are repeated and rearranged to create an interesting hierarchy of spaces. Circulation routes and spaces are made to overlap around doorways and the inside-outside theme is also evident in the use of courtyards and full- height glazing.

Semantics or Syntactics? – The Meaning of Structures 

There is a distant echo in Graves’ thinking of some phenomenological themes and it is perhaps no surprise to find Norberg-Schulz writing positively of Graves’ work.19 In an essay on figurative architecture, published in 1985, he claimed that many ideas in postmodernism were actually implicit within modernism. On the issue of materiality, however, this comparison appears tenuous, as the understanding of Graves’ work is predominantly visual and intellectual – a consequence of the structuralist principle of the “immateriality” of the sign. Another way of interpreting a possible continuity with modernism is to return to the syntactic analysis of the language of architecture. It is perhaps here among the work of a group of late-modernists that the future potential of linguistics might still become apparent. In fact, one of the earliest manifestations of structuralist thinking in architecture emerges within modernism in the work of Aldo van Eyck. The Dutch architect, educated in England, has written widely on his work and was part of the Team X group of post-war architects that were mentioned in Chapter 1. In the 1950s van Eyck and the Team X group were heavily critical of the modernist city and its tendency to erase the past. Rather than preserving ancient fabrics for the sake of sentiment or nostalgia, van Eyck attempted to draw out the underlying principles of traditional forms. By identifying the common characteristics in the architectures of the past he hoped to arrive at a “synchronic” series of timeless formal principles:

         Man after all has been accommodating himself physically in this world for thousands of years. His natural genius has neither increased nor decreased during that time. It is obvious that the full scope of this enormous environmental experience cannot be combined unless we telescope that past … . I dislike a sentimental antiquarian attitude toward the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians