The ‘doorstep philosophy’. Aldo van Eyck in the Amsterdam Orphanage 1954.59

Abstract

The idea of ‘Doorstep’ apperared at the 1953 CIAM as image of an architecture that claimed the recovery of the places of relationship between its inhabitants, and between them and nature, in a critical response to the wandering of Modern Architecture after Second World War. Aldo van Eyck saw a much wider significance in the ‘Doorstep’ symbol, and traced around it another way to comprehend our reality and the architecture that better accompanies it: the way of the in-between, the search of harmony between the opposite categories composing our existence. We stand out or inside, we are individuals but we belong to a community, we live alternately in natural and artificial surroundings. To van Eyck, architecture must be configurated in a way so these categories would reconcile with each other, must provide the places in which we find quietness between these dilemmas. In an in-between realm we would stand inside and outside at the same time, in an architecture in harmony there will be place for the collective without losing the individual character, and building and natural environment would find balance. This is his ‘Doorstep philosophy’.