Modern Architecture A Critical History - (Chapter 3 The Vicissitudes of Ideology CIAM and Team X Critique and Co... )

Chapter
3
The Vicissitudes of Ideology: CIAM and
Team X, Critique and Counter-critique
1928–68
1. The idea of modern architecture includes the link between the phenomenon of architecture
and that of the general economic system.
2. The idea of ‘economic efficiency’ does not imply production furnishing maximum
commercial profit, but production demanding a minimum working effort.
3. The need for maximum economic efficiency is the inevitable result of the impoverished
state of the general economy.
4. The most efficient method of production is that which arises from rationalization and
standardization. Rationalization and standardization act directly on working methods both in
modern architecture (conception) and in the building industry (realization).
5. Rationalization and standardization react in a threefold manner:
(a) they demand of architecture conceptions leading to simplification of working methods on
the site and in the factory;
(b) they mean for building firms a reduction in the skilled labour force; they lead to the
employment of less specialized labour working under the direction of highly skilled
technicians;
(c) they expect from the consumer (that is to say, the customer who orders the house in which
he will live) a revision of his demands in the direction of a readjustment to the new conditions
of social life. Such a revision will be manifested in the reduction of certain individual needs
henceforth devoid of real justification; the benefits of this reduction will foster the maximum
satisfaction of the needs of the greatest number, which are at present restricted.
La Sarraz Declaration,
Copyright © 2020. Thames & Hudson, Limited. All rights reserved.
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, 19281
The 1928 CIAM declaration, signed by twenty-four architects, representing France (6),
Switzerland (6), Germany (3), Holland (3), Italy (2), Spain (2), Austria (1) and Belgium (1),
emphasized building rather than architecture as ‘the elementary activity of man intimately
linked with evolution and the development of human life’. CIAM openly asserted that
architecture was unavoidably contingent on the broader issues of politics and economics and
that, far from being removed from the realities of the industrialized world, it would have to
depend for its general level of quality not on craftsmen but on the universal adoption of
rationalized production methods. Where four years later Hitchcock and Johnson were to
argue for the pre-eminence of style as determined by technique, CIAM emphasized the need
Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture : A Critical History, Thames & Hudson, Limited, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cityuhk/detail.action?docID=6460361.
Created from cityuhk on 2022-01-22 07:43:53.
for planned economy and industrialization, denouncing as it did so efficiency as a means for
maximizing profit. Instead it advocated the introduction of normative dimensions and
efficient production methods as a preliminary step towards a rationalization of the building
industry. Thus, that which aesthetes would regard as a formal preference for regularity was
for CIAM the initial prerequisite for increasing housing production and for superseding the
methods of a craft era. The La Sarraz document took an equally radical attitude to town
planning, when it declared:
Urbanization cannot be conditioned by the claims of a pre-existent aestheticism; its essence

is of a functional order …
The chaotic division of land, resulting from sales, speculations, inheritances, must be
abolished by a collective and methodical land policy. This redistribution of the land, the
indispensable preliminary basis for any town planning, must include the just division
between the owners and the community of the unearned increment resulting from works of
joint interest.2
Between the La Sarraz declaration of 1928 and the last CIAM conference held in
Dubrovnik in 1956, CIAM passed through three stages of development. The first, lasting
from 1928 to 1933 and comprising the CIAM congresses held in Frankfurt in 1929 and
Brussels in 1930, was in many respects the most doctrinaire. Dominated by the German-
speaking Neue Sachlichkeit architects, who were mostly of socialist persuasion, these
congresses addressed themselves first, at Frankfurt, under the title ‘Die Wohnung für das
Existenzminimum’, to the problems of minimum living standards, and then, at Brussels
(CIAM III), under the title ‘Rationelle Bebauungsweisen’, to the issues of optimum height
and block spacing for the most efficient use of both land and material. CIAM II, initiated by
the Frankfurt city architect, Ernst May, also established a working party, known as CIRPAC
(Comité International pour la Résolution du Problème de l’Architecture Contemporaine),
whose primary task was to prepare themes for future congresses.
