Inspired by the programme endorsed by orphanage director Frans van Meurs and by the latter's recommendations for the character and layout of the new children's home , Van Eyck tried from the outset to reconcile the advantages of a centralized structure with those of a decentralized pattern of pavilions.In the final design, the pavilion system was transformed into a continious but perforated built volume within which both the pavilions and the main block are identifiable.
The enterance court forms in essence the hearth of the building ,around which the central functions are grouped.An elevated section containing rooms for resident staff articulates the central court into a forecourt and a courtyard.The entrance court is adjoined by a spacious lobby where the building's two internal streets intersect.The residential units are arranged along these internal streets.Each unit consists of a common living room with facilities and a portion with a number of dormitories.The residential units are arranged in a staggered formation, giving ezch of them and individual outdoor space that communicates both with the internal street and the outside world.Each internal street terminates in a large communal space, the festivities hall and the gym respectively.The result is a building with a polycentric structure, with an articulation of large and small-both inside and outside- in successions of units, each defined in its own right, while interlocking rhytmically.The complex is simultaneously outward-looking and introverted.Underlying this balance is a stristly upheld, almost classical , architectural order, consisting of columns, load-bearing walls and architraves which combine to form a square grid of beams.The many roof domes on top of the grid provide a continuous spatial articulation.Although this grid of beams did not emerge until late in the design process, when the orginally flat roof was replaced by the domes,it plays an important part in the articulation of the sections of the building and their linkages..The grid also engenders diagonal directions which are important to the Orphanage building.These diagonals are not literally and physically expressed in materials , but are implicit in the structure.Occupation of the building is governed by the orthogonals ,but movement -both literal (circulation) and figurative (the spatial dynamic) is governed by the diagonals.This complementarity is a hallmark of the plan , with its equilibria of 'twin phenomena' (part/whole,unity/diversity,open/closed).
The architraves of the grid ensure both the equivalance of columns with walls,and the unity of this system with the multi-domed roof ; but above all they mark the divisionles of internal space.It is not just a matter of demarcating the building as a whole ,but also of its spatial components such as the larger domes,the pavilions and internal streets- as well as their counterforms, the patios and courts.By mounting the glass walls free from the architraves at certain points,Van Eyck created ambivalent zones where the boundary delimination is softened and penetrable.The architraves are also important in the light of the configurative process.This process may be understood in its simplest form as a multiplication of basic units,done is such a way as to reproduce the identity of the smallest component in the identity of the whole.The house is in this sense conceived as a little city and the city as a huge house.Through the repetition , this fundamentally fugal procedure evokes an infiniteness,which is balanced at all levels of multiplication by the articulation and experience of the finiteness of the abovementioned spatial components.The configurative process is thus capable of articulating the orphanage both in its extensiveness and its boundedness.
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