Aldo van Eyck's orphanage as a city of houses, Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer as a village of workplaces - Structuralism rejected anonymous functionalism to give every user an identifiable place within a legible collective order.
What it is, when it works, who it is for, and where it already exists.
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Where Structuralism came from, what makes it recognisable, and the fingerprint it leaves.
1950s-1970s · Netherlands, with influence in Japan and Scandinavia
Structuralism in architecture emerged from the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck's critique of both functionalist Modernism and the CIAM orthodoxy of urban planning. Van Eyck argued that architecture should create 'in-between' spaces that mediated between individual and collective, interior and exterior, large and small. His Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage (1960), with its complex configuration of small domed pavilions organized around courtyards and streets, demonstrated an alternative to both the Modernist megablock and the traditional institutional building.
The movement was formalized through Team 10, the group of younger architects (van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods) who challenged CIAM's top-down urbanism from the 1950s onward. Herman Hertzberger, van Eyck's colleague and successor in Amsterdam, became Structuralism's most prolific practitioner. His Centraal Beheer office building in Apeldoorn (1972) replaced the open-plan office with a three-dimensional configuration of concrete 'islands' that workers could personalize and inhabit as they chose.
Structuralist architecture anticipated contemporary interests in participatory design, user-configurable space, and architecture as framework rather than finished product. Its modular, additive approach to building (small units combined into complex configurations) influenced the Metabolist movement in Japan and remains relevant to housing design that must accommodate diverse and changing household patterns.
“Architecture that makes the space between things the main event.
The visual DNA: what makes it recognisable
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The style's primary materials, assembled bottom-up
Postwar · 1960–1975 - tap any style to travel
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How to shoot this aesthetic
"The building's own skeleton, worn as its finish"
Shot list
Lighting
Even daylight that reveals the modular repetition clearly across the full facade
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Structuralist architecture expressing its underlying structural system as the primary aesthetic, modular repeating units, Herman Hertzberger's participatory spatial framework, honest exposed load-bearing logic as ornament
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The repeated unit needs a real rule for growth. A cluster of identical cells without an ordering principle becomes a maze, which is the well-documented criticism of the movement, so circulation has to be legible. Design the joint and the threshold. Human scale is the corrective: the pattern must not stop the occupant from finding a front door.
Having a revival under other names, because designing for adaptation is exactly what the carbon argument now demands. It proposed buildings as configurable systems of repeated units, giving occupants room to change them. The irony the field notes repeatedly: its most famous works are now the hardest to reuse, so build in the flexibility rather than only depicting it.
A 'village' of individually legible spaces costs more than one big box.
Giving every user an identifiable place within a collective order.
Repeating a coherent unit at city scale without it feeling generic.
Giving every user an identifiable place within a collective order is the whole idea.
A rare, mostly academic reference in architecture circles.
Still cited as a working alternative to anonymous functionalism.
A village of individually legible spaces costs more than one big box.
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Where it stands now, and what it costs you to use it
Structuralism proposed buildings as configurable systems of repeated units, giving occupants room to adapt them, and it was a genuine attempt to design for change.
Its most famous works are now the hardest to reuse, which is an irony the field has noted repeatedly.
The idea is having a revival under different names, because designing for adaptation is exactly what the carbon argument now demands.
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Structuralism 50%Architectural Modernism 50%Merged palette
#3A4A50
#1A1A1A
#5A7A8A
#3D5A6B
#B8C8D0
Leads structured, geometric, minimal
Typography · from Structuralism
Space Grotesk over Inter
Materials
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Structuralist architecture expressing its underlying structural system as the primary aesthetic, modular repeating units, Herman Hertzberger's participatory spatial framework, honest exposed load-bearing logic as ornament (50%), infused with Modernist architecture with clean geometric volumes, glass curtain walls, steel and concrete, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe influence, pilotis, free plan, ribbon windows, color palette strictly #3A4A50 #1A1A1A #5A7A8A #3D5A6B #B8C8D0, overall character: structured, geometric, minimal
Structuralist architecture designs buildings as configurable frameworks of small spatial units rather than as fixed, single-function containers. Originating with Aldo van Eyck in the 1950s Netherlands, it emphasizes 'in-between' spaces, human-scale modules, and architecture that users can adapt. Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer is the canonical built example.
Both are post-war concrete movements, but their concerns differ. Brutalism focuses on material honesty and structural expression. Structuralism focuses on spatial configuration and the creation of intermediate spaces between individual and collective use. A Brutalist building is about how it is made; a Structuralist building is about how it is inhabited.
Indirectly. Both draw on the idea that meaning arises from relationships between elements rather than from elements in isolation. Architectural Structuralism treats buildings as systems of spatial relationships, much as linguistic Structuralism treats language as a system of differences. But the architectural movement developed more from practical design critique than from literary theory.
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