The second stage of CIAM, lasting from 1933 to 1947, was dominated by the personality
of Le Corbusier, who consciously shifted the emphasis to town planning. CIAM IV in 1933
was without doubt the most comprehensive congress from an urbanistic standpoint, by virtue
of its comparative analysis of thirty-four European towns. Out of it came the articles of the
Athens Charter, which for inexplicable reasons were not published until a decade later.
Reyner Banham characterized the achievements of this congress in 1963 in the following,
rather critical terms:
CIAM IV – theme ‘The Functional City’ – took place in July and August 1933 aboard the S.S.
Patris, in Athens, and in Marseilles at the end of the voyage. It was the first of the ‘romantic’
congresses, set against a background of scenic splendour, not the reality of industrial Europe,
and it was the first Congrès to be dominated by Le Corbusier and the French, rather than the
tough German realists. The Mediterranean cruise was clearly a welcome relief from the
worsening situation of Europe and in this brief respite from reality the delegates produced
the most Olympian, rhetorical, and ultimately destructive document to come out of CIAM: the
Athens Charter. The hundred and eleven propositions that comprise the Charter consist in
part of statements about the conditions of towns, and in part of proposals for the rectification
of those conditions, grouped under five main headings: Dwellings, Recreation, Work,
Transportation, and Historic Buildings.
The tone remains dogmatic, but is also generalized and less specifically related to
immediate practical problems than were the Frankfurt and Brussels reports. The
generalization had its virtues, where it brought with it a greater breadth of vision and
insisted that cities could be considered only in relation to their surrounding regions, but this
persuasive generality which gives the Athens Charter its air of universal applicability
conceals a very narrow conception of both architecture and town planning and committed
CIAM unequivocally to: (a) rigid functional zoning of city plans, with green belts between the
areas reserved to the different functions, and (b) a single type of urban housing, expressed in
the words of the Charter as ‘high, widely-spaced apartment blocks wherever the necessity of
housing high density of population exists’. At a distance of thirty years we recognize this as
merely the expression of an aesthetic preference, but at the time it had the power of a Mosaic
commandment and effectively paralyzed research into other forms of housing.
While the summary consensus of the Athens Charter may well have served to inhibit any
further examination of alternative housing models, the fact remains that there was a
noticeable shift in tone. The radical political demands of the early movement had been
dropped and while Functionalism remained the general credo, the articles of the Charter read
like a neo-capitalist catechism, whose edicts were as idealistically ‘rationalistic’ as they were
largely unrealizable. This idealistic approach acquired its pre-war formulation in the fifth
congress, dedicated to the theme of dwelling and leisure and held in Paris in 1937. On this
occasion CIAM was prepared to acknowledge not only the impact of historical structures but
also the influence of the region in which the city happened to be situated.
With the third and final stage of CIAM, liberal idealism triumphed completely over the
materialism of the early period. In 1947, at CIAM VI, held at Bridgwater in England, CIAM
attempted to transcend the abstract sterility of the ‘functional city’ by affirming that ‘the aim
of CIAM is to work for the creation of a physical environment that will satisfy man’s
emotional and material needs.’ This theme was developed further under the auspices of the
English MARS group which prepared the topic ‘The Core’, for CIAM VIII, held at
Hoddesdon, England, in 1951. In choosing the theme ‘The Heart of the City’, MARS caused
the congress to address itself to a topic that had already been broached by Sigfried Giedion,
José Luis Sert and Fernand Léger in their manifesto of 1943, where they wrote: ‘The people
want buildings that represent their social and community life to give more functional
fulfilment. They want their aspiration for monumentality, joy, pride and excitement to be
satisfied.’
For Giedion, as for Camillo Sitte, the ‘space of public appearance’ was necessarily
contingent on the monumental counterform of the public institutions enclosing it and vice
versa. Yet, despite their now manifest concern for the concrete qualities of place, the old
guard of CIAM gave no indication that they were capable of realistically appraising the
complexities of the post-war urban predicament; with the result that new affiliates, drawn
from the younger generation, became increasingly disillusioned and restless.
