Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2023 with funding from

Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/team10primerO000alis
 i) | INA Cc
LAS SPE

PASADENA, CALIFORN IA 91103

ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN

3220 00027 1838

 eam
primer
|

|
‘The MIT
Massachusetts
10
Press
Institute of Technology
edited by alison smithson
ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN LIBRARY
1700
PASADENA,
CIDA STREET
CALIFORNIA 91103

|. Cambridge, Massachusetts
.
And London, England

| SOLAR
820 AYER PARK Pity
Edited by Alison Smithson for TEAM 10 J.B. Bakema Holland
Aldo van Eyck Holland
G. Candilis France
A &P. Smithson England
Shad Woods France
How to read the Primer: Giancarlo de Carlo Italy
The object of this Primer is to put into one document those J. Coderch Spain
articles, essays and diagrams which TEAM 10 regard as being cen- C. Pologni Hungary
tral to their individual positions. J. Soltan Poland
In a way it is a history of how the ideas of the people involved S. Wewerka Germany
have grown or changed as a result of contact with the others, and R. Erskine Sweden
itis hoped that the publication of these root ideas, in their original
often naive form, will enable them to continue life.
The first part of the original Primer—the ‘Role of the architect’—
is concerned with the attitudes which the subsequent material
speaks about in another way. The material has been roughly
grouped into three sections—‘ Urban infra-structure’, ‘Grouping of
dwellings’, and ‘Doorstep’. Each of these sections tends to be
dominated by one person or group—he or they, whoever de-
veloped the root idea—and the complementary or commentary
material by others is printed alongside making a kind of counter-
point.
The ‘carrying text’—that which is intended to carry the main
message—is laid out in the largest face on the left hand side of
each pair of pages. On the right hand side of the pair in a smaller
face is the supplementary text. Between them, in italics, are
the ‘verbal illustrations’, and in the smallest faces of all, are the
footnotes, and, in italics, the captions.

EXPLICATION EN LANGUE ETRANGERE DU ABECEDAIRE

L’objectif de l’Abécédaire est de réunir sous une seule couverture des textes
continus, laches, en contrepoint, les différents écrits des individus qui ont formé
cette famille nébuleuse s’intitulant l’Equipe 10.
Aucun des textes ne fut écrit spécifiquement avec I’Equipe 10 en téte; ils forment
partie intégrale du processus de construction et de réflexion sur la fagon de mieux
faire les choses.
Toute I’essence est dans I'esprit et la saveur des piéces individuelles choisies
pour étre cousues ensemble—un nouvel ensemble, quelque chose de nouveau
comme un Annie est créé.
Il prétend étre un kaléidoscope de pensées, d’idées, d’opinions, de craintes, de
questions, de doutes, d’examens; en faire un résumé ne vous laisserait rien de
cette qualité transitoire, changeante. Comment résumerions-nous un jouet, ou
un film Eames?
Un intrus pourrait le faire—et les critiques peuvent le faire par la suite. Mais si ce
document contenait un résumé les lecteurs le liraient, baseraient leurs opinions
dessus, liraient les textes a travers ce résumé, examineraient les diagrammes
également ainsi et fonderaient leurs discussions dessus. Un tel support ou clef
trahirait cet Abécédaire.

EXPLICACION DE LA CARTILLA EN LENGUA EXTRANJERA

EI objeto de la cartilla es coleccionar er un solo volumen textos sueltos, corridos
y al contrapunto, los diversos escritos de personas que constituyeron la familia
confusa—que se titulan Grupo 10. Note: The following abbreviations are used
throughout.
Ninguno de los textos fué escrito especificamente tomando en consideracion Architectural Design.
el Grupo 10, sino que formaban parte del proceso de construccion y esfuerzos Architectural Review.
para mejorar el trabajo. Architectural Association Journal.
Architect’s Journal.
Toda la esencia esta en ei espiritu y sazon de las piezas individuales escogidas John Voelcker.
para ser ligadas formando una unidad nueva, algo nuevo como Annie Albers. a . Alison & Peter Smithson.
Se propone ser un Calidoscopio de pensamientos, ideas, opiniones, temores, . Alison Smithson.
preguntas, dudas, examenes; al resumir no quedaria nada de esta calidad YunPeter Smithson.
Jacob Bakema.
cambiante y pasajera. Como podemos resumir un juguente o una pelicula de Shadrach Woods.
Eames? George Candilis.
Podria hacerlo un extrano—y pueden hacerlo los criticos mas adelante. Pero oe:
AOI Alexis Josic.
Stefan Wewerka.
si se ofreciese un resumen junto con este documento la gente lo leeria, formaria c - Oswald Mathias Ungers.
sus opiniones segun el resumen, leeria el texto y miraria a los diagramas bajo la Charles Pologni.
influencia del resumen y llevaria a cabo discusiones con la ayuda del mismo. aOOS Giancarlo de Carlo,
Brian Richards,
Tal apoyo o ayuda violaria el fin de este libro. <7
YPOYEHV>>!
.) 3 m . Wan Eyck.

2
 Team !0—as various pub-
lications will show—comprises The Aim of Team 10
a gradual changing caucus.
The people who make up the Aim of Team 10 has been described as follows:
family Team 10 change over Team 10 is a group of architects who have sought each other out
the years as various human because each has found the help of the others necessary to the
peaks vary as intensity of focus
shifts as inclination changes; development and understanding of their own individual work. But
through pressures of society it is more than that.
affecting thought and built They came together in the first place, certainly because of mutual
work,
A person is not felt to be an realization of the inadequacies of the processes of architectural
associate until he has been thought which they had inherited from the modern movement as a
at three or four family whole, but more important, each sensed that the other had already
meetings.
The basic criterion—other than found some way towards a new beginning.
compatibility—is whether an This new beginning, and the long build-up that followed, has
individual ‘stays with it’ in been concerned with inducing, as it were, into the bloodstream of
a way to take full responsi-
bility for his thoretical the architect an understanding and feeling for the patterns, the
programme. aspirations, the artefacts, the tools, the modes of transportation and
communications of present-day society, so that he can as a natural
thing build towards that society's realization-of-itself.
In this sense Team 10 is Utopian, but Utopian about the present.
Thus their aim is not to theorize but to build, for only through con-
struction can a Utopia of the present be realized.
For them ‘to build’ has a special meaning in that the architect's
responsibility towards the individual or groups he builds for, and
towards the cohesion and convenience of the collective structure to
which they belong, is taken as being an absolute responsibility. No
abstract Master Plan stands between him and what he has to do,
only the ‘human facts’ and the logistics of the situation.
To accept such responsibility where none is trying to direct others
to perform acts which his control techniques cannot encompass,
requires the invention of a working-together-technique where each
pays attention to the other and to the whole insofar as he is able.
Contents Team 10 is of the opinion that only in such a way may meaningful
groupings of buildings come into being, where each building is a
Preface 4 live thing and a natural extension of the others. Together they will
Team 10 Primer 20 make places where a man can realize what he wishes to be.
Role of the architect 24 Team 10 would like to develop their thought processes and language
Urban infra-structure 48 of building to a point where a collective demonstration (perhaps a
little self-conscious) could be made at a scale which would be really
Grouping of dwellings 74 effective in terms of the modes of life and the structure of a com-
Doorstep 96 munity.
Bibliography 106 It must be said that this point is still some way off.

Primer Preface 1968

Here Team 10 tries to explain, in a similar edited form to the original
Primer, what we stand for today, why a republication of the Primer
is of point, and why, because of our continually evolving attitude,
the Primer is still a valid document for students of architecture ta
whom it was first directed in December 1962.

Copyright © 1968
by Alison Smithson
First MIT Press paperback edition, November 1974,
by arrangement with the author.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-25990
ISBN: 0 262 69047 0
Printed in the United States of America.
Preface
Team 10 know one another well enough not to get involved in
our different personal strengths and weaknesses—i.e. are a
‘family’. We already represent a sufficient variety of backgrounds
and attitudes, but have a common link.
To continue to meet these people (not more) would be of enor-
mous value, giving possibilities for discussing, exchanging and
developing the ideas that are occupying our minds—both ideas of
a general nature and our attempts to their precision in the jobs we
are doing. Should we be able to achieve, by mutual interchange, a
certain excellence in our own work,—in architecture and com-
munity building, in speech and writing, Team 10 could have much
greater importance for us and for others than as an arranger of
meetings!
For the internal meetings the need for a formulated common
theme need not be pronounced, though it might be found during
correspondence before the meeting that a bias in a certain direc-
I It was decided to continue using a
tion could be of common interest. Stockholm, February 22nd 1967. Erskine critical-descriptive method, with the
purpose of preserving along with the
hypotheses, all the nuances of
meaning from which they were
extracted, so that nothing would be
Is the sincere wish of many of us—and mine—of going on with lost that could aid the understanding
of an area which is dominated by
Team X a sentimental or a lazy habit or—what would be worse—a exceptional historical and
environmental features, Urbino,
lack of new ideas? de Carlo

| think that in our discussion we should start from this point:

what kind of approach is each of us carrying out and where does it
lead?
| believe that it’s no longer enough to trust that our theoretical lines
are similar even if our formal research and our philosophical
background are dissimilar. (There is, of course, a dialectical re-
lation between the three that can’t be disregarded.) | mean that
if we want to discover the real quality of our being together, it is
important to face the meaning of our theoretical statements
through the forms we are able to give them in our architectural
production. At the same time it is important to face their ideo-
logical background: the moral, political, rational, utopian pattern
from which we derive both theoretical lines and architectural
forms.
If forms appear expressive, unexpressive, unrhetorical, ambiguous,
unambiguous, open, closed, elemental, complex, and so on, each
of these reflects a difference on the theoretical lines and on the
ideological background. -
If the ideological background includes to be pro-affluent society
or co-it, pro-motor car dominated or co-it, and so on, each of
these reflects a difference on the theoretical lines and on the
architectural form.
To assess the reason of our being together implies now a con-
frontation of the whole system of our personal behaviour from
ideology, to theoretical lines, to forms. Paris, February 25th 1967. de Carlo

4
! do not feel that the Primer We can put on paper what has to be done and in the next moment
as dictionary need be revised we do quite another thing.
now. Only an Appendix has to The difference and the sameness are not in the doing, but in
be attached to it now, and what we think we will do and what we do while thinking; all that
from time to time, with a we think has to do with the making of environment and it is
collection of particular solu- impossible to say if this environment will be an additive process
tions which were influenced of buildings or if it has to be building of a network in which we
by the Team 10 way of think- catch house-school-workshop.
ing and in which Team 10
approach was influenced by At the moment it seems that American architecture is developing
conditions peculiar to the by making the finest buildings on campuses or Park Avenue
situation. Dialogues provoked situations. There are many pictures in magazines but ‘down-
in that way and the continuous town’—the flesh of the earth—disease called sprawl in America
contact between members will and walk-up flats in Holland—are not influenced by the pub-
help in the evolution of the lications and existence of the campus buildings.
ideas, enabling them to
It goes its own administrative way and stays away from the
continue their life. decision-making moments dedicated to statue-like buildings
Pologni which are small bright-coloured dots in an ever grayer getting
gray-background of the painting called town.
The noise of stencil machine is everywhere, multiplying reports
It is very difficult to say about what has to be done waving in ever wider circles around the
problem.
exactly how the ideas deve-
loped within or around Our problem is the high density part of our environment and these
Team 10, influenced today’s problems are not solved in campus buildings and saying hello to
thinking. The dialogues, the visiting professors at student parties.
meetings among close friends, Schools for design should be part of high density areas trying to
where the roots of ideas were solve surrounding problems for people who now are not able
formulated into principles, to solve their problems themselves which always is so with
continued their life through people who are poor.
publications, through the
activities of the members of The house will be creative again if it does away with the necessity
the Team who were engaged to flee from it: making interruptions in life called weekends.
in actual construction as well We haveto gotothe lowest cost housing programme tofind where
our problem-stone is thrown in the water and we must stay close
as in teaching nearly all over
to that spot because it gives meaning to all other problems. And
the world. The responsibility
in the solution for the problem of lowest cost housing, in high
to satisfy present needs is
density circumstances is the key for total urbanization of the
as real as to respond to the
earth.
ever increasing rate of con-
Philadelphia, April 1967. J.B.
tinuous change and growth.
To establish a continuous
and real dialogue with the
authorities who represent the If we try to see ourselves against the general background of
client, the real client—the architecture/urbanism today it would seem we have to take
society itse/f—is as important position as to the promises made to society in this our field. An
as the dialogue with scientists, architect can know clearly what promises he can keep as an
specialists, students or mem- architect, but knows equally from his experience that many
bers of the group. The Team promises that ‘planning consultants’ and so on make are im-
10 Primer became a widely possible to keep. Yet because plans of this type are called for by
used dictionary in this politicians—one act is simply a tool of the other—it is never
dialogue. But a good dic- thought to take any stand to question their validity. Paper pro-
mises, by omission condoned; continually made by political
tionary doesn’t make the
architect/urbanist planners who like to go along with the State,
poet. Not even everyone using
saying only such things as the politicians like to hear; such as
the same dictionary arrives
‘We can make a new town’ or ‘re-plan’ an old city to make it work
at the same meaning for a
given word. for traffic.
These and the following linked phenomena are all things which
It is easy to agree in the
we discuss in 1967; how—and whether—to take arms against
extreme cases, but as we
them, yet are really the same things that Coderch spoke about in
arrive at particular solutions,
1962 (see pages 35, 37 and 39). Untruthfulness presses the pro-
after a certain point the
fessions of northern Europe closer than ever before, for whereas
evaluation, the decision-
the commercial world of men like these we speak of has always
making becomes a very in-
existed—a law unto their purpose—outside the main cultural-
dividual matter. Thus dialogue
directive streams, now tend to be by the Welfare State plaited
becomes difficult even among
into the cultural stream. What was the rift is become a crack
very close friends who
running through honour in our society. The new socialism in the
developed the general ideas Welfare State is to do with the responsibility of ‘staying with’ a
together. But if it is not truthful promise to build until it is realized.
possible to sustain a dialogue
between those who agree on If we examine our position in England, we must also in the
the generalities by showing general political context question whether the Welfare State in
and explaining to each other choosing so much for us might not be freezing our life pattern,
our own particular solutions forcing social benefits to answer a time before, unopposed by
for our own particular pro- allowing no incentives. Incentives naturally generate decisions of
blems, the particularities may choice. Freely made choices are the redirective factors in society.
themselves deviate from the Without free choice bureaucracy becomes a dead load and it is

5
Since 1953, Aix-en-Provence, 9th Congress of C.I.A.M. July 1953, generalities. The group itself
has to be restricted in number
Europe has accomplished a change of life-style: its symbol is the in order to maintain the
motor-car. The new style reaches almost the whole of society emotional sensitivity of the
personal discussions. The
through pop styled clothes and ‘gear’—the very word gear, carrying knowledge retained of personal
overtones of sport and sport technology tells of envied and en- and emotional discussions
acts as a disciplinary influence
viable qualities previously available only to the few. when making design de-
The streets of the big cities and towns are pretty with ordinary cisions. Computer-adminis-
trated world-scale
girls going to ordinary jobs. organizations, with their
In the metropolis, at least, gay throw-away styled (but still costly) numerous advisers, might be
successful in formulating
furniture is available. neutral and polite manifestoes
Light colours on the inside of ordinary houses are now quite or in distributing information.
This might also help us to
normal. Television has opened people’s minds and made a new make our buildings better,
class conscious of its existence as a group with a need for a life- but ideas can’t be developed,
can't be kept alive that way.
style of its own. We as architects have still not found a built-mode Just as a fire always goes
appropriate to this life-style—we have not yet built the places out if a small number of
people are not on fire them-
‘where it can all happen’. selves. Team 10 is needed
to keep the Primer alive.
Ghana 1967, Pologni
Our housing especially is rigid and unfriendly.

A tradition of style has ridden the carriage-trade (for both coaches

and farm-carts were always stylish—perhaps especially farm-
carts), and the garment-trade /(with its unabashed concern with
emphasis, with line, with social mood, with the feel of material as
well as its look), through serial-production and out the other side
with style still in the saddle. Whereas one cannot feel anything but
shame for our trade (we lost our style tradition through the late
19th-century moralists) in letting the serial production of houses
ride right over us. We have yet to offer their fabricators either a
dream city to build towards or a model of a fragment they will want
to copy out of envy. The building industry today is like the garment-
trade without the couture houses. Like fashion designers, to
When a Pressman asked me
design effectively we must face the situation. We have to accept as what | thought of the new
normal motor car ownership, the proliferation of radios and high rise housing blocks by
the water in Perth, | replied,
various other sound-producing domestic equipment and ap- ‘I don’t think they behave
pliances, the higher living standards, and higher purchasing very nicely in relation to the
little red houses—and | don’t
powers, all of which require more house volume per family. think all the little red houses
These things of their nature need lower urban densities, more behave nicely to the high
blocks.’ The problem is that
distance between things, more openness. A different feel, a these are childish categories.
different style. You are not going to solve
the problems of the future
We must also accept industrialized building methods—that build- with /ittle red houses and a
ings can be as uniquely designed as they were in the middle-ages, few high rise blocks. It’s not
a question of either/or—it is a
but that they will be mostly of concrete. (The towers of Drancy question of a far richer
excepted, pre-cast concrete facing started with the Unité, and sequence and scope for the
mingling of functions—known
reached a real industrialized level at Roehampton only in 1958. and unknown—so that al/
Since then a whole new industry has grown up, an industry which sizes, quantities and mean-
ings can be familiarized. You
now has a great deal of know-how just waiting to be tapped.) That can’t just add an absolute
we have been unable to catch the mood of our times, unable to type of house to another
absolute type of street and,
take advantage of these newly perfected means, is mostly because after adding a lot more
we ourselves are not sure where we want to walk and where to absolute items, call this a
city and expect a nice reply.
ride in our bouncy new clothes and in our shiny new cars. Perth, Australia, 1966, van Eyck

6
 here the politico/planner/bureaucrat, jammed in the manipulation
of the administrative machine now too big for anyone to master,
tends to act against any re-establishment of honesty and re-
sultant trust in a community. We are locked in a wasting struggle
with Welfare State Bureaucracy in a very similar way to how men .
were in the size-kind war of 1914/1918. Even at a simple day to .
day level, useless struggles with committees are wasting valuable
working energy and time. On/y by the reduction of friction between
bureaucracy and action can the available talent be spread as far as it
needs to be.
It is particularly necessary in the Welfare State to be honest
about the economics of any operation. This is made difficult for
all people, from the professional to the petty criminal, when we
have before us the example of the traditional apparently un-
stoppable system of money taken by taxes being used for war
arms when it should in honesty be spent on human beings for
life. The excess spending on Self or State by any potentate was
2 Section through never on such a scale as legal governments today spend for
seven-storey office building
with roads and parking in arms; this without any bleat of protest to ask that money spent
moat below. Berlin, on but one boat, plane or rocket be spent instead to find the house
Mehring/Blucherplatz, A./P.S. worth mass producing to replace rotten areas of our cities.
Clear architectonic statement
of the rights and pleasures Besides this it is a small act, but one on our doorstep, to protest
of vehicular and pedestrian about economic irresponsibility of planners who make drawings
movement, of quiet work place of roads for one town that would absorb the whole national road
budget for several years. Those who might protest are perhaps
rightly suspicious that statistics on which might be based an
overall rationally-judged picture are swung about by politicians
It will soon be twenty-seven who hear of cultural status fashions in building as in defence.
years since | began to work Promises at political/urbanist level are involved with fashion as
as an architect and even so fashion carries cultural status in the world. We must therefore
| have very little to say about emphasize at this moment that cu/tura/ status must rest in the right
my work, | said all that | had gesture at the right place even if it takes such an ‘old fashioned’
to say in my first /etter. form as a single brass tap in an African community. The big
Since | am a member of thing—the autostrade, the site covering many city blocks, the
Team 10, my co-operation western style brick bungalow—all solutions given cultural status
has never been as great as by the communications media and commercial pressures may be
my desire to be helpful. | too grandiose, too destructive, economically preposterous, for
hope even so to continue, and the real situation or the actual society. It may therefore be that
to try to lean on my com- the 1967 variation on Van Eyck’s great word NO is perhaps
panions even if it is only moderation through commitment; whereby it is shown that small
with my worries and my actions actually carried out, might be more worthwhile for society
presence. and culturally correct and honest, and—most important—ACTIVE,
than useless paper work society has to pay for.
At present there are several
things that worry me: In old European societies fashions in cultural status take
destructive turns. Cultural fixes are wantonly destroyed with
1. The incoherence and
meaninglessness and speed reminiscent of those blood cultures
diversity of the architect's
of Sumer, Assyria and Babylon. In England in particular cultural
work that prevents the profit
structuring, original railway routes, canals, old turnpikes, historic
and experience he would
town centres, land formations, are being trampled under by those
obtain if his work was
whose minds are on an entirely different level of gain. Cultural
coherent.
fixes such as the Euston Arch, old houses in and around towns,
2. The necessity we have to
market halls and so on, are being removed with a vengeance
project great blocks of dwell-
barely equalled except in a putsch as if they alone represented a
ings. Before this problem |
past culture which if wiped away would miraculously gain our
think Candilis was right when country the cultural status of the Riviera. Destruction of cultural
he answered me in Royaumont
reminders which could act as roots and fixes is an obviously
that we had to face the deep-seated human reaction to stress. These stresses of modern
problem and answer yes society we have to mitigate when we cannot plan to stand off
leaving aside romantic posi-
entirely.
tions that cannot compete
with the modern systems of At this point is also obvious the greatness of the divide between
construction. ‘noise’-creating architecture and the stress-free Team 10 way of
3. The problems of teaching thinking. The most committed of the big thunder styles is in
architecture and our position Japan. Unlike the space-gun type theoretical projects, Team
in front of the students. Japan act out their promises and build ‘Samurai’ architecture.
! have remarked that there It is no doubt a racially different reaction to the stress engendered
exists a great cowardice in today by open societies—for Team 10 to reply with ever more
front of the young. Our own reticent acts of quietude, Team Japan with the violent gesture,
confusion very often brings loud scary noise, heavy armoured form, wild grimace. Neverthe-
us to accept their ideas, less in our noise and movement-worried societies there must be
fearing to be judged old and somewhere a kind of restraint and beyond a certain point
out-of-date. A great Spanish ‘Samurai’ architecture must become anti-social, a confidence
doctor said recently that never trick enjoining the rat race with quite the other sort of architect—
in the Human Story had there the space-gun man and the commercial man—who take no

i,
 been so many scientists alive
What draws us to Paris is the still-live sense of the city as a and so few wise men. We
collective art-form: it is that which pins us to the pages of learn techniques. We do not
learn to live.
Simenon, envious of the carnal connection of places and life- 4. The problem of colla-
pattern. A connection we know we have lost. boration between architect
and contractor and the con-
We can rebuild that connection only from the associations of tintuity of this collaboration.
people with places we know to be alive. Barcelona, March 1967, J. A. Coderch

We live around our house-group, we transit; we live around our

work-group, we transit; we shop, and we transit again.
The main difference from the past life-pattern is that we hardly ever
walk (or ride so that we see the people, houses and sky) from
district to district if the distance is more than a third of a mile, so
we don’t experience the city as a continuous thing anymore,
rather as a series of events.
For the new life-style a city pattern of large-area comprehensible
livable-around house-groups with inviolable quiet spaces, of com-
prehensible livable-around work-groups, of Disneyland-type
amble-around shopping areas, with easy anonymous transit
between, would offer a mode of organization which corresponds
to our everyday experience and our retained picture of ordinary
urban life. It would then be clear where we would walk in our
bouncy new clothes, and where we would ride in our shiny new
cars. To build one of these livable-around groups, stable, identify-
ing and identifiable should be possible, and this is what we should Again something general: our
work towards. If we can build a group large enough to be life-style real dilemma seems to be
that we are condemned to do
sustaining within its own boundaries, tough enough for its es- ‘rescue-work’ or a kind of
sential place-nature to survive—to be enhanced by—change, we ‘repairing’ especially in the
field of city-renewal. The
properly discharge our role. For if there is evolved a good infra- results are, as we know, more
structure such areas are what it serves, but if, as mostly happens, or less fragmentary and
meaningless, often more a
the town is badly organized at least we have made somewhere blocking than an opening
livable. January 28th 1967. P.D.S. action ; and city planners
seldom see that a tiny building
which has to be situated in
an existing structure (what-
ever the character or function
Isn't it obvious that in urban design one should proceed basically of such a city is) can stop or
from the first clustering stage to the second and third, reaching open future events.
outward in an orderly manner to gain some insight into the total This is the lack in modern
architecture movement: the
urban organism. over-importance of styling
The higher the level of clustering the greater must be the concern modern materials and so on,
all that is and was O.K., but
for community life. Conversely, in the basic cells, particular today it is more the question
attention must be paid to individual needs, particularly for the real where a building with its
processes is located. A good
sense of privacy. building wrongly situated is
Proceeding from the general to the particular means finding worse than a bad building
rightly placed. (A platitude.)
solutions to the problems of the whole town organism by examin- We have to react to special
ing the local implications of national and regional planning pro- environmental circumstances
more instinctively, more
posals. While previously we proceeded outward from the cell, here directly.
we reverse the process by moving inward from national and Our main job will still be
repairing here and there in
regional considerations. The urban texture thus becomes derived our old cities and one has to
from a concept that covers an entire region. We know that the town try to do the best; | think
it is not a way to break down
has definitely ceased to exist as an island. It is now time to state buildings to get wider streets
that the very notion of a new town has become obsolete—the term with more automobiles and
‘new town’ being connected with the old town-conceived-as-an- soon.
Berlin 1967, Stefan Wewerka
 thought of the type of human society we want ourselves to be.
All too soon ‘Samurai’ architecture moves up to the divide where
the issue is whether it is moral to publicize how to make a space
frame that would detract from life; or moral to think of making a
dome when one of its only conceivable uses is to store arms.
Morality of statement, promise, intention, today seem more than
ever tied to action. In 1967 it may be that to take a money grant
to write a paper on ‘The problem of the Indian Village’ is less
than praiseworthy, probably it is culturally debilitating and
downright dishonest. The more correct action might be to use
the money to allow you to mend the village well with your own
hands. Even more culturally responsible might be to build the
right house for your own culture. To march in Cambridge for
Vietnam is a screaming steam-age immature political farce;
whereas to sandbag a narrow pleasant street in Cambridge to
keep cars out so that life can be lived freely there and
re-experienced and de-stressed—then label it perhaps
Good action here by students
Why not right action by Vietnamese?
easel actually start a movement to change the spirit of the
world.
March 1967. A.S.

The structural order of a new urban growth can be said to rely

upon a ‘backbone’ of definable elements as Shadrach Woods
calls them. This ‘backbone’, composed of such facilities as the
ss
general network of utilities (water, sewage, power) and the*
circulation-transportation systems, is the main strategic tool of
the urban designer. Responsibility for (and control of) the ‘back-
bone’ rests with the community. The less-definable elements,
connected to and organized by the ‘backbone’ are subject to
intervention by the individual. An overlapping of the influences
of the individual and community occurs in the subsidiary
elements of the ‘backbone’, such as local commerce, education
and meeting places.
One observes in urban design projects of today a tendency to-
ward total physical integration of all parts of this ‘backbone’,
whereas in the twenties and thirties, they were deliberately
separated. Pedestrian and vehicular traffic systems must ob-
viously continue to be divided. (This is not only because of the
3 Bochum, model, Candilis
necessity of keeping the natural slow speed of people away from
The university is divided
academically around the Te ot ATO Cob ECTIVISM the mechanical, fast speed of the machine for physical security,
circulation spine but also each demand a totally different rhythm experience, with
properly differentiated psychological stimuli to reach their slow
and fast moving eyes.)
The implementation of the ‘backbone’ of definable elements cor-
responds with the implementation of the less definable parts of
the agglomeration. The size of the first element or increment is
obviously crucial (and debatable). The ‘increment quantum’
should be the smallest optimum: an element should be small
enough to be workable and efficient, but large enough to be
4 Diagram of Bremen sufficient to the needs. The next increment would be the result of
University, 1960, St. W. a study of the original one.
The whole concept of agglomeration is today in the process of
losing its definitive physico-visual character and acquiring the
meaning of a ‘control device’ conceived to hold variables between
desirable limits. The whole concept has to possess as an in-
trinsic feature the possibility of recognizing a field of changes in
all its increments. The changes would be controlled by the
‘backbone’ and from there they would extend to the freer, less
defined and less controlled domains of habitat, work, etc. A very
different process indeed is required from that which made the
old designs for new towns even to the early fifties of this century.
Harvard 1967. Soltan

First thing we have to do is: to change the conditions of the

actual slum-areas.
These areas can be the test-grounds of research for art-of-living-
conditions on urbanistic-architectural scale.
Planning should be concentrated at testground-operations and
their connections.
 My present preoccupation is
island period. Today the town is just one element of a regional in the design of ‘mechanisms
pattern. It is at the higher, regional levels that the primary reasons for horizontal movement’.
for proposing an agglomeration are generated. These incentives Cities in the past were com-
pact—everything within
result in decisions which affect the raison d’étre of the whole walking distance. Maybe this
region and must account for an entire spectrum of activities. Thus, is an ideal to be aimed at
in our new cities, implemented
a comprehensive regional pattern must be envisioned. The old by an abundance of different
principle of the CIAM that a healthy town should be a complete systems of movement.
organism was moved by Le Corbusier from the level of the town Today these are limited in kind,
bus, car, taxi, train, and none
to the level of the region. With the advent of efficient rapid trans- are suitable for the shorter
portation, even large urban areas are no longer autonomous and distance movement of 2-3
miles, often a distance too
self-contained. Today it is possible that urban areas the size of far to walk.
the new towns of yesterday, can be specialized. In other words, a We design buildings vertically
town, a new town in particular, becomes (again?) just one element around the /ift shaft, a con-
venient and silent device.
in a pulsating line along which the catalystic activities change But we design horizontally
following regional requirements. around the car, a device
having none of these qualities.
It may be commented that in many countries the process from
‘Time distance’ factor is
general to particular is made almost impossible because their important in deciding whether
regional or national planning process is not sufficiently developed or how to move; 30 minutes
walk, 3 minutes drive or 10
to supply the necessary data. While philosophic, economic, or minutes ride by bus.
political arguments may be put forward, isn’t this exactly where a Places we know well, even
responsible designer can contribute by asking intelligent love, we walk about in.
The car becomes problematic
questions and demanding data? when there are too many
In other instances, regional planning processes are often better together—moving or parked.
Then delight to use it changes.
than the urban designer is willing to accept. He thus finds it easier Given other movement
to dismiss a sizeable part of the existing research as being of no systems as convenient and
enjoyable to use, the car may
consequence so that he can proceed more on his own. become a leisure toy.
When regional data is limited, making the general to particular ‘The Japanese leave their
attitude uncertain, shouldn’t the urban resort to the process of shoes outside before entering
a house.’ Brian Richards
working from the particular to the general: a route always
Today cities are becoming
accessible. Soltan more and more unpleasant
places because of the pressure
of motorization. A physical
and psychological burden for
Evolution in structure of towns is based on evolution in structure the inhabitants—a chaotic
of society. situation for the whole of the
city organization—impossible
Evolution of structure of society is the growing awareness of man to reorganize meaningfully.
about what is existence. Part of existence is consciousness of The old street pattern, once
used by men, horses and
space—qualities. horse-carriages is constantly
During the past sixty years the anonymous man (employé) got being changed and remodelled.
This costs a considerable
basic rights in society. (In the Netherlands the first housing act, amount of money without
giving conditions for mainly state-subsidized housing, was made achieving satisfactory results.
in 1902.) In metropolitan cities the
process of destruction can be
In the coming fifty years the employé (the anonymous man) stopped by the improvement
will have to develop enterprise-responsibility: also enterprise- of existing means of mass
transportation. /n Paris and
responsibility of his own environment. He will only get his own Berlin for instance the under-
kind of environment if he knows space-quality has to do with his ground and Express-train
systems are constantly being
life-quality. enlarged and modernized.
The weakest part of the population still is a big part which takes Such a net, dense and perfect,
the smallest opportunity for improvement of its own environment. can preserve and hold
together an existing city
In the USA the hottest part of the planning-housing problems is structure, but motorization
how to replace slums by good built-environment. In slums live forces endless growth.
Berlin 1967, Stefan Wewerka

10
 a

Up to the present, time has been the element of variation in

urbanization of the house, the block, the building.
The house so far is a protector-against-nature, but this function
becomes extended and overlapped by the function of being-
space-detector.
Man likes to choose space-qualities fitting to his own wondering:
| think we are leaving this period of putting-together-houses-
and-buildings and are approaching the period in which test-
ground-groups can be the element of variations and scale of
operation.
We have to offer space-qualities instead of types of houses
(space-qualities have to be produced, advertised and distributed
as is done for all other production in our society,as food—clothes
—television).
The political administrative production of houses around
Washington, The Hague and Moscow, more and more result in a
world-wide monotony fitting for non-existing monotypeman.
We are still assisting in planning of Asian and African con-
tinents, filling them up with houses.
Doing so we become housing-missionaries, denying the right of
changing-man to trust his own individual wondering and the
manifestation of it by an own choice of particular-space-quality-
fitting-to-a-particular-person-in-a-particular-situation. Each test-
ground-action could be done by a particular association of
users—designers—producers and should result in realization of
a particular in-and-outside space-quality which can be tested by
using them.
Each test-ground-action for change of slums could be financed
by giving of the annual national building-budget for research of
space-quality-by-a-group-of-users, designers and producers.
In chemicals, food, clothes, cars, television, spacecraft-pro-
5 Volta Lake + white Volta channel rapid transport systems, duction, more is done for research.
Ghana, C.P.
But research in space-qualities has to be done by use, by people.
All societies on earth are making road networks, radio and
6 Uncontrolled growth and change in a city. Shops and television stations, knowing that we are in the period of the
workshops have eaten themselves into a traffic building
(S-bahn) architecture of connections. But it is also the period in which
7 A traffic building in one of Berlin’s typical main streets, the greatest client of all times (the anonymous man) got the right
The same situation as in Paris. The main street acts as a to express his individual wondering about life.
‘canal’, it serves the residential areas right and left, and
is the ‘spine’ of the quarter. In this ‘spinal-building’ Test-ground-action on slum-sites could make the weak countries
underground, trams, motor cars, footpaths, shops, etc., are really believe in strong countries: because in slums are living
combined, photographs Wewerka weak people who really need help.
If we don’t give it, it will be taken.
Rotterdam, July 1967. J.B.

