The complex encompasses a total of more than 300 modules, all interconnected and grouped around a series of intimate courtyards, with spaces merging into one continuous interior. Seen from above, the low-lying structure seems to spread across the terrain like a virus. An organism for living, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, as an expression of the Structuralist ethos, the movement that promoted a human-centric, self-generating and open-ended architecture. But in the initial caricature these planes were intended not literally, but as a simple metaphor. In their place could be substituted any other element used to define limits and offer opportunities for use. Wide cills, contoured benches, flowing staircases, sculptured handrails and many other elements may all be necessary for a really useful and comfortable building. In 2014 it was declared a National Monument, but the masterpiece of Dutch structuralism has become obsolete and abandoned. The floor is a continuous flat surface covered with dark gray carpeting, with stone pavers on the doorways towards the exterior. In the lining of the walls, both interior and exterior, also used large wooden panels with openings for vertical windows. Iroko wood was used in the exterior.

Most of the playground he conceived of were small, modest affairs. There was no showy paraphernalia, no zip-wires or intricate climbing frames. Very few of them even had swings. Ideas about play haven’t changed much since then,” says Nicola Butler, chair of Play England, who co-authored the charity’s Design for Play guidance in 2008 – and then discovered that Allen had written a pamphlet of the same name in 1962, outlining almost identical principles. “The more objects that children can actually manipulate themselves, the more enjoyment they will get out of a playground.” With the exception of the conference rooms that for acoustic insulation were made in reinforced concrete, the rest of buildings were raised with painted steel and wood. The Amsterdam Orphanage was truly a city for lost children. The building (now the Berlage School of Architecture) is a low, one- and two- storey beehive-like structure, a sequence of clusters in which children can invent by way of play and exploration a sense of community in the absence of a family, a place of chance encounters and of the imagination. Much publicised and debated when built, it was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair until taken over by the Berlage School in recent years. A child entering a playground perceives other children using the equipment and/or is introduced to it by the parents. Especially in the case of young children, parents guide their child to, for example, the slide, supports it while she climbs the ladder, and encourages her to slide down. By doing so, the parents demonstrate the child the function of the play element. Costall (2015) called such a function the “canonical affordance” of the object, to refer to its “single, definitive meaning” (p. 51; see also Costall, 2012) within a social practice. Indeed, when a child uses the slide in another way (e.g., by climbing up via the part that is meant to slide down), many parents correct their children that this is not how they should use the equipment—this is not “what the object was made for” (see also Kyttä, 2004, on “the field of constrained action”).In each of the four main circulation spaces, the restaurant, winter garden, library and conference rooms, a star-shaped ceiling rises above the lower roof, each ascending towards a pyramidal shape peak Different and variable configuration of large skylights. The inside of the dynamic folding roof creates the most important element of different spaces, wood entrechapado smooth surfaces combined with other grooved, which impart a warm color to all rooms. In 1946 he and his wife moved to Amsterdam, where he joined the Public Works Department, for which by the time he left in 1955 he had designed over 60 playgrounds in the interstices of the city. They set out on a series of travels to Africa, to pursue his lifelong fascination with non- European cultures. He became intimately involved with the Cobra group of artists. They had the first of their two children: a daughter, Tess (born in Zurich in 1945) and in 1948 a son, Quinten (born in the Netherlands).

Move on we must because our understanding of meaning in life and action is changing. The Modern Movement was revolutionary not only in trying to create a new world, but one in which it was possible continuously to invent one’s life. Truth and meaning could be grasped by analysis on which decisions could be committed and realised in action. And action, played against plain white screens, left no trace – other than rearrangement of the light steel furniture. (Hence the urban corollary of cities pulled down and rebuilt at will.) While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Structuralism and the group of architects who associated themselves with the movement. In 2014, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam dedicated an exhibition to Dutch Structuralism and initiated a study of its history and contemporary relevance. As an alternative to the technocratic planning that characterised post-war reconstruction, the buildings and plans from the 1950s and ’60s resonate strongly with a younger generation of architects and activists who are facing a new wave of large-scale urban developments and the privatisation of public space.The construction of the pavilion is a careful 2D drawing exercise. Six parallel walls almost 4 meters high are placed with a distance of 2.5 meters from each other. The walls bend, forming semicircular spaces, and the sudden cuts transform this simple pattern into a sophisticated spatial device. Until its reconstruction, this work stood as a model of paper architecture. We live in an era in which there are not many carefully constructed playgrounds. We don’t like what we see. Have we—city decision makers, architects, designers, parents, friends —forgotten to be critical?

