Aldo van Eyck is one of the most influential architects of our time. Through his designs, and texts he had an immediate impact on the buildings of the fifties and sixties. However, even more decisive has been the effect of his work providing a new view of architecture and of the world, a humanistic view, reacting against technocracy and super-consumerism. For half a century, Van Eyck composed manifestoes, crafted images, and created structures shaping the artificial sensibilities of his contemporaries, a 'rebel' and an 'angry young man' advancing some of the most creative design ideas of this century and developing a unique poetics of 'the inbetween' that sustains human community in buildings. \n\nFew architects achieved the stylistic depth VAn Eyck did in his work. Even fewer combined it with planning innovations that led to the new approaches to practice such as 'site specific,' 'infill' and 'incremental' design. In this book Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis explore Van Eyck's poetics of 'the inbetween' in all its facets, from the early pioneering playgrounds of Amsterdam to the latest complex institutional research buildings, where previously incompatible ideas, formal or functional, are united in a new syncretic whole. \n\nThe book gives a concise, comprehensive, and critical view of Van Eyck's oeuvre. It situates it among other contemporary architects and links it with the thinking of major contemporary contributions: The ideas of existentialist philosophers, the work of the 'angry young men' of the 1950s, Martin Buber, the Cobra painters, the situationists, and current multicultural studies.