Aldo van Eyck was a key figure in Team X and one of the most influential European architects of the 20th century. His work emerged as a critique of Modernist functionalism, proposing instead a human-centered architecture focused on intermediary scale, relational space, and the creation of “place” as a social and emotional construct. His most radical contribution was the design of over 700 playgrounds in post-war Amsterdam between 1947 and 1978, inserted into vacant lots, residual spaces, and urban voids. These playgrounds were modest in form but revolutionary in intention. Van Eyck used abstract geometries—rings, domes, sandpits, low walls—inviting children to invent their own rules of play. Rather than prescribing use, he offered spatial invitations. In this way, his playgrounds operated as political artifacts: small urban interventions fostering inclusion, imagination, and community interaction. Play became a mode of resistance to the rationalized, top-down logic of postwar urban planning. Far beyond spaces for recreation, these were micro-utopias—testing grounds for a more democratic society. Van Eyck saw architecture as a mediator of human relationships, not a sculptural object. His playgrounds embodied an ethics of care, reciprocity, and openness. They redefined the ruin (of war, of modernism) not as a site of loss but of potential. As political artifacts, these playgrounds anticipated contemporary ideas about tactical urbanism, relational infrastructures, and pedagogical space. Van Eyck didn’t design objects; he composed relations. And in a city rebuilding itself physically and morally, that was a deeply political act.
