Structuralist architecture organises buildings as flexible frameworks of repeating spatial units — like a city in miniature where individual rooms or zones can be adapted without disrupting the whole. The movement emerged in the 1960s from Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger, who rejected both Modernist top-down planning and the anonymity of mass housing.
Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer office in Apeldoorn is the canonical example: a honeycomb of identical concrete units that occupants personalise. The Orphanage by Van Eyck in Amsterdam uses a similar principle at a smaller scale. These buildings treat architecture as a support structure for human activity rather than a finished composition.