We have offered Stockholm a technique of modern city building.

Of traffic separation, of motor roads and of pedestrian dis-
tribution from arrival points at underground-railway and bus
stations and at parking buildings. But most of all have we offered
something of ‘Capital City’, that fantastic human invention
with its many faceted needs and activities, its capacity to offer
more and more and more, its hardness but also generosity and
grandezza.
The process of growth from city to town can, as in London,
largely be a process of physical expansion. Cities like Paris, or
even small towns such as Florence or Rome achieve city status
by a change of mental attitude and physical form. Each time a
small town becomes a city of world import it achieves the im-
possible.
Will Stockholm patch up its small town past, in a process of
widening existing streets and building larger buildings in a series
of ‘improvements’ of the kind which has proved so fruitless in
London or in many bombed German towns, or will it achieve the
mutation to citv status in its centre and its outer parts? Has it a
vision and a dream or only a technical programme which can be
embellished by certain individual buildings?

11
people who are poor and being poor in the USA means often that
you are black. It is a universal law that the weakest part of existence,
if ignored in evolution, can grow to revolutionary force. At the
moment the coloured part of the population is economically and
politically the weakest part and | think that the towns of America
can only be improved if we concentrate on methods of change for
these parts. Only this can avoid war-revolution.
The evolution of planning and architecture in Europe since 1910
was part of evolution of living conditions in workmen’s quarters.
Housing for the great number was tried by Berlage, Tony Garnier,
Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, Rietveld, Wright (Broadacre City, Suntop
houses near Philadelphia 1939). At the end they had to give up
and make houses for rich clients who spiritually were ahead of the
institutional housing diplomats.
At the moment it seems to me that the evolution of USA-
architecture becomes too much a kind of free-lance-action being
non-engaged in the real problems and making great-statement-
buildings at university campuses or along Park Avenue-like
streets, ignoring the hottest part of the problem which is housing
for those who really need help.
How is it that almost no School of Architecture is a centre of help
for those who need it? The education of many planning-archi- 8 and 9 Urbino College,
de Carlo. It is at the collective
tectural students becomes more abstracted from the real problem. level that we perhaps achieve
the most success in buildings
Our reality is that we have to produce in the next fifty years more
cubic-meter-built-volumes than were produced by the whole
civilization in the past 1950 years?!!

And we have to do it for a type of man who can be characterized as

the...changing man...
Changing from living in African and Asian jungles and
deserts into inhabitants of towns
from man working a whole day in workshops—
and plants—into
man working in a pushbutton-process
some hours a day and for the rest having What we are after is a new
free-time. as yet unknown configurative
discipline. It's hard to tell
It is the changing-man (the biggest client and consumer of all anybody about it because
times) who is trying to find ‘ownness’ by using food—clothes— nobody in the twentieth
century has made it his. The
transport—communication—space—sound—light. discipline is still not ours—
If we go on trying to produce for him types of houses multiplied the art of humanizing vast
number hasn't advanced
a million times we never will produce enough nor make just the beyond the first vague
contrast of what we pretend to be. We know we cannot do this by preliminaries. We know
nothing of vast multiplicity—
using actual methods. we cannot come fo grips
with it—not as architects,
Finding built form for changing-man becomes a religious value. planners or anybody else.
And there's the challenge.
Man’s need of identification-in-space through built-environment No discipline available to us
corresponding to ‘ownness’ has more to do with the kind of space now can solve the social and
he uses than with the amount of space he owns. (And | think this form problems which vast
number poses. We have lost
is true for all scales, from house to region.) The relationship of touch with what | call
space-quality to life-quality is under-developed. harmony in motion, or the
aesthetics of number.
Rotterdam, May 1967. J.B. Perth, Australia, 1966, van Eyck

12
 For the town with a dream all is possible. If the dream is lacking
today’s problems make a vision of the future impossible and a
city is left ‘improving’ the ‘backyards’ which it knows. London
missed its chances once in the seventeenth century when its city
burnt and Christopher Wren was commissioned to do buildings,
not city, and again after the Second World War. Will Stockholm
seize its chance when by its own planned activities it demolishes
the major part of its most central city?

1. We have offered Stockholm a structure for its most central

part not precisely designed buildings nor precisely defined
spaces.
2. The precisely defined buildings and spaces will be formed by
clients and their architects at each point where a defined pro-
gramme and finance create a dynamic moment in city building.
8. This process will happen in the near future as this part of
Stockholm becomes progressively demolished and rebuilt. It will
also happen in the future as the new buildings become obsolete
and a future generation rebuilds. The built form will vary but the
structure will remain and we can but hope that at each time the
best clients and architects create the form.
4. We offer a flexible structure and do not require detailed
design decisions for each part until development is envisaged.
The disadvantage is that flexibility means that policies must in
part be conceptual and not stated in concrete terms more easily
understood by the public (or even by architectural or art critics).
Stockholm, 1967. Erskine

The problem of having to pay for the preservation of the historic

TSO ATED COLLECTIVASM

centre with the prolongation of backward social conditions is
particularly felt by the local authorities. The tendency towards a
progressive destruction of the formal values of the ‘Centro
Storico’ with a consequent deterioration in the quality of the
whole urban pattern has a precise parallel in what is happening in
that other preserve of formal values, thatis, the countryside around
the town.
The weak mechanism of local politics, incapacitated by its lack
of instrumental power, is all the less in a position to oppose this
destruction in the name of principles which are reckoned to be
outside the understanding of public opinion.
This problem is an urgent and pressing one for historic cities;
more urgent and pressing where factors are more varied and
complex and where mistakes represent irreparable loss to
civilization and mankind.
‘Urbino’, de Carlo

In Paris existing transport-systems are: Underground (Metro),

railways (SNCF), bus routes in the city and out to the country.
All these public transport-systems exist. Sometimes some of
these systems meet each other at one point (traffic interchange).
These mechanical systems, with their different scales and
speeds, are together one immense, large labyrinth. The different
transport-systems are hooked and linked together with different
nets of human activities. The traffic-nets are the armature of a
metropolitan city.
Cities are the compact bundles of overlaid net-structures, the
sum of many different systems.
In all metropolis there are these unfinished systems. We should
finish and complete raw ends of systems.
St. W.

10 Nets of streets, nets of public

transport-systems, rows of buildings,
all hooked and linked together.
By applying the methods used for
building new towns, namely to
separate all these elements from
one another in rebuilding, would
definitely destroy all urban life in
the city, Paris, St. W.

13
| think that it’s perfectly senseless, faced with the problem ot
habitat for the greatest number, to say, as do most of our dear
colleagues, who are not interested in it, that there is no problem.
It is obvious a problem exists and has several facets. Not long ago,
Among urbanists and urban
in a lecture at the Technische Universitat in Berlin, Jean Prouvé designers today there is a
revealed one of the facets of the problem when he said that if he dangerous tendency arbit-
rarily to extract a part of the
compared our technological possibilities (bicycles, aeroplanes, design process from its com-
missiles, etc.) with the houses that we build, he had to conclude plex wholeness. Concentrating
on the ‘central’ part of the
that we are a bunch of dimwits. No intelligent architect would dare process—the narrow area of
say he is wrong. mainly urban form—they are
led, because of the narrow-
There is another side to the problem: our sociologists, those ness of their vision, to
eminent technocrats, wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of the increasingly eccentric, sub-
jective, and mostly visual
disintegration of family and social life in the housing schemes urban gimmicks. Such gim-
which are supposedly ‘moderate rental’ and other settlements. micks, being arbitrary, do not
even lend themselves to
After all, itisn’t all cake to live in these rabbit hutches; do-gooding fruitful and stimulating dis-
on the cheap is a dirty game. ‘Do-gooding’ is already a little bit cussion. Science-fiction urban
design projects prove nothing
suspect; on the cheap it is disgusting in the literal sense. despite the time and effort
spent on them. The world is
We have pointed out two aspects of the problem of the ‘greatest saturated and fed up with
number’ which seem to us to be essential respecting housing such projects. They provide
nothing more than noise.
proper, or more specifically dwellings. Another aspect of the However the more salutory
problem is in the grouping, the dwellings in relation to the city: aspect of urban design today
is the gap between the
the influence of the city on the dwelling and the dweiling on the majority of the serious pro-
city. This side of the problem touches us less in Markisches jects on the drawing boards
and the realizations. As
Viertel in 1967 because all the important decisions about it were designs all over the world do
already taken in 1963. There is no question of going back on those not obtain the proper feed-
back from the practice, this
decisions; at least before the construction of the fifteen thousand gap widens continuously both
dwellings provided for in the plan. (It is discouraging to note that in quantity and content.
those contributions to the urban fabric which have a certain It is an unhealthy paradox
that in a domain so prag-
value—notably those of Team 10 and others—were widely available matic, in a science and art
before this date.) We can only regret that. Nothing short of a so very much applied as
urban design, theorizing is
revolution will change anything in that direction. We can but what remains to the majority
examine the technical aspects and the quality of the construction of the practitioners. What
would become of applied
on the one hand, and the organization of space on the other. physics if it should be limited
| believe that housing for the greater number, i.e. housing sub- to theories ?—of medicine
without practice ? How many
sidized by public funds, should in no way be considered as a poor major urban design projects
relation of architecture (as too often happens). A large part of the are born every day ?—pub-
lished in architectural
built world (our world, after all) cannot and should not be only the magazines ?—how many of
product of a false calculation on the part of insufficiently informed them reach realization ?
cost-accountants. Naturally, we can’t close our eyes to figures What is the relation between
philosophy, the spirit of the
(but we can’t forget that mathematical figures are only the result of overwhelming majority of
mathematical operations, statistics, and are not determinants). the projects and the occa-
sionally realized urban
Since these buildings are financed with public money, everybody's units ? Aren't they often
representing complete
money, | think that we (everybody) are entitled to insist on better extremes ?
quality. If we consider that it is an investment of our own wealth, Can one obtain usefui feed-
that we transform our money (the product of our work) into real back for an intransigently
forward-looking project from
estate, without other counterpart, we should make sure that these a conservative or even
buildings are the best possible. The buildings, the dwellings, are backward-looking realization ?
all we have left at the end. If the buildings are bad, the dwellings How long can one discuss
without acting ?
out of date and inadaptable, we can say that we have been bilked, Harvard 1967, Soltan

14
11 Who actually does NOT
believe in it? diagram, Bakema

12 Ghana, housing, Pologni.

It is perhaps in the new
countries that architects
most significantly fail; as if
our discipline was too
cumbersome to touch their OMe 2 4 He yt dade
needs errr with Aimney b water bape

| think there is a recurrent

thought-mistake incorporated
whenever people simply
extend what happens (rightly
happens) in the world of small
things—along a straight line—
into that of larger
(quantitatively larger) things.
Take plug-inism; as an ism
it's worthless. | mean
‘plug-in’ without plugophiles
is all right because it is a
valid concept as long as it is
not extended into an
absolute abstract. Do-it-
yourself in a none do-it-
yourself society is a notion
which might make from a to j.
But it is simply foolish to

Cy
extend it beyondj to z (which
is a dream) to an imaginary
situation, i.e. when do-it-
yourself deals with everything quality, Fro Ubeatin gartiming,
from e to z. Mmanufatturng ,farring er.

We're not going to /et unpoetic

utopists (what a paradox)
browbeat our realism which
has as much utopianism in it
as society can absorb. We
cannot do more than we can
See
without doing less. Others —~<
wit Aeurexmge fryslem (We +phower)
be4 Pay VOSSSSOAS
may one day do more, but POR,
ee
the pseudo-utopian EN

browbeaters do /ess, usually

very much less.
ES
2)
Rots
a¢ Prnte,
1966, van Eyck

15
and our money thrown out of bureaucratic windows; we are left
holding a very poor bag, valueless either for renting or for re-
selling. Market value zero for second-hand flop-houses; what can
we do with these awful pads?
Figures: there is need, throughout Europe and throughout the
world, for lodgings—hundreds of thousands, millions even, just to
fill present needs, without counting the natural increase in the
number of people to be housed. It is recognized that a man, in the
beginning of his productive life, almost never has enough money
(excepting, of course, heirs) to buy himself the dwelling he needs
immediately. We have therefore invented some sort of contract
between him and us, his brothers, to advance him his dwelling, to
give him credit for it. This operation has become normal. To undo
this contract is always possible, but to do that we have to be ready
to face all the consequences. We do not know what they could all
be, but we can imagine several of them—an upset of the whole
social structure, with an ensuing drop in production, a return to the
good—for some—old days of before the revolution, and after a
while, the Revolution, but this time on another scale and with
another violence. It is undoubtedly better to respect the contract,
to make the advance of the indispensable dwelling, even to try to
make a larger contract, to go beyond the state of make-do and
to take a more positive view. Any action, including inaction, calls 13 Architectural quality of the buildings of Urbino,
de Carlo. Black/low; dots/high; open dots/very high;
forth a reaction. outlined white/outstanding ;(white/not classified)

Let us then make a broader contract. | would not say that every man
14 Level of efficiency and health standard cf.
has the right to his own dwelling and that society should give him residential buildings of Urbino, de Carlo. Black/bad;
dark grey/poor; light grey/good; open dots/excellent;
the credit to obtain it at the time when he needs it most. | would (outlined/public buildings)
say, however, that society needs the fact of this man being well
housed, where and when it is necessary. We are not ‘do-gooders’.
We realize that the society which we have fallen heir to is some-
what rickety and we can only keep it from breaking up at the price
of some effort to see clearly into its mechanisms. But man is nota
toothed wheel, needing a crank case and regular greasing. This
fact is manifest—if anything | said holds the smallest atom of
truth, if all of this is nothing else but asininities, it is in the interest
of everybody that every man has a decent dwelling.
| think that we all agree on this point. Unfortunately, we haven’t
been able to explain clearly to our agents—those devoted bureau-
crats who execute our contract with ourselves for us—what the
rules of the game are. So, first out of it, then more and more with it,
they invented the rules. They latched on, as anybody would, to the
first plank to float past. Shipwrecked and uncompassed in a sea of
numbers (i.e. population) they fell upon figures, which provide a
nearly absolute haven. And the statistical man will have, by con-
tract, a right to his own statistical house. Count them! Right! Next
please! (Not even ‘Thank you’.) But it is not and never will be too
late to tell them, to rectify the omission. We only have to realize it
and re-establish the priorities. To have a society we have to have
men living in the society. For this, given a certainty of eating

16
 He OOOSY, _SKS
Sy A Soe

15 University, Zurich, 1967,

Candilis. The successful
formal organization of
building complexes (com-
parable in scale to
neighbourhoods of houses)
might have much, if not all,
to do with their greater
proportion to the norm of
shared facilities and services
and access routes in relation
to units served. It is in new
universities such as Zurich
that we see this demonstrated

17
 The problem is not how to
regularly, we must have individual dwellings tor men. If the life of build houses for individual
a man can unfold (who folded it?) in a framework adapted to him, people or for smaller groups.
The constant increase of
the life of the society can but be enriched. population and their con-
But we haven't finished with the figures. Figures are, after all, not centration in certain areas
raise problems of how to
astronomical but human—i.e. very large. Enough to make an find living conditions for the
industry. Enough to operate the biggest factory. And we don't mass.
There are three real factors
seem to be interested at all. Our greatest industry is war. After- which demand buildings in
wards, cars. It is true that both of them tend to diminish the de- great volumes—'big-forms’—
in a highly developed industrial
mand for dwellings, but to such desperately little extent! (If it society. The enormous num-
weren’t for the bomb we would be tempted to shoot ourselves.) ber of dwellings: eight million
units were built in West
When we think of the lovely industry we could create! First the Germany after the war.
eating industry. What could be finer than to feed the world? At the The unfavourable relation
same time (it would be idiotic to assign priorities here) to house between effort and a house
for oneself. (Only five months
ourselves more than decently. To discover the pure joy of being a workman has to work for
alive. (Joie de vivre.) | say discover (perhaps | should say uncover) a VW, eight years for an
apartment of 90 sq.m.)
the joy of living, because it is buried beneath such dirt, a sticky, The scarcity of land (44
slimy layer of completely uninteresting petty private interests, that million people live on 80
sq.km. in Paris, that means
you have to dig deep into, but it is worth the sweat. 20 sq.m/person).
What are we waiting for? To read the news about a new armed Quantities produce new
qualities of form.
attack with even more esoteric weapons, news which comes to us
The contraform of the
through the air captured by our marvellous transistorized instru- ‘big-form’ is parasite-
ments, Somewhere deep in our more and more savaged dwellings? architecture.
Our weapons become more sophisticated; our houses more and The ‘big-form’ creates the
frame, the order and the
more brutish. Is that the balance sheet of the richest civilization planned space for an un-
since time began? Why wait? It is time to think, not of the determinable, unplannable,
spontaneous process: for
solutions, but of the problems. We can’t care less about solutions. parasitic architecture. Without
Moreover, there aren't any. To think about problems, which are for this component every planning
is rigid and lifeless.
humanity human problems, is already something.
The gothic cathedrals with
For architects, a little stunned by the mass of people, there are two small shops in the outside
arches, the town of Arles,
paths: either to think about solutions or to think about problems. built into a Roman amphi-
The first is a dead end, we know it, we can see the proofs all around theatre, the S-bahn in Berlin,
with different shops and
us. It is looking backwards, because if we say, ‘solutions’ we say, workshops in the arches of
‘knowledge’, and what we know is already old hat. To think ‘pro- the construction, are examples
for big-forms as an element
blems’ means to look to the future. Architecture is primarily in which a temporary and
intelligence and wit. We have to think otherwise, to imagine ‘une spontaneous building happens.
This process can change
architecture autre’ (and other politics); as we began to do together, every time without changing
you and Peter, Jaap, Aldo, Georges, Giancarlo, Jerzy, Ralph and the structure.
Berlin 1967, O. M. Ungers
Oskar, José Antonio, and, with ali the best will in the world,
We might say one of our
| believe that we owe it to ourselves to go a good bit further along primary aims in trying to find
this road together. adequate solutions for /arger
Letter to A.S.: Markisches Viertel, Berlin, 1967. Shad Woods groups of houses is to make
a haven within which the
individual dwelling rests
secure and peaceful. Within
this haven the individual
should be able to establish
private identity, find meaning
for the small acts ofhis or
her daily life, and ultimately
some Satisfaction through a
sense of well-being, in being
here at all.
Contribution to ‘Socialist Com-
mentary.’ A.S.

18
We know that living under Look, two kinds of order—a very uninteresting kind—just a sort
trees is quite different from of drawing board geometry translated into concrete, upright
living with the horizon and white stripes, a thousand of those would bea wicked kind of order,
we know that living against but a very endearing kind of order is that which you discover in
the trees looking at the bird's each of these little human occupancies. You will find real order
nest is the inbetween moment. there only in Hong Kong—such a capacity to accommodate all
This knowledge should have activities in a single hard cubicle 9ft by 9ft—and everything in the
a special colour in the sheets right place. And children creeping from under the table with their
of planning administration. blouses snow white. This is a magnificent example of how human
beings transcend the horrors which architecture provides. This |
We know that repeating the call order—colourful, human order. That woman is probably dead
same types of houses does tired trying to maintain order in that silly geometry, yesterday,
away with a most human today and tomorrow. Perth, 1966, van Eyck
aspect of life by denying the
capacity to compare things
which are here and there,
near or far; ignoring the
capacity of making choice is
promoting a monotypeman.
This knowledge also should
have a special colour in the
sheets of administration.
We know too that if we don’t
make towns in a way that
there can be a fair com-
petition for using public and
private means of transport
we never can build enough
capacity for use of private
means of transport.
This is also a colour in the
administration sheet.
Philadelphia, March 7th, 1967. J.B.

The dilemma of the architect

planner is that, if he en-
deavours by sketch forms to
give an understandable
indication of the environ-
mental potential of the
structure, these are im-
mediately given the dignity of
a well-studied building pro-
tect, and subjected to a
detailed criticism on this
basis, whilst if he abstains he
communicates no vision to
those for whom, quite rightly,
the vision is of great import.
Is it possible that new com-
munication techniques such
as film could present change
as the most permanent factor
in city building ?
Stockholm, 1967, Erskine

Urbino:
Survey of the district capital
Survey of the types of green
areas
Types of green zones:
black/gardens
dark grey/orchards
light grey/fully grown trees

19
Team 10 Primer
There was a time not so long ago when the minds of men moved
along a deterministic groove; let’s call it a Euclidian groove. It
coloured their behaviour and vision, what they made and did and
what they felt. Then—it had to happen sooner or later—some very
keen men, with delicate antenne—painters, poets, philasophers
and scientists most of them—jumped out of this groove and rubbed
the deterministic patina off the surface of reality. They saw wonder-
ful things and did not fail to tell us about them. Our unbounded
gratitude is due to them: to Picasso, Klee, Mondrian and Brancusi;
to Joyce, Le Corbusier, Schonberg, Bergson and Einstein; to the
whole wonderful gang. They set the great top spinning again and
expanded the universe—the outside and the inside universe. It was
a wonderful riot—the cage was again opened. But society still
moves along in the old groove, in bad air, making only sly use
of what these men discovered; worse still, applying on a purely
technological, mechanical, and decorative level, not the essence
but what can be gleaned from it in order to give pretence of
moving more effectively. Moving securely and lucratively along the
old circumscribed groove. We know this, it can’t be helped. But do
we know that architecture has been doing the same for the last
thirty years or so? No need to mention the few marvellous excep-
tions. A damnable truth this. When are architects going to stop
fondling technology for its own sake—stop stumbling after pro-
gress? When are they really going to join the riot and stop gnawing
at the edges of a great idea? Surely we cannot permit them to con-
tinue selling the diluted essence of what others spent a lifetime
finding. They have betrayed society in betraying the essence of
contemporary thought. Nobody can really live in what they concoct,
although they may think so.
Now what is wonderful about this non-Euclidian idea—this other
vision—is that it is contemporary; contemporary to all our diffi-
culties, social and political, economic and spiritual. What is tragic
i s that we have failed to see that it alone can solve them.
Each period requires a constituent language—an instrument with
which to tackle the human problems posed by the period, as well
as those which, from period to period, remain the same, i.e. those
posed by man—by all of us as primordial beings. The time has
come to gather the old into the new; to rediscover the archaic
qualities of human nature, | mean the timeless ones.
To discover anew implies discovering something new. Translate
this into architecture and you'll get new architecture—real con-
temporary architecture. Architectureimplies a constant rediscovery
of constant human qualities translated into space. Man is always
and everywhere essentially the same. He has the same mental
equipment though he uses it differently according to his cultural or
social background, according to the particular life pattern of which

20
When | am one month in
Philadelphia Pennsylvania
University, and | walk past
an exit-entrance of Drexel
Institute of Technology and
a man is leaving the buildings
with books under his left
arm, an umbrella under the
other, and having kind of
baseball shoes on his feet and
for the rest a white shirt
and gentleman black-tie-like
pants: | don’t know if he is
studying baseball, rain, or
technics from Drexel books
and then | walk on and the
same street is ending in a
dark space with trucks under
a big gray stone granite post
office but before coming
under it it is still a street and
at one side a man clothed in
a fine gentleman suit is
swinging a stick to catch a
piece of rubberbal! which is
thrown to him from the other
side by a gentleman-clothed
man and /| understand that
they are playing baseball or
hockey in an administrative-
office-like surrounding and
! know that you can study
technics in baseball-fitting
shoes-shirt, can have an
umbrella under the arm and
not a basebal/ or hockey stick
and that you can be a post
office administrator playing
in lunchtime that you are
hockey or baseball man and
that we al/ are stil! happily
mixed up in spite of so called
separation by specialization.
Philadelphia, April 7th, 1967. J.B.

It's getting cold again over

here—and always when it 17 Children’s home, van Eyck
does / start thinking about
how to warm up architecture,
how to make it lodge round us.
After all, people buy clothes
and shoes the right size and
know when the fit feels good!
It's time we invented the built
thing that fits them—us.
Van Eyck, 1959

21
he happens to be a part. Modern architects have been harping
continually on what is different in our time to such an extent
that even they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is
always essentially the same. This grave mistake was not made by
the poets, painters and sculptors. On the contrary, they never
narrowed down experience. They enlarged and intensified it; tore
down not merely the form-barriers as did the architects, but the
emotional ones as well. In fact the language they evolved coincides
with the emotional revolution they brought about.
The language architects evolved, however, and this after the
pioneering period was over, coincides only with itself and is,
therefore, essentially sterile and academic—literally abstract. It’s
all so obvious: we must evolve a richer tool—a more effective way of
approach—to solve the environmental problems our period poses
today. These problems wiil not remain the same, but they concern
the same man, and that is our cue. We can meet ourselves every-
where in all places and ages—doing the same things in a different
way, feeling the same differently, reacting differently to the same.
Otterlo Meeting. Van Eyck

We have no time to waste.

Better supply the right fruits
a little unripe than supply none
at all or the wrong sort over-
ripe.
Hurry, switch on the stars
before the fuses go!
Van Eyck, 1959

22
 Viollet-le-Duc describes how the change in social patterns gave a
change in the structure of medizeval churches and town halls.
After the medizval period in 1794 there opened a gap between
technique and art by the foundation of ‘Ecole Polytechnique’ in
Paris, where technique was concentrated, while art concentrated
in the ‘Ecole des Beaux Arts’.
In 1829 in Holland books containing illustrations about old styles
were circulated for use as facades of bath-houses, public works,
plants and railway stations. The nineteenth century accentuated
the balance between ‘to work’ and ‘to possess’.
Sullivan, Morris, Van de Velde, Gropius, were the first to attempt
to abandon the gap between technique and art, but they could
not make a bridge between technique, art and society-pattern; the
latter pattern, nowadays, is made principally by the anonymous
client. The idea of Gropius was ‘Bauhaus’ in which under one
SHEA eT and art. The Bauhaus introduced the workshop
idea.

The idea of Taut-Scharoun a.o. was the ‘Bauhof’, a courtyard

surrounded by technique—art and government.
Tony Garnier and Italian Futurists brought about the first approach
concerning buildings and cities based on an acceptance of
modern means of industrialization. Apollinaire and Corbusier
developed from it the Machine Age images stated in the Esprit
Nouveau Movement. Holland always became part of these move-
ments by the activities of Berlage and Van Doesburg.

The CIAM-movement became a kind of platform on which

architects met to discuss their ideas about architecture and
planning.
In 1947 there was a new attempt by young architects in CIAM to
abandon the gap between thinking and feeling.
They stated:
‘... we have to work for the creation of a physical environment
18 Respecting both the that will satisfy man’s emotional and material needs and stimu-
permanent small-scale of
table: bed: desk, and the
late his spiritual growth....’
ever-increasing scale of Bakema, 1959
administration and traffic:
harmonizing the relationship
between these two aspects of
town, Tel Aviv, Bakema
19 Below and 20 overleaf:
picture story, Bakema

23
 20
Role of the architect

The role of architectural expression and of town-planning in

contemporary society is the same as that in societies of the past.
Architecture and town planning are simply the spatial expression
of human conduct.
Thus we find in human conduct many constants which do not
change; man is happy, he is sad, he makes love, he dies. But there
is one aspect which is evolving rapidly. It is the relation hetween
man and total universal space.
In past societies the relation between man and total space was
shaped by: religion (medizval age)—to have faith; political
economy (nineteenth century)—to possess; administration
(twentieth century)—to manage.
New society will provide man with opportunities so that he will be
able to maintain an individual relation to total life: the right to havea
personal opinion about life. So we should create for men, by
technical means, physical, psychological and esthetic conditions,
so that he may have the possibility to define in space his personal
opinion about life.
Constructed volume is a tremendous instrument in attainment of
this goal vo ;
First, man creates environment and environment, in its turn, 150 A...
ae
Line Co rmvnd <a mal / : Saeek
influences man. Environment is created by simple means: walls and Cc
openings in the walls. It is of small significance which materials
the walls are made of. But constructions of man will bring about
more and more variations in walls and in openings of walls. The
vocabulary has enlarged and it is becoming more and more rich.
During 2000 years man was living under trees, immediately above
ground. Only in the last 500 years has he been able to live above
trees in contact with the horizon.
So now the whole alphabet has to be used. We have to harmonize
life on the ground and life which is in touch with the horizon. Yio deta dl tha
SiG \ oO Reet ck Send

We shall be very rich as the constructions will multiply our possi- ie

~*~ aei es SS Sohne
a

bilities to live in a given space and establish a personal relation to

this total space: they will allow the development of an esthetic or
of a style based on the right of everyone to have a personal opinion
of life, on the presumption that the material conditions, in order to
achieve this spiritual freedom, have been granted to everybody:
this is real democracy. Let us return to the past. If one sees old
towns like Amsterdam or Paris, one sees the built volume still
there; houses of those who produced goods. One does not see the
constructed volume of the anonymous population because very
often this population was not entitied to own a permanent home. &
They lived in transitory, improvised dwellings outside fortifications we se
or under the roof of those who had a leading role in society. The \ JORevwwe,

24
 ee

LAA

Psd
ut

- eos
ze
rine

> he raiimafphacs 4kod,

me

25
 slum of the nineteenth century was the first manifestation of a
population which escaped anonymity and came nearer to the sun,
and which intended to make recognized its own right to define
itself in relation to total space.

