ABSTRACT
Jacob Berend Bakema was one of the young Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) architects, attending his first meeting in Bridgewater in 1947. Bakema shifted the significance of the Heart from a concentric, traditionalist organic metaphor to an open, social and abstract symbolic moment of a "relationship between man and things." Bakema's belief about the Heart was fully imbued with resonances and references to all kinds of knowledge that theoretically and experimentally supported the Relationship as the only presence in nature. In the Pendrecht project, Bakema mostly used "Core" in order to describe both the physical public space and the theoretical idea of Heart. The most important image for the right relationship between different parts of the built environment through transitional elements was given by the image of the private family itself: from the hearth to the heart.