The decisive split came with CIAM IX held at Aix-en-Provence in 1953, when this
generation, led by Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck, challenged the four
Functionalist categories of the Athens Charter: Dwelling, Work, Recreation and
Transportation. Instead of proffering an alternative set of abstractions, the Smithsons, Van
Eyck, Jacob Bakema, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, John Voelcker, and William and
Jill Howell searched for the structural principles of urban growth and for the next significant
unit above the family cell. Their dissatisfaction with the modified Functionalism of the old
guard – with the ‘idealism’ of Le Corbusier, Van Eesteren, Sert, Ernesto Rogers, Alfred Roth,
Kunio Mayekawa and Gropius – is reflected in their critical reaction to the CIAM VIII
report. They responded to the simplistic model of the urban core by positing a more complex
pattern that would be, in their view, more responsive to the need for identity. They wrote:
Man may readily identify himself with his own hearth, but not easily with the town within
which it is placed. ‘Belonging’ is a basic emotional need – its associations are of the simplest
order. From ‘belonging’ – identity – comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short
narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.
In this singularly sharp paragraph they not only dismissed the Sittesque sentimentality of
the old guard, but also the rationalism of the ‘functional city’. Their critical drive to find a
more precise relation between physical form and socio-psychological need became the
subject matter for CIAM X, held at Dubrovnik in 1956 – the last CIAM meeting – for which
this group, thereafter known as Team X, was basically responsible. The official demise of
CIAM and the succession of Team X were confirmed in a further meeting that took place in
1959 in the elegiac setting of Van de Velde’s Museum at Otterloo with the old master in
attendance. But the essential epitaph of CIAM had already been written, in Le Corbusier’s
letter to the Dubrovnik congress, when he stated:
It is those who are now forty years old, born around 1916 during wars and revolutions, and
those then unborn, now twenty-five years old, born around 1930 during the preparation for a
new war and amidst a profound economic, social, and political crisis, who thus find
themselves in the heart of the present period the only ones capable of feeling actual
problems, personally, profoundly, the goals to follow, the means to reach them, the pathetic
urgency of the present situation. They are in the know. Their predecessors no longer are, they
are out, they are no longer subject to the direct impact of the situation.3
The peculiar London cultural climate of the mid-1950s, subject as it was to the influence
of Parisian Existentialism, not only decisively shaped the ethos of the British Brutalist
movement but also contributed to the Team X polemic with which it was closely associated.
In this respect credit must be given to the photographer Nigel Henderson, whose photographs
of London street life were exhibited by the Smithsons at Aix-en-Provence and whose
perception and way of life played such a crucial role in shaping the Smithsons’ sensibility.
That this sensibility was ultimately at odds with the tabula rasa implications of Le
Corbusier’s CIAM Grid, which was still being propagated as late as 1952, must in no small
part be attributed to Henderson’s record of the social and physical reality of London’s East
End – his photographs of community life in Bethnal Green. The Smithsons regularly visited
Henderson’s home in Bethnal Green from 1950 onwards and it was from their first-hand
experience of the street life in the area (now obliterated by the high-rise housing blocks of the
Welfare State) that they drew their first notions of identity and association. Thus the Bye-
Law Street, albeit distorted by their own rationalization, became the conceptual ‘armature’
for their Golden Lane housing proposal of 1952.
For all its resemblance to Le Corbusier’s ‘Ilot Insalubre’ project of 1937, Golden Lane
was clearly intended as a critique of the Ville Radieuse and of the zoning of the four
functions of the city into Dwelling, Work, Recreation and Transportation. The Smithsons
opposed these functions with the more phenomenological categories of House, Street,
District and City, although what they meant by these terms grew vaguer as the scale
increased. The house in their Golden Lane project was clearly the family unit; the street was
evidently a system of one-sided gallery access of generous width, elevated into the air. The
district and the city were understandably and realistically regarded as variable domains that
lay outside the bounds of physical definition.
