ABSTRACT
The photographs through which Aldo van Eyck’s orphanage building in Amsterdam first became known and famous, were shot shortly after its completion in 1960 by the photographer Violette Cornelius. In a stroke of genius, Cornelius photographed not only the building, but also let a couple of children feature prominently in the pictures. They were captured absorbed in play rather than posing and appeared as the main subject of some of the pictures. The series as such represents a noteworthy moment in the history of architectural photography but it is also symptomatic of certain characteristics of the architecture which centred around the Dutch journal Forum in the 1960s. Edited at the time by Aldo van Eyck and the young Herman Hertzberger, Forum was promoting a new and more humane understanding of modern architecture, inspired most importantly by van Eyck’s ‘story of another idea’ and the corresponding ‘configurative design.’ A body of architectural work emerged around this thinking, which one could loosely call Forum architecture, and which, besides the orphanage, includes the well-published contributions for the Prix de Rome of 1962 by Piet Blom and Joop van Stigt, Herman Hertzberger’s later Centraal Beheer and numerous other projects, and which is frequently discussed as Dutch structuralist architecture. Herman Hertzberger explained in 1967 that:
the overriding element in what we have called ‘the story of another idea’ is a concern to preserve the identity which threatens the more
dealing with; it is a struggle against the amorphous, the additive and the unnaturally splitoff, the consequences of plurality getting out of hand; it is the concern for a positive grip on large numbers to assure that even in the largest areas of mass living each individual will know ‘that he is somebody living somewhere’ that everyone’s identity will be guaranteed; that is all in all what A. v. E. called the configurative.1 (Fig. 1.)
In the attempt to counter the ‘amorphous’ and ‘additive’ nature of the modern city, configurative design worked within the logic of structural modules and with functional indeterminacy rather than with classic or modernist compositional principles. However, the configurative grids, modules and clusters had themselves an oddly amorphous and additive character. The architectural forms and indeed formalisms which resulted from the configurative approach were such that critics tended to defer their formal judgement in favour of an evaluation of the theory behind the architecture, a consequence of which has been the often contradictory or simplistic analyses of ‘structuralism’ in the field of architecture.