Considering man’s relationship

to the tree

21 Diagram,A.M.S.

22 Diagram, Bakema

23 ‘Walls and openings in the

walls’, diagram, Bakema

Above 6th floor it can be accepted that

old forms of contact with the ground
are no longer valid.

Below 6th floor, contact with the ground

can be more appropriately created in
other arrangements of dwellings, there-
fore these floors are perhaps best used
for something else.

26
‘Open up that window and let the Yes, we must stop splitting the making of a habitat into two
foul air out’ Jelly Roll Morton
disciplines—architecture and urbanism. Why? That's a long
Architecture—planning in story. As | have already said, a house must be like a small city if
general—breathes with great it’s to be a real house—a city like a large house if it’s to be a real
difficulty today. The breathing city. In fact, what is large without being small has no more real
image epitomizes my concep- size than what is small without being large. If there’s no real size
tion of twinphenomena—we there will be no human size. If a thing is just small or just large
cannot breathe one way—either we can't cope with it. The same counts for many and few. Urban-
in or out. | am concerned with ism hasn’t succeeded in reconciling them yet: large and small,
twinphenomena, with unity many and few; large and few, small and many—large and many,
and diversity, part and whole, small and few. Think about that and you’ll know why the thought
small and large, many and few, process in planning can’t be divided on the basis of part-whole,
simplicity and complexity, small-large, few-many, i.e. into architecture and planning.
change and constancy, order Otterlo Meeting, Van Eyck
and chaos, individual and
collective ; with why they too
are ignobly halved and the
halves hollowed out ; why they
are withheld from opening the
windows of the mind! As soon
as they materialize into house | believe that architects must learn to become specialists in
or city their emptiness materi- space. Educational methods should aim to ensure that architects
alizes into cruelty, for in such will respond to any situation with precise spatial ideas.
places everything is always Symposium on Education, 1959. J.V.
too large and too small, too
few and too many, too far and
too near, too much and too
little the same, too much and
too little different. There is no
question of right-size (by right-
size | mean the right effect of ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ cannot be the stimulating idea for the postwar
size) and hence no question situation because of its concentration on ‘things which can be
of human scale. analysed’.
Just the things which cannot be touched by words, analyses and
reports have to be touched by architecture. The relationship man
to man is too narrow, it must be man-+ nature + idea about
What has right-size is at the nature. Shall we travel, not only to the moon, but shall we travel
same time both large and in total universal space?
small, few and many, near and To make man familiar with space ‘endlessness’, will become
far, simple and complex, open the main function of the art of making space (architecture).
and closed ; will furthermore Discussion with architect Kloos about ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ 8 and
always be both part and whole Opbouw, 1942. Bakema
and embrace both unity and
diversity. No, as conflicting
polarities or false alternatives
these abstract antonyms all
carry the same evil; loss of
identity and its attribute,
monotony. A world is growing in which there will be the need to recognize
more that the moment ‘now’ is resulting from what was yesterday
and what will be tomorrow.* The struggle for earning every day
Right-size will flower as soon your bread and wine is no longer decisive for a man in modern
as the mild gears of recipro- society, but it will be more man’s struggle to become aware of
city start working—in the what js life; which will make the contents of man’s life.
climate of relativity ; in the Architecture will be a function in this process.
landscape of all twinpheno- (Introduction at a meeting at Doorn of students of the Delft Tech-
mena.
nical University and the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture.) In
Van Eyck, 1962 the middle of World War II 8 and Opbouw, 1942. Bakema

* Tomorrow is shut up in
today and yesterday. This
instant is the starting point.
To know this instant is a
proof of life. Surroundings
contact senses. Tomorrow is
released when experiences of
instants past contact this
instant, here, now. Tomor-
row and the day after that,
and that, and that, are antici-
pations of further contact.
Ue biig ee IE

27
| believe that if so many architects are interested nowadays in the
habitat of the Indians (the Pueblos) or in that of the negroes in
Africa, it is because here one may still recognize the spatial ex-
pression of the whole population. We should not forget, neverthe-
less, that this population is leading a fierce battle in order to be
equipped with modern techniques which were developed in the eR ae
different countries of Europe, of America and Russia. Here is the
drama. Here in our society we are attempting to establish for the
anonymous client a spatial expression of his way of living. In
primitive societies this way of living still exists, but it lacks pre-
cisely those techniques which help to get rid of fear and to attain
total life; we should not forget that those primitive societies are
frequently based on the exploitation of this fear. It is extraordinary
to think that in the very moment that man and races are confronted
with each other every day, there is taking place a confrontation
between on the one hand primitive societies with integrated habitat,
whose members claim a right to be provided with modern tech- 24 The plan only gives a
planning direction which has
niques, and on the other hand our society, disintegrated by these to transform experiences of.
movement, change, growth
very techniques, that seeks new disciplines of integration. For this and permanency into
three-dimensional forms, for
reason we need each other whether we may be white, yellow, black. identifying elements which can
be realized according to future
We have to mobilize ourselves simply as architects and as archi- demands. This sketch is a
diagram of the free growth
tect-planners able to co-ordinate and to integrate. It is only the principle involved.
Tel Aviv, Bakema
architect who may give man the possibility to express his right to
live a personal way of life, through constructed volume.
The elements required, therefore, are simple: walls, roofs, doors,
25 Diagram, Bakema
staircases, lifts, materials and technical equipment and the style
is the relation between these things.
It is possible to use elements negatively or positively in an active
or passive way. This is a problem directly
related to the general problem
By the combination of these elements one may stimulate the rela- of ‘structure of society’.
tion of man with light, horizon, trees and spaces. Each man has the A civic centre is part of
human settlement. The name
right to be in contact with that phenomenon called total life and it includes the word ‘civic’
is through constructed volume that it may be attained. Here lies which makes one thing about
man as a member of a society,
the function of architecture and of town-planning for the develop- and the word ‘centre’ which
ment of the new society. makes one think about the
central part of anything.
Sometimes we use the word
‘core’ instead of ‘centre’. /t
indicates a place which is the
heart of a matter.

It is also useful to realize that

society means enduring co-
operation of a group to main-
tain itself. We are occupied
with an essential element that
functions in the enduring co-
operation of a group to main-
tain itself.

To make a ‘civic’ centre we

have to touch intellectually and
emotionally the forces of this
enduring co-operation called
‘society’ in order to find out
where these forces are con-
centrating.
5 Diagram, Bakema. 196!
Today, when one is searching desperately for some sense of
continuity and hoping for development and not destruction, some
knowledge of our position in time, as well as in space, is essential.
Therefore | consider that the learning of history in an academic or
systematic way is necessary. It probably seemed unimportant
twenty-five years ago, in so far as the polemical desire of archi-
tects was to break free from the past; architectural history had
become an impediment for those who were seeking the new
architecture and a sanctuary for those who were not.
However, today, the boundaries which separate our direct
experience from past knowledge and future possibility are in-
distinct. For example we feel a part of the modern movement,
yet we can criticize it and see it as a distinct historical force
affecting the ways in which we build.
It is necessary to ask what sort of history should be learnt. There
can be no objective history, for we know that, even in scientific
observation, the dynamic connection between the observer and
the thing observed is more significant to us than the appearance
of the thing observed. Any interpretation of historical material is
affected not only by our position in time now, but also by the fact
that we are architects. For the social historian the constitutional
forms of government may be his primary material, deduced from
a mass of secondary material, which may well include buildings
and records of their construction. For the art historian a group of
pictures, of buildings, or of sculpture may be primary material,
but for the architect the primary material is space (‘L’espace
indécible’ of Le Corbusier) and this is because an architect's
banal, practical and every-day purpose is to make spaces; spaces
which will be comprehensible to the people who use them now
and will use them for some time to come.
This summarizes for me the present difficulty in teaching history
to architects. Sometimes, in conversation amongst historians
and architects, a building or group of buildings is discussed in
terms of space organization. The significance that is attached
to these spaces is examined. For example, Smithson on Greek
space, Banham on Antonio Sant’Elia, Colin Rowe and John
White on perspective; or a generation earlier, Wittkower on the
Centralized Church, Panowsky on the connection between the
logic of scholasticism and the construction of Gothic space. |
suggest that such studies provide* the primary material around
which secondary material (the primary material of other his-
torians) may be woven.
Lectures and seminars centred around such spatial experiences
might provide the first islands in a history of space. Little by little
these might connect up with one another so that architects could
experience the continuity of time and space, and should therefore
be able to design with increased certainty and precision.
AJ., April 23rd, 1959. J.V.

7 Diagram, Bakema
* Martiensen teaching in
South Africa did this. See, for
example, ‘Space Construc-
tion in Greek Architecture’,
South African Architectural
Record, May 1942

29
 Having found this concentra-
One may see in Nimes the great difference between an active anda tion of forces, we can begin to
passive architecture. For instance on the same site, given elements discipline (channe/) them
and standards are used passively by architects who are not inter- spatially by means of con-
structed form. Working in this
ested, whereas the same elements and standards are actively used way we do planning by archi-
tecture and architecture by
in buildings designed by the team Candilis-Woods. But what a planning.
difference! The individual flats are here disposed like the leaves of To channel the forces of
society by means of construc-
a tree: the trunk (the staircase) enveloped by the leaves (the flats). ted forms towards a focus
The individual and the collective, like entities in relation to each called a civic centre makes the
structure of life in ahuman
other, explain the phenomenon of the total life. settlement understandable.
Our task is to introduce into social life the play of volumes in space But as this focus is part of a
whole structure, it is clear that
as a function. The new society will be that one which will enable
it has to be introduced step by
the individual to express his personal opinion about total life. It step by this structure and
is our task to transform the fear of total space to a respect and simultaneously the focus must
introduce the several steps
confidence in this space. These are the oldest and at the same making the whole structure.
time the most recent functions of architecture and town-planning. We could say a civic centre or
core is a kind of 3-dimensional
Means are simple: walls, pilotis, windows, staircases, lifts, loggias, communication by con-
technical equipment, and the plan as a frame of a new freedom. structed form about what
happens in the whole human
This forms the spirit to which one can subordinate specialists, settlement (town). We have to
technicians. It is with such a spirit that the architect may co- see towns built in the past in
order to know how the focus
ordinate and integrate. We have to start the battle in order that of the town structure can
architecture may be recognized as an essential function in society. make the total structure clear,
while in many modern towns
Creation or routine. Way of living or esthetics. Freedom or you need days or weeks to
dictatorship. Simultaneity or hierarchy. Integration or chaos. understand where you are.
Our interest in old towns is not
Town-planning or administration. Structure or decoration. Func- only interest in historical
tion of architecture or functionalism. Bakema, ‘Carré Bleu’, 1961 forms, but | think that it is also
the fact that these constructed
forms are still communicating
to us in a clear way about the
structure of life in those days.
We shall have to make habitable places of our sick cities before it And | think it is not unreason-
is too late. We know this and we forget this, as we choose, whilst able that we should be able to
communicate about life in our
the borderline of the uninhabitable lies just ahead. We are cer-
day in a clear way by 3-
tainly catching up with it at an alarming pace; for ours is a tiny, dimensional expression.
flat, open and appallingly crowded country. We must, therefore, To maintain ourselves by
means of enduring cooperation
act quickly and dispel at least the excessive stupidity for which we need understandable clear
there is really no room. spatial structures for our
settlements just as we need
In the meantime architects continue to occupy themselves with oxygen for our respiration, no
matters which, although not foreign to our time, are often clearly matter whether it is a house,
workshop, village, town,
foreign to the constructive task they should set themselves which metropolis or whole region.
is simply this: to provide the urban ‘interiors’ society needs; the For everyone using the city
structure the heart of the
built counterform of its dwindling identity. matter has to be clear.
To those architects who are still inclined to believe that all this has Architectural and urbanistic
forms can be a kind of 3-
nothing to do with ‘the story of another idea’ | can only say: go and dimensional language explain-
take another walk in one of the new towns—as an outsider, guiltily ing to man what life is. This is
proved by history.
implicated. It seems to me that any idea concerning the architect's We have to take care of the
task which may be lodged in their heads will soon make way for fact that this function of
architecture and civic expres-
another. And then the ‘story’ begins—but not until then. sion is often ignored in
It seems to me, furthermore, that the making of a habitable place modern buildings and towns
and we cannot work together
for all citizens—and this implies another sort of place—is also a at a civic centre plan for St
task for another sort of architect. In order to accomplish the Louis if we don't find a working
method that can re-establish
indispensable union of architecture and urbanism within a single this almost forgotten function.
discipline, a severe revaluation of what both really stand for is a Problem: Civic Centre for Metropolis
St Louis. Bakema

30
 As far as architecture is concerned, the question of appropriate-
ness is a matter for radical organizational thinking; but it is also
a question of language. What are the appropriate organizational
ne of buildings and building groups which respond to today’s
needs?
How is the response to this need to be communicated? If no
forms are discovered and no suitable language is evolved, the
needs are not met and there remain unfulfilled, undefined, long-
ings in society as a whole.
IUA Catalogue, 1961. P.D.S.

There is more to this business Can architects meet society’s plural demand? Can they possibly
of community facilities than substitute the present loss of vernacular and still build a city that
the convenience they offer to really is a city?—a liveable place for a large multitude of people.
the citizen, and their counter- Vernacular was always able to cope with plurality in former days.
action to the wasteful exodus In what way are people to participate in fashioning their own
from the big cities which takes immediate surroundings within a conceived overall framework?
place every weekend. Com- You see, when one says ‘city’ one implies the ‘people’ in it, not
munity facilities are the raw just ‘population’. This is the first problem confronting the archi-
material for the construction tect urbanist today.
of social space.
AD., December 1960. P.D.S. If society has no form—how can architects build the counterform?
Architects have always been concerned with single buildings or
a complex of single buildings.
| believe there is a paradox involved in his task today.
Van Eyck

What you should try to accomplish is built meaning. So, get

close to the meaning and build!
Van Eyck

28 Not putting a building ona

site, but with a building
making a space. Location,
plan, general view diagrams.
P.D.S. 1960

31
 | | \

| |
i
TT
Hoa

AANA
SSS
SS.
SN a

inl
1
tt
itty
I}

29 Le Corbusier’s dream of
preliminary prerequisite. For the sake of the task and its inherent a Radiant City. 1925
limits. Van Eyck at
Pagapdy
#NHL)MAN

By definition there could be no modern architecture before there

was a machine esthetic and this did not come into being in
1851 or even in 1909, but arrived between 1923 and 1927. De Stijl,
essentially a continuation of L’Art Nouveau, has to be fully ab-
sorbed before a real deadpan, un-selfconscious machine esthetic
can be said to have arrived. (Rietveld chair—Mies chair.)
The Germans certainly found a way of making buildings that
responded to the new feeling for the machine—the houses at
Dessau, the Gropius exhibitions, or the Barcelona Pavilion for
example—but somehow it was and is the Villa Savoie that made
the old architecture look really ridiculous. One has only to compare
the buildings by Mies with those by Le Corbusier at the Weissen-
hof Siedlung (1927) to see what | mean: MIES IS GREAT BUT
CORB COMMUNICATES. These arguments do not diminish the
work of German architects, especially that of Mies van der Rohe,
but give a special place to Le Corbusier for somehow breathing
life into us.
On the level of the individual building, | hold that although Berlin
in the ‘twenties generated quantities of heat, only with Le Corbusier
did other people catch fire. The German movement was rational
and severe more than anything else, and in spirit was a continua-

32
30 ‘It is our task te transform Architecture, perhaps to a more tangible extent than any other
the fear of total space toa
respect and confidence in this art, reflects and expresses ideas about space and time. Good
space.’ Diagram, Bakema architecture expresses in microcosm but with precision the
obtaining concepts of the universe. Such expression is neither
idle nor arbitrary, for it is only through cosmology that a sense of
physical and social location in time and space can be com-
municated. This sense of location, however changeful or however
permanent, is essential to the health and life of human com-
munities.
Sign and Symbol. J.V.

Architects and urbanists have become true specialists in the art

of organizing the meagre. Fetch a mirror, architects, and you will
discover again what mirrors are for—and why it is always futile to
transfer the cause of failure.
Van Eyck

31 Bakema, Tel Aviv, near You may ask what are the characteristics of the New Modern
the crossing of the national Architecture. Well, | think that it is pragmatic rather than old
road system
style rational. Its basis is a sort of active socio-plastics.
As to its imagery, the magic having flown from the rectangle it is
much freer in its use of form, more rough and ready, and less
complete and classical. Technologically it accepts industrially
produced components as the natural order of the architect's
vocabulary, not as something special or magical that will do the
architect's work for him.
AD., March, 1958. ‘Europe/USA’, 1957. P.D.S.

= eer Cb) / becaeerrp

Although architecture (planning in general) answers very tangible
functions, ultimately its object differs in no way fundamentally
from that of any other creative activity; i.e. to express through men
and for men (through ‘us’ and for us) the real essence of existence.
The more tangible functions are only relevant in so far as they
adjust man’s environment more accurately to his elementary
hugh opted yw can
inclinations. But this, surely, is no more than a necessary pre-
Lew oped liminary.

33
tion of a previous tradition—the ethic of nineteenth-century
architecture. It was certainly not one which would make a man
leave home and start a new life, which I hold Le Corbusier’s work
could.

Le Corbusier is a great visionary and this word to me has a special

significance, carrying a more religious meaning than words like
idealist or revolutionary. For a visionary can make other people’s
minds take alight almost as a by-product of his personal struggle.
And | hold that without Le Corbusier there would be no modern
architecture as an ideal, although there would be modern buildings.
What was Le Corbusier’s vision?

A humane, poetic, disciplined, machine environment

for a machine
society (probably a society of technicians with a pretty strict
hierarchy).

Now it will be held that the definition of a machine environment as

an aim was the work of the Futurists, but for me their environment
was One dominated by machines. The essence of Futurism was the
display of mechanisms and this is an early nineteenth-century
attitude towards machines.

Le Corbusier’s dream of a Ville Radieuse has the machine firmly

under control, and even although some of his esthetic techniques
may have been carry-over ones, he was never confused about his
all-over objective. His city was to be one of shining towers in a sea
of trees, with the automobile used at the scale at which it is a
moving poetic thing and not a stinking object; an essentially
controlled, quiet environment with the energies of transit and
communication channelled and not randomly and wastefully
displayed.

He saw at once that the skyscrapers were too small.

No other men have succeeded as have Le Corbusier and Mies van

der Rohe in building complete systems. Their concentration is such
that the nature of their systems is implicit even in the fragment.
One has, for example, a perfectly clear notion of the sort of city
and the sort of society envisaged by Mies van der Rohe, even though
he has never said much about it. It is not an exaggeration to say
that the Miesian city is implicit in the Mies chair.

Le Corbusier’s system is of course more familiar because of his

constant reiteration of the part even his smallest objects play in
his general scheme of things. And, what validates both their
systems is that they are conceived in the terms of the technology
of their time and that both men have a capacity for rejection and
reconsideration in the face of changing circumstances.

Le Corbusier Exhibition, February 1959. P.D.S.

34
 Only imagination can detect what is basic and what is not. The
values with which architectureis concerned (should be concerned)
are elementary values—hence basic.
Van Eyck

How can we have—through modern architecture—contact with

the people for whom we build?

We have the confrontation of local population with world-wide

problems by modern means of communication; but lack of time
to integrate this process in our personal life.

We protest against the existing structure of society that makes

some corn-elevators not big enough to stow the over-measure
of food, while there is hunger in other parts of the world.

We have the big halls in which an automatized machine-process

is part of a collective enterprise economy in which each individual
will participate for a short-hours-labour-day.
4
Resulting from this there will be simultaneously a free-time-
private enterprise economy.
(/n the middle of World War I/), 1942. Bakema

a Criticizing the working method developed by the government at

32 Big scale, small scale. some reconstruction centres such as Middelburg and Rhenen:
Ideogram, Bakema
Traditionalistic eesthetical interpretation of Granpré Moliére
theories are becoming barriers against the possibility to make
from the reconstruction of war damage a start for expression of
social structure which could give more responsibility to ‘the
great number’.*

Young architects have to be critical about the social forces of

the post-war period in order to find a real base for structures
housing ‘the great number’. The actual working methodt gives
too little chance for realizing modern architecture as promoted by
the ‘8 and Opbouw’—architects.

The working method also for that reason is anti-democratic,t

as well as ignoring an important cultural aspect of post-war
Holland in the reconstruction work.
(One year after World War //), 1945. Bakema

Our relationship with total life has to be acknowledged as the

basic element in the evolution of our social pattern, the architect
has to abandon his artificial isolation.
‘De Vrije Kunstenaar’, No. 2. Groningen, 1945. Bakema

33 Bakema, Tel Aviv. The First publication in Holland about the relation between architec-
* backbone’ building provides a ture and society, just after the liberation:
natural entrance or ‘ gateway’
for the national road systems
into the city area. The core The artist has to build a ‘morality’ for society; he touches values
corresponds to the old city square hidden in each member of society so that the work of the artist
can stimulate members of societies to become aware of what are
their own ideas about life.

* See also Candilis—ie Plus Real architecture in our day can only be developed by those who
Grand Nombre.
like to construct new social patterns; differentiation in archi-
+ Nature of the brief given tectural form has to be based on real differentiation in the ways
to architects. of life; a street has to express total life.
t It would seem that the
‘De Vrije Kunstenaar’, No. 1. Groningen, 1945
change of emphasis is from
the planner saying ‘this is It is neither my intention nor desire to join the ranks of those who
what you have to do’, to the
individual architect taking delight in talking and theorizing about architecture. But | have
responsibility for building in had to state my views and have, therefore, felt obliged to submit,
a particular situation, so that in all humility, the following.
it responds to the disciplines
of the situation—even postu-
lates a new set of disciplines An old and famous American architect (if my memory serves me
and its actual architecture well), said to another who was much younger and was asking for
its esthetic has built into it,
as it were, creative change; his advice: ‘Open your eyes wide and look; it is much easier than
so that the object of the whole you think.’ He also said to him: ‘Behind every building that you
thing is to get a dynamism see there is a man that you don’t see.’ A man, he said. He did
into the city structure.
AD., November 1958. P.D.S. not mention whether he was an architect or not.

ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN LIBRARY ,,

1700 LIDA STREET
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91103
One of the fundamental tenets of the Modern Movement in archi-
tecture has been the industrialization of building. In the absence of
genuinely industrialized building techniques the architects of the
‘twenties concerned themselves primarily with creating an archi-
tectural language in the spirit of the machine. A good many people
are interested in technology, but far fewer are interested in the
changes it can bring to the way of life and shape of things.
‘Design’, May 1958. A./P.S.

What, for example, is the good of neat prefabricated metal bunga-

lows sitting on little plots of ground in a layout pattern we all know
to be obsolete and which collectively looks dreadful? Is there no
feed-in from urban theory, or feed-back from fabrication technology
(which is in many cases highly advanced and elegant as in the
United States and France) which might suggest new modes of
urban organization, new sorts of buildings?
Thus for the architect the question of the industrialization of
building is still a question of what to fabricate, not how to fabricate
it. IUA Catalogue, 1961. P.D.S.

34 Living with the climate

diagram, Erskine

SITING FOR) SUN WITH EMPHASIS

ON MORNING.
PROTECTION AGAINGT

— MIDNIGHT SUN
~ WIND
— SNOW DRIFT
— BXTREA\E TEMPERATUEES
— MADDOW ING
—~ MOS TQUITAS
WITH SLOPING STE GIVES MORE PITEUSIVE
RPADIATICN , A VIEW OVER NATO, AWD
dacs OF AIMTH BLEVaATICNS

36
No, | do-not think that it is a genius that we need at this time.
Genius is an occurrence that is an Act of God. Nor do we need
High Priests or dubious Prophets of Architecture, or great
doctrinaires. There is something of a living tradition that is still
within our reach, and also many ancient moral doctrines con-
cerning our trade or profession (and | use these terms in their
best traditional sense) of architect and ourselves. We need to
take advantage of what little there is left of the constructive
tradition, and, above all, the moral tradition in this epoch when
the most beautiful of our words have lost their real meaning.

We need thousands and thousands of architects to think less

about ‘Architecture’, money, or the cities of the year 2000, and
more about their trade as architects. Let them work tied byalegso
that they cannot stray too far from the earth in which they have
their roots or from the men they know best; let them always
ee a firm foundation based on dedication, good will and
onour.

To bring this about | believe that we must first rid ourselves of

many ideas which appear clear but are false, of many hollow words,
and work with that good will that is translated into one’s own
work and teaching rather than with a mere concentration on
doctrinairism. | think that the best teaching is that which teaches
our trade; teaches us to work with great faith; or, in short, that
which teaches us to be architects, knowing, at the same time, as
we must, that we can all make mistakes. It is also the example of
working, continuously watching in order not to confuse human
frailty, the right to be mistaken (a cloak which if wrongly used
can cover a multitude of sins), with inconstancy of will, im-
morality or the cold calculation of the climber or ‘getter-on’. In
Spain, my parents used to tell me, a gentleman, an aristocrat, is
the person who finds himself unable to do certain things which
even the law, the Church, and the majority approve of or permit.

We must all, every one of us, individually constitute a new

‘aristocracy’. This is an urgent problem, so urgent that it must be
tackled at once. The main thing is to begin to work and then, and
only then, can we talk about it.

We must pit ourselves against money, against the vanity of

success, against excess of property or earnings, against in-
constancy and haste, and against the lack of spiritual life or
conscience; we must put instead dedication, craftsmanship,
good will, time, the bread we need for every day, and above all,
love, which is acceptance and giving, not possession and
domination—all these must be taken hold of and clung to, for
these are the true values.

Seeing and knowing more or less profoundly the works or forms

(the exterior signs of spiritual richness) of the great masters is
considered to be culture, or architectural formation.

The same means of classification are applied to our craft or

profession as are used (exterior signs of economic richness)
in our materialistic society. And then we lament or complain
because there are no great architects under sixty, because the
majority of architects are bad, because the new urbanization is
anti-human, because our ancient cities, towns and villages are
destroyed, and houses and towns are built like film-sets along
the length of our beautiful Mediterranean coasts. It is strange
that so much is said and published about the exterior signs of
the Great Masters (truly very valuable signs) and that their moral
value is hardly mentioned.

May it not also be considered curious that people write and talk
of their weakness and frailty as an attractive oddity or a tit-bit
for gossip or just as being mistaken, and at the same time con-
ceal as a forbidden subject or as an anecdote their attitude to
life or to their work?

