Congrès Internationaux D'Architecture Moderne

The Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (International Congresses of Modern Architecture, or CIAM) was an association of avant-garde architects founded in 1928 to advance an international modern architecture and urbanism. The congresses, attended by European delegates and, to a limited degree, by delegates from North and South America, met eleven times from the 1928 organizational meeting at La Sarraz, Switzerland, until CIAM disbanded at Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1959. Each congress was planned in several meetings of the Comité International pour la Réalisation des Problemes d'Architecture Contemporaine (International Committee for the Implementation of Contemporary Architecture, or CIRPAC). Through extensive conversations held both at the preparatory meetings and at the congresses themselves, and with the help of exhibitions, publications, and news reports, CIAM's participants examined and articulated the purposes of a radical, twentieth-century architecture and urbanism.

CIAM claimed that contemporary building should be derived from industrialization, thus rational and standardized; and that it should be shaped by political and economic realities, therefore an agent of social change. The La Sarraz declaration stated, “Urbanism is the organization of all the functions of collective life” (Mumford 2000, p. 25), and advanced the notion of a functional order consisting of dwelling, production, transportation, and recreation. The 1929 congress in Frankfurt focused on the minimal housing unit (Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, or “minimal housing unit”); the 1930 congress in Brussels considered effective land use for housing projects (Rationelle Bebauungsweisen, or “rational development manner”); and the 1933 congress, held on board the SS Patris II en route between Marseilles and Athens, examined the functional city, and became more widely known through Spanish architect Jose Luis Sert's 1942 publication, Can Our Cities Survive? and the 1943 publication by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, La Charte d'Athënes (The Athens Charter). Though deliberations were often fraught with diverse opinions, the main lines [Page 335]of argument claimed that contemporary society was in flux, changing from a family-based structure to a more egalitarian one of individual citizens operating within a setting of cooperatives and communal law. Housing needs under these new conditions would be best met by high-rise slab apartment buildings, rationally arranged on large sites and acting as the central element of urban organization. Urban design on a human scale (a range of dimensions related to the proportions of the human body) was to “assure individual liberty and the benefits of collective action” (Mumford 2000, p. 87).

If the first two congresses were dominated by the attitudes of tough German realists with socialist leanings, the next two considered urban design as a set of generalized propositions. The Athens charter, developed in 1933 but not published until 1943, promoted idealistic and unrealizable functional zoning; CIAM 5 (Paris, 1937) considered historic structures and the larger regions surrounding cities.

After World War II, new sensibilities entered into CIAM deliberations, and participants became interested in creating a physical environment that would both satisfy people's emotional and material needs and also stimulate their spiritual growth. CIAM 8, which was titled “The Heart of the City,” was held in 1951 in Hoddesdon, Great Britain, and was the most significant postwar meeting. It addressed the urban core on the basis of the complexities of human association and with a belief in the achievements possible through cooperative action. Building on this base for CIAM 10, which was held in 1956 in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, a faction of younger architects identified as “Team X” opposed the functional categories of the Athens Charter. In their place, they advanced notions of human association and spiritual growth in terms of the cluster: “The problem of cluster is one of developing a distinct total structure of each community, and not one of sub-dividing a community into parts” (Mumford 2000, p. 252). A sense of belonging, identity, and neighborliness were the critical values to be promoted. To pursue them, it was argued, would require a new way of thinking about and operating on the city. Three years later in the meeting held in Otterlo, after extensive debate by its members about whether or not the organization had served its purposes, CIAM was formally dissolved.

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