Tracing Van Eyck

From 1950–70, Aldo van Eyck placed more than seven hundred playgrounds in the vacant lots and public spaces of postwar Amsterdam. They were acts of urban repair as much as design: small, considered spaces that challenged the rising dominance of the car and returned the city to its children. Most are gone now. The sites have been developed, with fewer than twenty surviving.

Tracing Van Eyck is a documentary photo essay made in the early years of studio dmau. Moving through Amsterdam, the project follows the traces of the playgrounds that remain — the recognisable geometric forms of the concrete sandpits and stepping stones, the steel climbing frames and igloos.

Van Eyck's playgrounds have been a constant in our studio's design thinking. A reminder that public space can be humble, and that a child's claim to the city is worth defending. Placing play at the centre of our cities is a radical act. This essay was an attempt to see those ideas in the places they first took form, and to document what is left before more disappear.

Photography: Daryl Mulvihill

Year: 2014

Published in: A+U Magazine (Japan), April 2026