37
35 Choice of architectural
space, diagram, St. Louis,
Bakema

36 Architect as space specialist,

diagram, Bakema
Is it also not curious that here we have Gaudi, very near to us (I
myself know persons who have worked with him) and so much is
said of his work and so little of his moral position or of his dedica-
tion? It is still more curious to contrast between the great value
placed on Gaudi's work and the silence or ignorance that exists
on the moral position or attitude presented by Gaudi to the pro-
blem of architecture. The former, that is, Gaudi’s work, is beyond
our reach to do, and the latter, which is Gaudi’s approach to
his work, is something which we can all do, or at least attempt.
We cannot reach his genius, but we must emulate his devotion
and work. And every architect can do it easily if he wishes. We
must concentrate on the things we can do, and not on what we
cannot.
The real spiritual culture of our profession has always belonged
to a few. The circumstance that enables nearly anyone to have the
possibility of access to this culture is the heritage of all, and is
one that is not generally taken. Neither unfortunately do we
accept cultural behaviour which should be obligatory and in the
consciousness of us all.
But the conditions on which we have to base our work vary
continuously. There are religious, moral, social and economic
problems, together with those of teaching, and, in this modern
world, possibly the most important sources of energy, which
can all play a part in changing, unsuspectingly, the face and
structure of our society (some brutal changes whose meanings
are lost to us are also possible). All these different problems can
impede honourable long-range planning.
It is ingenious to think that the ideal and the practice of our
profession may be condensed into slogans, such as the sun,
light, air, greenness, social architecture and so many others. A
formalistic base, dogmatic, above all if it is only partial, is in itself
bad, save in exceptional and catastrophic occasions. From all
this it may be deduced that, in my opinion, among the many
different paths that each thinking architect will choose to follow
there must be something in common, something which must
be in all of us; and here | return to the beginning of what | have
written; this | have done without wishing to give anybody a
lesson, but only with a profound and sincere conviction.
Barcelona, August, 1961. J. A. Coderch de Sentmenat

For the coming period, study of techniques and esthetics are

not of primary use, but rather the study and understanding of a
new structure of society. Regulations now being made for the
reconstruction programme must be based on ideas about life.
An architect's office has to be more a workshop than an office.
In our day we must find an approach to ‘total life’ by means of
ideas. Ideas about life cannot grow on a decision made by 50
pre-war votes + 1.
It is a mistake that in this conference students are warned agains
experiments.
A society can only find its cohesion—belonging together, ‘by
means of the way we express in housing how to live together’.
Young architects have to identify themselves with structures
based on big-scale planned production with its short-hour-
labour-days and small-scale-free-time private-production.
Also on the knowledge that man will live in universal space and
by planned production will have more free time each day such as
he never had before.
These are decisive facts for the change of structure of cities
and towns.
Architects must know that the culture pattern of to-morrow can
only be a great-number-participation culture.
The modern architect must be able to communicate with people.
In our days beauty has to express openness in human relation-
ships in order to make a new style.
‘Vrije Katheder’, No. 1, 1946. Bakema

39
New architecture is the expression of a new relationship between
men and man-made universe. More and more a building is made
from elements, each of them having their own relationship to
total space.
In our day it becomes necessary for governments to give financial
aid to experiments in architecture, about space, construction,
and working methods.
Before the war private enterprisers like Van der Leeuw gave just
such possibilities for experiments in the Van Nelle plant.
Development of spatial conception is of the same value as the
development of construction and prefabrication methods.
‘Forum’, No. 7, 1956. Bakema

37 ‘A strong and free design’,

Grung
| have spoken of place; of house Educating architects so that style is a serious consideration for
and city as bunches of places— them has become unknown.
both; of the inbetween realm as
man’s home-realm. In the key year of 1913 there were the beginnings of four distinct
| have identified the built artifact architectural styles. Constructivism, de Stijl, Purism and Bau-
with those it shelters (the building haus.
with that same building entered)—
and, having done so, defined space Each of these movements had an attitude and a complete compre-
simply as the appreciation of it, hensive plastic system—and that is what used to be known as a
thus excluding all frozen properties style. The schools and institutes, the academies of today do not
attributed to it academically whilst teach style. They make no approach to the problem of architecture:
including what should never be they make an approach to technology, to technique, but the
exc/uded : man appreciating it! central problem of creating an actual architecture, they ignore.
. man appreciating it! | have This escape from style is reflected, quite naturally, in the buildings
even called architecture Built that are going up around us. It would be wrong to say that the
Homecoming. builders are using the language of building badly, because they
With this in mind I now regard have not realized there is such a thing as a language of building;
architecture conceived primarily in they do not know the words from which to construct sentences
terms of space and visibility as In my opinion, an architecture which is incoherent is useless to
abstract and arbitrary; only phy- society.
sically accessible and therefore
closed, Style is a problem that | think has been completely neglected
Space and time must be opened— since the days of William Morris, certainly for 70 or 100 years.
interiorized—so that they can be
entered ; persuaded to gather mass Now you may say such a statement in favour of academies con-
into their meaning—include him. flicts with my personal opinions, which have been lifelong,
By virtue of what memory and directed against academic architecture. But it is impossible to
anticipation signify, place acquires construct a meaningful dynamic between a new system and a
temporal meaning and occasional muddle; if people were aware of what they were doing and why
spatial meaning. Thus space and they were doing it, it would be possible to comprehend the
time, identified reciprocally (in antithesis, the new system. One finds more and more that one is
the image of man) emerge human- talking in a stylistic void. Such a stylistic void makes any teaching
ized, as place and occasion. any writing, any talking, almost a waste of time.
Places remembered and places ‘Futurism’, Banham's R.1.B.A. Lecture, 1959. P.D.S.
anticipated dovetail in the tem-
poral span of the present. Memory
and anticipation, in fact, constitute
the real perspective of space; give Democracy is now only of significance if it is a kind of approach
it depth. towards a society in which every member gets his chance to
What matters is not space but the become aware in his own personal way of what is total life.
interior of space—and the inner
horizon of the interior. A man’s free choice of a way of life foresees a kind of archi-
The large house—little city state- tectural space expressing this awareness. The development of
ment (the one that says : ahouse is building techniques only becomes meaningful in this respect.
atiny city, acity is ahuge house) is
ambiguous and consciously so. The architect working in this direction helps to make the next
In fact its ambiguity is ofa kind | step in society’s evolution.
should like to see transposed to
architecture. /t points, moreover,
To develop a housing technique so that every individual family
towards a particular kind of clarity can make a kind of space fitting to their particular circumstance,
neither house nor city can do with-
in a certain place at a certain time, is not only an esthetic goal,
out; a kind which never quite but one concerning the spirit of society too.
relinquishes its full meaning. It would make it possible for a man to be more responsible for
CALL IT LABYRINTHIAN his being.
CLARITY
The relation of what is happening in a building with what is
Such clarity (ally of significant happening outside in total space will certainly result in space
ambiguity) softens the edges of defining elements as walls, beams, floors.
time and space and transcends
visibility (allows spaces to enter The relation between men and things seems to become more
each other and occasions to en- important and in turn makes it necessary to recognize the relation
counter each other in the mind's of architecture to town planning in order to take the next step
interior. in architecture. The new vision of total life as experienced in
It is kaleidoscopic. physics also gives direction for architecture.
The Inbetween Realm is never
without it ; Architecture is simply one of the tools available for man to get
Right-size goes hand in hand with familiar with total life in order to have his own art of living.
it; it harbours bountiful qualities ;
. . bountiful qualities ; scope for Architecture is based on use, space and form.
what is small yet large—large yet Use has to be social (functional).
small; near yet far—far yet near;
open yet closed—closed yet open ; Space has to be universal (cosmos).
different yet the same—the same
yet different: scope for the right Form has to be total (organic).
delay, the right release, the right ‘New Architecture’ and the next step. ‘Forum’, 1947. Bakema

41
There is no room for the !mponderable, for the things that escape
the limitations of the architect's ameliorative thinking—no place
where it can nestle.

38 ‘Logic, economy, structural

clarity’, Soltan

ESVite eees
e
es, Ne he, Coe vA
certainty, the right suspense, the First collective publication after the war:
right surprise, the right security. The period of ‘to possess’ is being replaced by the period of ‘to
And, withal, scope for multi- be’; we measure space by means of ‘house’ as we measure time
meaning. by means of hour and day. Splitting of the atom will become
There is a kind of spatial apprecia- construction of a new labour process; by imagination we can
tion which makes us envy birds in transform the wonder of total space with sun and stars into an
flight; there is also a kind which habitable environment.
makes us recall the sheltered
enclosure of our origin. Architec- Imagination turns ‘battle against’ into ‘to be familiar with’.
ture will fail if it neglects either the ‘New is always social.’
one or the other kind. To gratify ‘Forum’, No. 2-3, 1949. Bakema
Ariél means gratifying Caliban
also for there is no man who is not
Architectural planning in our day can only be done in teams.
both at once. Labyrinthian clarity,
at any rate, sings of both! A necessary condition for good results is that co-operation in
ARCHITECTURE NEED DO NO the team is based upon the acceptance by the members of the
MORE THAN ASSIST MAN’S team of an idea about one inter-relationship between the different
HOMECOMING aspects which make up the problem.
Van Eyck, 1962 The shopping building ‘ter Meulen-Wassen-van Vorst’ in Rotter-
dam has four blocklike elements inter-related by spatial order.
Oud described the building as a next step in modern architecture.
In the office of van den Broek and Bakema this was made by team-
work intensified by the acceptance of the idea of inter-relation-
ship.
The relationship between the things has to be recognized and this
has to be ‘visualized’ in order to put things in a good order.
CIAM Hoddesdon, 1951. ‘The Heart of the City’. Bakema

The architect will always be the space specialist and this gives
him the right to leadership in teamwork on architectural (spatial)
problems.
Present working methods generally are based on administrative
order. This has to be replaced by an order based on use of
imagination.
(De Groene Amsterdammer, 6, 12, 1952, page 6.)
Open discussion with Oud about teamwork, 1952. Bakema

For me, categorically, architecture and technology are not homo-

logous terms. Architecture is a discipline because it is a process
involving a person and technique. Technology is no more than a
repository of knowledge which can be used negatively or posi-
tively, upstairs or downstairs, indoors or out, by anyone.
Contribution AAJ. Discussion. J.V.

| consider that, at the present time, there is a general orientation

towards a tech-man ideology which employs analytical methods
and inevitably leads to a high degree of specialization. It is diffi-
cult for architecture to absorb this orientation for the result will
be, and to some extent has been, the replacement of architects
by a variety of specialists.
Symposium on Education, 1959. J.V.

It wasn't the pioneers that started flirting with science but the
hordes that came after, the next generation, they flirted with
what they imagined science to be. You can’t really fall in love with
what science really is today without somehow falling in love
with what art really is today (perhaps you can but | personally
can’t see how).
Van Eyck

It is highly probable that the objects that we are so painfully

devising may be the wrong ones and it is a good thing every now
and then to let other specialists into one’s private world to see if
their specialization makes one’s own irrelevant or, what is more
probable, to produce mutual modification of concepts. It is parti-
cularly obvious, for example, in the case of cars and signs and
roads and buildings, that the underlying concepts are wrong,
and it is quite mad to think in terms of styling and not in terms of
change in the total living pattern, not in any philosophical sense,
but pragmatically as things affect the use of other things.
‘Design’, 1960. P.S.

43
Instead of the inconvenience of filth and confusion, we have now
got the boredom of hygiene. The material slum has gone—in
Holland for example it has—but what has replaced it? Just mile
upon mile of organized nowhere, and nobody feeling he is ‘some-
body living somewhere’. No microbes left—yet each citizen a
disinfected pawn on a chessboard, but no chessmen—hence no
challenge, no duel and no dialogue.

The slum has gone Behold the slum edging into the spirit.

Again we have only to take a look at one of the new towns or a

recent housing development, to recognize to what extent the
spirit has gone into hiding. Architects left no cracks and crevices
this time. They expelled all sense of place. Fearful as they are of
the wrong occasion, the unpremeditated event, the spontaneous
act, unscheduled gaiety or violence, unpredictable danger round
the corner. They made a flat surface of everything so that no
microbes can survive the civic vacuum cleaner; turned a building
into an additive sequence of pretty surfaces (I find it difficult to
find words for those | saw in the United States) with nothing but 39 ‘It is the architect who can
demonstrate the special
emptiness on both sides. To think that such architects are given conditions that have to be
recognized for the future
to talking devotedly about space whilst they are actually emasculat- development of the part.’
Diagrams based on St Louis,
ing itinto a void. Van Eyck Bakema. 1961

44
You all know what happens We are concerned with problems of form and we need, im-
after a heavy snowstorm? mediately, to develop techniques which enable us to transform
The Child takes over—he is our experience as social beings into the plastic expression of
temporarily Lord of the City. architect-urbanists.
You see him darting in every Commission 6, Aix-en-Provence, CIAM 9, 1953. Smithsons and
direction collecting snow off Howells
frozen automobiles. A great
trick of the skies, this, a A building, like any other man-made object, can make the universe
temporary correction for the more intelligible to those who experience the modulations of its
benefit of the neglected child. form and volume. An architect who builds with this intention
It is up to you now to conceive fashions the parts of his building not only as mechanical com-
of something for the child ponents of construction, but also as clear signs in a language of
more permanent than snow— form.
if less abundant, something Sign and Symbol. J.V.
quite unlike snow in that it
provokes child movement At this point it seems suitable to define further ‘new archi-
without impeding other tecture’.
essential kinds of urban move-
ment. The open form or the art of the great number
Which are the objections one may raise against Architecture as
we know it?
/t must be conceived further- 1. It did not solve the problem of number—the need for necessary
more not as an isolated thing accommodations and social amenities instead of decreasing, is
or isolated set of things, but as constantly rising.
something which can be 2. As an expression of the closed form contemporary archi-
repeated on suitable places in tecture cannot be adapted to change; it becomes often outdated,
the city. The city must be able even before being completed.
to absorb it both esthetically 3. Present architectural conception does not sufficiently take
and physically ; it must become into account the personality of the inhabitants and is too often
part of the city’s everyday inhuman.
fabric. 4. It is wasteful of the financial means at our disposal.
5. The rég/e de jeu in architecture today sanctions the dissipation
of group traits (the problem of cosmopolitism).
‘Carré Bleu’, Oscar Hansen
lt must be elementary in that
it must respond to the child's Generally, people will experience much difficulty in utilizing such
elementary inclinations and possibilities as are facilitated by today’s architecture. Tradition,
movements (the /atter does manner of living and conservative views constitute major attach-
not completely cover the ments. The architect is therefore faced with a great task having
former) and activate his to provide people with buildings liberated from tradition and of a
imagination. It must be able to free and strong design, the demands of our times being his pivot
survive the impact of city life: of achievement.
faulty construction, choice of He should give evidence of power of imagination and be of a
materials or design inevitably constructive and alert mind, composing all materials in a simple
go hand in hand with un- and impressive manner. At all times he will have to keep an
necessary danger. What you industrial production in mind, rendering the houses cheap,
make should in the first place sturdy and adapted for all ends and purposes.
be attractive to children of four Even to the architect the result may often be a rather wretched
to eight years old. one, and only the best and most persevering will succeed in
You are free as to your choice prevailing, their results being realized by completed buildings,
of materials. the use of which people may learn how to appreciate.
You are not bound to a parti- AD, May, 1960. Geir Grung, Norway
cular site.
12-day student project—Washington Mobility, variability, elasticity are important factors in the archi-
University, St Louis, 1961. Van Eyck tecture of today.
Logic, economy, structural clarity of architectural solutions are
by themselves a source of poetic satisfaction for even the least
developed human being. | take the liberty to stress this point in
the face of what is happening in this world today and is discussed
* It ought to be kept well in by many active architects and theoreticians.
mind that one of the sources
of CIAM’S strength was the In fact, during the last four to six years, the approach to the
fact that in practice every- modern movement has changed very much. Everybody everywhere
body—old or young—had to
(a) Present continuously HIS
now expresses the wish to be modern. No more war between the
OWN ideas and solu- new and the old! The old, as it seems, has ceased to exist!
tions to the Congress. The important centres of academic, quasi-classical, decorative
(b)Fight for these ideas be- approach to architecture in the USSR and the Ecole des Beaux
fore the Congress.
In other words, an important Arts have also changed their position. But it is obvious that
source of CIAM strength was ‘modern’ does not mean the same to everybody. For CIAM, the
the fact that everybody who
wanted to deal with CIAM
notion ‘modern’ was backed and supported by a philosophy, a
seriously had to be ACTIVE. logic and economy, a reliability, a straightforwardness in function
No listening to lectures or and structure, etc. etc., connected with poetic, emotional and
passive looking at exhibitions plastic values. For CIAM esthetic values did not exist per se in
of other people’s work
could be sufficient. an autonomous way.*

45
 If you say esthetic control is ethically wrong (as it clearly is), and These playgrounds are built
on empty plots of land, those
one man should not have taste control over another man, itassumes formless islands left over by
that one has a responsible society, and that you can do away with the road engineer and the
demolition contractor ; they
control to a very large extent. The architect has to take that res- are constructed from the
ponsibility—social responsibility—on himself. At each moment one simplest materials often
immediately obtainable within
acts, as it were, creatively, with one’s building, thatis as an architect the vicinity of the site.
urbanist in one operation. There will obviously have to be overall
discipline in town planning, or social disciplines, to do with general The playgrounds are
significant at the present time
economic trends, etc. But at the detail level, the actual town con- for two reasons. Firstly
struction which is at the heart of architecture, one has to take because they reveal the
importance of Time to the
responsibility for the form of the town oneself. urbanist, an empty plot of land
is an inescapable reality ; it
must be used, else the com-
The client naturally wants to express his ego, and he reaily is only munity in its immediate
interested in his own requirements; the architect must stand, as it neighbourhood is, to some
extent, deprived of its freedom
were, between the client’s ego and society. And the architect's of movement and right to
traditional role is to produce a comprehensible community. The expression ; since it must be
used it must be developed as
responsibility for this must be taken by the architect in a new way. the situation, social and
In the situation where the architect takes his position between economic, allows. Al/ too
frequently empty city sites lie
client and society—the community—he interprets the needs of the idle, stagnating until ‘the
client in terms of community structure in order that the community time comes and funds are
available’. Such phrases
structures become more comprehensible by each act of building. reflect an utter contempt and
disregard for the nature, the
force, of time; citizens are
What is the role of the ‘planner’ in this set-up? inevitably deprived for a
considerable period, of large
chunks oftheir city.
In the end, real time having
Maybe the role of the planner is to provide social information which acted, the site is absorbed into
the individual architect cannot assess for himself; the economics some hastily conceived and
usually worthless develop-
of a given situation, the trends of development, the general pattern ment. The second reason why
of traffic; and somebody has got to do the work that civil engineers these playgrounds are impor-
tant is because they represent
used to do in the mechanical aspects of a town, to make the ‘hard’ a particular scale of work
analysis of drain fall-outs, of water supply, of road construction, essential to the urbanist, for
here he may come into
of how many people come in, of what are the likely developments personal contact with some of
in the number of motor cars, and so on, which is the sort of infor- the more positive and vital
elements at work in a com-
mation you need before you can start to think about the kind of munity. He is able to combine
building you should make. In a situation where the architect gets in a single process both
creative achievement and
more responsibility and the planner less control, the architect research.
must have more information and have less implied.
Discussion, AD., November 1958. P.D.S.
Through a playground, and
similar simple urban functions,
If anything could be a symbol of the aspirations of the second half the existing urban associa-
tions, in hitherto isolated
of the twentieth century it would be the hydro-electric dam— streets for instance, may be
perhaps because it is the essential anti-monument. Silent, out of extended ; the urbanist will
achieve this extension through
sight, serving the organic and the mechanical, making contem- the clarity and relevance of the
plative action a possibility for every man. forms he makes; this is archi-
tecture. By observing the way
in which this architecture is
used, the urbanist will be
An architecture which could satisfy such an aspiration must use guided to future, more exten-
similar techniques—largeness of organizational scale (not neces- sive, socially more complex,
and inevitably more expensive
sarily large in volume or density, that too is part of the jungle), and developments in that location ;
at some level the acceptance of the anonymous. this is research.
Amsterdam Playgrounds, Dutch
IUA Catalogue, 1961. P.D.S. Arch., 1954. J.V.

46
 Not so with the ‘new modern’, where everything from town
planning to building relies on applied decoration with modern
elements. | have seen, in Lebanon, housing units designed very
much under the influence of Le Corbusier, erected at a distance
of some 6ft. from each other and lined up four to six in a row. |
have seen, in the USA, sun-breakers suspended on northern
elevations. The list of such examples from all over the world can
be lengthened ad infinitum.

The reasons for this are certainly complex, but the main ones are
that the ‘new modernists’ did not change their approach (it is
not so easy), they changed only their manners—whereas the
public, the sponsors, always want their buildings to blossom. If
they cannot ‘blossom’ with classicist details, let them be right
with some modern ones.

Also, among some of the ‘true modernists’ one feels a need to

react against the achievements of the previous generation. This
need for reaction often has no sensible background other than
the wish to be different. Now it is obvious that the research and
true seeking of new solutions is our task, but this task often
degenerates today into some shallow dream of being different
from a Corbu or a Mies.

| am strongly convinced that superficial bourgeois modernism in

architecture, supported by some superficial trends in other plastic
arts of today, is of utmost danger to the sanity and health of the
city planning and building.

The previous generation of CIAM had to fight an enemy that was

outside the movement. Our task is to fight the inner enemy, the
‘brother-modernist’. The task of the previous CIAM was, maybe,
more heroic—our task needs more moral strength.

Could not therefore the aim of the new CIAM be two-fold: to help
the development of really sane and worthy new ideas on the basis
established by the previous CIAM, but also to unmask and fight
down everything that claims to be modern but is thriving on what
is superficial and mean in human nature?
AD., May, 1960. Jerzy Soltan, Poland

40 ‘The architect must stand

between the client’s ego and
society.’
Diagram of use, the Lijnbahn,
Bakema. c. 1954

4l Arctic city, Erskine

47
Urban infra-structure
Traditionally some unchanging large-scale thing—the Acropolis,
the River, the Canal or some unique configuration of the ground—
was the thing that made the whole community structure compre-
hensible and assured the identity of the parts within the whole.
Today our most obvious failure is the lack of comprehensibility
and identity in big cities, and the answer is surely in a clear, large
scale, road system—the ‘Urban Motorway’ lifted from an amelio-
rative function to a unifying fuiiction. In order to perform this
unifying function all roads must be integrated into a system, but the
backbone of this system must be the motorways in the built-up
areas themselves, where their very size in relationship to other
development makes them capable of doing the visual and symbolic
unifying job at the same time as they actually make the whole thing
work. From our first interest in the life-of-the-street we have been
obsessed with the concept of ‘mobility’ in all its meanings, and
particularly with the implications of the motor car. For the architect
this is not only a matter of traffic system for he is concerned with
the invention of building types appropriate to the new urban pattern
that motorization demands. ‘Uppercase’. A./P.S.

The aim of urbanism is comprehensibility, i.e. clarity of organiza-

tion. The community is by definition a comprehensible thing. And
comprehensibility should also therefore be a characteristic of the
parts. The community sub-divisions might be thought of as
‘appreciated units’—an appreciated unit is not a ‘visual group’ ora
‘neighbourhood’, but an-in-some-way-defined part of a human
agglomeration. The appreciated unit must be different for each
type of community. ... For each particular community one must
invent the structure of its sub-division.

In most cases the grouping of dwellings does not reflect any

reality of social organization; rather they are the result of political,
technical and mechanical expediency. Although it is extremely
difficult to define the higher levels of association, the street implies
a physical contact community, the district an acquaintance com-
munity, and the city an intellectual contact community—a hierarchy
of human associations. CiAM 9, Aix-en-Provence, 1953. A./P.S.

In general, those town-building techniques that can make the

community more comprehensible are:

(1) To develop the road and communication systems as the urban

infra-structure. (Motorways as a unifying force.) And to realize the
implication of flow and movement in the architecture itself.
(2) To accept the dispersal implied in the concept of mobility and
to re-think accepted density patterns and location of functions in
42 Appreciated unit, A./P.S.
relation to the new means of communication. 1954

48
 There is no doubt that a decisive moment has arrived in the
development of the modern movement.... For those who followed
the main road there was one goal... to stimulate independently
the development of man's awareness of the phenomenon called
life... . Today in many countries mechanization commands and
we see a development of planning which could not have been
predicted at the start of the century. Many ideas of the modern
movement have found employment in society... . But disappoint-
ment is often felt in that the originators of ideas sometimes see
much of their work used, not ona basis of love and understanding
but on a basis of prostitution and exploitation. It is often apparent
that the development of certain principles of the modern move-
ment is now faced with barriers which cannot be surmounted
without reorganization of working methods.

People are confronted with a mass-produced way of living.

The possibility of comparing different ways of living expressed

in the different types is lost in daily environment. If one cannot
compare one will forget the relativity of our own way of life and
development will cease. Comparison is essential to a democratic
way of life.

But to make this next step, methods of work of the architect must
be changed and the resistance to him will be stronger than
43 Cluster city, diagram, ever before, because awareness of inter-relationships demand
P.D.S. 1955 that he penetrates with his imagination in those circles where
today specialization in every form is master. The town planner
can only give indications of the kind of use for a part of a town,
but it is the architect who can touch the special conditions that
have to be recognized for the future development of that part.
The variety of types, for example, is an essential part of the
architectural expression, and the relation between the types is of
decisive influence in the development of each type in itself. This
can never be done by the town planner, who has to recognize a
series of circumstances of a quite different kind. If the architect
has no feeling for the relationship between types, he may well
fall back on decorative solutions of space to escape from mono-
tony.

Form is a visual means of communication between people. The

modern movement cannot ignore this without losing quality.
‘Architects’ Year Book’, 8, 1957. Bakema

There are the problems of mass-communication and the prob-

lems of the whole change of society towards the middle-class
society with different sorts of drives—different sorts of status
urges, and so on; but in addition you have the business of terrific
complexity of actual physical communication—the cars and the
motor-way situation—which seems to mean that we have got to
44 ‘To realize the implications evolve a completely new sort of esthetic to begin with—a new
of flow and movement in the sort of discipline—which can respond to growth and change.
architecture itself’, diagram,
Kahn AD., November, 1958. P.D.S.

The form and esthetic of such a community has been presented

in the article on ‘Cluster City’.
‘A.R.’, November, 1957
The attitude that prevails in architectural education which sug-
gests that architects should be trained to synthesize, that they
should be coordinators of specialists, does not seem to be
proving effective. It is, | believe, an attempt to escape the
characteristics of the present time. Furthermore, | do not believe
that it is possible to synthesize or coordinate without some
clearly stated architectural ideals. Synthesis and coordination
must be to some clearly defined end.
Symposium on Education, 1959. J.V.

How again can architectural discipline function in daily life?

And how can research in planning and architecture be done in
such a society where the command was to build for the anony-
mous client?

49
 45 Pedestrian net structuring
. the central area, Berlin,
Smithson/Sigmond. 1958
rd

Ub ‘

A
A '

a Sa

NO

i
"
‘ : /
: AIG <a > “3s, =

i'
Ri
RE DESTRIAN
Noten

PLATFORM
SS. ”

mh
nS At

M
oO
ya
iz Z <

NET On
ZAG:
<a,
: ss ‘+
ia ot
at , ‘i

ae f ‘ ee - :
LAN Ae fi : Pe hte
A Se Wt; S.nene een) , ‘ Eee ,
== — were: (te Oe - ta 2 f: erent oe HOES 5 2 46 ‘Building types appropriate
Bi OP Gg ORGS OS ies , 4 . YQ be’ to the new urban pattern’,
URBAN “MOTORWAY °“ A ff London Roads Study, diagram
Dean and Richards, 1960
 47 ‘In order to perform this
unifying function all roads iN \ ¢
| must be integrated into a En Si ae
i. Rete Plan, Smithson/ 25 of no tt a te a HG
‘ Sigmond. “S \ 3 brat Ti
| Pass a e eee)
wet \ Ped END, / i} pos sm ~~.
Sq
\ Crt. ook - a t U
1 vA A NsSy (2)

7 ENECS oe
Serato | fF
=f a
/ Save
fe oe
eS (
nS nee
OES a.
pe
erPa Goan / a )
pees
(a
ea‘ sf
Pie Cgc Us
. i wolf.. of ~-0°8 a
ve u is j ' oe ' , oO" 52)
“ “~e .
‘ Os “ an) ae — Ds oeHN
on “4 | TaN on \
Sk XN 47 ey Benes Ae £ \
ay Sg \ Ss pte f -- —--“t-~6ro) ( ° \ :alt
see 22“ —----
BESS eee Pd
uy ( oe 0? is
PS '
\ Vi q 009 © bo Oo <a
\ 4 ~S
i) N2)
\ oe °° \
\4 Sols ° ‘“ 's *
fo OAK? }
D000 0° a
0
()
se = °
Vi "RSS r)
ie
2. = /
“ae A SC IER
/ NE GOS SE SoRase i ° / Lie Ss
i SF ~~” i) / i Ux :
ie Ir ~ &, ooh -7-- pesin soe Se 1

/ [ / 7
( ij \

1, Bet cdeteer city, diagram, How can planning-architecture discipline the different phases in
i: the extension of towns, villages, and buildings, maintaining in
every phase relationship and variation?
j How can industrialization produce building elements by means
| of which the different variations in way of life can be expressed?
fi How can the flexible plan serve the change in the needs of family
; life?
4 How in the agglomeration of townships can Holland’s natural
space be urbanized in order to be an element of daily
. . y
life, recog- g
fi nizing the fact that Holland recently became the country with
e / the highest density in the world?
‘Magazine Bouw', No. 5. Towards a new concentration of forces,
1957. Bakema
Mobility has become the characteristic of our period. Social and
physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one
of the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of
this freedom is the individually-owned motor car. Mobility is the
key both socially and organizationally to town planning, for
mobility is not only concerned with roads, but with the whole
concept of a mobile, fragmented, community. The roads (to-
gether with the main power lines and drains) form the essential
physical infra-structure of the community. The most important
thing about roads is that they are physically big, and have the
same power as any big topographical feature, such as a hill ora
river, to create geographical, and in consequence social, divi-
sions. To lay down a road therefore, especially through a built-up
area, is a very serious matter, for one is fundamentally changing
the structure of the community.
‘Uppercase’. A./P.S.
As long as cities exclude particular kinds of motion that belong
inseparably to urban life, their human validity—they have no other
—will remain partial.
The time has come to orchestrate all the motions that make a
city a city. It is somehow in the nature of cities in general and of

51
(3) To understand and use the possibilities offered by a ‘throw-
away’ technology, to create a new sort of environment with different
cycles of change for different functions.

(4) To develop an esthetic appropriate to mechanized building

techniques and scales of operation.

(5) To overcome the ‘cultural obsolescence’ of most mass housing

by finding solutions which project a genuinely twentieth-century
technological image of the dwelling—comfortable, safe and not
feudal.

(6) To establish conditions not detrimental to mental health and

well-being. Past legislation and layout were geared to increasing
standards of hygiene; in countries of higher standards of living this
is no longer a problem. Criteria* have to be found to define under-
mining environment. These might be: noise level, polluting and
polluted environment, overcrowding, pressing and pushing, no
space for the social gesture, all those demands made on the
individual in societies inhabiting accumulated built forms.
* Criteria for Mass Housing, etc. ‘Forum’ (Holland), 7, 1959. A./P.S.

The studies of association and identity led to the development of

systems of linked building complexes which were intended to
correspond more closely to the network of social relationships, as
they now exist, than the existing patterns of finite spaces and
self-contained buildings. These freer systems are more capable
of change, and, particularly in new communities, of mutating in
scale and intention as they go along.

It was realized that the essential error of the English New Towns
was that they were too rigidly conceived, and in 1956 we put forward
an alternative system in which the ‘infra-structure’ (roads and
services) was the only fixed thing. The road system was devised to
be simple and to give equal ease of access to all parts. 49 ‘Down-town’, diagram,
P.D.S.

This theme of the road system as the basis of the community

structure was further explored in the Cluster City idea between
1957 and 1959, in the Haupstadt Berlin Plan 1958, and in the London
Roads Study 1959. ‘Uppercase’. A./P.S.

Roads can be deliberately routed and the land beside them neutra-
lized so that they become obviously fixed things (that is changing
on a long cycle). The routing of individual sections over rivers,
through parks, or in relation to historic buildings or zones, provides
a series of ‘fixes’ or local identity points. The road net itself de-
fining the zones identified by these ‘fixes’.

52
 traffic in particular to suppress certain kinds of motion which, if
less insistent, are certainly no less fundamental to the idea city.

Cities today demonstrate an appallingly limited range of move- ~

ment. Their rhythm is as vehement as it is monotonous.
A city, if it is really a city, has a very compound rhythm based on
many kinds of movement, human, mechanical and natural. The
first is paradoxically suppressed, the second tyrannically
emphasized, the third inadequately expressed.
Wheels or no wheels man is essentially a pedestrian. Whether
he really wants to be, will again become, or no longer wants to be
is quite arbitrary. He is! ‘Side’ walk indeed means just what it is!
0 Gute To cater for the pedestrian means to cater for the child. A city
which overlooks the child’s presence is a poor place. Its movement
View Guvtte
will be incomplete and oppressive. The child cannot rediscover
50 Cambridge proposals, the city unless the city rediscovers the child.
Ralph Erskine Van Eyck
51 ‘The architect can control

atthe MITT We ATS a

Tl
DY VRLEU IRE) CPT) 27, e
wr systems of physical com-
Wn munication and offer new
WW? concepts’, diagram, Kahn
LULLED VIEILLE Oy con e
wnt
Wnt
< ed 9 iyPF=DoT arc cfara eSPooh
i i
Hn) ‘ AS ‘ e
SIP
a Re a niauinuiiiitinieocs ine oe uv
=)
t wy
RW) Wy WwW Ni \u Wy

1G
TOWING

ueuelL
qa

a Y'
gettee
s=>S>-_ pte
I,
oh? ,

.
aque
Quin HDOFTal
Sutter
Sari

wit ay
py any

LELa
QM itivergngve enone COOP
PSO UC OU OO) @OUUUU8 @OUUUULL mann e Nt

CEE CCE E

ak Se tad
W
oy) So ETE.
>)
ov
™ =) PSEr sow

nh asSS ‘SS
es ay
oly

53
 52 Office cluster, diagram,
P.D.S. 1957

WY or rye Wi -
WAN I ANE 3 Stage

« “ERENT
« | :

53 Diagram of close house

structures, A.M.S. 1954

54 ‘First diagram of
equal flow road structure,
P.D.S. 1956
 55 Pattern of association—
Each district with a different
function. Diagram, A.M.S.
1953

Cs, Pathan

56 Ideogram, P.D.S. 1956 57 A.M.S. 1952

‘Linked building complexes’

es
Care
——

;
Lee
VY

58 ‘A new sort of environment

| with different functions.’
Diagram, Kahn. 1957

55
Urban motorways thus designed form the structure of the com-
munity. In order to work they must be based on equal distribution
of traffic loads over a comprehensive net, and this system is by its
nature apparent all over the community, giving a sense of con-
nectedness and potential release.

