Un paseo fotográfico por la casa de Aldo van Eyck

Abstract

This paper analyses the photographs of Aldo van Eyck's house in Binnenkant, Amsterdam. On the one hand, the famously staged photographs by Jan Versnel are used to build a biography of architectural concepts. With their help, the house is described as a test field where the architect firstly explored innovative architectural strategies: polycentrism, relativity, psychogeography. The house, built at the same time as the first playground in Bertelmanplein (1947), advanced a new way of designing, a collage of autonomous fragments held by reciprocal relationships. However, this already known photographs are now completed by a stack of unpublished sketches and negatives. With all of them, we can trace the history of the house and its conversions, throwing light into the Van Eycks' art of living. While the staged photographs clarified the terms that scholars have often used to describe his projects, the new negatives can now be used to make better sense of Van Eyck's avowed definition of architecture: "architecture as built homecoming". The archival interaction helps thus redefine architecture as an unfinished process, a thing constantly in the making.