Yet, while remaining opposed to the pre-war determinism of the ‘functional city’, the
Smithsons in their Golden Lane proposal became caught in a rationalization process
comparable to that of CIAM. For all that the ‘yards’ in their Golden Lane scheme were
indicated as adjunct areas to the streets, it was clear that the ‘house in the air’ did not have a
yard that was in any way akin to the backyard of the Bye-Law Street and that the street itself,
now divorced from the ground, could no longer accommodate community life. Above all, its
one-sided nature had only the capacity to stress the linearity of the route rather than engender
a sense of place. The presence of life on both sides of the Bye-Law Street had clearly been
responsible for its social vitality (as an early sketch by the Smithsons would indicate), but the
nature of Golden Lane – high density on a small site – and the Smithsons’ own acceptance of
Functionalist norms precluded a solution that could have sustained such a life.
From their postulation of this housing pattern as a prototypical solution, one must
conclude that the Smithsons were largely unaware of these contradictions: they proceeded to
show their Golden Lane scheme, repeated ad infinitum over the metropolitan area, as though
it were the manifest critical alternative to Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. And while its
random, ‘twig-like’ distribution could no doubt be taken as a polemic against wholesale
demolition and as an argument in favour of piecemeal development, their collage of the
Golden Lane prototype as a phantom axonometric, apparently erecting itself amid the ruins
of Coventry, returned its authors to the central dilemma of CIAM. As imposed on blitzed
Coventry [277], Golden Lane appeared to be as much against the continuity of the existing
city as the Haussmann-like projections of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin of 1925. The
axonometric depicted the ‘edge conditions’ between the old street pattern and the new work
as a series of inevitable collisions. After the building-out of the Golden Lane concept in 1961
at Park Hill in Sheffield [278], to the design of Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, it became obvious
that aside from the perimeter block form, such as had been realized by Brinkman at Spangen,
Rotterdam, in 1919 (a scheme well known to the Smithsons), there was little possibility of
achieving any continuity between decks in the air and streets on the ground.
277 Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Housing system applied to central Coventry. (The parish church and ruined
cathedral are on the left.)
278 Lynn and Smith, Park Hill, Sheffield, 1961.
For all that Team X were committed to the multilevel city – an idea stemming via Le
Corbusier from Hénard’s visions of 1910 – it was to the Smithsons’ credit that they remained
conscious of its limitations and in consequence produced one of the most critical sketches of
their early career, namely a drawing which demonstrated that above the sixth floor one lost
all contact with the ground. While the Smithsons were to use this sketch as a way of
justifying a megastructural approach, their recognition of tree height as an experiential limit
may well have exerted an influence in the 1960s on the general adoption of ‘low rise, high
density’ as the preferred policy for family residential development. This critical awareness
was amplified at the time by the Smithsons’ own village-infill projects of the mid-1950s –
their ‘close’ and ‘fold’ houses – and by their insistence, following the ‘ecological’ argument
of their Doom Manifesto of 1954, that ‘habitat should be integrated into the landscape rather
than isolated as an object within it’.
The sociocultural challenge of Bethnal Green was largely lost on Bakema, despite the
anti-Functionalism of his pronouncements in the early 1940s. He was the one member of
Team X whose practice was hardly to deviate from the site planning principles of the Neue
Sachlichkeit – the row-house principle of open-ended blocks of identical height an optimum
distance apart. Bakema’s constant point of reference was clearly the Amsterdam South Plan
of 1934 and the pre-war work of Dutch Functionalists such as Merkelbach, Karsten and
Stam. All the same, in the Opbouw studies for Pendrecht (1949–51) and for Alexander
Polder (1953–56), in all of which Bakema participated, there was a move away from the rigid
principle of blocks of uniform height and orientation to a more modulated layout, comprising
‘swastika’ formations, grouped into ‘neighbourhoods’ about clusters of public facilities,
swimming pools, schools, etc.
The Kennermerland project, designed by Bakema in collaboration with J.M. Stokla and
submitted to the Otterlo Congress of 1959, was a culmination of this research work, as
Bakema admitted when challenged by Kenzo Tange as to the origin of the proposal. Yet it
says something for the confusion of the time that both Tange and Bakema should insist on
Corbusian rationalism as its point of departure, for clearly Kennermerland stemmed from the
abstract ‘neighbourhood’ concept first developed by German planners such as Ernst May and
Arthur Korn. Even as late as the early 1960s, Bakema was still proposing an extremely
hierarchized form of neighbourhood planning as had first appeared in Korn’s MARS plan for
London of 1942.
Bakema did not truly come under Le Corbusier’s influence until his Tel Aviv proposal of
1963 [279], when he used the megastructural Obus block projected for Algiers in 1931 (fig.
175) as a means for giving order to the dispersed form of the city. Paradoxically, this
continuous superblock in no way served to liberate Bakema from his deterministic
tendencies, for while the fiction of the neighbourhood unit was given less importance, its
structuring function was replaced by megaforms that either cut across topography, as in the
case of his 1962 entry for Bochum University, or alternatively, as in Tel Aviv, paralleled the
trajectory of a freeway spine running through the city.
279 Bakema and Van den Broek, project for megastructural blocks in Tel Aviv, 1963.
It is one of the paradoxes of Team X that Bakema proposed the megabuilding as the
psychological ‘fix’ for the megalopolitan landscape just when the Smithsons had begun to
entertain doubts as to the viability of such structures. The Smithsons’ ‘open city’ thesis,
influenced by the urbanistic concepts of Louis Kahn, was first broached after their initial visit
to the States in 1958. In that year they also designed (with Peter Sigmond) their competition
entry for the Hauptstadt district of Berlin. In this scheme (strangely similar to that of
Scharoun) they posited the notion of the permanently ‘ruined’ city – ruined in the sense that
accelerated movement and change in the 20th century were incapable of relating to the
pattern of any pre-existing fabric.
While both Bakema and the Smithsons were preoccupied with the notion of ‘urban fix’ –
with the sense of place to be established by architecture within the ‘space endlessness’ of
Motopia – the Smithsons, rather than continuing to advocate the megastructure, opted for
localized traffic-free enclaves, be they the elevated podiums of their Hauptstadt scheme [280,
281] or the Schinkelesque Paradeplatzen of their Mehringplatz proposal of 1962. Either way
round, both Bakema and the Smithsons were, by this date, obsessed with the liberating
promise of mass mobility, whose achievement they wanted to celebrate with an appropriate
architectural counterform.
280, 281 Alison and Peter Smithson and Sigmond, project for Berlin-Haupstadt, 1958. Above, southern portion of pedestrian
net, showing the growth of causeways above the old street grid; below, escalator access to shopping level and roof.
Of the various strategies proffered for dealing with this phenomenon, those of the
Smithsons seem to have been the more feasible, and this is reflected in the partial realization
of both their Hauptstadt and Mehringplatz prototypes – the one in their Economist office
complex, London, of 1965, and the other in their Robin Hood Gardens housing, London, of
1969. Yet the sterile conditions imposed by these developments, particularly in the case of
Robin Hood Gardens, which was as isolated from its urban context as the towers of any
‘functional city’, would suggest that the Smithsons had yet to come to terms with the urban
consequences of their ‘landcastle’ approach.
The essential pluralism of Team X found a direct reflection in the very different approach
of Aldo van Eyck whose entire career was devoted to evolving a ‘place form’ which would
be appropriate to the second half of the 20th century. From the very outset Van Eyck
addressed himself to issues which the majority of Team X would have preferred to have left
unformulated, and where Team X kept its initial buoyancy through a naïve optimism Van
Eyck was motivated by a critical impulse which verged on the pessimistic. No other Team X
member seems to have been prepared to attack the alienating abstraction of modern
architecture at its roots, possibly because no one else had had the benefit of Van Eyck’s
‘anthropological’ experience. His personal preoccupation with ‘primitive’ cultures, and with
the timeless aspects of built form that such cultures invariably reveal, dated from the early
1940s, so that by the time he joined Team X he had already developed a unique position. His
statement at the Otterlo Congress of 1959, in which he declared his concern for the
timelessness of man, was almost as foreign to the mainstream of Team X thought as it was to
the ideology of CIAM:
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 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.4
Van Eyck’s concern for transition, for the amplification of the ‘threshold’ so as to mediate
symbolically between such universal twin phenomena as ‘inside versus outside’ and ‘house
versus city’, was to make itself manifest in his own work of the late 1950s, most particularly
in his children’s home in Amsterdam which was then nearing completion. In this school Van
Eyck demonstrated his notion of ‘labyrinthine clarity’ (see pp. 334–35) through an
interconnected sequence of domed ‘family’ units, all united under a continuous roof.
By 1966, however, that which had been the cause for enthusiasm became the occasion for
despair. Five years of intense urban development had been enough to convince Van Eyck that
the architectural profession, if not Western man as a whole, had so far proved incapable of
developing either an aesthetic or a strategy for dealing with the urban realities of mass
society. Van Eyck stated: ‘We know nothing of vast multiplicity – we cannot come to grips
with it – not as architects, planners or anybody else.’ Elsewhere Van Eyck characterized this
predicament in terms of the cultural void left by the loss of the vernacular. In his various
writings of the period, he pointed to the role played by modern architecture in the eradication
of both style and place. He argued that post-war Dutch planning had produced nothing save
the organized uninhabitable nowhere of the ‘functional city’. His doubts as to the ability of
the profession to meet the pluralistic demands of society, without the mediation of a
vernacular, led him to question the authenticity of the society itself. In 1966 he asked: ‘If
society has no form – how can architects build its counterform?’
By 1963, Team X had already passed beyond the stage of fertile exchange and
collaboration, a transformation that was intuitively acknowledged by the Smithsons in their
1962 publication of the Team X Primer. From now on, Team X would continue as a
movement in name only, since what there had been to achieve through a creative critique of
CIAM had already been attained. Little more, in fact, was now to be accomplished in the way
of critical reinterpretation, save possibly for the work of two men who had hitherto remained
somewhat to one side – an American, Shadrach Woods, and an Italian, Giancarlo de Carlo.
The new departure made by Woods in his Frankfurt-Römerberg competition entry of
1963 [282] was a direct response to Van Eyck’s appeal for ‘labyrinthine clarity’: for what
was being proffered in the Frankfurt proposal was a ‘city in miniature’. In the place of the
medieval centre destroyed in the Second World War, Woods, in collaboration with Manfred
Schiedhelm, proposed an equally labyrinthine configuration of shops, public spaces, offices
and dwellings, the whole being served by a double-decked basement containing service and
parking. If Frankfurt was an urban ‘event’, it was certainly conceived in different terms from
those of the Smithsons or Bakema, for while presenting an orthogonal counterform in
opposition to the medieval form of the city, it also embodied a three-dimensional ‘loft’
system, served by escalators, whose interstices could be occupied according to demand. That
this concept had been anticipated by the infrastructures of Yona Friedman’s L’Architecture
mobile of 1958 in no way detracted from the magnitude of Wood’s achievement.
282 Candilis, Josic and Woods, project for Frankfurt-Römerberg, 1963. Model. (Designers: Woods and Schiedhelm.)
Frankfurt-Römerberg, although it remained a project, was without doubt the greatest
accomplishment of Woods’s career and is probably one of the most important prototypes
developed by Team X. In relating to the context of an existing city and refusing the escapism
of both ‘functional’ and ‘open’ city models, it endeavoured to put the automobile in its place
and to continue the tradition of urban culture.
That this Frankfurt scheme as built out in the Free University of Berlin in 1973 [283,
284] lost much of its conviction stems largely from the absence of an urban context. In
Berlin-Dahlem it was deprived of that urban culture for which it had been conceived and to
which it would have responded had it been built in Frankfurt. However much a university
may function like a city in microcosm, it cannot generate the animated diversity of the city
proper. Aside from this, Frankfurt’s flexibility in terms of space was replaced in Berlin by an
idealization of flexibility in terms of technique – by the ‘poetic’ but somewhat unserviceable
detailing of Jean Prouvé’s modular clip-on façade of Corten steel.