59 Definition of zones by
superimposed movement nets,
Berlin Plan Sketch, Sigmond

56
 The form of the city must correspond to the net of human relations
as we now See them.

The changing arrangements of this net are effected by changing

systems of communication and changes of social aims.

The architect can act directly in this situation. He can control

systems of physical communication and he can offer new con-
cepts.

And in fact the two things are wrapped up with each other, for
putting increased emphasis on physical communications in-
volves throwing over traditional esthetic values which were
mostly concerned with fixed relationships; and on the other hand
rejection of Cartesian esthetics, because they are incapable of
carrying the cultural loading of our time, inevitably leads to an
‘eesthetic of change’ the plastic resolution of the problems of
mobility.

By increasing or decreasing the possibilities of communication,

the potential intensity of use can be manipulated. The increase
of density of the traffic net in a given area will induce an increase
of use intensity in that area. The road net is, therefore, a tool to
produce a change of the pattern—to break down the ‘density
pyramid’ into a looser cluster of ‘density high points’ (points of
maximum intensity of use) with areas of lower residential density
between. Each area being more specific to its use than those
allowed by present density ‘blankets’.
London Roads Study. AD., May, 1960

60 Equal flow road structure,

basic diagram, P.D.S. x

6I First study, use of neutral- 4

ized strip to define areas, NG
P.D.S. 1959 4

Z= =sSS====
x C717 URGAN MoTORWAY
SYSTEM TRIANGULATED
To Give EASE OF
ACCESS To ALL PARTS

The identity of the whole should be latent in the components

whilst the identity of the components should remain present in
the whole. It does not imply, however, that these identities need
or should remain constant in the face of mutations. On the
contrary, it is exactly this potential to change face without losing
it which cities must acquire in order to fulfil their purpose in space
and time: the provision of places where vast numbers of people
can live, benefiting from all the varied forms of human association
and activity large cities can best furnish.
A city should embrace a hierarchy of superimposed configurative
systems multilaterally conceived (a quantitative and a qualitative
hierarchy). The finer grained systems—those which embrace the
multiplied dwelling and its extension—should reflect the qualities
of ascending repetitive configurative stages.

57
Roads are the one big urban reorganization job which are neces-
sary to the general economy and, therefore, money and resources
will be made available.

Although the roads system can be thought of a priori as a triangu-

lated net of varying density (no hierarchyof routes,equal distribution
of traffic load over whole net, equal accessibility to all parts,
only one decision at each intersection, etc. etc.), the realities
of route finding and respect for (and wish to revalidate) the
existing structure, as well as the desire to modify the town pattern
generally, produce a road net which is not a pattern in the con-
ventional formal sense, but is nevertheless a very real ‘system’ to
which the architecture must respond.
London Roads Study, AD., May 1960

We have to accept the dispersal implied in the concept of mobility

and to rethink accepted density patterns and location of functions
in relation to the new means of communication.

In the dense, built-up areas of big cities the problems of move-

ment are more complicated than those on out of town highways.
Movement in cities must include the functions of parking and stop-
ping. In general, national, inter-city, inter-sector and local (low-
speed car, pedestrian) traffic should each have separate systems
which offer no short cuts—all movement must proceed through
each stage of the hierarchy—and the town-building should respond
to this hierarchy of movement. Louis Kahn’s Plan for Midtown
Philadelphia demonstrates how movement can be organically
reorganized so that it is one with its inter-related functions of
parking, shopping, etc. The idea of relating the architecture to the
type of movement can be shown most easily in an example un-
complicated by existing conditions. The latest plan for Alexander-
polder has a low speed road at its centre meandering backwards
and forwards serving family houses on the ground; and the direct
high speed road runs around the periphery where the buildings are
62 Berlin plan, traffic net
large Unités at quarter-mile intervals. AD., October 1958. A./P.S. Smithson/Sigmond, 1958

58
 ifs
All systems should be familiarized one with the other in sucha
way that their combined impact and interaction can be appreci-
ated as a single complex system—polyphonal, multirhythmic,
kaleidoscopic and yet perpetually and everywhere compre-
hensible. A single homogenous configuration composed of
many sub-systems, each covering the same overall area and
equally valid, but each with a different grain, scale of movement
“ and association-potential.
These systems are to be so configurated that one evolves out of
the other—is part of it. The specific meaning of each system must
sustain the meaning of the other. The large structures—infra-
structures—must not only be comprehensible in their own right,
they must above all—this is the crucial point—assist the overall
comprehensibility of the minutely configurated intimate fabric

bearer
which constitutes the immediate counterform of every citizen's
everyday life. They must not only be able to absorb reasonable
mutations within themselves, but also permit them within the
intimate smaller fabric they serve.
Van Eyck

Most towns exist because of meeting of people at the crossing of

land and water-roads. An old town centre can only exist in modern
time if the kind of traffic of this time is allowed to be part of the
heart of the town. It is always the death of life in towns if modern
traffic becomes forbidden. Most towns already have some main
63 Low density residential traffic lines on which the buildings have already lost their cultural
cluster, diagram, A.M.S. 1955
(historic) function. These mainlines could be transformed into
multi-level traffic roads and buildings corresponding to the scale
of production of our days could be in visual relationship with
these new traffic roads.
To solve the inter-relationship between these new elements and
the remaining ones of historic value is a difficult but normal
architectural problem. In those parts of the town expressing
patterns of culture based on non-mechanical circulation, the
mechanical transport has to be abandoned. They will be the
pedestrian-areas satisfying a real human need as is the circula-
tion by motor car.
64 Roads as the urban infra-
structure, a basis for a pattern Building in town centres of historic value as Amsterdam. ‘Het
of growth, diagram, P.D.S. Parool’, July 1, 1958. ‘Handelsblad’, February 6th, 1960. Bakema

fl Historic centre
2 New urban nodes
3 Local fixes

A Urban motorways
& Local roads

59
Expressways are like RIVERS 65 Philadelphia study, Kahn
Wound up parking towers anc
These RIVERS frame the area to be served pee
RIVERS have HARBORS
HARBORS are the municipal parking towers
from the HARBORS branch a system of CANALS that serve the interior
the CANALS are the go streets
from the CANALS branch cul-de-sac DOCKS
the DOCKS serve as entrance
halls to the buildings

A town is by definition a specific pattern of association, a pattern

unique for each people, in each location, at each time. To achieve
this specific pattern it must develop from principles which give
the evolving organism consistency and unity.

A town-plan can be defined as the method of applying those

principles. ‘Uppercase’. A./P.S.

It is somehow not right to rebuild to the old pattern.

If one considers movement as the mainspring of urban building,

more radical forms come into being. AD., October 1958
 In small villages in Germany, people gather on fine Sundays at
vantage points overlooking the autobahn just to see the cars go
by. And this is a very moving experience, for one feels in contact
ae lifestream of Europe, and not just of Germany itself.

A typical situation occurs where a new urban motorway is driven

through the built-up area following an old street, one side being
torn down to accommodate it. The side that is left consists of
six-storey commercial buildings from the nineteenth century, with
domestic type windows and a doorway on to the street.
Two problems result; how to develop on the cleared side, and
how to infill or re-develop on the existing side which now faces
into a six-lane highway. The noise has increased by ten times
since horse-and-cart days.
Should windows therefore face the motorway at all? Or would it
be more correct for the buildings to have their backs to the motor-
way and an indication on the facades of development in relative
quiet behind or at the side? Surely such drastic re-thinking of the
situation is taking place at the wrong level. The urban motorway
design must be such that a new solution to adjacent building is
implicit—or even irrelevant.
AD., October, 1958

The patterns of thought, and ideals of behaviour, of the new

machine society are already well established. In some curious
way the intellectuals who traditionally helped to establish these
patterns and ideals, find themselves in the position of having to
catch up. Everyone now knows that no one can push him around.
This is certainly a new feeling which has come into being since
1955. There is a genuine egalitarianism in the air, the result most
obviously of a prosperity that can be taken for granted, and of
television, (cutting people down to size; broader level of interest).
Everyone also has fairly well defined material ideals: more leisure,
more pleasure, more travel, more education for their children.
These ideals are largely those of the younger man in his best
earning and most confident years, and, of course, they are helped
in formulation by the popular press and by the advertising media.
But there is no doubt that they are the genuine popular taste.*
This new sort of society needs a new sort of environment. An
open society needs an open city. Freedom to move—good com-
munications, motorways and urban motorways. And somewhere
to go—both inside and outside the city.

Freedom to move
The main structure of the urban environment to which our every-
day activities can be related is a special sort of road system. Such
a system, designed to act as a structure for the whole community,
66 Diagram, A.M.S. Greenspace
neutralized by a green strip or built landscape, need not in fact
compliments streets-in-the-air be very large in relation to the town—two or three great highways,
pattern for dwellings. 1952 are almost sufficient to serve even Los Angeles. (Where motori-
zation is gradually approaching its saturation point of one car to
every two persons.)t

This road system is a ‘fix for movement’ running through the

whole community; but the big motorway intersections, like the
Los Angeles ‘Mixmaster’, or the San Francisco Skyway take-off
for Oakland Bay Bridge, are more like traditional architectural
features. A whole network of motorways related to existing
‘fixes’ in this way could serve not only for the purpose of travel,
but could also define the areas into which the urban region is
divided. The use of the road-system in this way would keep our
apparent level of mechanization under control; we can channel
noise and excitement to where they seem appropriate, or can do
no harm, and create pools of calm where they are not.
* There is no need to assume
that the advertising man’s
professional tastes are not
also his real tastes.
+ Motorway patterns of this
size may already be approach-
ing the stable condition of
the railway system, and like
them will probably go into a
slow decline.

61
The main case that is being put here is that for a human agglo- pas ele Melt y,
meration to be ‘acommunity’ in the twentieth century itis not neces- Mitiatetss BINS 20 a
sary, practically or symbolically, for it to be a dense mass of :
buildings, but that does not necessarily mean that a bigger overall
area need be covered than is covered at present. It is essentially a
matter of regrouping of densities. There is no need for example for
low-density family houses to be excluded from the central areas
of the city, noris there any need to think conventionally that housing

68 Berlin Free University,

Candilis, Josic, Woods

69 Opposite: ‘Town-building
must respond to the hierarchy
of movement,’ Berlin plan,
diagram, Sigmond. 1958

To recognize the forces that

make a town, we have to
investigate them and visualize
them on a map. To know the
dynamic process of change of
the forces making the town
we have to understand these
forces in the past, nowadays
and as they expect to be in the
future. Doing this we can
identify ourselves with the
moment now.
We can discover from this
first period also the structure
of houses, workshops and
public buildings and the
relationship between the
structure of the settlement and
the structure of the built-up
volume. The house, for
example, in the days of 1700-
1800 in St Louis had steps
leading to galleries which gave
access to the rooms of the
house. Bigger buildings had
simple steps leading to a front
door.
The first Washington Univer-
sity buildings were surrounded
by a kind of courtyard and
wall, while the older buildings
of St Louis University had an
interior courtyard. The most
remarkable characteristic of
Locust Street in St Louis of
1850 is still the small scale of
individual buildings, and

62
nearer the country should be at low densities. It depends on the
life pattern of the people who live there what sort of environment
is needed and what sort of density results. The overall pattern of
the community is of clusters of varying densities, with many parts,
as high as 300 per acre (Towers or Streets-in-the-Air.). Such
concentrations will allow for the creation of the new road/green
space system that compensates for family living development,
without increasing the occupied area and without forcing people
into an unwanted pattern. Dispersal of course must be disciplined
so that any resultant development does not become absolutely
structureless. Experience has shown that it is possible to maintain
large-scale green belts and parkway strips, and indeed the relating
of the green areas to the major road system is an obvious way of
providing the main urban structure.
70 Berlin F. U. Sketch showing
types of multi-level and direc-
It is the intention, by using the road-system as the town structure, to tional circulation built into the
complex. Dotted track shows
keep the apparent level of mechanization under control. We are no pedestrian free circulation and
indicates random nature of
longer in the position of needing to play up our devices, but rather pedestrian movement across
open courts between teaching
to play them down, channelling mechanical noise and excitement blocks. Direct pedestrian
movement between faculties is
and creating ‘pools of calm’ for family living and regeneration. via travelators and escalators,
Woods, 1964

Density and intensity will be related to the function of the zone,

resulting in communities of much greater genuine variation of
living pattern.

As has been stated elsewhere, this feeling of being trapped-in-a-

jungle-of-irresponsibilities has made the car and its corollary, the
urban motorway, into necessities for mental quietude in the
metropolis—they represent escape and freedom.

At some point must be a place of maximum intensity.

71 Diagram showing the
systems of orthogonal
(grid-iron) and diagonal
Somewhere must be a place which not only allows for the contact random cross circulation of F.U.
Woods, 1964
of mind with mind, but also symbolizes it. It can only happen at the
‘centre’ (there can be only one place where the experience of the
community reaches its maximum, if there were two there would be
two communities), but it follows that in a dispersed community it
will be smaller and more intense than existing ‘city centres’.

But it is in the question of social foci that the difference between

the Cluster City idea, and what it is commonly compared with, Los
Angeles, can be seen.

Los Angeles is fine in many respects, but it lacks legibility—that

factor which ultimately involves identity and the whole business of
the city as an extension of oneself, and the necessity for compre-
hension of this extension. The layout of Los Angeles and the form
of its buildings do not indicate places-to-stop-and-do-things-in.
What form it has is entirely in its movement pattern, which is
virtually an end in itself.

64
 ) covered
Broadway of those
sidewalks.
days had
There
72 Berlin F. U. Model of the
teeny ton ue
were also transitional elements Woods, 1964
between the space of the
buildings and the space of the
town.

| About this time the building

| occupying a whole block
| became characteristic instead
of several individual buildings
being together in one block
and Louis Sullivan built one of
the first skyscraper construc-
tions in St Louis about 1890
(the Wainwright building).
The relation between the
street pattern of the town and
the structure of such sky-
scrapers was no more by
courtyards or galleries, but 73 URoie building serving
simply by a door giving direct office towers, diagram,
access to the street. P.D.S. 1959
Think about this!
No more a transitional element
between building and town
structure for a building in
which were working perhaps
500 to 1000 people, while for a
building with 10 to 20 people
this element was stil! there in
1850. It is in the period 1850-
1900 that the relationship
between city pattern and
building structure became
purely mechanical. The
evolution from small-scale
production units into big-
scale production units was too
fast and the various aspects of
life still expressed in a picture
of Broadway in 1850 became all
subordinated to the laws of
| buying and selling mass-pro-
duced goods. Thinking oe “ ‘At sore point eS = a
designing a ‘civic centre’ for GLE. OL] TCP ET) OTN
St Louis, you have to think perspectiven Kates
this over because we are still
occupied with the problem of
the relationship between these
big-scale buildings and the
space of the town. And | am
sure that when 5000 people
working in a building come in
the building or leave it at the
| beginning or end of their work- |
ing hours this cannot be done ¥
by pouring these people in and
out by some doors into the
crowded streets.
ai
z

So thinking about the design

of the buildings of a civiccentre
we have to give special
attention to those elements
which have to function be-
tween the specific working
levels and the level of public
interest (street).

65
 Itis quite clear that in an ideal city at the present time, the communi-
cation net should serve (and indicate) places-to-stop-and-do-
things-in. This is somewhat different from saying that every city
needs a core. When Los Angeles is criticized for not being a city
in the old European sense, it is not generally realized the colossal
scatter of the places people go to; up to the mountains for a picnic;
to the desert for a trip; to a far-off beach for a bathing party; or to
Marshall Fields (in Chicago) for shopping. The social foci are
almost all outside the so-called down-town, and they are:not really
based on the sort of facility that can be readily moulded to help the
legibility of the town pattern. AD., Scatter, April 1959. A./P.S.

Old town centres still inspire more than new neighbourhoods.

We are now in a period when people have to be taught how to
visualize—by word and design-thought about social structures.
We have to communicate by built forms the next step in the evolu-
tion of the structure of social relationships. This is research which
can make the work of an architect become a necessity—as bread
and wine are. For us to re-establish the function of form in daily life.
Schools of Architecture have to educate students in a way that
they can build, by planning and architecture, the morality of their
time.
The design process of ‘recognized’ kinds of buildings, as, for
example, new headquarters for firms, or government centres, has
to start with the design of the programme for the building because
by this programme is fixed how people can be alone—or can meet—
while working in the building.
Such buildings have to be more and more a kind of village and
town, while towns have to be more and more buildings. Neighbour-
hoods must be kinds of castles with towers, rooms, galleries,
secret corridors and surprising courtyards.
Amsterdam Students’ Magazine ‘!oorters Periodiek’, 1959. Bakema

The needs of the new mobile society and the communications

systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning tech-
niques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space. The
grouping of buildings must both give meaning to and communicate
function, function in the complex sense of the part they play in the
activities of the community as a whole. Such a way of considering
town building will inevitably require the reflection in the buildings
themselves of such non-static things as flow, and speed, and
stopping and starting, and all the other varied manifestations of
human occupancy. A.|P.S.

66
 Expressway

Penn Center, LE
Lligy

sos

wae
ae :

75 Detail plan of Philadelphia The road as /iberator

central area, Kahn
Already, for example, we can recognize that an adequate urban-
motorway system is a psychological as well as functional require-
The Lever House and Seagram ment of an urban region—it offers the possibility of release.
Building in New York give
some direction about what | To help them enjoy their spare time, the densely populated areas:
mean. will have to be able to empty a large proportion of their population
into the surrounding countryside, and where possible on to the
nearest coast, pleasantly and within reasonable time, each
These transitional elements of weekend and on summer evenings.
the building will be of decisive In response to this demand, for example, our coastline will have
significance for the civic centre to be reorganized along its length in order to keep some parts
because these elements can without people, and to cope with the influx to the rest.
visualize spatially the relation-
ship between the buildings.
The pattern of dispersal
sone parts of a solution are already obvious:
We have to revitalize for our A general system of motorways, which amongst its many
big-scale buildings the haere provides access to the countryside and to the sea. (At
principle as was realized in which points proper vehicle and people handling facilities need
Broadway of 1850 for small- to be provided, more or less on the model of Jones Beach which
scale buildings by recognizing is part of the New York Parks Service.)
the actual forms of our present 2. An increase in mass-transit facilities, particularly to existing
society. resorts. (Whose major features, promenades, piers, etc., are
Problem: Civic Centre for Metropolis
St Louis. Bakema already incapable of handling motorized holiday makers.)

67
Just as our mental process needs fixed points (fixed in the sense
that they are changing over a relatively long period) to enable it to
classify and value transient information and thus remain clear and
sane, so the city needs ‘fixes’—identifying points which have along
cycle of change by means of which things changing on a shorter
cycle can be valued and identified. With a few fixed and clear things,
the transient—housing, drug stores, advertising, sky signs, shops
and at shortest cycle of all, of course, people and their extensions,
clothes, cars and so on—are no longer a menace to sanity and
sense of structure, but can uninhibitedly reflect short-term mood
and need. If this distinction between the changing and the fixed
were observed there would be less need for elaborate contro! over
things for which no good case can be made for controlling, and
legislative energy could be concentrated on the long-term structure.
At the present time the road system seems an obviously fixed
thing, changing on a long-term cycle of up to seventy-five years
(even in Los Angeles the cycle is fairly long). The road system
deserves therefore to be treated as a fix. But it is a fix that connects,
and this makes its implications quite different to those of historical
fixes.

The non-building environment is increasingly transient: posters

change on a monthly cycle, sky signs on a half-yearly and shop
windows, clothing, magazines, and so on, on varying regular and
irregular cycles often related obscurely to each other.
The establishment of an zsthetic of change (or transience) is in
fact almost as important to the feeling for the structure as the
maintenance of the inviolability of the road system. 76 Diagram, Bakema
 3. Protection of areas of great natural beauty.
What is less obvious is the form dispersal communities must
take so that they will not become merely low-amenity suburbs of
stuffy townships.
People want a country retreat so that they can live closer to nature
and in a more disorganized way (or in a more organized but
quite different way, should they choose to go up a mountain or
into the arctic for rigorous physical/manhood-test conditions).
To really provide these conditions, the shack has either to be by
itself out of sight of other shacks (minimum 2 to 5 acres) or there
has to be a pocket of shacks crowded together, but surrounded
17 Berlin plan, hotel building, by ‘real country’.*
section, P.D.S. 1957 What can definitely be said about caravan sites, groups of holiday
bungalows, extended villages and so on, is that they must be
kept small (150-200 families) and well dispersed (3 miles apart or
so) and the inhabitants of these dispersed groups should use
the existing regional towns or newly created out-of-town shop-
ping centres (linked to the motorway system—for leisure-dis-
persal assumes motor cars) to do their shopping, and they should
NOT be built up into mechanically tidy satellite communities.
Leisure dispersal may well stimulate a demand in the built-up
city for maximum-convenience town apartments (no maintenance,
no outdoor space to keep up, maximum anonymity, maximum
ease of servicing and so on), and this usually means high density
blocks of 300 persons to the acre and up.
These sorts of ideas are, of course, the result of thinking about
human agglomerations, and cities in particular as ‘places’—the
architect's discipline—but if any of the ideas are to be realized,
they have to be introduced, legislated for, and administered, in
the field of politics.
Ideal City. A./P.S.

* It is this latter condition

that makes people unashamed
of the squalor of the caravan
site and the army camp—the
feeling that all round is the
wild, which was only a short
time ago where one stands;
and quite unrepentant
because nature can come back
and wipe out the mess. It is
only when the camp is as
large as Catterick, or as
permanent as Chicago, that
real despair sets in; nature
will never get back.

20-40mM

78 ‘We have to communicate tom

by built forms the next step in
the evolution of the structure
of social relationships.’ Berlin
law courts and parliamentary
buildings, P.D.S. 1957 ee ia
69
An ‘esthetic of change’, paradoxically, generates a feeling of
security and stability because of our ability to recognize the pattern
of related cycles. AR., December 1960. A./P.S.
The first step is to realize a system of urban motorways. Not just
because we need more roads but because only they can make our
cities an extension of ourselves as we now wish to be.
AD., October 1958. A./P.S. 79 ‘Flow and speed.’ Berlin
plan, sketch, Sigmond. 1958

80 Diagram, Soho study

Dean/Richards. 1960
— TRAVELATOR LéEver

STORAGE

SERVICE SERVICE CAR PARK

Roar RoAD
Section and plan of the route building. A travelator B office tower | travelator 2 deceleration
lane 3 shop windows 4 shops 5 down to cross streets

Ls -

@ 2
|i m2 J
B Ll
Q EXISTING STREET 9
eS) eal ea ei ee
n

ibe
oC
Ip,

ei
ee
EXISTING STREET

=)
EXISTING EXISTING

70
In the past cities were This generation of architects must switch their focus to the
compact, transport was slow problem of making the community structure more comprehen-
and people lived and worked sible; and this is not only a matter of ‘city planning’, but must
close to one another. A alter the nature of architecture itself—at least as far as the nature
great deal of movement was of architecture has been understood since the Renaissance.
on foot, and people could AR., December, 1960. A./P.S.
meet one another quickly and
easily. A few men such as
Howard and Soria y Mata saw In the complex of associations which is a community, social
the importance of using cohesion can only be achieved if ease of movement is possible.
transport as an element to The assumption that a community can be created by geographic
give a new form fo the city. isolation is invalid. Real social groups cut across geographical
The form of future cities will barriers, and the principal aid to social cohesion is looseness of
depend on the decisions groupings and ease of communications rather than the rigid
made now. To plan a fully isolation of arbitrary sections of the total community with impos-
motorised city is possible sibly difficult communications.
today, and for some countries,
where the economy of the SOCIAL ORDER
country is inexorably bound
to the motor industry, such ENVIRONMENT
cities will be inevitable. x
The second possibility will be
to allow for a balance of CHANGES OF
use between private and
ATTITUDE
public transport, and it is
‘Uppercase’, 3. A./P.S.
this which is considered to
be the most valid solution, at
least in densely populated
countries.
‘New Movement in Cities’, 1966,
Brian Richards The esthetic of the buildings in an urban environment should
reflect the appropriate cycle of change.
‘Fixes’ should look fixed and ‘transients’ transient, even if their
actual life as a building (so called permanent construction) is
the same.
In the related cycles-of-change of a community, certain historical
buildings are often regarded as fixed in perpetuity, and are indeed
fixed as long as they are socially felt to be important. Others, like
law courts or municipal buildings, have almost unchanging
functions, or—like power stations and heavy industrial plants—
represent investments too massive to be altered frequently.
These are the architectural fixes; the architectural transients are
the shops, and houses and similar small structures, which are
added to, altered or completely rebuilt on a short-term cycle of
change.
AR., December, 1960. A./P.S.

Today we are involved in mass production, mass distribution,

mass consumption, mass housing, mass education, mass
leisure. We are especially concerned with the relationships
between these mass activities. We have to define the use of public
and private transport, from rocket ships to bicycles, and to relate
their different scales of speed to each other and to man as he
continues to be despite these hurrying marvels. These problems
are most acute where the mass is greatest, i.e. in our cities and
urban regions. The constant and rapid evolution of our society
will not allow the stratification of cities. The question is not to
build flexible buildings but to establish an environment in which
buildings appropriate to their function may occur, and to en-
courage an interaction between these buildings and their environ-
ment. It is clear that no formal composition can provide an answer
to this problem; for the nature of all formal composition is static,
precise, and fixed. Buildings which formerly took fifty years to
fail, now fail in five. We assume that technology will solve the
problem of the five-year economic life by considering the total
economic context. Our problem is to seek a way to allow the five-
year building to occur when and where it is needed. The object
is not to make the building flexible but to make the urban complex
flexible enough to foster short-life buildings as well as long-lived
ones.
‘Carré Bleu’, 3, 1961. Candilis, Josic, Woods

71
 eee

fee
3

4 vmv1 v ‘3
ee
ats.
Prem

a
, Ped Peete >

<< pee
SSSFSESS~
Pers eae Nias *“ s
Nort Taoiectee
>>>
Veees Sane AIPA a
sys: Soest
es &AF 5 334 igh las
<

ead he y= } safes ofc cde Be

v

ee
~ PAR jh, ¢

oe te
‘ : fo gyre sae H k
ci) ade v a septic g ees: re hs i
eee fore hese. t Tet ome 4 bis, ZN v :
oe
oe
os
PE Pk= oho
aoe
Varah
Meek
RON Wiese ee
en
E) Se ad eae % Re SR‘ Ie
iB
ie Sane at

Setv
. v t

SI

81 Ideogram of existing traffic

movement, Philadelphia
study, Kahn. On the same
streets trolleys, buses, trucks
and cars with varying speeds,
purposes and destinations

82Project for Bochum

University, Candilis, Josic,
Woods. Plan showing service
road access
 The time has come, | believe, to approach architecture urban-
istically and urbanism architecturally.

The present situation is due, among other things, to a wrong con-

ception of the relation part-whole. The result, of course, is weak
architecture and atrocious urbanism. Whereas the dilemma of
most contemporary building lurks in the half-hearted way the
available background is understood and handled, the dilemma of
most contemporary urbanism lurks in the intrinsic insufficiency
of the available background, quite apart from the half-hearted way
it is understood or handled. And this brings me on to the problem
of number and multiplicity. We’ve forgotten most of what there is
to know about the esthetics of the single thing, whilst we know
little yet about the esthetics of multiple things. The capacity
to impart order within a single thing—to make it rest within itself
is unfortunately no longer ours and that's a terrible thing—for we
Bae esas
University, teocrenJosic.
Candilis, can't do without classical harmony. The capacity to impart order
Woods. Plan showing at the same time to a multiplicity of things is as unfortunately not
POMEL Dat tie hoa yet ours, and that’s a terrible thing too, for we can't do without
. ine . . rf
paneralicgie rimnjaciabov’ what | wish to call harmony in motion.
spine of the whole university Nagele Schools. Van Eyck
Grouping of dwellings
Throughout the years ATBAT* has studied the problems of
‘habitat’ for the greatest number in all its aspects and peculiarities.
It has not arrived at an all-round solution, but one solution for each
case. It has found many solutions and many variants, but the
spirit of search remains the same, the spirit of the greatest number
with its laws and its disciplines.
Statement of principle:
It is impossible for each man to construct his house for himself.
It is for the architect to make it possible for the man to make his
house his home.
*Bodiansky, Candilis, Woods

84 Housing for Moroccot,

models, ATBAT Afrique 1951-2

+ Aix-en-Provence, 1953
Candilis and Woods pre-
sented as their Grille a series
of models and photographs
(set against 80ft. of Grille on
the Problem of the Bidonville
presented by Emery and
others of Algiers), the
technical brilliance of which
was the flash point annealing
the early Team 10 (then
including Lasdun, the
Howells, van Ginkel).
Golden Lane ‘deck’ housing
was the basis of the Smith-
son’s Grille, Alexander-
polder was presented by
Bakema and others of
Rotterdam.

74
 THE DOORN MANIFESTO
1. It is useless to consider the house except as a part of a
community owing to the inter-action of these on each other.

2. We should not waste our time codifying the elements of

the house until the other relationship has been crystallized.

3. ‘Habitat’ is concerned with the particular house in the

particular type of community.

4. Communities are the same everywhere.

(1) Detached house—farm.
(2) Village.
(3) Towns of various sorts (industrial/admin./special).
(4) Cities (multi-functional).

5. They can be shown in relationship to their environment

(habitat) in the Geddes vailey section.

| 2 3 (a) Fi 3 mc
- 2 ]

6. Any community must be internally convenient—have

ease of circulation; in consequence, whatever type of
transport is available, density must increase as population
increases, i.e. (1) is least dense, (4) is most dense.

7. We must therefore study the dwelling and the groupings

that are necessary to produce convenient communities at
various points on the valley section.

8. The appropriateness of any solution may lie in the field of

architectural invention rather than social anthropology.
Holland, 1954

It had become obvious that town building was beyond the scope
of purely analytical thinking—that the problem of human relations
fell through the net of the ‘four functions’. In an attempt to correct
this, the Doorn Manifesto proposed: ‘To comprehend the pattern
of human associations we must consider every community in its
particular environment’.
What exactly are the principles from which a town is to develop?
The principles of acommunity’s development can be derived from
the ecology of the situation, from a study of the human, the natural
and the constructed, and their action on each other.
If the validity of the form of a community rests in the pattern of
life, then it follows that the first principle should be continuous
objective analysis of the human structure and its change.
Such an analysis would not only include ‘what happens’, ‘the
organisms’ habits, modes of life and relations to their surround-
ings’, such things as living in certain places, going to school,
travelling to work and visiting shops, but also ‘what motivates’
the reasons for going to particular schools, choosing that type
of work and visiting those particular shops. In other words, trying
to uncover a pattern of reality which includes human aspirations.
The social structure to which the town-planner has to give form
is not only different but much more complex than ever before.
The various public services make the family more and more
independent of actual physical contact with the rest of the com-
munity and more turned in on itself.
Such factors would seemto make incomprehensible the continued
acceptance of forms of dwellings and their means of access
which differ very little from those which satisfied the social
reformers’ dream before the first world war.

