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ANTI-MODERNIST REACTIONS
The radical tactics of street demonstrations and vocal
opposition to government plans employed by British
community architects and American advocacy plan-
ners noted above was part of the anti-establishment
ideological change in Europe and America during the
late 1960s and early 1970s. The young professionals
were reacting against the recent mistakes and omis-
sions of urban policy and design in political ways, but
there were other, more intellectual critiques of mod-
ernism emerging at the same time, ones that had
their roots in the 1950s. This lineage begins most
clearly with the work of a post-World War II genera-
tion of young architects, most particularly those asso-
ciated with the group known as Team 10.
This group was entrusted with the preparations
for the tenth meeting of CIAM (the Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) that took
place at Dubrovnik in 1956. At the core of this group,
which took its name from the number of the CIAM
conference, was a smaller circle of professionals who
had come together in Doorn, Holland in 1954 and
set out a critique of CIAM doctrine from earlier con-
ferences in the ‘Doorn Manifesto’ (Gold: p. 230).
This group, comprising architects Aldo van Eyck,
Peter Smithson, John Voelcker, Jacob Bakema and
Daniel van Ginkel, together with a social economist
Hans Hovens-Greve, argued specifically that CIAM’s
overly technical view of city functions failed to deal
with ‘human associations,’ or the social fabric that
sustained the city and its people.
CIAM’s doctrine about cities had been spelled out
clearly in 1933, during the movement’s fourth con-
ference, and in the celebrated Athens Charter, writ-
ten largely under the auspices of Le Corbusier. The
Congress was only five-years old in 1933, having
been founded in 1928 at La Sarraz in Switzerland as a
means of propagating the agenda of modern architec-
ture. Specifically, it sought to unite a series of dis-
parate architectural experiments into an international
movement with common intentions and cohesion
around the building style that had emerged strongly
the previous year at the Weissenhoff exhibition.
As a relief from the political tensions in Europe,
CIAM’s famous fourth conference was held aboard
the steamer S.S. 
Patris II
as it sailed across the
Mediterranean from Athens to Marseilles. On board,
elements of the most notable, one might say notorious
manifesto of modern city design were formulated.
The crusading document we know today as the
Athens Charter is in fact a substantial and subsequent
rewriting of CIAM IV’s original maritime proceedings.
The mild-mannered technical language of the origi-
nal notes, 
Les Annales Techniques
, was transformed by
a series of working groups, influenced heavily by
Le Corbusier, into a hard-hitting, dogmatic mani-
festo that eventually appeared in 1942 under Le
Corbusier’s sole authorship (Gold, 1997).
The Charter narrowly defined the modern city
under four main categories – Dwelling, Work,
Recreation and Transportation – each with its dis-
tinct location and urban form. A fifth heading briefly
discussed historic buildings and suggested it was
appropriate to conserve buildings if they were true
remnants of the past. However, the tone of the
document implied that no avant-garde architect or
planner associated with the modern movement could
or should allow these irrelevant past cultures to inter-
fere with the grand work of making the new city.
Absent from the text of the Charter was any mean-
ingful discussion of the social, economic or architec-
tural character of existing residential or mixed-use
neighborhoods.
However, the Charter’s rhetoric was powerful, and
its vision compelling in its distilled abstraction of
human functions. The urban ideas enshrined in the
text became guiding principles and doctrine for
many architects and planners involved in rebuilding
British and European cities after World War II. But
while many professionals in the new postwar
generation were persuaded by the promise of a crisp,
clean technical future, others began to question the
doctrine. Radicals like those involved in the Doorn
Manifesto quickly discerned an intellectual vacuum
in postwar thinking about urban architectural and
social issues. For example, all that could be said 
at CIAM VIII in 1951, structured around the theme
of ‘The Urban Core,’ was that the center city itself
should be designated as a functional zone, and
include ‘open space’ to which citizens would be
spontaneously attracted in some mysterious and
unspecified fashion. It was becoming all too clear
that CIAM’s model of the Functional City had 
been formulated in ignorance of how cities actually
worked.
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In opposition to these large-scale, technical and
abstract generalizations, Team 10, which grew out of
the Doorn group, proposed an urbanism that valued
‘the personal, the particular and the precise’ (Banham,
1963). In the words of Aldo van Eyck, one of Team
10’s founders, ‘Whatever time and space mean, place
and occasion mean more’ (van Eyck, 1962: p. 27).
The tenth conference in Dubrovnik in 1956 signaled
the end of CIAM as an organization and an intellec-
tual force. But the power of the modernist view of the
city, with its single-use zones divided by major high-
ways, and new large buildings constructed as singu-
lar, unrelated objects in the open space laid bare by
the demolition of old neighborhoods, lasted for
another twenty years. It created the city we now fight
to reform.
In contrast to the abstraction of city plans inspired
by Le Corbusier, the work of younger architects who
came to prominence in the 1950s through their asso-
ciation with Team 10 demonstrated a concern to
enrich modernism with a sense of social realism that
it lacked. The urban designs of one such architect,
Ralph Erskine, revealed his special sensitivity to
human behavior and community dynamics.
Erskine’s work in the northern British city of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne is particularly relevant to our
story, as it provided a dramatic counterpoint to the
general set of values, assumptions and procedures
that pertained to most British urban renewal pro-
grams, and to a large degree in America also. The
bulk of city redevelopment in Britain during the
1960s continued to follow an impersonal process of
slum clearance with old neighborhoods replaced by
large-scale residential projects. In this bureaucratic
process, homes were ‘housing units,’ and residents
were regarded as passive consumers and quantified
merely as numbers to be rehoused. There was little or
no sense of partnership between city planners and the
public, and the bureaucratic process often bred bitter
conflict. Residents resented being forcibly rehoused,
while paternalistic city architects and planners couldn’t
understand why people weren’t grateful for their
efforts to provide them with newer, better accommo-
dation. It wasn’t only young idealistic professionals
who waged a campaign to change the urban renewal
process. Ralph Erskine, already a well-established
architect, came to prominence in Britain for doing
just that.
Although born in Britain, Erskine had developed as
a major architectural figure in his adopted homeland
of Sweden, gaining a reputation for well-designed
housing schemes that were sensitively adapted to site,
climate and community. When Erskine was appointed
architect for the massive Byker redevelopment project
in 1968, the Newcastle city authorities intentionally
embarked on a more progressive policy of urban rede-
velopment, but it is doubtful whether they had any
real inkling of where this appointment would lead.
What the Newcastle city fathers got for their good
intentions was a mini-revolution in urban redevelop-
ment. Erskine stood the standard process on its head,
involving the residents as partners and forging a
strong bond between the community and the design-
ers. Erskine’s partner, Vernon Gracie, lived on-site for
many years during the rebuilding process in a flat
above the drawing office set up in an old corner store,
previously a funeral parlor, which became as much a
community resource space as a professional drawing
office. In this program of urban redevelopment that
lasted for 14 years, Erskine and his team showed
what could be done when urban designers took com-
munity values seriously. Suddenly there was a real
alternative to the standard urban renewal procedures
that had devastated so many communities.
Erskine’s design team evolved a new process, and
derived an architecture that was contemporary in its
details but which grew from an understanding of
the traditional pedestrian scale of urban space (see
Figure 1.6). The architect author of this book was
privileged to be associated with Erskine’s office in the
early 1970s, an experience that healed his damaged
faith in the profession of architecture, and invigorated
his lifelong pursuit of democratic urban design.
CHAPTER ONE
●
PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND