UNIT 1: CRITIQUING MODERNISM

Modernism
Challenging CIAM declarations
Team X
Brutalism
Writing of
Venturi
Jane Jacob
Aldo Rossi
Christopher Alexander

MODERNISM
Modernist architecture emphasizes function.
It attempts to provide for specific needs rather than imitate
nature.
The roots of Modernism may be found in the work of
Berthold (1901-1990), a Russian architect who settled in
London and founded a group called Tecton.
The Tecton architects believed in applying scientific,
analytical methods to design.
Modernist architecture can express a number of stylistic
ideas, including:
Structuralism
Formalism
Bauhaus
The International Style
Brutalism
Minimalism

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at

Cornell University - I.M. Pei
Modernist architecture has the following main features:

 Little or no ornamentation
Factory-made parts
Man-made materials such as metal and concrete
Emphasis on function
Rebellion against traditional styles
Architects, influenced by this style:

Le Corbusier
Philip Johnson

Mies van der Rohe

In the later decades of the twentieth century, designers
rebelled against the rational Modernism and a variety of post
modern styles evolved.
Examples of post modern architecture include:
Postmodernism
High Tech
Organic Architecture
De-constructivism

POSTMODERNISM:
Postmodern architecture evolved from the modernist
movement, yet contradicts many of the modernist ideas.
Combining new ideas with traditional forms, postmodernist
buildings may startle, surprise, and even amuse.
Familiar shapes and details are used in unexpected ways.
Buildings may incorporate symbols to make a statement or
simply to delight the viewer.

The concept of postmodernism is also expressed in the realm of

art
Philip Johnson's At&T Headquarters is often cited as an
example of postmodernism.
Like many buildings in the International Style, the skyscraper
has a sleek, classical facade.

AT&T Headquarter - Philip Johnson

The key ideas of Postmodernism are set forth in two
important books by
Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture and
Learning from Las Vegas.

HIGH TECH:
High-tech buildings are often called machine-like.

 Steel, aluminium, and glass combine with brightly colored

braces, girders, and beams.
Many of the building parts are prefabricated in a factory and
assembled later.
The support beams, duct work, and other functional
elements are placed on the exterior of the building, where
they become the focus of attention.

HSBC Building Sir Norman Foster

ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE:
Frank Lloyd Wright said that all architecture is organic, and
the Art Nouveau architects of the early twentieth century
incorporated curving, plant-like shapes into their designs.
But in the later half of the twentieth century, Modernist
architects took the concept of organic architecture to new
heights.
By using new forms of concrete and cantilever trusses,
architects could create swooping arches without visible
beams or pillars.
Organic buildings are never linear or rigidly geometric.
Instead, wavy lines and curved shapes suggest natural
forms.

The Sydney Opera House - Jorn Utzon

DECONSTRUCTIVISM:
Deconstructivism, or Deconstruction, is an approach to
building design that attempts to view architecture in bits and
pieces.
The basic elements of architecture are dismantled.
Deconstructivist buildings may seem to have no visual logic.
They may appear to be made up of unrelated, disharmonious
abstract forms.
Deconstructivism in architecture, also called deconstruction,
is a development of postmodern architecture that began in
the late 1980s.
It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an
interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or
skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and
dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as
structure and envelope.
The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit
the many deconstructivist "styles" is characterized by a
stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

Glass it is one of the largest constructivist buildings

World's most spectacular buildings in the style of

Deconstructivism.

CHALLENGING CIAM DECLARATIONS:

CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture)
were an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in
1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses
arranged around the world by the most prominent architects
of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of
the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of
architecture (like landscape, urbanism, industrial design, and
many others).

FORMATION OF CIAM:
The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM)
was founded in June 1928, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in
Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized
by Le Corbusier, Hlne de Mandrot (owner of the castle),
and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general).
CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to
advance the cause of "architecture as a social art".