75
Up to now the house is built down to the smallest detail and man
is pressed into this dwelling—in spirit the same from Scotland to
Ghana—and adapts himself as best he may to the life that the
architect furnishes him with.
We must prepare the ‘habitat’ only to the point at which man can
take over.
We aim to provide a framework in which man can again be master
of his home.
In Morocco, as in all countries which are developing rapidly, the
fundamental problem is that of housing ‘le plus grand nombre’.
The question is one of housing the Mussulman population who live
in the huge ‘bidonvilles’ on the outskirts of the great urban centres.
According to statistics about 70 per cent. of the population of
‘bidonvilles’ come from south of the Atlas, their original habitat is
therefore collective housing (vide the Casbahs and mountain
villages).
In accordance with the ethical and climatic conditions, the dwelling
of a Moroccan family consists of rooms which open on to an interior
court, a patio flooded with sunshine. This patio is the true hearth,
the meeting place of the family, and is enclosed by high walls to
ensure complete privacy.
ATBAT AFRIQUE set itself the task of finding a multi-storey
solution where the patios would be flooded with sun and at the
same time the rooms accessed from it would be protected and the
whole completely private. AD., January 1955. Candilis 85 Section and plan Moroccan
housing for Moslems. ATBAT
Afrique. 1951-2

The Golden Lane Deck Housing project is similariy concerned

with the problem of identity.
It proposes that a community should be built up from a hierarchy
of associational elements and tries to express these various levels
of association (THE HOUSE, THE STREET, THE DISTRICT, THE
CITY).
It is important to realize that the terms used: Street, District, etc.,* * Concerning the size and
shape of community sub-
are not to be taken as the reality, but as the idea, and that it is our division; it must first be
recognized that in modern
task to find new equivalents for these forms of association for our urban society there are no
natural groupings above the
new, non-demonstrative, society. level of the family. We must
furthermore recognize that
The problem of re-identifying man with his environment (contenu many recognizable social
entities in existing settle-
et contenant) cannot be achieved by using historical forms of house- ments—say that of the street
in a mining village—have
groupings, streets, squares, greens, etc., as the social reality they been created by the built
form. A valid social entity can
presented no longer exists. result from architectural
decisions. That is, decisions
which include consideration
In the complex of association that is a community, social cohesion of plastic organization—the
shape of the community.
can only be achieved if ease of movement is possible, and this
provides us with our second law, that height (density) should
increase as the total population increases, and vice versa. In the
context of a large city with high buildings, in order to keep ease of
movement, we propose a multi-level city with residential ‘streets-

76
 This is particularly so when one considers the increasing use of
the car. It must be assumed that we will approach the American
standard of mobility. A footpath off a windy ill-defined village
green is a poor link between a heated car and a heated house.
For the design of buildings and layout of towns in tropical areas,
it is an accepted method to establish the general principles of
design by considering the ways in which the bad effects of the
ciimate can be ameliorated and its beneficial effects exploited.
In England it is rainy and cold for about eight months every year.
This would seem to call for houses that would both give and look
as if they gave, all-round protection. Double walls, double roofs,
double windows, covered approaches, covered drying yards and
possibly covered means of access.

{ 86 Plans Moroccan housing

‘ showing the staggered patio
‘ stacking system, ATBAT
. Afrique. 1951-2

Ze

87 Street equivalents, deck

housing, drawing, P.D.S. 1953

| 88 Street mesh in the air,

basic diagram, P.D.S. 1951

shiek

89 ‘Nehru humping a load of

hay over a balcony,’ collage,
| AM.S. 1952
in-the-air’. These are linked together in a multi-level continuous
complex, connected where necessary to work places and to those
ground elements that are necessary at each level of association.
Our hierarchy of associations is woven into a modulated continuum
representing the true complexity of human associations.
This conception is in direct opposition to the arbitrary isolation of
the so-called communities of the ‘Unité’ and the ‘neighbourhood’.
Weare of the opinion that such a hierarchy of human associations
should replace the functional hierarchy of the ‘Charte d’Athénes’.
CIAM 9, Aix-en-Provence, July 24th, 1953. A./P.S.

The assumption that a community can be created by geographic

isolation is invalid.
Real social groups cut across geographical barriers and the
principal aid to social cohesion is looseness of grouping and ease
of communications rather than the rigid isolation of arbitrary
sections of the total community with impossibly difficult communi-
cations, which characterize both English neighbourhood planning
and the ‘Unité’ concept of Le Corbusier.
The creation of non-arbitrary group spaces is the primary function
of the planner.
The basic group is obviously the family, traditionally the next social
grouping is the street (or square or green,any word that by definition
implies enclosure or belonging, thus ‘in our street’ but ‘on the
road’), the next, district, and finally the city. It is the job of the
planner to make apparent these groupings as finite plastic realities.
In the suburbs and slums the vital relationship between the house
and the street survives, children run about, (the street is com-
paratively quiet), people stop and talk, dismantled vehicles are
parked; in the back gardens are pigeons and ferrets, and the shops
are round the corner; you know the milkman, you are outside your
house in your street.
The house, the shell which fits man’s back, looks inward to family
and outward to society and its organization should reflect this
duality of orientation, and the looseness of organization and ease
of communication essential to the largest community should be
present in this the smallest.
The house is the first finite city element.
Houses can be arranged in such a way, with only such additional 90 A bad series of diagrams of
an important problem—the
things that prove necessary to sustain physical and spiritual life, increase of scale of the parts
tuned to the increase of size of
that a new finite thing, the plastic expression of primary community the whole, P.D.S. 1956
is created.
The street is our second finite city element.
The street is an extension of the house, in it children learn for the
first time of the world outside the family, a microcosmic world in
which the street games change with the seasons and the hours are
reflected in the cycle of street activity.

78
 The English climate is not characterized by intensity, but by
changeability. The house, therefore, should be capable of
grasping what fine weather it can get, grasping solar heat through
south windows into all rooms and giving easy access to sheltered
patios, roof gardens or terraces which can be arranged in a
moment to catch the pleasures of our climate and then closed up
in a moment so that we can ignore it. Such an attitude towards
prorecuen and changeability could guide the form of the whole
ayout.
Any new development exists in a complex of old ones. It must
revalidate, by modifying them, the forms of the old communities.
The concept of a balanced self-contained community is both
theoretically untenable and practically wasteful. The rejection of
this conception necessitates a complete change of attitude. The
planner is no longer the social reformer but a technician in the
field of form, who cannot rely on community centres, communal
laundries, community rooms, etc., to camouflage the fact that the
settlement as a whole is incomprehensible. Certainly in planning
a new development, the size of the new community in terms of
population would have to be estimated from the beginning as is
the present procedure, to enable a suitable site to be chosen and
the links—roads, drainage, power, etc.—to the existing complex
to be planned.
But municipal pre-planning cannot create the form of a new
community. Form is generated, in part, by response to existing
form, and in part, by response to the Zeitgeist—which cannot be
pre-planned. Every addition to a community, every change of
circumstance will generate a new response.
An aspect of this response is scale—the way in which the new
part is organized plastically to give it meaning within the whole
complex. As the complex changes with the addition of new parts,
so the scale of the parts must change in order that they and the
whole remain a dynamic response to each other.
Scale has something to do with size but more to do with the effect
of size.
AD., July, 1956. A./P.S.

91 Ideogram of net of human

relations, P.D.S. a constellation
with different values of
different parts in an immensely
complicated web crossing and
recrossing. Brubeck! a pattern
can emerge

The lack of love of architects for the problems of ‘the greater

number’ makes it so we don’t know how to do ‘housing’.
We must know how individuals and groups live with sun + wind
| think that an architect- + trees + horizon.
planner faced with the problem
The labour movements are out of date now we approach the
of s/um areas in St Louis has
to plan housing conditions to period of ‘you-and-me’.
improve the wellbeing of No more a society with speculative so-called labour market, but
the inhabitants, because more a society in which getting-aware-of is a right of everybody.
these inhabitants cannot do It is better to touch daily in overall-cloth-reality than to develop a
it themselves, having not the kind of Sunday-cloth-art style not based on what has to be done
organization talents. Often for those now called ‘the greater number’.
they did not create their own
conditions!
The art of discovering that ‘I’ am a great number. The process of
Bakema. 1960 getting familiar with the wonder called space.

79
But in suburb and slum as street succeeds street it is soon evident
that although district names survive, as physical entities they no
longer exist, but we all know that once upon a time those streets
were arranged in such a way and with such additional things
that proved necessary to sustain physical and spiritual life to form
the third finite city element, the district, the plastic expression of
secondary community.
The difference between towns and cities is only one of size for
both are finite arrangements of districts, with only such additional
things that prove necessary to sustain physical and spiritual life.
The city is the ultimate community, ‘the tangible expression of an
economic region’.
To maintain looseness of grouping and ease of communication,
the density must increase as the population increases, and with
high densities if we are to retain the essential joys of sun, space
and verdure, we must build high.
In the past acceptance of the latter part of this thesis has led
to a form of vertical living in which the family is deprived of its
essential outdoor life, and contact with other families is difficult if
not impossible on the narrow balconies and landings that are their
sole means of communion and communication. Furthermore,
outside one’s immediate neighbours (often limited to three in
point blocks) the possibilities of forming the friendships which
constitute the ‘extended family’ are made difficult by complete
absence of horizontal communication at the same level and the
ineffectiveness of vertical communication.
The idea of ‘street’ has been forgotten.
It is the idea of street, not the reality of street, that is important—the
creation of effective group-spaces fulfilling the vital function of
identification and enclosure making the socially vital life-of-the-
streets possible.
At all densities such streets are possible by the creation of a true
street mesh in the air, each street having a large number of people
dependent on it for access and in addition some streets should be
thoroughfares—that is leading to places—so that they will each
acquire especial characteristics.
Be identified in fact. 92 Ideogram, A.M.S.

COUNTRY

Sl | 59 n Beab 8 Db
fa)

1S LAN D SCAPE
eBITAT IN ERD OCAFE
 Building is a function in this process.
Architectural form is developed by planning in which architects
and town planners have to work simultaneously and not hierar-
chically.
(After one year in the concentration camp.) During a conference of
architects and town planners in the Municipal Museum of Amster-
dam, 1944. Bakema

93 First ideogram of the | believe that, in a given material situation, the present ‘swelling’
animal, where deck housing is
seen as a large element of society has an arsenal of means. That unfortunate problem of
district, P.D.S. 1951 quantity, unsolved up to now, lies in the naturalistic manner in
which the heritage of the closed form is taken over in order to
solve other substances—the large quantity. The sooner we cast
off the shackles of the closed form (the form on the basis of which
we have been brought up and consequently often do not perceive
its deleterious effect), the sooner will we solve the basic task of
architecture.
| consider that the problem of quantity can be resolved without
lowering the standards by taking the open form as a basis.
The half-century of reducing architecture to one decision has
made it—and by the same token also the tenants—barren of the
potential energy of self-determination.
The open form, unlike the closed form, does not exclude the
energy of the tenant’s initiative, but on the contrary treats it as a
basic, organic and inseparable component element. This fact is
of a fundamental significance to the tenant’s psychology and
hence to the work output. The rhythm of our times—the elements
of which are attainments in the field of science, political changes,
cataclysms and the functioning of the closed form which appears
in a particularly drastic form in the faulty interpretation of indus-
trial material out of which emerges the monstrous shape of dull
standardization—causes that individuality to become lost in the
collective.
‘Carré Bleu’, 1961. Hansen

95 Deck housing. The street-

94 Deck housing diagrams of deck with its movement
east and west faces of in- threading through the more
dividua Junits, P.D.S. 1951 static living cells, P.D.S. 1952
Each part of each street to have sufficient people accessed from
it to become a social entity and be within reach of a much larger
number at the same level. Streets would be places and not corridors
or balconies. Thoroughfares where there are shops, post boxes,
telephone kiosks.
Where a street is purely residential the individual house and yard-
garden will provide a viable life pattern as a true street or square,
nothing is lost and elevation is gained.
The flat block disappears and vertical living becomes a reality.
‘Architects Year Book 5’, Golden Lane Project. A./P.S.
Each generation feels a new dissatisfaction, and conceives of a
new idea of order.
This is architecture.
Young architects today feel a monumental dissatisfaction with the
buildings they see going up around them. For them, the housing
96 Deck housing. First diagram
estates, the social centres and the blocks of flats are meaningless of the idea, P.D.S. 1951
and irrelevant. They feel that the majority of architects have lost 97 Bakema’s diagrams of
housing capable of growing
contact with reality and are building yesterday’s dreams when the with the family by addition
in pre-determined places of
rest of us have woken up in today. They are dissatisfied with the standard units. By planning
for growth the rights of the
ideas these buildings represent, the ideas of the Garden City individual are stimulated yet
maintained. General views and
Movement and the Rational Architecture Movement. plan

i t (OO me if Ie 1? La Vowen,

SSSI S
NFi
e es
ieee mao
Pts tts
ttt RAE
:
s
a
=

82
 Differentiation and unity through rhythm and sub-rhythm—an
old story a little forgotten. As | have said before, if we are to over-
come the menace of quantity faced with the terrific problem of
habitat for the greatest number, we shall have to extend our
esthetic sensibility: uncover the still hidden laws of what | have
called Harmony in Motion—the esthetics of number. Quantity
cannot be humanized without sensitive articulation of number.

This, by the way, can't be done as long as we don’t know what a

large number of people really is, or for that matter, what a single
person really is. Well, a kind of planning based on the physical
reality of place and occasion rather than on the abstraction of
space and time; a kind, to follow this lead, which is based on
awareness and subsequent realization of the right in-between,
since this is the common ground where split polarities can once
again become twinphenomena. This signifies a kind of planning
conceived as the built counterform of a more complete and
complex human reality than that which (apart from a few obvious
examples) finds a questionable harbour in hollow spaces the
modern habitat provides. A kind of planning above all which is
not merely the expression of human values, but which actually
constitutes their very counterform, a counterform in which they
can exist—survive so that man can be where he wants to be: at
98 Berlin plan, diagram, home no matter where he is.
P.D.S. 1958 Nagele Schools, 1960. Van Eyck

99 Ideogram of infill to a
village—completing and
making clear an old structure
so it can serve today’s needs. 100 City building, ideogram,
A.M.S. 1959 P.D.S. 1956
 These two movements achieved their built form by discovering the
esthetic means to achieving social programme. The Garden City
Movement is basically a social movement; Ebenezer Howard saw
in the idea of combining town and country a ‘Peaceful Path to
Real Reform’.
The image left in the mind by his book is one of a railway archi-
tecture for clean but bewildered working men. The Garden City
idea was Ebenezer Howard's, but its form came from Camillo Sitte,
who first conceived of ‘Town Design’.
Until Camillo Sitte it had not occurred to anyone that a town
could be anything other than the most convenient and significant
organization of the social hierarchy. After Camillo Sitte, meaning
was to give way to ‘Townscape’. The Garden Cities as realized owe
more to the misunderstanding of the medieval town than to the
reforming drive of the railway age.
From the Garden Cities has come forty years of town pianning
legislation.
In the more ‘progressive’ places, the Garden City tradition has
given way to the Rational Architecture Movement of the ‘thirties.
The social driving force of this movement was slum clearance, the
provision of sun, light, air, and green space in the over populated
cities. This social content was perfectly matched by the form of
functionalist architecture, the architecture of the academic period
which followed the great period of cubism, and dada, and de Stijl,
of the esprit nouveau.
This was the period of the minimum kitchen and the four functions,
the mechanical concept of architecture. Today in every city in
Europe we can see Rational Architecture being built. Multi-storey
flats running north-south in parallel blocks, just that distance
apart that permits winter sun to enter bottom storeys, and just that
high to get fully economic density occupation of the ground area.
Where the extent of development is sufficient we can see the work-
ing out of the theoretical isolates, dwelling, working, recreation (of
body and spirit), circulation; and we wonder how anyone could
possibly believe that in this lay the secret of town building.
The dissatisfaction we feel today is due to the inadequacy of either
of these Movements to provide an environment which gives form
to our generation’s idea of order. The historical built forms were not
arrived at by chance or Art, they achieved order through signifi-
cant organization, and the forms have a permanent validity, a
secret life, which outlives their direct usefulness. Each one of us
recognizes the Street, the Place, the Village Green, the Grand
Boulevard, the Kraal, or the Bidonville, as urban inventions,
extensions of the house and components of the town which satis-
fied the needs and aspirations of past generations in other places.
Why is it we cannotfind for each place the form for our generation?
In England the key problem is that of the ‘Council House’. A form

84
101 ‘Close Houses’ diagram of If you think back to the pioneer days of modern architecture you
detail make-up, P.D.S. 1955
will see that the Hilberseimers and the Le Corbusiers and the
Gropiuses were producing Ideal Towns in the Renaissance sense,
in the sense that their esthetic was in fact the classical esthetic,
one of fixed formal organization. Now the attitude of Team 10 is
that this is an unreal attitude towards towns, and we think that
planning is a problem of going on, rather than starting with a
clean sheet. We accept as a fixed fact that in any generation we
" PARKING can only do so much work, and we have to select the points at
which our action can have the most significant effect on the total
city structure, rather than try to envisage its complete reorganiza-
tion, which is just wishful thinking. Our current esthetic and
ideological aims are not ‘castles in the air’ but rather a sort of new
realism and new objectivity, a sort of radicalism about social and
A House building matters; and (to stress again) a matter of acting in a
3B Pedestrian close given situation.
PEDESs
G Covered porch
102 ‘Close Houses’ diagram of
linear organization, A.M.S.
i> Garden 1955

bear
ote
eRerp

103 ‘Urban re-identification’,

first diagram, P.D.S. 1952

: /

GO "tg

[§ 7 as
must be found for the house which is capable of being put together
with others of a similar sort so as to form bigger and equally
comprehensible elements which can be added to existing villages
and towns in such a way as to extend the traditional hierarchies
and not destroy them. The relationship of the country and the town,
the bank and the house, the school and the pub, is conveyed by
the form they take. Form is an active force, it creates the com-
munity, it is life itself made manifest. We are involved in mass
housing not as reformers, but as form givers. We must evolve an
architecture from the fabric of life itself, an equivalent of the
complexity of our way of thought, of our passion for the natural
world and our belief in the nobility of man.
Let us therefore start our thinking from the moment the man or
child steps outside his dwelling, here our responsibility starts, for
the individual has not the control over his extended environment
that he has over his house, which can become palace or pigsty
irrespective of what is provided in the first place.
We must try to find out in what way this basic contact should
take place, how many houses should be put together, what should
104 This diagram shows the
be their shared facilities—the equivalent to the village pump, sort of interval between the
major events of urban
continually questioning the arbitrariness of existing solutions. structure that are required
if we are to appreciate them
This is the basic step of the ecological approach to the problem as events. The interval
between them has increased
of habitat: the house is a particular house in a particular place, in distance but the timal
intervals are the same as
part of an existing community and it should try to extend the laws those of old cities such as
Bath, P.D.S.
and disciplines of that community. AD., June 1955. A.|P.S.

Consider for example the commuter—the Travelling Man.

The man going to—or returning from—work should be able to
find eye rest in the street scenes he passes. Housing in the mass
presents an essentially hostile face, there are few eye-rests. The
eye wants to see what the man can eat, can do, make, take, wear,
buy. The mind wants to receive suggestion for action—or relaxa-
tion—as a relief from tension if it has no wish or need to think
about work. The clerk, the mechanic, seeks release from work 105 A knowable area is the
area within which we are
when going home. A few gardens can be interesting, but forty tiny prepared to walk and there-
fore know in an intimate,
plots are a bore and the man hurries past head down. carnally connected way,
P2DiS?
The approach to the house forms the occupants’ link with society
as a whole: a lengthy climb up a stair; or down into a basement; up
an avenue; up an estate road past twenty or forty semi-detached
houses; along an air-conditioned, artificially lit corridor.
These are men’s links with society, the vistas down which man
looks at his world.
In the housing areas there are certain simple ‘principles of
mobility’.
A road must: feel as if it is going somewhere; North or South;
towards or away from; orientate you, even if itis pitch dark orona
grey day.
Car movement is flow movement, not the irregular stopping and
starting; changing direction; turning around, of the walker.
 | believe that the use of space is not merely a statistical matter.
One’s home is one’s home because one has learnt to use its
spaces, its bricks and mortar. The neighbourhood outside it,
the quarter of the town in which it is placed and the town, even
the region, should be extensions of this space, coherent and
offering many choices of activity. All too frequently today, each
successive layer is a barrier and the home is a refuge from a dark
and unknowable environment.
May, 1960. J.V.

The question of the optimum density for various sorts of family

life is tied up with the increased availability of personal transport
and the relationship of the car to the house. If the caris to bea
convenience and a pleasure, it must be easy to use it. A family
excursion with babies and baskets and buckets and spades, from
the fifteenth floor of an access balcony two-lift slab block via an
underground garage can be no picnic. Then there is the problem
of the real space needs of family life, especially for children.
Everyone needs a bit of sheltered outdoor space as an extension
lt is now accepted that the to his house. This space can also serve the needs of children up
making of good places to live to two or three years old, but from then on children need more
in involves more than the and more space. Space to play safely close by until seven years
provision of good houses. old or so, and space for wild running and little excursions until
It is also widely understood eleven, and then places to go and do things in until they are
that the housing group within almost grown up.
the neighbourhood needs to be Maybe none of these requirements can be met simply and
visually comprehensible and pleasurably at densities much above 70 p.p.a.
that the housing group is the Of course there are lots of people to whom ‘hotel life’, by which is
first step towards establishing meant the maximum of privacy, anonymity, and simplicity of
a form of identity beyond the service, is suitable and pleasurable—perhaps 40 per cent. of the
household. population of big cities, especially where the population is grow-
But it is here that theory and ing older. These people are in fact well served by conventional
practice stop. Housing groups forms of high building such as the Lake Shore Drive apartments
aggregated into neighbour- or the Swedish point blocks, where the access is swift, secret,
hoods of roughly like size, and completely enclosed and the windows look out into anony-
which are thought of as objects mous space. Such buildings situated near the city centres give a
put down in a void, the addi- maximum of convenience for students, single people, childless
tional community facilities, as couples, and grown-up families. Their density can be very high
they become necessary, are indeed, up to 300 p.p.a.
placed around.
A.M.S. Family living, except in exceptional circumstances, is best served
by relatively low density development, whatever its location.
It is common sense to suppose AD., April, 1959. Scatter. A./P.S.
that as far as establishing
identity is concerned, the
neighbourhoods would be Architecture can assist man’s homecoming. Since | like to
better off of different size, and identify architecture with whatever it can effect in human terms,
different density and different | like to think of it as the constructed counterform of perpetual
intensity of use. But it would homecoming. When | speak of house or city as a bunch of places,
be made to impose a difference | imply that you cannot leave a real place without entering another
on identical needs. We have no —if it’s a real ‘bunch’. Departure must mean entry. (This goes
right to turn houses into naturally for both place and occasion in time and space.) Space
towers or casbahs for purely is the appreciation of it.
formal reasons. Leaving ‘home’ and going ‘home’ are difficult matters both ways.
AD., December 1960. P.D.S. Van Eyck

Let us for a moment imagine

a public space beautifully Unfortunately, almost all known sorts of low-density development
articulated with a single seat are inadequate, in their form, in their system of construction, and
meaningfully situated under in their system of access, for our present way of life. And, most
serious of all, they are ‘culturally obsolete’. To overcome ‘cultural
a tree. The sun is relentless.
1 am very tired and very sur- obsolescence’ is not only a matter of finding the right living
prised to encounter a place so pattern for our present way of life and the equipment that serves
it, but it is also a matter of finding the correct symbols to satisfy
well accommodated to my
inclination and so apparently our present cultural aspirations.
beautiful too. Now, what if | Up to now most architects have evaded the issue and are building
discover a warning : wet paint! imitation market-towns both inside and around our great cities,
on the seat at the last moment ? denying them the right to be urban forms.
Or one that says: for whites Conversely, we suggest that in small places multi-level solutions
only!? The space for me—hot, are absurd, for no one wants to lose touch with the earth if he
tired and perhaps dark can avoid it. But if it is unavoidable by pressure or density, out-
skinned, is all at once no door space must be created directly outside the dwelling; indeed
longer the place | thought it it is in a city that this outdoor space becomes vital.
was. Will / still think it A./P.S.

87
To flow means to move evenly at speeds to suit functions, from
fast on national roads, to slow on house access roads.
AD., October 1958. A./P.S.

We are least sure of solutions for housing very large groups of

people. But if, as we suspect, the trend is towards a ‘Leisure
Society’, which requires ease of communication and easy func-
tioning houses, we might, by having unloaded the population of
the metropolis via our transport network to ail over the country to
areas spoiling for insufficient use, close-in on a vastly different
problem—metropolis, emptied of many of its problems of too dis-
similar, conflicting uses.
Reality will lie somewhere between what exists, and an ideal city
of a ‘Leisure Society’ whose working population retreat for long
weekends long distances to the family grounds.
People could be helped to choose between city, town, village, or
hamlet life. And alongside our present schools’ grading system
we might think of a classification as to how much stress and tension
a person is capable of bearing, and this information should be
used to help the choice of a career by making it clear whether the
individual would be more suited to the quieter tensions of country
life or to those tensions and pressures of a metropolitan life.
Meanwhile, one of our primary aims in trying to find adequate
solutions for larger groups of houses is to make a haven for the
individual dwelling. Within this haven the individual should be 106 Kemmerland plans,
Bakema
able to establish his identity, find meaning for the small acts of his
or her daily life—the chores of the housewife—and ultimately some
satisfaction and sense of well-being in being there at all. A..S., 1954
We cannot at the present time aim to teach in the accepted
academic sense, there is no contemporary grammar of space. We
would avoid all educational methods which aim to perpetuate the
‘Domaine Batie’ as we know it. All we can do within education is to
expose the spatial problems which we cannot ourselves resolve.
This orientation towards space is particularly important at a time
when the cosmos physically within reach is expanding with
terrible rapidity. Between the physical limits of the human body and
the orbit of a man-made planet, there lies the inarticulate vastness
of space to be humanized. Symposium on Education’, 1959. J.V.
The word ‘cluster’ meaning a specific pattern of association has
been introduced to replace such.group concepts as ‘house, street,
district, city’ (community sub-divisions), or ‘isolate, village, town,
city’ (group entities), which are too loaded with historical overtones.
Any coming together is ‘cluster’; cluster is a sort of clearing-house
term during the period of creation of new types. Certain studies
have been undertaken as to the nature of ‘cluster’.
The intention of these studies, in which the conditions were largely
made-up and not ‘real’ was to show in terms of actual built forms
that a new approach to urbanism was possible. In other words it
was to present an ‘Image’. A new esthetic is postulated as well
as a new way Of life. ‘Uppercase 3’. A.|P.S.

88
beautiful now that it is im- At Bagnols-sur-Ceze we tried, without being antiquarians, to
possible for me to experience construct with today’s given elements and today’s technical,
whether it really is. Certainly aN and social disciplines something which ties in with
not, for the circumstance of the old.
the seat—the physical place Each flat has double orientation, opening to the splendid sur-
focus—makes it inaccessible. rounding landscape and to theinside outdoor space, whichisin no
We can also ask what the manner closed in, but reassuring and alive with its shopping
emotional impact of the space centres, playing fields, and swimming pool. We tried to avoid
would have been, had the uniformity and symmetry, to find an organic disposition of these
seat been accessible on elements, which is usually, traditionally, the result of a long
previous occasions, or what development in time.
it would have been had it It was necessary to give a specific character to the town, to
been inaccessible on previous eliminate the appearance of uniformity, to make the city come
occasions, but now for the alive. Thus each natural obstacle, each valid element of the past,
first time accessible. Space such as old parks and gardens, the open-air theatre, ruins, wells
experience, / repeat, is the and characteristic farms are respected, kept, and are used as
reward of place experience. dramatization in the composition of the whole, working within
The doorway to architecture housing regulations, a series of different types of apartment build-
and urbanism has no gates ings were found which still keep the same conceptual standards.
and no warnings in the nature AD., May, 1960. Georges Candilis
of the one discovered on the
dry seat. But it is inaccessible,
nevertheless, to all those who
may still want them there.
Van Eyck
The wonderful thing about architecture is that it's an art—just
that. The terrible thing about architects is that they are not
always artists. Worse, they’re semi-artists (tiny omnitects!)—and
that’s the last thing they should be—comfortably engaged in
something super. But architecture is neither a semi nor a super
art—it’s an art, simply that, not an omnibus for nobody—and that’s
a crucial thing in itself. For almost half a century, architects have
been tampering with the principle of art, squeezing it into the
jacket of semi-science—not science, oh no—semi-science applied!

( > bp
| mean technology and the kind of rubbish that clings to the
technological slant—progress, weak mechanical thinking; grovell-
ing naturalism; sentimental social thinking, antiseptics. Compared
or with the other arts, compared with
especially urbanism, have made a very poor show.
science, architecture, and

Far from expanding reality as the others have done, architects

LN
have contracted reality—side-tracked the issue of contemporary
thinking. You all know how suspicious architects have been of

Bin
the few exceptions—those that defy measurement in grams or
( millimetres, fall through the coarse mesh of four functions and are
therefore regarded as contraband—hence all the graphic surfaces
with hollowness on both sides and everybody a nobody on either
side. Heavens, that we should have been fooled so long.
(eSa Architecture is an art and we’re not going to twist it into some-
thing else because we can't live up to what it is, we’re not going
to re-define it so as to make it fit neatly round a lack of creative
potential. Modern architecture, I'll say this here, has (more often
107 Terraced infill housing, than not) been dishonest with a halo of honesty.
diagram, P.D.S. 1955 Otterlo Meeting. Edited version. Van Eyck

jn
Te WAU
108 Low-terraced housing,
diagram, P.D.S.

89
In the centuries before the advent of the architect-town-planner,
habitat was the result of the interaction of cells (houses) and
environment. In the years since, it has become an arithmetical
progression from cell (house) to mass-housing, and environment
a by-product of cell-planning. This single-mindedness was per-
haps necessary to solve the problem of the production of houses
in massive quantities, but it has led architects and planners to the
present absurdity of treating habitat as a means of self-expression,
a plastic universe where houses are building blocks for the child-
architect to play with. :
The problem of production, at least from a design standpoint, has
been solved. Each year more and better cells are made and still
the search for the optimum cell goes on. The technique of plan-
ning homes or flats is in continual progression and, although the
building industry remains archaic, we have achieved today a
perfection in design (within the limits of price and volume imposed
in most countries) far in excess of what was thought possible
fifteen years ago.
The question of what to do with the cells that are produced in
such numbers has almost invariably been resolved by a more or
less new, more or less ingenious plastic arrangement. Cells have
been stacked, staggered or spread out in an endless variation of
geometric arrangement to make an endless series of virtually
identical housing schemes, from Stockholm to Algiers and from
Moscow to London. 109 Diagram, Wewerka.
Cities are the compact
The result is desolation. Nothing so resembles a plan masse as bundles of overlaid net-
structures, Paris, St.W.
another plan masse. A crossword puzzle universe is springing up
around every large city in Europe.
This planning process, from cell to block of flats to plan masse,
leads only to architectural symbolism. For the justification of the
use and disposition of towers, slabs and long or staggered walk-
ups is usually based on some sort of symbolism; towers as sym-
bols of the structure of the scheme, or of gateway, or of centre,
etc. The purely gratuitous esthetic reason is seldom avowed and
the economic basis of such planning is so spurious in the face,
for instance, of national defence budgets, that only the civil
servant’s completely compartmented mind can accept it. Thus in
the same way that architects used to hide all the expressions of
life behind a neo-classic facade, they are now reduced to com-
bining plastic art and plumbing in the search for self-expression.
If planning continues to proceed from cell to plan masse, it must
remain systematic (additive), and the occasional tower block only
serves to accentuate its symbolic and static nature. The addition,
almost as an afterthought, of commercial or civic centres, of
schools and playgrounds, fitted in to furnish empty spaces in the
site, is a confirmation of the deficiency in this concept of planning.
Fortunately, the commercial centre is usually at the centre of
gravity (usually symbolized by a tower block) but the other pro-
longements du logis are often only put in where blocks of flats
wouldn’t look good.

