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An Installation in Four Acts Education, Ideals, Building, the City programme Landscape and Interior fi l e Ongoing research on Structuralism Instituut project Het Nieuwe Structuralism curator Structuralism: An Installation Dirk van den Heuvel / in Four Acts is the first presen- Jaap Bakema Study Centre tation on the subject. It is the starting-point of a research project mining the historical dimensions of 1960s structuralism while investigating exhibition design its potential for today. An Lada Hršak / Bureau LADA Installation in Four Acts con - centrates on the event of Dutch Structuralism in archi- tecture. For 2016 a follow-up project is planned: Total Space, which looks into the interdiscipli- graphic design nary aspects of structuralism as Patrick Coppens well as its international context. objectnummer / inventarisnummer architect / author year An Installation in Four Acts An Installation in Four Acts 2 3 Education, Ideals, Building, the City Education, Ideals, Building, the City objectnummer / objectnummer / inventarisnummer architect / author year inventarisnummer architect / author year Academy before moving their weekly evenings The Event City of to Hertzberger’s attic space. Exchange between teachers and students would be a recurring motif Dutch Structuralism in the Forum issues. The first one, largely com- Dirk van den Heuvel piled by Van Eyck and called ‘The Story of Another Idea’, was distributed at the last CIAM conference in Otterlo in 1959, organized by Jaap Bakema. It portrayed the history of CIAM and the beginnings Dutch Structuralism was born from a unique of Team 10 from the perspective of its Dutch confluence of people and events in the city of members, while it also made a strong plea for a Amsterdam in the second half of the 1950s. Aldo new (or ‘other’) approach to architecture and plan- van Eyck and Joop Hardy were teaching at the ning. Surprisingly, Van Eyck proposed Piet Blom’s Academy of Architecture, a meeting place for student work as the ultimate and didactic example Dutch modern architecture already before the of this ‘other idea’, which was summarized with the Second World War. After the war, the school had evocative image of a casbah organisée. moved to a new building at the Waterlooplein in the midst of the former Jewish quarter of the city, The Algerian Kasbah was but one of the many which would see dramatic changes in the next ideal cities that can be found in the pages of the decades due to large scale modernization pro- Forum journal of those years between 1959 and jects such as the new town hall and opera house, 1963, with a delayed issue published as late as the construction of the new underground and 1967. Dogon villages, Pueblos, Mediterranean the fierce street fights over the course of urban scenes of both urbane equipoise and lively socia- renewal policies. With a relatively open studio bility, amphitheatres such as the one in Arles, system, the Academy was quite more advanced Diocletian’s Palace in Split and Joseph Rykwert’s objectnummer / inventarisnummer architect / author year compared to the Delft University of Technology ‘Idea of a Town’. Still, the ultimate city of Forum with its system of year professors who controlled was undoubtedly the city of Amsterdam itself, par- the curriculum. Piet Blom and Joop van Stigt ticularly so for the students it seems. For instance, were among the most outstanding students who both Blom and Van Stigt were born in Amsterdam. together with their teachers would fanatically The Dutch capital was then still dirty, worn down, pursue a new approach in architectural design, full of slums, but also brimming with everyday, albeit rather intuitively as well. At the same time, urban life. Van Eyck’s Municipal Orphanage was under The old working class neighborhoods of Jor- construction at the periphery. Joop van Stigt was daan and de Pijp were sources of inspiration in the Van Eyck’s supervisor and right hand during its search for another architecture that was to bring construction. His role was especially critical after about a new kind of social space beyond the clini- Van Eyck was denied access to the construction cal hygienic city of straightforward functionalism. site after some serious conflicts with the client and builder that involved among others the tearing Social Space down of bits of the building by Van Eyck during The notion of an inclusive, social space is nightly visits because they weren’t in accordance one of the more appealing aspects of the struc- with his ideas. turalist discourse in architecture. Especially Herman Hertzberger would consistently elaborate When the Forum journal got a new editorial board this notion. When talking about structuralism or in 1959 spearheaded by Jaap Bakema and Aldo social space Hertzberger resists any definition in van Eyck together with Joop Hardy, Jurriaan scientific or disciplinary terms, yet he tirelessly Schrofer, Gert Boon, and the young graduates describes the phenomenon by countless