can celebrate the festival of proportion without much refer-
OASE #75
Aldo van Eyck, Hubertushuis, Amsterdam,
1973-1978, entrance hall and stairwell; elevation
and floor plans and axonometric projection
Aldo van Eyck, Hubertushuis, Amsterdam, 1973-1978
142
ence to the outside. Or at least, this could form the basis for an
analysis seeking not the similarities but the differences within
Van Eyck’s oeuvre. The houses more strongly resemble the
tectonic signs of the monuments and pavilions, which are also
pure proportion, but they keep those signs indoors and do not
let them shine out over the city – or rather, the woods in which
they are found. Perhaps the inside and outside of the private
house are not divergent enough in character to enter into a for-
mal merger of scale in the design, or to be significant. Both in-
side/out and private/public seem barely able to signify a social
or cultural value in this work. They can form a psychological
content, but that is by grace of their informality, their lack of
form. Aldo van Eyck must have been avoiding the educational
function that, in the 1950s and ’60s in the Netherlands, was as-
sociated with living in a small country house in a modern style.
For him, in a sense, this work must have been a non-genre and
thus have represented a kind of building as such, more so than
his schools, playgrounds and other urban creations.
JOOST MEUWISSEN
TRANSITIONS
Van Eyck’s houses do have transitional spaces between the
inside and the outside, but those spaces are almost always in-
corporated into the volume of the house itself. Within those
houses, they manifest more as a vertical absence or void than
ALDO IN WONDERLAND
Aldo van Eyck, Hubertushuis,
coloured tiles in a mirror frame
Aldo van Eyck, Hubertushuis,
wall columns; at left, coloured tiles in
descending spectral order from purple
to red; at right, in ascending spectral
order from blue to red