La matrice originaria nei disegni di Aldo van Eyck

Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) during his career as an architect deeply explored the archaic tradition, while studying the practices and customs of certain African and Central American peoples. His work focused on the pursuit of a primordial matrix, of the constant characteristics of architecture. Identification of features that endlessly resurface over the course of time is the key to the design of the new. In other words, the need to build things in an appropriate way implies study of formal roots in the history of architecture, rediscovery of a principle of continuity with what has existed in the past. This theoretical position becomes clearly evident if we observe the drawings. The pursuit of the eternal and the essential is transformed, through graphic expression, into formal simplification: the forms are almost exclusively elementary; simple geometric shapes that evoke the power of archetypal forms and the anthropomorphic overtones of the collages of certain avant-garde artists. The drawings, made with just a few colors and lines, remind us of the planimetric layouts of certain ancient settlements, in which the symbolic and formal components are combined in single design. Through his drawings he searched for the counter-form, the casting. Architecture is an independent discipline whose roots lie in its own tradition and which recognize in the archetype a model to design the new.