While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country. In the autumn of his life, Gibson developed an alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale. A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as follows.

Considering the career of the architect who subverted mainstream thinking by championing place over space A child entering a playground perceives other children using the equipment and/or is introduced to it by the parents. Especially in the case of young children, parents guide their child to, for example, the slide, supports it while she climbs the ladder, and encourages her to slide down. By doing so, the parents demonstrate the child the function of the play element. Costall (2015) called such a function the “canonical affordance” of the object, to refer to its “single, definitive meaning” (p. 51; see also Costall, 2012) within a social practice. Indeed, when a child uses the slide in another way (e.g., by climbing up via the part that is meant to slide down), many parents correct their children that this is not how they should use the equipment—this is not “what the object was made for” (see also Kyttä, 2004, on “the field of constrained action”).For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on. There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need to be emphasized here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a relationship between the properties of the environment and the action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e., meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus, an affordances-based description of the environment “includes” the animal ( Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this, describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an animal points to the functional significance this environment has for the animal. It refers to what the animal can do in his environment, what it means to him ( Gibson, 1982). Oversimplification of form and detail is still a serious failing of most modern architecture. Yet what should be critical is not so much a limited vocabulary of forms, as the discipline with which they are deployed (hence the deep attraction to Modern architects of frugal, even ascetic, purposefulness of vernacular buildings). And just as a building or space must communicate its use, to be usable, so must individual elements or details suggest use – again it is ambiguity that allows creative interpretation. The best Modern architects understood this and to them the challenge was to communicate without resorting to familiar conventions with their predictable interpretations. Within such a discipline there is no reason why architecture should not enrich its language to redress the balance upset by the oversimple and abstract language of early Modernism. Wherever architecture goes from here certain discoveries and disciplines of Modern architecture deserve to be retained. They had the first of their two children: a daughter, Tess (born in Zurich in 1945) and in 1948 a son, Quinten (born in the Netherlands). The floor is a continuous flat surface covered with dark gray carpeting, with stone pavers on the doorways towards the exterior. In the lining of the walls, both interior and exterior, also used large wooden panels with openings for vertical windows. Iroko wood was used in the exterior.

The residential units are arranged in a staggered formation, thus allowing each of them to have communication with an individual outdoor space and with the internal street. The result is a polycentric building, with a joint of large and small spaces, inside and outside, in successions of units, sets of 9 modules, each defined in its own right, while it is interlaced rhythmically, also with domed covers in This case greater. This pro-risk view is shared by landscape architect Jennette Emery-Wallis, designer of the award-winning Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens and the equally acclaimed Tumbling Bay in Olympic Park, designed with Erect Architecture. The former is a piratical Peter Pan fantasy, featuring a great galleon marooned in a sandy sea, with rigging to climb, a crow’s nest to look out from, and a hold to explore, surrounded by a magical landscape dotted with teepees, Wendy houses and dammable water channels. Unlike the abstraction of “dwelling” as a concept, the doorstep was a physical reality. It was an actual step, that children sat on, while a parent talked to a neighbour. It could be a fort or a mountain. It was a bridge, too, between home and the street, between family and something bigger. It was the launch pad to the outside world.Steel and paint are closely allied: one tends to forget this, taking it for granted. Ships, railway engines, motor cars, bicycles, bridges-a host of things-are painted and repainted for protection according to custom, tradition or, if they happen to be pipes, like those which run up, down, along and across the Beaubourg, just for fun: for where there are no pipes there is no fun!’ He taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1959 and he was a professor at the Delft University of Technology from 1966 to 1984. He also was editor of the architecture magazine Forum from 1959 to 1963 and in 1967. CIAM’s analytical method of measuring life in the city and land use by density and the mapping of just the so-called four main Functions – dwelling, work, recreation and transport – were considered by Team X to be too simplistic as it did not show the overlapping and intertwining of uses, events or the details of its richness and sensitivity and reasons why certain neighbourhoods had and should be allowed and continue to thrive as an integral part of the developing and expanding urban form. Much that is wrong with modern architecture is due to its superficial closeness to the caricature of pure planes’ We live in an era in which there are not many carefully constructed playgrounds. We don’t like what we see. Have we—city decision makers, architects, designers, parents, friends —forgotten to be critical?

His designs seem somehow underwhelming compared with his vivid, lucid and poetic writing, which even 30 to 60 years later is still strikingly relevant. While some of the early texts have a preachy side, with all the desperation and hope for salvation connected to sermons, many of his later lectures and articles are more polemical, sharp and witty. From the end of the sixties he went on to apply his approach in the context of historical towns, first in his competition design for the Deventer town hall (1966, another prize-winning but unexecuted project), and then in the renovation projects for the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt and Jordaan quarters (1970), and for the inner cities of Zwolle (1971–75) and Dordrecht (1975–81) – all of them urban housing projects which he developed and executed in association with Theo Bosch (1971–83). His most striking building of that period was the Hubertus House in Amsterdam, a home for single parents and their children (1978–81) which achieved a remarkable integration of a colourful functionalist language within an eclectic context. This is the heroic, or tragic, dimension of modern architecture; it refuses to coddle, to give directions and it forces Man to stand on his own, to be his own free agent’

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American psychologist James Gibson developed an ecological approach to psychology. This approach aimed to understand how animals, including human-beings, perceive and act in their environment. As Gibson (1979) started his landmark book The ecological approach to visual perception, Ever since its introduction, the concept of affordances has proven to be useful to understand the environment and our behavior in it (e.g., Kyttä, 2002, 2004; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Cordovil et al., 2015; Prieske et al., 2015; Menatti and Casado da Rocha, 2016; Withagen and Caljouw, 2016). In his study of the environment of children, Heft (1988), for example, contrasted an affordance-based description of the environment with a “form-based classification of environmental features” (p. 29). The latter refers to our everyday description of our environment. When describing a park, for example, we mention a tree that is in the middle of a grass court, the lake, and the benches at its side. Heft claimed that such a form-based description considers the properties of the environment to be independent of the individuals who use them, and, thus, “provide little insight into the functional, and hence, the psychological significance of environmental features” (p. 36). An affordance-based description of the environment, on the other hand, is relative to the user and puts the functional significance of the environment center stage. Moreover, contrary to a form-based description, an affordance-oriented one recognizes that a single object can have different meanings to an individual. As Gibson (1979) had already emphasized, a single object can afford different behaviors to an animal. For example, a child can sit on a bench, but can also step on it, and jump from it. We all call this view: artistic expression of light-spherical expansion of light in space. In this way, we will have a spherical expansion of colour in perfect accord with the spherical expansion of forms’