Aldo van Eyck, le Musée Imaginaire. Sobre la casa de Aldo y Hannie van Eyck en Loenen aan de Vecht

In 1964, after more than 20 years living in Amsterdam with his family, Aldo van Eyck moved to Loenen aan de Vecht. Months before they had acquired a modest construction, about 200 square meters spread over two floors and an attic, built in the seventeenth century and refurbished in the eighteenth. His will be the third transformation of a building, currently protected as a rijksmonument, to turn it into a house in which he and Hannie lived until 1999. The house has remained unpublished and unknown, as the last place lived by the Van Eyck's family, inhabited as a permanent process, for 35 years: a house that's just a house.
This thesis takes the project as an object of study, trying to record the house as a house before its disappearance and simultaneously to open it as a published material for successive readings and interpretations. This means that the research results in a sum of three efforts. The first one that documents, raises, catalogs, photographs, records and archives the physical reality of the house to provide all the material to those who want to visit it virtually. The second that interviews, talks, listens, understands its inhabitants and their concerns to capture the house that still remains, understanding the importance of the everydayness in the making of a home. And the third that performs an interpretation based on the data collection, which orders the documents according to an intentional gaze, which designs the house from scratch to discover its generation process, to make it readable to the public.
In short, this research proposes a long stay inside the house in Loenen aan de Vecht. From its insides, from the collection of vernacular art, the library, the architectural models, the avant-garde paintings, the photographs of the archive; the thesis builds Aldo van Eyck's musée imaginaire.
After all, a man's story is a long detour around his house.