A story in last month's Metropolis, Modernists at Play, featured designs for children by noted twentieth century architects. These playrooms and pieces of furniture are sweet because they’re so small and because they're mostly personal, intended for the designer’s own children. But Aldo Van Eyck’s drawing for an array of playground equipment made my heart leap. Van Eyck pictures each plaything – sandbox, jungle gym, swingset – as a platonic figure, built from geometries of circle, square, and line. Spread evenly across the blank page, these figures have a bright, musical energy. It’s as if Van Eyck intends to set children within a field of cartesian space, one filled with adventure and pleasure.
Working for the city of Amsterdam as a young architect in the 1950’s, Van Eyck designed about 700 playgrounds in the city. Most are gone. The ones that we have photographs of seem both elegant and audacious because they are so simply composed, with a handful of play pieces set strategically within a flat, open plot. These toys, because they’re idealized in form, are ripe with possibility. They aren’t proscriptive; they're generic objects for children to climb on and jump from and run in between. Are children happy in this sort of playground? It’s hard to know. But it must take an imaginative leap for a child to enter and make the landscape their own. Maybe they invent nicknames for the elements, and games for each one too. Today we give children entertainments that are, whether educational (Reading Rainbow) or escapist (Mulan), structured and predictable. Van Eyck gives children a lot of credit. He doesn't set them in a scaled-down version of the city, or on courts for games with readymade rules. He lets them play.