90
 TNHUMAN !!
Wie

110 ‘Zone’ scheme. A. A. Thesis The house is the smallest building to be found in village, town or
Plan and general view,
Voelcker/Darbyshire/Crook, city, yet, in aggregate, housing occupies a greater volume of
1952 space than the public buildings which serve it. Therefore, the
configurations which groups of houses take, whether they are
separate, horizontally attached, orvertically stacked, will determine
to a greater extent than any other group of buildings the form which
village, town or city will take. Furthermore, since these configura-
tions are built up from individual houses they present a problem
which is characteristic and significant at the present time, the
control and positive use of repetition towards human ends.
The formal significance of housing is matched by its ecological
significance. The house is the centre from which living extends
and to which it returns; it contains in embryo all the organs of
village, town and city; the kitchen, for example, becomes the
workshop, factory, warehouse and multiple store of the great
city, the living room becomes the cinema, library and dance hall.
If village, town and city are to be comprehensible extensions of
living and not unknowable forces within which the house is
nothing but a refuge, the connections between the embryo and
its development need to be apparent. The design of the house
must imply what lies outside.
At a time when architect and urbanist build for vast numbers of
people, the form of the house is determined not by the particular
person who is to live in it nor even by the particular class or
occupational group, but rather by the context in which it is placed.
The house is a Town House, a City Dwelling or a Cottage. While
the context as it is found determines the form of the house, the
configurations which these houses will take in aggregate will
be the agents through which the inevitable forces of subsequent
change, growth and decay are controlled and directed. Housing in
its social role as an image, and on account of its peculiar formal
characteristics, is the most potent force at work in the urban
fabric. The housing group is the modulus of living; it is at once
the instrument of urban research, the means of urban develop-
ment and an end product of the constructed image.
AAJ., June 11th, 1957. J.V.

in new layouts the road/building relationship should indicate

by their form the relative importance of the route. In an existing
road system this could be done with coloured markers, and at
night by coloured lights.
Roads are also places.
Consider for example the social implications of the arrangement
of houses around a small green, parking lot, or turn-around,
which puts all movement under continuous social scrutiny.
AD., October, 1958. A./P.S.

91
The housing scheme which starts from an additive system
invariably ends in formalism. The idea of cluster, so clear in the
cell or in the block of flats, which is a composite cell, is non-
existent in the greater scale of the housing scheme.
The plan masse as a plastic or esthetic arrangement of homes
or flats does not work in our mobile civilization. Through its very
sensitivity, it tends towards a fixed, immobile, static form—an
optimum form based on contemporary esthetic. These fleeting
images are built to last fifty or a hundred years and in one-tenth of
that time the image is already out of date. The concept of plan
masse is static, its form is closed. It is a predetermined, congealed
form, incapable of change in a changing milieu.
Caen Hérouville, ‘Stem
The problem of habitat, which is cell plus activity, is only half development’, Woods. 1961
solved by plan masse, since plan masse is concerned only with 111 The synthesis of parking
lots, pedestrian ways, and lift
cell and not with environment or activity. It gives only one dimen- points becomes the generator
of the urban element
sion of habitat. In an urban complex the idea of p/an masse as an
independent, plastic arrangement does not correspond to the basic
112 The linear centre is
axiom that every extension to the city is an extension of the city exclusive to pedestrians and is
served by vehicles, and it re-
and cannot be considered as a self-contained unit, isolated by its establishes the street as the
primary and permanent
introspective nature from the rest of society. function of urbanism
It seems clear then that the esthetic, monumental or symbolic
grouping of cells (hence, of families), in the tradition of La Grande
Architecture, leaves out too many factors of human ecology. It is
the wrong tool for the job.
Today we are concerned more and more, in the face of a profound
transformation in economy (from production to consumption as a 113 From the parking lot, one
moves onto an independent
goal) and in ethics (from interior moral discipline to social inter- pedestrian network at all levels
(served by vertical mechanical
relationship), with what we call mobility so as not to use a more circulation)

precise term. For architects, mobility has several connotations;

in terms of movement it signifies the shift from 24 miles per hour
to 60, 100 or 500 miles per hour. In terms of time it means the
appreciation of a fourth dimension, i.e. change on a short-time
cycle. In terms of economy, it means rapid mass-distribution, 114and 115 Schemes showing
the linear organization of
consonant with the potentialities of mass-production and mass- activities and the proposed
grouping of cells round the
consumption. In terms of housing, it means the easy, unquestion- linear centre

ing rootlessness of the urban population. Architects and planners

are principally concerned with mobility, in all its connotations, asa
diagnostic tool to new forms.
It has been found, in the planning of housing units, that the most
effective way to proceed is to start with those elements which can
first be determined and defined (entry, kitchen, bath, etc.) and to
cluster the rooms around these services. This concept of planning
by dissociation is general practice today. First the core is deter-
mined, then the cluster is formed. This is true for one-family houses
as well as for blocks of flats, and as a planning process usually
results in good and efficient design. Servant and served, as Louis
Kahn puts it, are distinguished and the core brings clarity and
organization to the cluster.
The idea of cluster in the cell proceeds from core. Core is usually
expressed in the plan masse or in the satellite towns, as a fixed
point in the general scheme (a centre of gravity which results from
92
93
massing), out of contact with the greater part of the homes. There
is generally no correspondence between the scale of core and the
scale of development. In view of the failure of the traditional
architectural tool, p/an masse, to cope with the accelerated crea-
tion of habitat, it is proposed that planning be reconsidered as
proceeding from stem to cluster (rather than from cell to symbol),
as in the design of cells one proceeds from core to cluster.
In this way it is felt that a basic structure may be determined; this
structure or stem includes all the servants of homes, all the pro-
longements du logis ; commercial, cultural, educational, and leisure
activities, as well as roads, walkways and services. These are the
factors which vary from place to place and from year to year; and,
taken as determinants of a scheme, can give organization and iden-
tity of a higher order than that obtained from plastic arrangement.
Stem is considered not only as a link between additive cells, but
as the generator of habitat. It provides the environment in which
the cells may function. The design of this basic structure influences
the design of the cells it serves. If the structure itself incorporates,
as it must, the ideas of mobility and growth and change, these
characteristics will necessarily affect the design of the cells.
While the basis of planning and architectural design is contained
in Louis Kahn’s distinction of servant and served, in planning, the
servant may have one scale of temporal validity, while the served
has another. The temporal validity of the home is the life of the
family (approximately twenty-five years), that of the stem varies
with its social and economic milieu.
The validity of the servant or stem is that which society gives it.
It varies for the whole of stem, and within the stem varies from one
Place is the appreciation of
function to another. It is felt that stem will change constantly to space; that is how | see it.
reflect the mobility of society. These two or several scales of If | say: space represents the
appreciation of it, my purpose
validity may be superimposed, as in planning the systems of is again to dethrone abstract
pedestrian and vehicular traffic are superimposed. properties attributed fo it
academically. Now space-
The plan of a housing scheme may be based, for example, on a meaning need not be pre-
pattern of movement valid today. In ten years the pattern of move- ordained or implicitly defined
in the form. It is not merely
ment will almost certainly change. The plan will then tend to re- what a space sets out to effect
establish a new validity for the new pattern. This possibility must be in human terms, that gives it
place value, but what it is
conserved. The door to the future must be left open. Stem is able to gather and transmit.
conditioned by mobility. Its dimensions are given not in measures van Eyck

of length but of speed: 24 miles per hour and 60 miles per hour. It
can provide the link between these measures of speed as it can
between the measures of validity (the 25- and 5-year cycles). The
process of planning from stem to cluster will tend to re-establish
density and scale in habitat. The principle of equalization of spaces
in the occupying of a given site will disappear and exterior space
can again be small or medium as well as big and empty. The street,
destroyed by the combined assaults of the automobile and the
Charte d’Athénes, may be revalidated if it is considered as a place,
as well as a way from one place to another. Its form or spatial
content will be different from that of previous streets, but the idea
of street (as distinct from road) is inherent in the idea of stem.
AD., May 1960. Woods
94
116 The car is halted at the 117 The linear centre, enables
appropriate point, and vertical the scheme to be realized in
mechanical circulation is successive stages, each section
located at key points in the comprising all the elements
scheme, Caen that go to make up ‘habitat’,
each section becoming a new
organic section linked to the
others

118 Toulouse-le Mirail project, We propose:

diagram, Candilis, Woods,
Josic. 1961
1. To distribute ancillary activities throughout the domain of
housing instead of localizing them in certain fixed places, to
bring together as many activities as possible, to bring the sum of
life to all the parts. A linear organization (a line has neither shape
nor size) is the truest reflection of an open society.
2. To define the use of the automobile which, covering greater
distances in shorter times, enables us to imagine a totally new
organism in which vehicular and pedestrian traffic is entirely
independent.
3. To determine points of contact between transportation and
dwelling as a way towards the realization of a collectivity and
hence to the identification of the individual.
4. To re-establish multiple access in collective dwellings, to have
more than one way into one’s house.
‘Carré Bleu’, 3, 1961. Candilis, Josic, Woods

What is a door? A flat surface with hinges and a lock constituting

a hard terrifying border line? When you pass through a door like
that are you not divided? Split into two—perhaps you no longer
notice! Just think of it: a rectangle. What hair-raising poverty.
Is that the reality of a door?
van Eyck

To be hard-headed and objective one has to study with sociolo-

gists, but perhaps their discipline has to extend itself before it
can be useful.
PEDES:

95
Doorstep
There’s one more thing that has been growing in my mind ever
since the Smithsons uttered the word doorstep at Aix. It hasn't
left me ever since. I've been mulling over it, expanding the meaning
as far as | could stretch it. I've even gone so far as to identify it
with what architecture as such should accomplish. To establish
the in-between is to reconcile conflicting polarities. Provide the
place where they can interchange and you re-establish the original
twinphenomena. | called this ‘la plus grande réalité du seuil’ in
Dubrovnic.
Take an example: the world of the house with me inside and you
outside, or vice versa. There’s also the world of the street—the
city—with you inside and me outside or vice versa. Get what |
mean? Two worlds clashing, no transition. The individual on one
side, the collective on the other. It's terrifying. Between the two,
society in general throws up lots of barriers, whilst architects in
particular are so poor in spirit that they provide doors 2in. thick and 119 Diagram of ‘Deck
Housing’, P.D.S. 1951
6ft. high; flat surfaces in a flat surface—of glass as often as not.
Just think of it: 2in.—or tin. if it is glass—between such fantastic
phenomena—hair-raising, brutal—like a guillotine. Every time we
pass through a door like that we’re split in two—but we don’t take
notice any more, and simply walk on, halved.
Is that the reality of a door? What then, | ask, is the greater
reality of a door? Well, perhaps the greater reality of a door is the
localized setting for a wonderful human gesture: conscious entry
and departure. That’s what a door is, something that frames your
coming and going, for it’s a vital experience not only for those that
do so, but also for those encountered or left behind. A door is a
place made for an occasion. A doorisa place made for an act that
is repeated millions of times in a lifetime between the first entry 120 Looking out from the yard-
garden of ‘Deck Housing’,
and the last exit. | think that’s symbolical. And what is the greater A.M.S. 1952

reality of a window? | leave that to you. ‘Otterlo Meeting’. van Eyck

Hearth and doorstep are symbols which used together present to

most men’s minds the image of a house. Forty or fifty houses make
a good street.
Streets, with many small local and some larger local facilities in the
interstices and round about make up a fairly recognizable district.
Districts interspersed with many more and more complex facilities
than they would individually support, make up a city. House,
street, district are ‘elements of city’. Housing groups being built
when this breakdown of Elements of City was first proposed (in
1952), were to high standards of construction and met the needs of

96
 CiAM X

121 ‘Close Houses’ from end,

P.D.S. 1955 ,

122 Looking out of the ‘Close’,

A.M.S. 1955

123 Photograph, Nigel Henderson

97
society as outlined by official sociologists, but they lacked some The leaf-tree and house-city
identifications were brought
very vital quality; a quality which was undoubtedly necessary in forward by me at the Team
order to achieve active and creative grouping of houses. This X Royeaumont meeting in
1962. Christopher Alexander
missing quality—essential to man’s sense of well-being—was iden- was present at the meeting
as a guest, and, if | remember
tity. Much of the social pattern as observed by the sociologist in right, joined the discussion.
the Bye-law Street is a survival—modified by the particular built His subsequently published
environment—of even earlier patterns. There is no point in per- thesis that a city is not a tree
but a semi-lattice is, in my
petuating this way of life, but it might be worth looking further opinion, neither a valid
back to its roots, to gain a picture of the development of a parti- negation or a valuable
affirmation of the truth in
cular society. mathematic terms. | tried to
In a tight-knit society inhabiting a tight-knit development such as replace the current ‘organic’
city-tree analogy, because it
the Bye-law Streets, there is an inherent feeling of safety and social is based on the sentimental,
bond which has much to do with the obviousness and simple though well-meant, assump-
tion that, ideally, the man-
order of the form of the street: about forty houses facing acommon made city should behave,
open space. The street is not only a means of access, but also an and hence also be ‘planned’,
according to a similar kind
arena for social expression. In these ‘slum’ streets is found a simple of system of ascending
relationship between house and street. dimension and ascending
degree of complexity (with
How would people use ‘good’ environment? How many of the a similar one track reference
traditional acts of expression (of joy, time passing, faith, play- sequence from small to
large—many too few—and
teaching) are likely to continue to want to find expression? from part to whole) as is the
‘Uppercase’, A./P.S. case with the tree. The
analogy is false (the way all
If you imagine what is going to happen in the next five years—that, such analogies between
for example, the shape of man’s car, the shape of his refrigerator, different categories are false—
and unpoetic) because it
the shape of his kitchen equipment, how he works in the kitchen, overlooks the real meaning
the shape of his living room, will be dictated not by architects or of tree and city. | replaced it,
therefore, by two separate
the cultural instigators of previous epochs—the ‘avant garde’ autonomous, though
artist and his friends or clients, the upper class—but by an industry intersuggestive identifica-
which will itself produce a new pattern of culture simply by having tions: leaf is tree—tree is
leaf; and house is city—city
to get rid of its products. Discussion, AD., June 1957. P.D.S. is house. By their inclusive
ambiguity they preclude a
Today we tend to be crowded out by household appliances. The city being a semi-lattice. Also
architect has little control over rooms whose walls are lined with that a city is chaotic and
necessarily so (when we say
appliances which can, even if chosen by him, be over the years so city we imply people). Cities,
fundamentally changed as to leave none of the original space or moreover, as Shakespeare
said of man, are ‘of such stuff
idea. The appliance industry fixes the dimensions and the styling. as dreams are made on’. The
Today, twenty-five years after Lillian Gilbreth’s motion studies on dream, of course, implies
infinite reference, and so does
‘well-functioning work spaces’, appliances can do away altogether the city, for both are as man
with the need of ‘work space’ in this old sense. We can also assume is. This is why cities neither
should nor can ever reflect
that the large-sized appliance will soon be a thing of the past. The the kind of order a tree
change in concept is away from adjusting the pieces inside the wrongly suggests : wrongly,
because a tree is not a tree
‘room’, to a re-distribution over the whole house, taking advantage without inhabitants. They—
of the flexibility or actual mobility the new appliances allow. So the birds, beasts and insects—
see to it that a tree is also not
that we do not have more efficient ‘rooms’, but a freeing from the a semi-lattice. Still, a city is
‘room’ fixation. This should be the basis of the ‘Appliance House’. no more a tree than it is not a
Future of Furniture, AD., April 1958. A.M.S. tree! That goes without
saying ;hence also without
Every culture produces type objects, indeed it is through them mathematics.
Amsterdam, May1!968, van Eyck
that a culture can be defined. From prehistory to contemporary
peasant society, each culture has thrown up a limited number of
house forms.
The culture expresses itself through these forms.
Team 10. Mars Group, 1953

98
 The same house can be a slum or a palace, not just in spirit but
to look at, by virtue of the mode of living of its inhabitants.
And where one lives, is in a place, not only in a house, the outside
y eaf and leat a yesinside, objects and behaviour are indivisible.
Wis tvee — houseis

Take off your shoes and walk along a beach through the ocean's
last thin sheet of water gliding landwards and seawards.
You feel reconciled in a way you wouldn't feel if there werea
forced dialogue between you and either one or the other of these
great phenomena. For here, in between land and ocean—in this
in-between realm, something happens to you that is quite different
from the sailors’ reciprocal nostalgia. No landward yearning from
the sea, no seaward yearning from the land. No yearning for the
alternative—no escape from one into the other.
Architecture must extend ‘the narrow borderline’, persuade it
to loop into a realm—an articulated in-between realm. Its job is to
provide this in-between realm by means of construction, i.e. to
provide, from house to city scale, a bunch of real places for real
people and real things (places that sustain instead of counteract
the identity of their specific meaning).
van Eyck
; ie say leaf - Saytvee mid
ae Say a few leaves still and
mony leaves soon — say leafless tree Ee
“s Soy heap of leaves- Say this tree Sy Whichever technique the architect chooses, his function is to
ey when 1 vow up ond that tvee when Vie
2 was a child- say one tvee, lots o¢ Weg
propose a way of life, and the ‘appliance-way-of-life’ suggests an
trees, cdl sorts of tveer trees in the bee entirely new sort of house.
ovest — sey forest e Tapeees dovk, lost
Brest, five foivy, owls hoot toadstool Je The appliance house offers a way of life in which the appliances
ti'gey, tibee 2a ovchord, apples themselves would not be part of the decor as attractive-looking
ee opple pie- sa tree- say fig lea i
iB say Nuts!— he house —- say
possessions subject to style obsolescence. Their sole validity
4, Sos Say anyths n9- but would be in their ability to perform their functions efficiently and
: gay PEOPLE a a unobserved.
F2DES:
124 van Eyck, St Louis 1962

The caravan is the nearest to an ‘Appliance House’ that the

market has to offer, and people are prepared to put up with some
conditions as primitive as their great grandmother knew—vide:
sanitary arrangements, refuse disposal, mud outside door,
children in a field affected by the English climate—to achieve
greater gains. Like the car, the caravan represents a new freedom.
It has become a sort of symbol as well as a sign of ‘population in-
flux’. It might have something of the powerful, safe, transient
free-from-responsibility feeling one gets driving in a car.
A.M.S.

However, in any house the problems are vastly different from

those of a car, where only a few things can be eliminated without:
destroying its performance. In a house there are many variables:
and the removal of some or the changing of others would not
fundamentally alter the performance. Therefore, ahouse designed
like a car is at some disadvantage, for the appliances would be
so closely integrated into the structure, that to change the
refrigerator would be like getting a larger glove compartment in
a Volkswagen dashboard—it would be simpler to get a new car.
[PDLSS.

The present concept of what a house should be is being sold by

advertisers on the basis of cars and domestic appliances. Un-
fortunately, this ideal stops short of the functional aspect of the
house itself. The appliances exist in a sort of never-never land,
not really declaring themselves as they really are, i.e. as things
that can modify or even revolutionize the way of life of their
possessors. Instead they are presented as convenient adjuncts
to a previous way of life. Nobody has thought what difference toa
house appliances were making. The houses being put up at
present, on the whole, seem obsolete; that is, they no longer
represent an acceptable social ideal. The most important thing

99
In England we are in a state of change towards a middle-class
society which will correspond roughly to the sort of set-up which
exists in Sweden or the United States, and in such a society the
value of a social anthropological study seems to me to be pretty
low as far as being able to use it creatively. Social anthropology
will never be able to tell you what to do. It will be able to say what
pattern in the past was such and such because they had certain
motivations and so on, but what the pattern is to be now seems
to me more a matter of men than social anthropology.
Discussion, AD., June.1957. A./P.S.

Planning on whatever scale level should provide a framework—to

set the stage as it were—for the twinphenomenon of the individual
and the collective without resorting to arbitrary accentuation of
either one at the expense of the other, i.e. without warping the
meaning of either, since no basic twinphenomenon can be split
into incompatible polarities without the halves forfeiting whatever
they stand for.
This points towards the necessity of reconciling the idea unity with
theidea diversity in architectural terms or, more precisely,toachieve
the one by means of the other. It’s an old forgotten truth that diver-
sity is only attainable through unity, unity only attainable through
diversity. There are of course many ways of approaching this
objective.
The architectural reciprocity, unity-diversity and part-whole
(closely linked twinphenomenon) must cover the human recipro-
city individual-collective. Still there are two more twinphenomena
likewise closely linked to those just mentioned, which still elude
adequate translation into planning—a twin set: large-small and
many-few. The irreconcilable polarities—false alternatives—into
which they are split cut no less brutally across the gaunt panorama
of urbanism today. Failure to govern multiplicity creatively, to
humanize number by means of articulation and configuration (the
verb to multiply should coincide with the verb to configurate) has
led to the curse of most new towns. The mere fact that habitat
planning is arbitrarily split into two disciplines—architecture and
urbanism—demonstrates that the principle of reciprocity has not
yet opened the determinist mind to the necessity of transforming
the mechanism of the design process. As it is, architecture and
urbanism have failed to come to terms with the essence of con-
temporary thinking. Inseparably linked as all basic twinphenomena
are, a few were extracted from the rest mal-digested (those al-
ready mentioned) part-whole, unity-diversity, large-small, many-
few, as well as others equally significant—inside-outside, open-
closed, mass-space, change-constancy, motion-rest, individual-
collective, etc. etc.

100
125 Plan of Sonsbeek Pavilion,
van Eyck, 1966 for the architect is to present a new concept of the house; a new
image with symbolic value which is both technological and cosy.
Appliances have accepted symbolic values and | submit that they
are both technological and cosy.
We already have houses which make provision for appliances as
props to an existing way of life. They prop it up to the extent that
there is often no house left. The technique adopted in the design
of the ‘appliance houses’ on the other hand was intended some-
how to bring appliances under control.
Why cannot the appliances be changed technologically and
improved every five years, so that people have the opportunity of
replacing them instead of buying en suite and staying en suite,
which seems to me to be economically impossible. | myself have
practically no appliances for economic reasons, and | suspect
Space has no room, time not most people have not. Therefore, | want to be able to get the best
a moment for man. He is
at the moment. Let us somehow arrive at a concept of appliances
excluded.
that assumes that they are going to be changed rather than that
In order to ‘include’ him— they had some commonality in character.
help his homecoming—he | prefer the things that cannot be moved, the absolutely fixed
must be gathered into their things like sinks and heavy units to be put into a box. The things
meaning. (Man is the subject that can be moved you can select and group together for stylistic
as well as the object of or symbolic reasons, so that they accord with your present way
architecture.) of life. Under certain conditions, no matter how well intentioned
Whatever space and time styling is, there will inevitably be a conflict. Under those conditions
mean, place and occasion it is better to have a box to put them away in and take them out
mean more. and display them together.
For space in the image of man Most houses today are terribly under-storage-spaced and having
is place, and time in the more space to move in is partly wrapped up with storage. You
image of man is occasion. must be able to put furniture away when you do not want it and
Today space and what it your life should not be cluttered up with appliances you do not
should coincide with in order happen to be using at the moment.
to become ‘space’—man at The intention was to free the living space of appliances by con-
home with himself—are lost. centrating them. Then you would select appliances to be brought
Both search for the same into the living space such as the television, the movable cooker
place, but cannot find it. and so on. They would need to be well designed because they
Provide that space, articulate
would become a sort of social focus. This way you get an un-
cluttered living space from which you can remove the mobile
the inbetween.
appliances and concentrate the fixed appliances out of sight so
Is man able to penetrate the that you do not get this warring of technology and styling. The
material he organizes into concept of having a mass of unrelated objects all with a different
hard shape between one man style round you seems to me ultimately to destroy the spaces.
and another, between what is
Obviously this is not meant to be a universal solution, no house is
here and what is there, bet-
ever that. The amount of houses that can be built in one genera-
ween this and a following
tion is, say, 5 per cent, of the total number of houses existing.
moment ? Is he able to find
‘Design’, May, 1958. A./P.S.
the right place for the right
occasion ?
No—So start with this: make 126 Sonsbeek Pavilion, van
a welcome of each door and a Eyck, 1966
countenance of each window.
Make of each place, a bunch
of places of each house and
each city, for a house is a tiny
city, a city a huge house. Get
closer to the shifting centre of
human reality and build its
counterform—for each man
and all men, since they no
longer do it themselves.
Whoever attempts to solve the
riddle of space in the abstract,
will construct the outline of
emptiness and call it space.
Whoever attempts to meet man
in the abstract will speak with
his echo and call this a dia-
logue.
Man still breathes both in
and out. When is architecture
going to do the same?
van Eyck

101
Disregarding the inherent ambivalence in each one of them, one-
half of each was warped into a meaningless absolute—part,
diversity, small, outside, open, space, change, motion, collective—
and twisted in such a way as to become a ‘new city’. Hence spatial
continuity, constructive flexibility, structural interpenetration,
human scale, and more of that kind of music!
The time has come to conceive of architecture urbanistically and
urbanism architecturally (this makes sensible nonsense of both
words) i.e. to arrive at the singular through plurality and vice
versa.
Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of deterministic
thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions (the same
goes for all the halves mentioned). Place and occasion constitute
each other’s realization in human terms: since man is both
the subject and object of architecture, it follows that its primary
job is to provide the former (place) for the sake of the latter
(occasion).
Since, furthermore, place and occasion imply participation in what
exists, lack of place—and thus of occasion—will cause loss of
identity, isolation and frustration. A house, therefore, should be a
bunch of places—a city a bunch of places no less.
Make a configuration of places at each stage of multiplication, i.e.
provide the right kind of places for each configurative stage and
urban environment will again become liveable.
Cities should again become the counterform of society’s recipro-
cally individual and collective urban reality. It is because we have
lost touch with this reality—the form—that we cannot come to 127 and 128 Ina flat
country, the man on his way
grips with its counter form. Still it is better to acknowledge the to a steeple in the distance
will orientate himself more
sameness of architecture and urbanism—of house and city—than easily by the tree in the
foreground and the sun will
to continue defining their arbitrary difference, since this leads us help. The single tree is at
home in the space.
nowhere—i.e. to the new city of today! Whilst constituent con- To the man in the wood, it is
exactly the place where there
temporary art, science and philosophy, etc., have joined hands are no trees which indicates
a particular spot, Van stoel
wonderfully for half a century reconciling split polarities through tot stad, 1965, J.B.
reciprocal thinking—tearing down the stifling barriers between
them, architecture, and urbanism especially, have drifted away,
indulging paradoxically in arbitrary application of what after all is
essentially based on relativity and thus misunderstood.
In the light of what the others have managed to evolve—a relaxed
relative concept of reality—what architects and urbanists have
failed to do amounts to treason. All the more so since whatis done
is done and cannot be torn down again (nobody is forced to look
at a bad painting, read a bad poem or listen to bad music).
To go in or out, to enter, leave or stay, are often harassing alter-
natives. Though architecture cannot do away with this truth, it can
still counteract it by appeasing instead of aggravating its effects.
It is human to tarry. Architecture should, | think, take more
account of this. The job of the planner is to provide built home-

102
As long as we keep balancing Sooner_or later, you’ll have to risk it. That’s the moment of
fearfully between false realization—the jump, the risky jump. It’s really tragic when you
alternatives, like a tightrope think of it, | mean the way architects and urbanists still fail to
dancer shifting sideways creep out of their determinist strait-jackets, still fail to really
along a taut thin wire in a participate in the contemporary world of art; still cling to mother
void, we shall continue to miss nature as if unable to walk without her. Now in order to be natural
the mark. But | think the in architecture we must depart from nature. It is in the nature of
doorstep symbol is rich art that it should be different from nature. Of this | am sure.
enough to sustain a kind of We're not concerned with the way nature does the trick. Art
architecture—planning in has its own kind of logic. It looks illogical beside nature’s logic,
general—which is certainly but so does nature’s logic look illogical beside that of art—beside
more valid than the kind we that of man. Hence the conflict and the fear to risk the jump.
have got used to during the
last thirty years. You cannot reach the other side without jumping—no arbitrary
stop gap whim—team work or anti-prima donna nonsense—is
going to bridge the gap. The art is in the jumping, how you take
The doorstep idea, of course,
off, when and where. Without the jump there'll be no architecture
does not cover the idea of the
—good or less good; just buildings and cities—bad or worse.
inbetween realm. The /atter
van Eyck
has further connotations.

Awareness of this inbetween

(inbetween awareness) is
essential. The ability to detect
associative meanings simul-
taneously does not yet belong
to our mental equipment.
Since, however, the meaning
of every real articulated in-

=
between place is essentially
a multiple one, we shall have * y

to see to it that it does.