283 Woods and Schiedhelm, Free University, Berlin-Dahlem, 1963–73. Sections and ground plan of first phase.
284 Woods and Schiedhelm, Free University, Berlin-Dahlem, 1963–73. Corten steel cladding system, detailed by Prouvé.
In 1964, the implicit ideology of Woods’s Frankfurt scheme found its complement in De
Carlo’s plan for Urbino. This plan, preceded by an exhaustive topographical study, devotes
more space to the tactics of preservation and rehabilitation than to the accommodation of new
development. With De Carlo’s Urbino, Team X finally arrived at the complete antithesis to
the Cartesian projections of the Ville Radieuse. De Carlo’s concern for the reuse of existing
stock wherever possible has been confirmed as a policy by recent housing studies, which
have shown conclusively that, despite the higher densities usually attained, it may take as
long as fifty years for new housing to compensate for the statistical ‘housing loss’ incurred
through the time spent in demolition and construction.
Considerations such as these finally had the effect of precipitating Team X into a realm
that it had always strenously avoided, namely politics. Never was this shift in consciousness
more manifest than at the Milan Triennale of 1968 when Woods, in sympathy with student
radicals, assisted in the removal of his own work. Only one year before, he had written:
What are we waiting for? To read the news about a new armed attack with even more
esoteric weapons, news which comes to us through the air captured by our marvellous
transistorized instruments, somewhere deep in our more and more savaged dwellings? Our
weapons become more sophisticated; our houses more and more brutish. Is that the balance
sheet for the richest civilization since time began?5
This same theme was taken up by De Carlo in 1968 when he wrote his synoptic analysis
of the ideological development of modern architecture, under the title Legitimizing
Architecture, wherein he reviewed the consequences of the CIAM Declaration of 1928:
Today, forty years after the Congress, we find that those proposals have become houses and
neighbourhoods and suburbs and then entire cities, palpable manifestations of an abuse
perpetrated first on the poor and then even on the not-so-poor: cultural alibis for the most
ferocious economic speculation and the most obtuse political inefficiency. And yet those
‘whys’ so nonchalantly forgotten in Frankfurt still have trouble coming openly to the surface.
At the same time, we have a right to ask ‘why’ housing should be as cheap as possible and
not, for example, rather expensive; ‘why’ instead of making every effort to reduce it to
minimum levels of surface, of thickness, of materials, we should not try to make it spacious,
protected, isolated, comfortable, well equipped, rich in opportunities for privacy,
communication, exchange, personal creativity. No one, in fact, can be satisfied by an answer
which appeals to the scarcity of available resources, when we all know how much is spent on
wars, on the construction of missiles and anti-ballistic systems, on moon projects, on
research for the defoliation of forests inhabited by partisans and for the paralyzation of the
demonstrators emerging from the ghettos, on hidden persuasion, on the invention of artificial
needs, etc.6
For De Carlo, the students’ revolt of 1968 was not only a necessary culmination of the
crisis in architectural education, but also a reflection of the deeper and more significant
dysfunctions of architectural practice and theory – the latter often serving to mystify the true
network of power and exploitation permeating the entire society. As an example of this, De
Carlo cited the proceedings of CIAM VIII, whose sentimental deliberations on ‘The Heart of
the City’ were largely responsible for the ideology with which the traditional city core was
subsequently raped (an ironic, if not cynical, procedure that did not gain its full momentum
until a decade later). As De Carlo argued, the Newspeak overtones of this venture were not
entirely lost on the critics of Western society, who came to regard the process of urban
renewal as a euphemism for the dislocation of the poor.
In the mid-1960s this point still largely escaped most Team X members who, with the
exception of Van Eyck, Woods and De Carlo, seemed to prefer to ignore the destruction of
our urban heritage in the name of speculation. The postulative capacities of Team X became
paralyzed at this juncture, their inventive energies becoming depleted in the face of an
impossible situation. Paradoxically, what now endures from their work is not so much their
architectural vision as the suggestive power of their cultural criticism.

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Modern Architecture A Critical History - (Chapter 3 The Vicissitudes of Ideology CIAM and Team X Critique and Co... )

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Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, 19281

Urbanization cannot be conditioned by the claims of a pre-existent aestheticism; its essence

278 Lynn and Smith, Park Hill, Sheffield, 1961.

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