INFLUENCE:
The organization was hugely influential.
It was not only engaged in formalizing the architectural
principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw
architecture as an economic and political tool that could be
used to improve the world through the design of buildings
and through urban planning.
The fourth CIAM meeting in 1933 was to have been held in
Moscow. The rejection of Le Corbusier's competition entry for
the Palace of the Soviets, a watershed moment and an
indication that the Soviets had abandoned CIAM's principles,
changed those plans.
Instead it was held onboard ship, the SS Patris II, which
sailed from Marseille to Athens.
Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of "The
Functional City", which broadened CIAM's scope from
architecture into urban planning.
Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed
that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by
strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the

population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced

intervals.
These proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1942,
when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily
edited form as the "Athens Charter."
As CIAM members traveled worldwide after the war, many of
its ideas spread outside Europe, notably to the USA.
The city planning ideas were adopted in the rebuilding of
Europe following World War II, although by then some CIAM
members had their doubts. Alison and Peter Smithson were
chief among the dissenters.
When implemented in the postwar period, many of these
ideas were compromised by tight financial constraints, poor
understanding of the concepts, or popular resistance.
Mart Stam's replanning of postwar Dresden in the CIAM
formula was rejected by its citizens as an "all-out attack on
the city."
The CIAM organization disbanded in 1959 as the views of the
members diverged.
Le Corbusier had left in 1955, objecting to the increasing use
of English during meetings.
For a reform of CIAM, the group Team 10 was active from
1953 onwards, and two different movements emerged from
it: the New Brutalism of the English members (Alison and
Peter Smithson) and the Structuralism of the Dutch members
(Aldo van Eyck and Jacob B. Bakema).

CIAM Conferences:
CIAM's conferences consisted of:
1928, CIAM I, La Sarraz, Switzerland, Foundation of
CIAM
1929, CIAM II, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on The
Minimum Dwelling
1930, CIAM III, Brussels, Belgium, on Rational Land
Development
1933, CIAM IV, Athens, Greece, on The Functional City

 1937, CIAM V, Paris, France, on Dwelling and Recovery

1947, CIAM VI, Bridgwater, England, on Reconstruction
of the Cities
1949, CIAM VII, Bergamo, Italy, on Art and Architecture
1951, CIAM VIII, Hoddesdon, England, on The Heart of
the City
1953, CIAM IX, Aix-en-Provence, France, on Habitat
1956, CIAM X, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, on Habitat
1959, CIAM XI, Otterlo, the Netherlands, organized
dissolution of CIAM by Team 10

TEAM 10:
Team 10, just as often referred to as "Team X", was a group
of architects and other invited participants who assembled
starting in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of C.I.A.M. and
created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire
approach to urbanism.
The group's first formal meeting under the name of Team 10
took place in Bagnols-sur-Cze in 1960; the last, with only
four members present, was in Lisbon in 1981.
Team 10's core group consists of the seven most active and
longest-involved participants in the Team 10 discourse,
namely
Jaap Bakema,
Georges Candilis,
Giancarlo De Carlo,
Aldo van Eyck,
Alison and Peter Smithson and
Shadrach Woods.
They referred to themselves as "a small family group of
architects who has sought each other out because each has
found the help of the others necessary to the development
and understanding of their own individual work."
Team 10's theoretical framework, disseminated primarily
through teaching and publications, had a profound influence

on the development of architectural thought in the second

half of the 20th century, primarily in Europe.
Two different movements emerged from Team 10:
the New Brutalism of the English members (Alison and
Peter Smithson) and
the Structuralism of the Dutch members (Aldo van
Eyck and Jacob Bakema).
"Core family members" included:
Jacob B. Bakema, The Netherlands
Aldo van Eyck, The Netherlands
Alison and Peter Smithson, England
Georges Candilis, Greece
Shadrach Woods, USA/France
Giancarlo De Carlo, Italy

HISTORY:
Team 10's core group started meeting within the context of
CIAM, the international platform for modern architects
founded in 1928 and dominated by Le Corbusier and Sigfried
Giedion.
After the war CIAM became the venue for a new generation
of modern architects.
As a student, Candilis had already been taking part in the
CIAM meetings since the congress in Athens, 1933, while
Bakema and Van Eyck had been involved in the discussions
on the future of modern architecture since the reunion
congress in Bridgwater, 1947.
Alison and Peter Smithson attended the congress in
Hoddesdon in 1951 to hear Le Corbusier speak, and it was
there that they met, among others, Candilis, Bakema and
Van Eyck.
These individuals would form part of the core of Team 10
after the dissolution of CIAM, as would Shadrach Woods and
Giancarlo De Carlo.
The younger members who instigated the changes in CIAM
formed a much wider group than the later core of Team 10.

