Life at the Threshold

Abstract

In 1949, the year that the architects Peter and Alison Smithson moved to London to begin their professional careers, an ideological controversy over the avant-garde role of architecture in the postwar period erupted within the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Le Corbusier, who had founded the organization twenty-one years before, sparked the dispute with his address to the seventh congress in Bergamo, Italy. After declaring the pursuit of the industrialized housing prototypes and functionally zoned urbanism that were characteristic of the early phase of modernism obsolete, he proposed that successive meetings be dedicated to the drafting of a new charter. That charter, he stated without much in the way of explanation, would be known as the Charte de l’Habitat. At the time, habitat was a clearly defined, if broad, concept in the biological fields that governed the interconnectedness of the organisms that inhabited a region. In the interwar period, a similar urban discourse had grown up dedicated to “the territorial arrangements that social activities assume.”1 Until this point, however, CIAM had been focused on the development of a standard that would accommodate the most rudimentary necessities of habitation—or “dwelling,” as this goal was translated into English.2 Le Corbusier remained vague about the architectural application that he hoped this ecological concept would assume at CIAM, though he requested that all the national delegations participate in the discussion over “the place of l’Habitat in the human complex.”3 Peter and Alison Smithson both joined CIAM during the period of this highstakes controversy and were instrumental in shaping the ecological debate in terms