Formed during the waning years of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and sounding the movement's death-knell at its final congress in 1956, Team X emerged as a radical alternative to the supposed uniformity of post-war Modern architecture. A younger generation... [more]

Formed during the waning years of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and sounding the movement's death-knell at its final congress in 1956, Team X emerged as a radical alternative to the supposed uniformity of post-war Modern architecture. A younger generation of architects, unencumbered by the vicissitudes of world wars, sought to reconceptualize the methods and ideology of architectural design and turn it away from its functionalist origins. Led by Peter and Alison Smithson and Aldo van Eyck, Team X -- named after the tenth and last CIAM meeting -- sought to develop a more psychological and phenomenological basis for the development of form. Eschewing the scientific methods of the Modern movement, Team X posited a broader anthropological approach to design. This approach had already fueled the Smithsons' Brutalist ethos, particularly as developed through their work with Nigel Henderson and his photographs of London slums. The Team X architects shared the CIAM concern with urbanism and the acute need for mass housing. The Smithsons produced a canonical sketch demonstrating that once above the sixth floor, one lost all contact with the ground and, supposedly, the pulse of the city. The drawing immediately skewered the idealized 'tower in the park' and heralded the development of low-rise, high-density housing types. The desire to create a sense of place informed much of the Team X output. Aldo van Eyck, perhaps the most sensitive of these architects, clearly recognized the need to address the particular social and cultural conditions of a location. Van Eyck sought to create collective spaces that could be inflected and interpreted in personal terms. Thus, his orphanage in Amsterdam achieved cohesion through an interconnected sequence of domed family units, all united under a continuous roof. From this heightened awareness of the individual's importance within the collective arose other strands in the Team X trajectory. Giancarlo De Carlo's 1964 plan for Urbino accommodated the preservation of existing buildings with the discreet insertion of modern forms. Clearly influenced by the tenets of the emerging Italian Tendenza, De Carlo's long-term commitment to developing the urban form of Urbino signaled a critical repudiation of the Ville Radieuse concepts of High Modernism. The discrete attentiveness of De Carlo's proposals was not lost on the student revolts of 1968, particularly those among the architecture students in Italy and France. Given the loss of vital city centers to the ravages of urban renewal (particularly in America), De Carlo and van Eyck's incisive cultural criticism was a polemic that largely fell on deaf ears until far too late. [show less]