 After the eighth congress in Hoddesdon, the individual

national groups of CIAM set up youngers sections, whose
members generally took a highly active part in the
organization.
The intention was to rejuvenate CIAM, but instead a
generation conflict started to dominate the debates,
triggering a lengthy process of handing over the control of
the CIAM organization to the younger generation.
After the tenth congress in Dubrovnik in 1956, organized by
a representative group from the younger generation which
was nicknamed Team 10, the revival process of CIAM began
to falter, and by 1959 the legendary organization came to an
end at a final congress in Otterlo.
An independent Team 10 with a partly changed composition
subsequently started holding its own meetings without
declaring a formal new organization.
There is a variety of reasons why Team 10 and its particular
core participants emerged from this process.
They certainly belonged to the most combatant, outspoken
and eloquent youngers.
They also shared a profound distrust of the bureaucratic setup of the old CIAM organization which they refused to
continue.
But perhaps more importantly, they were initially part of the
most active and dominant CIAM groups, namely those from
the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, which
were run by the second, so-called middle generation of
modern architects.
This observation partly explains why there are no German
participants to the Team 10 discourse in the early years; due
to the Second World War most of the first and second
generation of modern architects had fled the country to the
UK and the USA.
This migration also explains the dominance of the AngloSaxon contribution to post-war CIAM, which was quite

different from the pre-war years, when modern architecture

was dominated by developments on the European continent.
Especially the English youngers were eager to abandon the
CIAM organization and set up their own platform.
There is no doubt that Team 10 sprang from within CIAM but
it is impossible to identify an exact and singular moment of
origin; looking back each Team 10 participant seems to
remember a different particular moment.
The chosen period of 1953-81 represents the years of the
most intensive interaction between the core participants.
All of them were present in an official capacity for the first
time in 1953, at the CIAM congress in Aix-en-Provence,
except for De Carlo who first attended a CIAM meeting in
1955 and who did not really form part of the core group of
Team 10 until after the dissolution of CIAM.
The last official Team 10 meeting took place in 1977, but in
retrospect the core participants identify the demise of
Bakema in 1981 as marking the end of Team 10.
With the loss of Bakema as a driving force, the magic of the
meetings apparently evaporated.
At the same time, this was the moment when Van Eyck and
the Smithsons became embroiled in a dispute which
damaged their formerly close relationship beyond repair.
Individual Team 10 members continued to meet, but the core
of the group had finally disintegrated.
Besides the ambiguous status of the participants and of the
group, as well as the time frame, there is a third factor
complicating the reconstruction of the history of Team 10.
From the perspective of conventional historiography, there is
scarcely a tangible product or object to research.
The individuals within the group emphatically maintained
their autonomous standpoints as demonstrated by the many
clashes that arose.
Yet they persisted in calling Team 10 a family, so expressing
their close bond and their mutual trust and respect.

 There was no unequivocal Team 10 theory or school in the

traditional sense.
There was only one manifesto, the Doorn Manifesto of 1954,
and that had been assembled within the older CIAM
organization before Team 10 came into being.
Even this one manifesto was moreover a subject of dispute
between the Dutch and English younger members of CIAM.
Mention may be made of two other brief public statements
which were sent into the world in 1961 in the aftermath of
the dissolution of CIAM the Paris Statement and The Aim
of Team 10.
They stated the new groups intentions to continue to meet,
but can hardly be called a programme for a new
architecture.
According to the introductory text of the Team 10 Primer, the
individual members sought each other out, because each
has found the help of the others necessary to the
development and understanding of their own individual
work.
It could be argued that the only product of Team 10 as a
group was its meetings, at which the participants put up
their projects on the wall, and exposed themselves to the
ruthless analysis and fierce criticism of their peers.

BRUTALISM:
The Bauhaus architect Le Corbusier used the French phrase
bton brut, or raw concrete, to describe the construction of
his rough, concrete buildings.
Brutalism grew out of the Bauhaus Movement and the bton
brut buildings by Le Corbusier and his followers.
Heavy and angular, Brutalist buildings can be constructed
quickly and economically.
Common features include:
Precast concrete slabs
Rough, unfinished surfaces

 Exposed steel beams

Massive, sculptural shapes
The Prizker Prize-winning architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha is
often called a "Brazilian Brutalist" because his buildings are
constructed of prefabricated and mass-produced concrete
components. Shown here is his home in So Paulo, Brazil.
The Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer turned to Brutalism
when he designed the Whitney Museum in New York City and
the Atlanta, Georgia Central Library.