Das Gebäude am südlichen Stadtrand von Amsterdam gelegen, IJsbaanpad 3B Bereich, Holland Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts wurde von H. P. Vorschlag der Süd-Plan beeinflusst Berlage für die Erweiterung der Stadt. Er war unter der Autobahn A10 und das Stadion der Olympischen Spiele 1928 auf dem flachen Land ohne benachbarte Gebäude.The building is located on the southern outskirts of Amsterdam, IJsbaanpad 3B, Holland, an area that at the beginning of the 20th century was influenced by the South Plan proposed by H.P. Berlage for the extension of the city. It was located between the A10 motorway and the Olympic Games Stadium in 1928, on a flat lot without neighboring buildings. This pro-risk view is shared by landscape architect Jennette Emery-Wallis, designer of the award-winning Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens and the equally acclaimed Tumbling Bay in Olympic Park, designed with Erect Architecture. The former is a piratical Peter Pan fantasy, featuring a great galleon marooned in a sandy sea, with rigging to climb, a crow’s nest to look out from, and a hold to explore, surrounded by a magical landscape dotted with teepees, Wendy houses and dammable water channels. The central area of the project is covered with a hundred pyramidal domes of square base, 3.36m of side, prefabricated in concrete and some of them with a central skylight. The domes are supported by a grid of equal dimensions created by round pillars and concrete T-shaped jigs made in situ. Center for Human Movement Sciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

The restaurant that is defined by an octagon with four slightly projected arms is accessed through the ground floors of the new towers. The restaurant offers a wide variety of areas, some oriented to the outside, others more intimate, some on ground floor others in height. Steel and paint are closely allied: one tends to forget this, taking it for granted. Ships, railway engines, motor cars, bicycles, bridges-a host of things-are painted and repainted for protection according to custom, tradition or, if they happen to be pipes, like those which run up, down, along and across the Beaubourg, just for fun: for where there are no pipes there is no fun!’ This is the heroic, or tragic, dimension of modern architecture; it refuses to coddle, to give directions and it forces Man to stand on his own, to be his own free agent’ A big part of his life was going against the grain, being in opposition to the mainstream, whatever that was: mainstream Modernism, mainstream CIAM, mainstream Team X or mainstream Postmodernism (the latter most famously in his Rats, Posts and Other Pests rant at the RIBA in 1981).The building is situated near the dunes of the coastal town of Noordwijk-aan-Zee and tulip fields, at Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, near Leiden, Holland and gently spreads up and down the surroundings. The vocabulary of the playgrounds is based on geometric concrete sandpits, which appear like small archipelagos and groups of stepping stones, both massive and anchored in the ground, and lighter structures, arches, domes and frames made of tube steel resonating with archetypes of architecture. The arrangement of the elements in the playgrounds is always non-hierarchical and based on a careful compositional balance which is able to create tension and intensity between the objects while allowing a multiplicity of paths around the forms. In 1961, the International Play Association was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1974, Arvid Bengtsson, the Swedish landscape architect and then president of the association, published The Child’s Right to Play, in which he campaigned for playgrounds to be close to where children live. This first project, although enthusiastically received in Noordwijk, did not get the approval of the executive board in Paris, largely because in making the program for ESTEC had underestimated the space needs of the facility constantly expanding. As a result, the program for the restaurant, library and conference center nearly doubled by adding a number of new office spaces, forcing the relocation of new additions to the large developing area southwest of existing buildings near From the main entrance to the complex down the road. For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on. There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need to be emphasized here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e., meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus, an affordances-based description of the environment “includes” the animal ( Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this, describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an animal points to the functional significance this environment has for the animal. It refers to what the animal can do in his environment, what it means to him ( Gibson, 1982).