Aldo van Eyck, Hubertus House, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1974 (view in google maps)

Aldo van Eyck was a dutch architect born in Driebergen in 1918 and died in Loenen ann de Vecht in 1999. He grown up in Golders Green near London and later studied at ETH Zurich.

This house in Amsterdam is a multifamily house built in an urban context. It presents a steel and glass facade, a cheerful multicolored place for single parents (mainly single mothers) and children.

Van Eyck’s work lies in line with that important tradition of humanitarian modernism central to 20th century Dutch architecture. The 6-stores Hubertus House cannot be viewed in isolation, although its social success is clearly a result of the way its particular design was carried out. It is concerned with the spirit and the establishment of a comfortable scale for the building of this type and size—an open ‘home’ for single parents and their children—with the creation of a non-stressful environment, in a block that seems to say ‘house’.

We can also discover in this building surprising occurrences of semiprivate spaces within the confines of the
building bring a sense of the outside indoors,and the privacy of living quarters is ensured by their location at the periphery of thebuilding, away from heavily trafficked areas. The result is a series of intimate spaces that adhere through a nonhierarchical yet clearly articulated modular program. [Source: Dennis Sharp, Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History]

Selected links:

http://www.architectural-world.com/2008/05/aldo-van-eyck.html

http://www.worldarchitecturemap.org/buildings/hubertus-house

More pictures: BW plan 1, BW plan 2

Reviewd by

Anna Bęza and Dominika Puchalska November 2016