"Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.”
Aldo van Eyck would be ninety-two today.
He's really the reason I started the blog...finding "The Playgrounds and the City" as I stumbled around in libraries and obscure internet postings, thinking that there had to be better playground ideas out there somewhere, but where? felt like tripping over treasure in the dark.
So it was satisifying to notice recently that the day I started the blog, two years ago, was on March 18, just two days after his birthday. I made eight quick posts in an afternoon flurry when I should have been working, compelled to start talking about the new ideas, the new places, I'd discovered. Aldo's was the eighth, the top shot of the first blog cover. It was months before I had a single reader.
And now I have you all, and many of Aldo's surviving playgrounds from the prodigious 746 sites that he designed for Amsterdam between 1947 and 1978 have reached their half-century with grace and happiness and children still.
The occasion is Aldo's birthday, though the place is one he couldn't have anticipated, the virtual landscape of a blog-home, for great playgrounds and their champions.
Happy Birthday Aldo!
[photos from "Aldo Van Eyck the Playgrounds and the city" (eds. Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode), which still makes me happy every time I look at it. The series of before and after photos show a sad bombed-out city coming back to life...recuscitation by playground. Detroit should take note.]
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