Aldo van Eyck

The architect Aldo van Eyck, born on March 16, 1918, is often remembered as the Great Old Man of Dutch architecture. Van Eyck belonged to the cradle of structuralism, an architectural movement that played an important role in the history of Dutch architecture. In addition to a large number of awards, Van Eyck was the recipient of at least five honorary doctorates. Throughout his long career, this influential architect made countless and lasting contributions to the profession in the Netherlands. Since the early eighties, he worked closely with his wife Hannie, an architect in the architectural firm he had been leading since 1951.

From the beginning of the sixties, when design increasingly became a problem-solving discipline, Aldo van Eyck advocated the idea that architecture, beyond being merely functional, should carry meaning.

He gave a new impulse to the notion of architecture as a language with emotional impact and sociocultural reach, as the primary visual medium through which human society expresses and reveals itself. He acted as the conscience of architecture and defended his humanist views with relentless energy, often against the routines of established modernism and the deviations of postmodernism.

Aldo van Eyck died on January 14, 1999 in Amsterdam.

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