Aldo van Eyck by Robert McCarter
Yale University Press, 2015
Hardcover, 264 pages

Aldo van Eyck: Seventeen Playgrounds by Anna van Lingen, Denisa Kollarova
Lecturis, 2016
Paperback, 96 pages

Searching my memory, I have a hard time figuring out exactly when I learned about Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. He was not a staple of architectural history classes when I was in architecture school in the early 1990s, at least not up there with other postwar modern architects, such as Louis I. Kahn, and the postmodern architects that followed. Maybe I learned about him in a modern architecture seminar during my fifth year, but if so projects like the Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam would have made a stronger impression on me.
This Van Eyck gap in my undergraduate education can be chalked up only partly to his portfolio, which had one masterpiece (the Orphanage) alongside lots of temporary playgrounds and numerous lesser known works. Mainly it had to do with Van Eyck being an "in-between" architect, one whose ideas and buildings did not fit neatly into the modern or postmodern camps that received the most attention from critics and historians. Robert McCarter, in his thorough historical monograph on Van Eyck, puts it this way: "Van Eyck was always standing in-between, always critical and, as a result, always a school of one, which left him open to attack from both sides."

Although I can't signal the first occurrence of Van Eyck in my learning as an architect,...