Da Rocha Residence, Sao Paolo - Paulo Mendes

WRITING OF VENTURI -JANE JACOB:

Jane Jacobs, (May 4, 1916 April 25, 2006) was an
American-born Canadian writer and activist with primary
interest in communities and urban planning and decay.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane
Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban
planning in the 20th century.
First published in 1961, the book is a critique of modernist
planning policies claimed by Jacobs to be destroying many
existing inner-city communities.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her singlemost influential book and possibly the most influential
American book on urban planning and cities.
Widely read by both planning professionals and the general
public, the book is a strong critique of the urban renewal
policies of the 1950s, which, she claimed, destroyed
communities and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces.
Jacobs advocated the abolition of zoning laws and
restoration of free markets in land, which would result in
dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and frequently cited New
York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant
urban community.
Cities and the Wealth of Nations attempts to do for
economics what The Death and Life of Great American Cities
did for modern urban planning, though it has not received
the same critical attention.
Beginning with a concise treatment of classical economics,
this book challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of
the greatest economists.
Classical (and Neo-classical) economists consider the nationstate to be the main player in macroeconomics.

WRITING OF VENTURI ALDO ROSSI:

Aldo Rossi (May 3, 1931 September 4, 1997) was an
Italian architect and designer who accomplished the unusual

feat of achieving international recognition in four distinct

areas:
Theory
Drawing
Architecture and
Product design.

WORKS:
His earliest works of the 1960s were mostly theoretical and
displayed a simultaneous influence of 1920s Italian
modernism (see Giuseppe Terragni), classicist influences of
Viennese architect Adolf Loos, and the reflections of the
painter Giorgio De Chirico.
A trip to the Soviet Union to study Stalinist architecture also
left a marked impression.

Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht

In his writings Rossi criticized the lack of understanding of
the city in current architectural practice.
He argued that a city must be studied and valued as
something constructed over time; of particular interest are
urban artifacts that withstand the passage of time.
Rossi held that the city remembers its past (our "collective
memory"), and that we use that memory through
monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city.

WRITING OF VENTURI CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER:

 Christopher Alexander was born in Vienna, Austria, and

raised in Oxford and Chichester, England.
He graduated from Cambridge University, where he studied
Mathematics and Architecture. He then obtained a Ph. D. in
Architecture at Harvard University.
For his Ph. D. Thesis, later published as the book Notes on
the Synthesis of Form, he was awarded the first Gold Medal
for Research by the American Institute of Architects.
Since 1963 he has been Professor of Architecture at the
University of California at Berkeley, and Director of the
Center for Environmental Structure.
In 1980, Professor Alexander was elected member of the
Swedish Royal Academy; and in 1996 he was elected fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Christopher Alexander is a Trustee of the Prince of Wales's
Institute of Architecture. He is now retired and is based in
Arundel, Sussex, UK.

PUBLICATIONS:
Dr. Alexander is the author of numerous books and papers.
He has initiated a new approach to architectural thinking, in
which the same set of laws determines the structure of a
city; a building; or a single room.
He has spent most of his life in searching for these laws.
His approach to solving this universal problem takes
advantage of scientific reasoning, and totally opposes other,
unscientific approaches based on fashion, ideology, or
arbitrary personal preferences.
This is so different from the way architecture has been
taught since the second world war that it causes conflicts
with established architectural schools
Alexander offers definitive solutions to the problems of urban
architecture and design.
It is a great pity that these were not adopted when first
published.

 Fortunately, a small number of his ideas have been

incorporated into the "New Urbanism".
Nevertheless, this very recent movement by no means
represents a wholesale application of his results.
Alexander has actually abstracted the process by which
organic and inorganic forms evolve -- which is the same
process that governs the growth of a city.
These results lie at the basis of how matter organizes itself
coherently, and are the opposite of the modern planning
approach in which grids, zones, roads, and buildings, based
on some preconceived design on paper, are imposed on
human activity.