Our target is multiple meaning

in equipoise.
existence: “ ‘the spiral of reality

Considering the aspect of

ascending dimension in the mans the interior of existence
light of a concept of size and
quantity nurtured by recip-
tho interior of the present “4
rocity, the articulated inbet- past and future:
ween rea/m may also coincide
with inbetween dimension.
gathering experience: the interior of the mind
Things of a very different
nature must be familiarized
by some device. The same goes the interior of vision
for things of different size. awareness:
(This by no means impinges
on the positive effect of the inbetween realm
twinphenomena:
contrast, but then contrast
means so many things—bad
and sometimes good.) for idea: inside imagination

Awareness of the inbetween for dialogue: a bunch of places

creeps into the technology of
construction. It will transform
not only our idea as to what we rs ARCHITECTURE . ) <
should make, but also as to
how we Shall make it—
including our technological
approach. It will be there in
oy
a
the body, the members and
the joints of whatever we
9 Ve
a0 =?
make.
van Eyck

129 Diagram, van Eyck

103
 130 Diagram, van Eyck

coming for all, to sustain a feeling of belonging—hence to Thinking about such twin-
phenomena as inside—
evolve an architecture of place—setting for each subsequent outside ; open—closed ;
occasion—determined or spontaneous. far—near ; alone—together ;
individual—collective, the
Architecture should be conceived of as a configuration of inter- following images come to my
mind:
mediary places clearly defined.
People seated concentrically
This does not imply continual transition or endless postponement in a hollow gazing inwards
with respect to place and occasion. On the contrary, it implies a towards the centre; and
people seated concentrically
break away from the contemporary concept (call it sickness) of on a hill gazing outwards
spatial continuity and the tendency to erase every articulation towards the horizon. Two
kinds of centrality, two ways
between spaces, i.e. between outside and inside, between one of being together—or alone?
space and another (between one reality and another). The hill may reveal whai the
hollow may conceal: that man
Instead the transition must be articulated by means of defined in- is both centre-bound and
between places which induce simultaneous awareness of what is horizon-bound. Both hill and
hollow, horizon and centre
significant on either side. An in-between place in this sense pro- are shared by all seated
vides the common ground where conflicting polarities can again concentrically either way:
both link and both /ure (the
become twinphenomena. For thirty years, architecture—not to horizon and the shifting
mention urbanism—has been providing outside for man inside centre, the centre and the
shifting horizon).
(aggravating the conflict through attempting to eliminate the
essential difference). Architecture (sic urbanism) implies the crea- Neither centralized nor
decentralized but centred in
tion of interior both outside and inside. For exterior is that which every place and at every stage
precedes man-made environment; that which is counteracted by of multiplication, with the
interior horizon of space as
it; that which is persuaded to become commensurate by being constant companion—that,
interiorized. Dutch Forum on Children’s Home. van Eyck surely, is our real home! It is
also what Labyrinthian clarity
can bring about—house and
city a bunch of places both.
And that’s where I’ll end—at the beginning. van Eyck, 1965

104
 Town planning and architecture are parts of acontinuous process.
Planning is the correlating of human activities; architecture is
the housing of these activities. Town planning establishes the
milieu in which architecture can happen. Both are conditioned
by the economic, social, political, technical and physical climate.
In a given environment thorough planning will lead to architecture.
Planning remains abstract until it generates architecture. Only
31 Diagram of church, yan through its results (buildings, ways, places) can it be. Its function
yck, September 1965 is to establish optimum conditions in which the present becomes
future. To do this it must seek out, explore and explain the rela-
tionships between human activities. It must then bring these
activities together so that the whole of life in the city becomes
richer than the sum of its parts.
The important question is not ‘how?’ but ‘why?’ or ‘what for?’.
Town planning, like architecture, has to help society to achieve
its ends, to make life in a community as rich as possible, to aspire
to a present Utopia.
We have no quarrel with the past except in so far as it is used to
compromise the future. The past can guide us but past techniques
(composition) are of little avail. Present techniques and present
means must be used to open as many doors to the future as
possible.
‘Carré Bleu’, 3, 1961. Candilis, Josic, Woods

105
Bibliography
Bridgewater Architektur und Gemein- Statement on the non-rational aims of
schaft, S. Giedion CIAM. Van E. ,
‘The heart of the City’, Relationship between men and things.
CIAM book J.B
1945 Editore Rosa e Ballo, Le Corbusier, antologia critica degli
Milan scritti. de C.
1945 De Vrije Kunstenaar, Architectuur—Gemeenschap Groote
Groningen Markt—Burgerij. J. B.
No. 2, 1945 De Vrije Kunstenaar, Architectuur der toekomst. J. B.
Groningen
No. 12, 1945 De Vrije Kunstenaar, De Wederopbouw, de jongere Archi-
Groningen tecten en nieuwe Architectuur. J. B.
1946 Lezingcyclus over Jan Publiek en de architect. J. B.
Stedebouw Utrecht
No. 211 1947 Domus William Morris, pioniere dell’arte
sociale. de C.
1947 Dutch Forum Het nieuwe bouwen en verder, J. B.
1947 Editore I! Balcone, William Morris, studio critico. de C.
Milan
Heft 3, 1949 Bauwelt Rathaus Berlin Kreuzberg, Wewerka.
Nos. 2/3, 1949 Dutch Forum Nieuw is ook sociaal. J. B.
Wij outdekken stijl. Van E.
No. 10, 1949 das Werk Sociaal-cultureel centrum, Zuidplein,
Rotterdam. J. B.
June, 1950 A.R. Cinema, Rotterdam, pp. 375-379. J. B.
No. 3 1950 Urbanistica Il piano regolatore di Reggio Emilia
degli architette Albini, Castiglioni.
eC.
Nos. 6/7,1952 Dutch Forum CIAM number. J. B. & Van E.
Dec. 6th, 1952 De Groene Amster- Open brief aan architect J. J. P. Oud
dammer, Amsterdam J.B.
1953 Parallel of Life and Art A. & P. S., Henderson, Paolozzi
Exhibition Catalogue
No. 46, 1953 L’ Architecture Etudes d’habitat Européen et Musul-
d’Aujourd’hui man au Maroc. ATBAT
1953 Technique et L'Habitation individuelle minima.
Architecture Candilis
1953 L’ Architecture Contribution a |’étude de I’habitat.
d’Aujourd’hui Special Candilis, Woods, Kennedy, Mas.
Supplement CIAM 9
1953 A.Y.B. 5 An Urban Project (Golden Lane).
A.& P.S.
Sept., 1953 A.D. Dutch architecture today. J. B.
No. 12, 1953 Sinkentiku, Japan School in Brielle. J. B.
Autumn, 1954 Literary Guide Sign and symbol. J. V.
No. 199 1954 Casabella Continuita Formalismo, continuita dell’accade-
mismo. de C. Architetture Italiane.
de C.
No. 200 1954 Casabella Continuita A proposito di La Martelle. de C.
No. 201 1954 Casabella Continuita Casa di abitazione a Bavena. de C.
Studio per un nucleo rezidenziale
No. 202 1954 Casabella Continuita La mostra dell’architettura spontanea
alla IX Triennale. de C.
No. 203 1954 Casabella Continuita La mostra di Urbanistica alla X
Triennale. de C.
Aug.-Sept. 1954 Casabella Continuita Lijnbaan et la tradition Architecturale
hollandaise. J. B.
No. 57, 1954 L’ Architecture L’esprit du plan masse. Candilis
d’Aujourd’hui
No. 301 1954 Domus La mostra dell’urbanistica alla X
Triennale. de C.
No. 53 1954 Edilizia Moderna La mostra dell’urbanistica alla X
Triennale. de C.
No. 14 1954 Urbanistica Centro residenziale nei pressi di
Cesate. de C.
Jan., 1955 A.D. Collective housing in Morocco.
Candilis, Woods, Richards
No. 205 1955 Casabella Continuita L’urbanistica nel deserto. de C.
June, 1955 /\{). The built world: urban reidentification.
A.&P.S.
No. 7, 1955 Architectura Cantiere, Lijnbaan: Una via di negozi a Rotter-
Milano dam. J. B. :
Sept., 1955 D. CIAM 10 projects. Team 10

106
 1955 A.Y.B. 6 Polder and Playground. J. V.
Dutch Building. J. V.
Polder and Playground. Article on
Nageleand playgroundsinAmsterdam
designed by Aldo Van Eyck
1955 Editore Hoepli L’architettura italiana oggi. de C.
July, 1956 A.D. Alternative to the Garden City Idea.
A.& P.S.
July, 1956 Architecture & Building Cluster Patterns. A. S.
No. 7, 1956 Dutch Forum Het ‘Tweede Vrijzinnig Christelijk
Lyceum’. van Oud (1956) gezien in
verband met de architectuuron-
twikkeling. J. B.
Aug., 1956 ‘This is Tomorrow’ Statements by various English groups
Exhibition Catalogue
Heft 8, 1956 Baukunst u. Werkform Federal Youth Hostel, Bonn, Wewerka.
No. 9, 1956 Architettura Recenti opere di Johannes Van den
Broek e Jacob Bakema
No. 210 1956 Casabella Continuita Discussione sulla valutazione storica
dell’architettura e sulla misura umana.
de C.
Nov., 1956 Ark 18 But today we collect ad’s. A.& P.S.
1956 A.Y.B.7 Theme of CIAM 10. A. & P. S.
Contributions to CIAM 10. Theo
Crosby
1956 Official CIAM Com- Statements of Howell, Smithsons,
mission documents Candilis, Commission 6
1956 Integral 8 CIAM 10. Habitat, 1956. A. S.
Heft 5, 1957 Baukunst u. Werkform Round about the Cathedral Cologne,
Wewerka.
No. 5, 1957 Bouw, Rotterdam Naar een nieuwe concentratie van
krachten. J.B
No. 6, 1957 Dutch Forum Wederwoord (op een critische
beschouwing van het werk van Van
den Broek & Bakema door Van Tijen)
Dutch Forum The type-Berlinflat in Hansaviertel and
other works of V.d. Broek & Bakema
Aug., 1957 Architectural The social architect. J. B.
Forum (U.S.)
No. 10 1957 Goed Wonen Het kind en de Stad. Van E.
No. 214 1957 Geeeecie Continuita Una precisazione. de C.
Sept. 19th, 1957 Projects, CIAM
Nov., 1957 A.R. Cluster City, P. S.
1957 A.Y.B.8 Aesthetics of change. P. S.
Architecture by planning, planning by
architecture. J. B.
CIAM 10 Dubrovnik. J. V.
Mars. Group 53-57. Lasdun
No. 33 1958 L’Architettura Il contributo degli architetti ataliani
alla cultura internazionale. de C.
No. 33 1958 Urbanistica Il concorso per la Pineta di Donora-
tico. de C.
March, 1958 Technique et Economie et position de l’escalier.
Architecture Candilis
No. 3, 1958 Dutch Forum Rietveld 70 years old. ‘The _ ball
bounces back’ discussing the stale-
mate of CIAM and functionalism.
Van E.
April, 1958 A.D. The future of furniture. A. S.
May, 1958 Design 113 The appliance house. A. & P.S.
July 1st, 1958 Het Parool, Amsterdam Oude binnenstad kan van meer
betekenis worden door 20e eeuw haar
kans et geven J.B.
duly 21st, 1958 Bauwelt No. 29 Berlin plans
1958 Baukunst und Werkform Berlin plans and Coventry. A. & P. S.
Oct., 1958 A.D Mobility. A. & P.S.
Nov., 1958 A.D. Capital cities: discussion, P.S., Lucio
Costa
No. 11, 1958 Der Aufbau Vienne Profile (J. B.)
No. 44, 1958 Bouwundig Weekblad, Enkele gedachten naar aanleiding van
Amsterdam Granpré Moliére, nu 75 jaar. J. B.
1958 Het Moderne Bouwen, (Een reeks voordrachten, gehouden
Delft aan de Technische Hogeschool te
Delft.) J. B.
No. 41 1959 L’Architettura Alla ricerca di un linguaggio antiac-
cademico: due opere dell’architetto
Giancarlo de Carlo.

107
 No. 41 1959 L’Architettura (contd.) 1. edificio per negozi e abitazioni a
Milano
2. case per dipendenti dell’Universita
di Urbino
Mar. 21st, 1959 De Groene, Amster- (Antwoord aan Oud Over Teamwork)
dammer, Amsterdam ‘Er zijn nog architecten in Nederland’
J.B
March, 1959 Technique et Proposition pour un habitat evolutif.
Architecture Candilis, Josic, Woods
No. 3 1959 Architecture & Building The progress of an Italian architect.
de C.
April 23rd, 1959 Teaching History. J. V.
April, 1959 Scatter. A. & P. S.
A.D. Towards a total architecture. J. B.
April, 1959 Poorters Periodiek, De maatschappelijke positie van de
Amsterdam architect, mede in verband met de
opleiding tot architect °
No. 4, 1959 Bouwen en Wonen Het werk van Van den Broek and
Antwerpen Bakema
May 21st, 1959 A.J Talks to A.A. Students. Reprints. P.S.
June, 1959 L’Oeil Bagnoles-sur-Céze. Candilis, Woods
No. 7, 1959 Dutch Forum The evolution of the idea of repeatable
living units
CIAM terminationnumberquotesfrom
CIAM work. Compiled by Van E.
No. 87, 1959 L’ Architecture Repenserle probléme. Candilis, Josic,
d’Aujourd’hui Woods
Sept., 1959 A.D. Caravan-embryo ‘Appliance House’?
A.S.
No. 10, 1959 Bauen + Wohnen, The work of Van den Broek and
Zurich Bakema
No. 47, 1959 L’Architettura, Rome Construzioni degli architetti Jacob
Bakema e Johannes van den Broek
‘La forma segue le funzione’ se
riconosciamo ‘la funzione della forma’.

1959 New German Federal Youth Hostel, Berlin, Wewerka.

Architecture,
pub Gerd Hatje
Dec. 11th, 1959 St Louis Post Despatch Urges more open space down-town.
J.B
1959 American Forum Series ofintroductionsinthe Washing-
1960/1961 ton University, St Louis, U.S.A. J. B.
1959 Spielplatz und Gemein- The Child and the City.
schaftszentrum— General statement on lost identity and
published in Stuttgart survival. Van E.
No. 1, 1960 Dutch Forum Plan Kennemerland. J. B.
Feb. 6th, 1960 Handelsblad, Nieuw beuwen in oude binnensteden.
Amsterdam J. B.
Feb., L’Architecture Problémes d’une ville: Barcelone.
No. 88, 1960 d’Aujourd’hui Candilis.
March, 1960 ‘Architektura’ 3/149 Warsaw—Warszawa. ‘Main trends in
contemporary architecture’. Soltan.
No. 2, 1960 Dutch Forum Architecture—Townplanning is the
3-dimensional expression of human
behaviour.
March, 1960 Uppercase A. & P. S. Theories.
April, 1960 AED: Function of Architecture in cultures
in change. P. S.
May, 1960 A.D. Team 10 number, Otterlo. A. & P. S.
No. 364 1960 Domus L’Universita di Urbino. de C.
No. 2 1960 Carré Bleu The situation of the Modern Move-
ment. de C.
Architecture and Art. A. & P. S.
ea meccune et la nouvelle Société.

May, 1960 Husimellom (Norway) The Revolution in Architectural think-

ing since 1950. P. S.
1960 Dutch Forum 3. Door ‘There is a garden in her face’. Van E.
Window Number The idea ‘place and occasion’ to
warm up the idea ‘space and time’.
July 16th, 1960 De Linie, Amsterdam Bouwen. J. B.
Aug., 1960 LY.B9 Louis Kahn by A. & P.S.
Three schools in Nagele—discussing
Esthetics of Number. Van E.
No, 91-92, 1960 L’Architecture ‘Recherches pour une structure de
d’Aujourd’hui habitat’, Candilis, Josic, Woods.

108
 No. 8, 1960 Byggakunst Education for Town Planning. P. S.
No. 9, 1960 Bauen + Wohnen Plan Kennemerland.
Sept., 1960 A.D. Byelaws for Mental Health. A. S.
Oct. 8th, 1960 De Groene Amster- Gewoonte en gewoon (Antwoord
dammer, Amsterdam ann Vriend over Weehuis van Aldo
van Eyck).
Dec., 1960 L’Architecture Children’s home. Statement on
d’Aujourd’hui reciprocity. Unity and diversity
reconciled. Van E.
Dec., 1960 A.D. Social Foci, and social space. P. S.
Dec., 1960 A.R. Fixeipe se:
1960 L’Architecture Panorama d’architecture et
d’Aujourd’hui d’urbanisme, 1960. J. B.
1961 Dutch Forum 4, The Asthetics of Number, multiplicity
and the Kasbah idea. Van E.
Jan., 1961 A.A. Journal Education for Town Planning. P. S.
Carré bleu (nb. 1) The open form in architecture (Art
for the greater number). Intervention
at Bagnols-s.-Céze Oscar Hansen.
Carré bleu (nb. 3) Hambourg—Steilshoop, Caen—
Hérouville, Toulouse-le Mirail, objec-
tives and methods of architecture in
relation to planning. S. W.
1961 CIAM 59, Otterlo. Karl Team 10—meeting Otterlo.
Kramer Verlag, Stuttgart Verbatim report and projects
June, 1961 Architectura 6 Children’s Home, Van E.
June 6th, 1961 Baumeister Children’s Home, Van E.
Dutch Forum 6 Van E.
Dutch Forum 7 Van E.
July, 1961 1.U.A. Catalogue, & A.D. Architecture and Technology. P. S.
1961 Dokumente der Moderne Streekplan Kennemerland. J. B.
Architektur Band 1
Sept., 1961 ArchitecturalForum(U.S.) Architecture of Dogon, Van E.
Nov. 2nd, 1961 The Guardian Idea on Mass Habitation, the Exten-
sible House. J. B.
1961 Magnum 38 Die Revolte der Masse. J.B.
1961 Dutch Forum & Schindler's spel met de riunite in
Californié. J. B.
dan. 1962 Werk Children’s Home, Van E.
1962 Carré Bleu Web. W. W.
No. 101, 1962 L’Architecture Caen-Hérouville, Hamburg-Steil-
d’Aujourd’hui shoop, Toulouse-le Mirail. Candilis,
Josic, Woods.
Heft 4, 1962 Aachener Prisma Gallery Du Mont, Cologne, Wewerka.
No. 5, 1962 Techniques et Architec- Caen-Hérouville, Toulouse-le Mirail
ture 22 éme Série Candilis, Josic, Woods.
1962 Dutch Forum 2 Bouwen voor de anonieme opdracht-
gever. J.B.
Carré Bleu (nb. 3) A study on urban patterns: project
for a housing unit in Bilbao. Candilis,
Josic, Woods.
August, 1962 The Indian Architect Children’s Home, Van E.
August, 1962 A.D Philadelphia and London Roads. P. S.
1962 Urban Comments, The Human Core. J. B.
Washington University
Autumn, 1962 Dutch Forum 3 Fake Client and the great word No.
Steps towards a configurative dis-
cipline. The Pueblos. Van E.
Autumn, 1962 Magyar Epitomuveszet Work by Team 10, Pologni.
Aug-Sept. 1962 Ekistics Some thoughts about Relationship
between buildings and cities. J. B.
Sept. 1962 Progressive Architecture Place and Occasion, Van E.
Dec., 1962 D
A.D. Team 10 Primer, edited A. S.
1962 Carré Bleu (nb. 4) Meeting at Royaumont (Résumé),
Schimmerling. Visual group idea,
poetry of transition. J. B.
Dec. 1962 Arkitekten (Denmark) Children’s Home, Van E.
1962 Wittwatersrand Labyrinthian Clarity. Van E.
University.
Johannesburg
1963 Report of the Pacific Labyrinthian Clarity. Van E.
Congress, Univ. of
Auckland, N.Z.
1963 Carré Bleu Frankfurt. S.W.
June, 1963 Architectural Forum Toulouse-le Mirail. Candilis, Josic,
Woods.
July, 1963 A.D. Oud obituary. P. S.

109
 No. 107, 1963 L‘Architecture Université de Bochum, Candilis,
d’Aujourd’hui Josic, Woods. oe E
No. 9, 1963 Architecture Formes-+- Toulouse-le Mirail. Candilis, Josic,
Fonctions Woods.
1963 Dokumente der Moderne Architektur und Stadtebau. J. B.
Architektur Band 3 1
Autumn, 1963 Research Institute for London Stations. B. Richards (Views
Consumer Affairs— expressed at Royaumont).
Vol. 3
1963 Carré Bleu (nb. 3) Competition core of Frankfurt. Can-
dilis, Josic, Woods.
1964 Armando Argalla Questioni di Architetturae Urbanis-
Editore, Urbino tica. de C.
1964 Marsilio Editore, Padua Introduction to ‘La metropoli del.
futuro’ by Lloyd Rodwin. de C.
Jan., 1964 Bauen & Wohnen The Open City. A. & P. S.
1964 Carré Bleu F.U. Berlin. S. W.
April, 1964 L’Architecture Le Corbusier. G. C.
d’ Aujourd’hui
1964 World Architecture One Urban Environment—Search for Sys-
tems. S. W.
June, L‘Architecture ‘Recherches d’Architecture’. Can-
No. 115, 1964 d’Aujourd’hui dilis, Josic, Woods. }
1964 Carré Bleu* (nb. 3) Research in housing and Tel Aviv
Project. J. B.
No. 6, 1964 Bauwelt Freie Universitat Berlin. Woods.
F.U. Elementary School, Berlin—
Reinickendorf, Wewerka.
August, 1964 A.D. Team 10 number. Paris.
August, 1964 A.R. Reproduction Furniture. P. S.
Sept., 1964 A.D. Rietveld obituary. P. S.
No. 10, 1964 Architecture Formes+ Frankfurt, Bochum, Marseille-La Viste
Fonctions Candilis, Josic, Woods.
Oct., 1964 Progressive Bilbao, Belleville, Frankfurt in ‘The
Architecture Future of Urban Environment’. Can-
dilis, Josic, Woods.
Oct., 1964 A.D. Reflections on Tange’s Tokyo Bay
Plan. P. S.
Nov., 1964 Architectural Forum Frankfurt. Candilis, Josic, Woods.
(U.S.)
Dec., 1964 Van Stoel tot Stad Een Verhaal over mensen en riunite.
(book) pub. Standard 5 13%
Boekhandel, Antwerpen
1965 Bulletin of Wash. Univ. F.U. Berlin. St.W.
St. Louis
Jan., 1965 Carré Bleu Fort Lamy. Candilis, Josic, Woods.
Fort Lamy. A. J.
No. 11965 Forum Collegi Universitari per la Libera
Universita di Urbino. de C.
No. 86, 1965 Urbanisme Languedoc-Roussillon. G. C.
Feb., 1965 A.D Economist, A.& P.S. definitive article.
Feb., 1965 Washington University Toulouse-le Mirail. S.W.
Law Quarterly, St Louis
March, 1965 A.D, Pavilion and Route. P. S.
No. 41965 Bau ‘Ruhwald’ and ‘Frih Auf’. St. W.
1965 World Architecture Two, Berlin Free University. S.W.
Studio Vista
1965 Symposion, stadtebau- Words and Pictures—The Planners’
liches Entwurfsseminar, Dilemma. S. W.
T.U. Berlin
1965 Domus The large leaf—little tree image. Van
ES
Aug., 1965 Whitefriars Press Primer in square format
No. 391965 Bauwelt Competition ‘Ruhwald’. St.W.
No. 481965 Aujourd'’hui Colonie de VacancesaRiccione. de C.
No.91965 Werk Wettbewerbsprojekt fiir die Univer-
sitat Dublin. St. W.
1965 Editrice Cluva, Venice Proposal for a University Structure
(Based on a competition). de C.
Dec., 1965 A.D. Heroic Age. A. & P.S.
No. 121965 Delftse school Adolf Loos. Van. E
No. 121965 Werk Collegi Universitari per !a Libera
Universita di Urbino. de C.
No. 1 1964/5 Verdffentlichungen Wochenaufgaben 1964/5. O.M.U
0.4 zur Architektur Schnellstrasse und Gebaude. O.M.U.
Feb., 1966 A.D. Celaboratory Gear. A. S. Contribu-
tions to a fragmentary Utopia. P.D.S.

110
 1966 Marsilio Editore, Padua Mezzi e strumenti di intervento e
problemi della forma urbana, in Prob-
lemi delle nuove realta territoriali. de C.
Feb., 1966 A.A.J. Arena A Smithson file.
Mar., 1966 Berlin Tech. Univ. Without Rhetoric. A. & P.S.
No. 16 1966 Zodiac Collegi Universitari per la Libera
Universita di Urbino. de C.
1966 Marsilio Editore, Padua Urbino, la storia di una citta e il piano
della sua evoluzione urbanistica. de C.
No. 124, 1966 Forum (U.S.) The accretion of three very ordinary
parts. deC.
Nos. 46/7, 1966 Urbanistica Brevi accenni ai aproblemi della
forma nell’organizzazione. de C.
No. 26, 1965 Le nouvel observateur Le retour ala sauvagerie. S. W.
No. 243, 1965 Kentchiku Bunka City and core. S. W.
April, 1965 Architectural Forum Why revisit ‘Le Pavillon Swiss’. S. W.
April, 1966 Architecture & Planning Euston—Future. B. R.
No. 306, 1966 Casabella Ruhwald. St. W.
No. 3, 1966 T.U. Bulletin, Berlin. Ruhwald and Frith Auf. St. W.
May, 1966 Bauen + Wohnen Mies Hommage. A. &P.S.
July, 1966 Bauen + Wohnen Der Mensch auf der Strasse. S. W.
No. 6, 1966 Art in America nies space and urbanism.
1966 New movement in cities,
S. V. and Reinhold
July, 1966 A.D. Concealment and display: Medita-
tions on Braun. A. & P.S.
No. 16, 1966 Zodiac University College in Urbino by
Giancarlo de Carlo. Van E.
1966 World Architecture The large house—little city image.
Studio Vista The wheels of Heaven. Van E.
Ghana: tradition and technology.
1966 Report edited by Bui resettlement study. New com-
U.S.T. Kumasi munities. C. P.
duly, 1966 A.A.J. Arena Ronee 2000. C. P. Village structure.

Aug., 1966 A.D. Two recent buildings, Bakema. P. D.S

Sept., 1966 A.D. Eames Issue. A.& P.S.
Nov., 1966 Chatto & Windus Portrait of the female mind as a young
girl. (Novel) A. S.
Nov., 1966 A.D. A parallel of the orders: an essay on
the Doric. P. D.S.
1967 Dutch Forum The Universe in a basket. The Dogon.
Van E.
No. 14, 1967/8 Architecture Formes, S.W.
++ Fonction, Krafft,
Lausanne
Jan., 1967 Forum (U.S ) The tunnel of love. Review of B. R.’s
‘New movement in cities’, by S. W.
1967 Architecture Canada Architectural education. S. W.
1967 A decade of architecture Candilis, Josic, Woods.
and urban design, Karl
pene Verlag, Stuttgart
dan., 1967 AD}, Without rhetoric (reprint). A. & P. S.
Review of B. R.’s ‘New movement in
cities’, by P. D. S.
April, 1967 Landscape Magazine Density Interval and Measure. P.D.S
duly, 1967 Kumasi study Report of the Post-graduate Urban
Planning Course. C. P.
Sept., 1967 Urban Structuring, A.&P.S.
S. V. and Reinhold
Oct., 1967 Ark, Finland Alvar Aalto and the ethos of the 2nd
generation. P.D.S.
Nov., 1967 Le Corbusier Inter- Le Corbusier. A. S.
national Cultural
Organization
1967 Dutch Forum The universe in a basket. Van E.
The gathering body of experience.
Van E.
De spiegel-meester (concerning the
work of Hoost van Roojen). Van E.
1967 World Architecture Pavilion, Arnheim, a place for sculp-
Four, Studio Vista ture and people. Van E.
Dec., 1967 A.D. Alvar Aalto—the 2nd _ generation
ethos. P.D.S.
1968 Architects Year Book Movement in cities. B. R.
1968 S. V. and M.1.T. Press Team 10 Primer

111
Team 10 Purpose of the Family Meetings
Team 10 is fifteen years old in 1968. It is six years since it first
published Team 10 Primer for students.
Team 10 is still a small family group who know each other so well
they can begin to work whenever together with a ‘better mind’ than
each could achieve alone.
Problems Team 10 choose to tackle together are those building forms
beyond what society asks us individually to do (for these buildings
are not necessarily those we would be tackling by especial self-
training).

Dates of Meetings
FAMILY MEETINGS LARGER MEETINGS
Aix-en-Provence, July, 1953
9th Congress of CIAM
Doorn, Holland, Jan/Feb., 1954
(Post-mortem on Aix, preparation
of Doorn Manifesto.)
London, July, 1954
(To prepare for intended 10th
Congress of CIAM, Algiers, Sept., 1955.)
Paris, Sept., 1954
(To meet Le Corbusier, to prepare
a statement of intentions for
circulation to national groups.)
Paris, April, 1955
(To prepare documents for invita-
tions.)
Paris, July, 1955 Invited Participants at Team Meetings
Meeting at UNESCO of CIAM
CIRPAC and Team 10.
La Sarraz, Sept., 1955 Doorn 1954 Royaumont 1962
(1st version of new standard CIAM van Ginkel Miquel
Grilles, and mock-upto be included London 1954 Richards
as invitation for Dubrovnik.) Gutman Kurokawa
Holland, Sept., 1955 van Ginkel Schimmerling
(Post-mortem on La Sarraz.) Paris 1954 Josic
Holland, July, 1956 van Ginkel Guedes
(Last words before Dubrovnik.) Paris 1955 Stirling
Dubrovnik, 1956 Josic Oiza
10th Congress CIAM. Otterlo 1959 de Carlo
La Sarraz, Autumn, 1957 Rogers Wewerka
(Revivalist meeting.) Roth Wilson
Paris, April, 1959 Gardella Paris 1963
(Preparation for Otterlo.) Korsmo de Carlo
Otterlo, Sept., 1959 Wogensky Wewerka
(See Otterlo book.) Miquel Schimmerling
Bagnols-sur-Céze, July, 1960 Haan Blomstedt
(Study.) Stockla Berlin 1965
Paris, Jan., 1961 Lemco de Carlo
(Post-mortem on Bagnols.) van Ginkel Ungers
London, July, 1961 | Tavora Wewerka
(Presentation of Primer, 1st draft.) da Lima Urbino 1966
Stockholm, Jan., 1962 Magistretti Ceccarelli
(Primer in ammended state, Josic Coderch
Abbaye planned.) Tange Correa
Abbaye Royaumont, Sept., 1962 Kahn Doshi
(Study.) de Carlo Gardella
Paris, Sept., 1963 Bagnols-sur-Céze 1960 Hansen
(Tapes of Royaumont studied for Haan Hertzberger
publication, work of A.D. August Miquel Hollein
1964 discussed.) Schimmerling Kurokawa
Berlin, Sept., 1965 Busquets Polonyi
(1st family meeting after death of Wewerka Richards
Le Corbusier. Some participants.) Maki Ridruejo
Urbino, Sept., 1966 Blomstedt Rykwert
(Some members of Team 10 plus Josic Schimmerling
their participants to live and meet London 1961 Stifter
; in Giancarlo de Carlo's Coilege.) Josic Ungers
Paris, Feb., 1967 Richards Valle
Team 10 family. (Restatement of Paris 1967
conviction.) Voelcker

112 FHA
FS RHeR TALE
ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN LIBRARY

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91103

 Corbusier, and (ts far-reaching effects Team 1@Pri is a collection of
had created the vision of the new, articles, essay d diagrams which
f nally organized city. By Team 10 rega s as being essential
950s, younger architects real- to its individ members’ positions.
t while the Athens Charter In a way it is istory of how the
was succeeding in rehousing people involved have grown or
le, the life they were expected to changed. as a résult of contaet with
livg was dreary and socially obsolete. the others. Mueh new material has
1g valuable had been for- a been included in this revised edition
busier, Gropius, lace! of the work.
nders of modern archi- § CIAM congress at Aix-en- ° Today the architects grouped
se they felt that the ice in 1953, several young together in Tean 10 are J. B. Bakema
chitects were too fects, including Alison and (Holland), Aldo’ Eyck (Holland),
aire in their approach Smithson, Candilis, and G. Candilis (France), Alison and
6 design, especially in the area of — Bakema, formed a group to ex- Peter Smithson (Engl ), Shad
housing. . .. As an historical docu- change information, and CIAM, Woods (France), Giatheatio-de Carlo
ment of the 1950s and 1960s this aware of the dissension which (Italy), J. Coderc
me is significant.” growing, entrusted this group, Pologni (Hungary: zy Soltan
brary Journal 10, with the task of preparin (Poland) and St
nderstand what Team 10 stands -program for the Dubrovnik co: (Germany). :
, one must recognize the disillusion- gress in 1956. In 1956 the split
hich set in in the early 1950s became complete, and Team 10 was
The MIT PRESS
over ghe Athens Charter which had Massachusetts Institute of Technology
left in possession of the field. Since
mulated at the Congres _ _ Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
then it has continued to meet and
‘ternationaux d‘Architecture Mod- _ to exchange ideas and information
IAM) in 1933. CLAM had as a loose association of dedicated,
rmed by Gropius, Oud and Le forward-looking architects. STTP.