Challenges to Modernism in Europe 1959–1967

Abstract

One thing is certain: if society at large fails to come to terms with its people – what a paradox – people will spread over the globe and be at home nowhere, for it is in the nature of countless pseudo places made today that they are all the same. Aldo van Eyck ciam and Team 10 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s ciam had remained very much in the hands of Le Corbusier and Giedion. The fourth ciam congress, held aboard the S.S. Patris II in 1933, produced (ten years later) the document published by Le Corbusier as the “Athens Charter,” which became the definitive statement of the organization's objectives and planning policies. It was in many of its details synonymous with Le Corbusier's “Radiant City” proposals. With the collapse of modernism in Germany in the mid-1930s, Le Corbusier assumed an even more powerful role. The fifth ciam congress was held in Paris in 1937, and Le Corbusier arranged his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition as a propaganda display for the organization. The theme was the functional city. The Spaniard Jose Luis Sert and the Dutchman Cornelis van Eesteren joined the inner circle of the organization in these years, but the German occupation of much of Europe in the 1940s dispersed once again the remnants of ciam . The saving grace for ciam turned out to be England, which after the founding of mars (Modern Architecture Research Group) in 1933 had grown increasingly active.