There have been earlier attempts to study Aldo van Eyck’s relation with vernacular art and cultures, most notably the research by F. Strauven (1998) and K. Jaschke (2011), but they lacked the full archival sources to tackle the issue. This research uncovered new information inside the Van Eycks’ family house, where it still remains their vernacular and modern art collection, library, travel pictures and conference slides. This information has been used for the study of Van Eyck’s multicultural and trans-disciplinary references, and shows that previous contributions have often overlooked an important aspect of the Van Eycks' engagement with cultures others than his own, namely a long-lasting practice of non-Western art collecting that started in the late 30s and continued all through the second half of the twentieth century. There was previously not a thorough exploration of their art collecting practices and their relationships with their knowledge production, nor there is a critical revision of these practices from a postcolonial perspective, an omission which has led to a set of misconceptions on the Van Eycks and their oeuvre, and to an inaccurate representation of their interest in anthropology.
This research has proven that their roles as collectors, tourists and “ethnographers” need to be taken into consideration, that their contribution to the field of architecture becomes unreadable without a proper and critical look at their engagement with cultures other than their own. Ultimately, art collecting was an activity extensively performed by the Van Eycks from the 40s, leading to the unfolding of an extensive network of actors —art dealers, art galleries, museums, collectors, artists— and ideas —universalism, multiculturalism, primitivism— that made a long-lasting impact on their architectural thinking and, beyond, on international post-war architectural discourse.
The research has also approached Van Eyck Collection from a post-colonial perspective, via an analysis of the processes of Othering that were at play. This has shown that, while the Van Eycks' engagement with non-Western cultures might initially be seen as a positive “learning-from” endeavour, it also undoubtedly had many problematic elements. The research thus introduces a de-colonial/post-colonial lens that helps unravel the processes and problematics of the anthropologisation of post-war architectural discourses, finding guiding principles that are of utmost societal implication in our globalised societies and economies, where questions of restitution and epistemic de-colonisation are in the spotlight.