observa- Dick Apon and Herman Hertzberger, the new ideas tions of all sorts of instances how people behave found a platform that would dramatically enlarge and how they appropriate space. The ‘social’ of its impact. The editors would initially meet at the structuralism was tailored against sheer econom- An Installation in Four Acts An Installation in Four Acts 4 5 Education, Ideals, Building, the City Education, Ideals, Building, the City objectnummer / objectnummer / inventarisnummer architect / author year inventarisnummer architect / author year ization of our cities and everyday lives. Also then First of all, there is the new awareness that archi- Within the history of Dutch Structuralism, or its aim to provoke the user to appropriate the unfin- in the 1950s, when Aldo van Eyck was building his tecture is embedded, that it forms a part of the wider context of the last CIAMs and the Team 10 ished spaces of structuralism. The user is not just Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam and when he larger social structure that is society. That insight discourse on the future direction of modern archi- accommodated (as if such neutrality can exist in and the editors of the Forum journal laid out the comes from anthropology. This might sound like tecture, one finds many variants based on these architecture), but actually forced into a certain ‘story of another idea’, the social and so-called kicking in an open door to some, but it is not. Con- two trends: one approach that seeks to accom- mode of operating. humanizing of architecture and urban planning ventional wisdom thinks of architecture (and cities) modate the social and its events by providing a was part of a project to counter global moderni- as accommodating individuals and communities. structure, and another that conceives itself as an Within the urban renewal practices in Amsterdam, zation and the homogenizing of urban spaces. So, From this perspective the search for an archi- event part of a larger structure. The former is the one finds an even more socially and politically what could be said about the kind of social space tecture of social space gets too often reduced more conventional one and is commonly associ- charged approach that might be termed the as proposed by the Dutch structuralists? What sort to the idea of architecture as a frame for society ated with the formal elaborations of structuralism, second moment of Dutch Structuralism. In itself, of architecture and what sort of city comes to the and everyday life, a structure that accommodates in particular Van Eyck’s Orphanage, Piet Blom’s the story is by now quite a familiar one, albeit fore in their writings and projects? indeed. The most utopian (and megalomaniac) Kasbah in Hengelo, or Hertzberger’s Centraal rather stereotypical. During the 1960s, Amsterdam proposals derive from such fallacy: universal Beheer office building in Apeldoorn. The latter is became a hotbed of anti-authoritarian activism structures that are open for all sorts of events, the more irritant approach that was made opera- and experimentation with Provo being the most temporary infill and human appropriation, as in the tive in the political debates and street fights over radical exponent, clearing the way for the squat case of the most radical examples of Constant and the course of urban renewal in the historic inner movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yona Friedman, but the same can be said of some cities, Amsterdam in particular. The inner-city and the historic districts were in of the projects of Piet Blom and Jaap Bakema. desperate need of modernization. The large- The formal characteristics of Dutch Structuralism scale schemes for new office development and The reverse is usually overlooked or forgotten, present a paradox, since the basic starting point is motorway construction as planned for by the city namely that human activities and social institu- the classic avant-garde notion that form is not an raised immense protests. The construction of the tions bring architecture into the world. To rethink a priori given, but a result. Yet, looking back one underground, which was accompanied by massive structuralism in architecture and its specific cannot help but recognize a structuralist formal demolition in the historic Nieuwmarkt neighbor- achievement, it would be a most productive language based on the multiplying of small units hood, triggered the start of street revolts against approach to also think of architecture itself as an into larger patterns or structures by way of all sorts the city government. The city and its planning event or piece of infill. It was Aldo van Eyck who of serialist compositional operations. One could bureaucracy were forced to drop the initial plans mastered such reciprocal thinking like nobody even state that today we still speak of structur- and adopt a new approach. Supported by the local Aldo van Eyck, Municipal Orphanage, Amsterdam (1955–1960) else.

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