Multiculturalism in the work of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck. Rethinking universalist notions in architecture.

Today, we live immersed in a new globalized universalism, an increasingly homogeneous planet where architecture remains dominated by mass media, hindering renewal.

However, in the aftermath of WWII, the Dutch architects Aldo and Hannie van Eyck already proposed a profound rethinking of the eurocentrism of his time.

In their work, one can observe a hybrid of universalist and exoticist attitudes, looking for both continuity and renewal of the pre-war avant-garde and for critique on capitalist and nationalist ideologies of his time.

This research aims to scrutinize the blending of non-western and modern art in the Van Eycks’ designs in a holistic way where space, inhabitants, political ideas and ways of living merge to shape a multiculturalist notion of society and architecture.

There have been earlier attempts to study Van Eyck’s relation with the vernacular by Strauven (1998) and recently Jaschke (2011) and Rodríguez (2016), but they focused on form relations or lacked the full archival sources to tackle the issue. Recent research (2018) has uncovered an enormous amount of information that will be used to go beyond state-of-the-art.

The multidisciplinary nature of the project is strong, since it will develop an innovative qualitative approach to the architect’s oeuvre from his private house, an Anthropology of Architecture, using his full ethnographical art collection, books, travel pictures and conference slides as an entry to document and unpack the ways domesticity, global travels and art collecting intersect and sustain a non-universal view from which architecture was re-conceptualised.

Proper measures will be taken to integrate the research into different areas of expertise.

The results would constitute the first critical inquiry on the influence of the ""ethnographic paradigm of the 60s"" in postwar architecture, an example of open and inclusive design practices, hence in line with EU global strategies, helping debates in a post-colonial globalised world.