THE HEART OF THE CITY
TOWARDS THE HUMANISATION OF URBAN LIFE
International Congresses for Modern Architecture 8
J. Tyrwhitt, J. L. Sert and E. N. Rogers [Editors]
J. Tyrwhitt, J. L. Sert and E. N. Rogers [Editors]: THE HEART OF THE CITY: TOWARDS THE HUMANISATION OF URBAN LIFE [International Congresses for Modern Architecture]. London: Lund Humphries, September 1952. First edition. Quarto. Orange cloth decorated in black and white. Printed dust jacket. Decorated endpapers. 185 pp. 106 black and white and spot colored illustrations. Multiple paper stocks. Corrigenda slips laid-in. Elaborate graphic design throughout by Max Huber (Part 1) and John Denison-Hunt (parts 2-4). Tiny former owner inked signature to front free endpaper. Jacket edgeworn, with mild chipping, creases, and closed tears. Book and textblock very clean—a nice copy of this scarce and significant title: a very good or better copy in a good dust jacket.
8.75 x 10.75 hardcover book with 185 pages fully illustrated with black and white and spot colored illustrations. Endpapers by Saul Steinberg. Elaborate graphic design throughout by Max Huber (Part 1) and John Denison-Hunt (parts 2-4).
Includes contributions by J. L. Sert, Sigfried Giedion, Gregor Paulsson, G. Scott Williamson, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, J. J. Sweeney, J. M. Richards, Ian McCallum, J. B. Bakema, Ernesto N. Rogers, Paul Lester Wiener, Maxwell Fry, Richard J. Neura, A. Ling, W. J. Holford, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Gegenbach & Mollö Christensen, Olaf Thunstrom & Swedish Co-Op, The Institute Of Design, Pratt Institute, Godon Stephenson, J. Alaurant, Kenzo Tange, and many others.
Projects discussed include: Italian Piazzas, Commercial Core of London, Chicago Housing Projects, St. Die France, Bogota Government Center, etc.
“The “Heart of the City”, title of the 8th CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), held in 1951, is a contradictory and pervasive figure of speech which has marked a thinking and urban transition after the 2nd World War and still affects our contemporary urban and social condition. In 1951, two opposite urban conditions are considered by Sert, President of CIAM, as main issues which the Heart discourse should face: from the disappearance of city centres because of the destruction of the War to the negation of the urban centrality because of urban sprawl and the infinite constant enlargement of city boundaries. But the Heart itself also represents two different figures of speeches, the symbol and the metaphor: from one side it becomes a humanist symbol “which springs directly to the senses without explanation”, in opposition to the “mechanized killing”, to the “tyranny of mechanical tools” as stressed by Giedion during CIAM 8; from the other side the Heart still keeps its anatomical metaphorical organic meaning translated into a presumed right physical form and dimension of the city. These oppositions - from annulled bombed centers to infinite urban structures, from metaphor to symbol, from pro-urban to proto-urban Idea are the main causes of the complexity and of the stratification of several different layers of significances of the Heart of the City, since CIAM 8 until the present.
“Starting from CIAM 8, the paper investigates this Post-war urban tension, which lies at the crossroads of intellectual-theoretical and architectural-design worlds. On the one hand, there is the resilience of the decontextualized social-spatial tabula rasa created by the dangerous mechanical progress which led to the blood and horror of the War. While on the other, the resilience of embracing, stemming, and compressing the Galileo scandal, “the constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space” (Foucault, 1967) which was, for the first time, mirrored in the urban sprawl. The aim of this paper is to focus on the complexity and the difficulty of interpreting the Heart of the City, from the tangible Janus-faced binomial reconstruction-recentralization of the urban Core, to the symbolical abstract resilience of the Heart as a constituent element at the foundation of the urban structure and anticipator of an anthropological idea of Habitat as an integrating part of the human settlement. From this analysis, the paper states that the Heart does not only concern the Post War reconstruction of the cities as has been generally thought. On the contrary, the Heart of the City is still a valid issue in our contemporary urban condition and it deals with the progressive, contemporary topic of a correct synergy between social and physical space, between the private and public sphere.” —Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi
The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM), or International Congresses of Modern Architecture, was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged across Europe by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture (such as landscape, urbanism, industrial design, and many others).
The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded in June 1928, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the castle), and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general). CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art.”
Other founder members included Karl Moser (first president), Hendrik Berlage, Victor Bourgeois, Pierre Chareau, Sven Markelius, Josef Frank, Gabriel Guevrekian, Max Ernst Haefeli, Hugo Häring, Arnold Höchel, Huib Hoste, Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), André Lurçat, Ernst May, Max Cetto, Fernando García Mercadal, Hannes Meyer, Werner M. Moser, Carlo Enrico Rava, Gerrit Rietveld, Alberto Sartoris, Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, Rudolf Steiger, Szymon Syrkus, Henri-Robert Von der Mühll, and Juan de Zavala. The Soviet delegates were to be El Lissitzky, Nikolai Kolli and Moisei Ginzburg, although at the Sarraz conference they were unable to obtain visas.
Other later members included Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Uno Åhrén, Louis Herman De Koninck (1929) and Fred Forbát. In 1941, Harwell Hamilton Harris was chosen as secretary of the American branch of CIAM, which was the Chapter for Relief and Post War Planning, founded in New York City.
Josep Lluís Sert, co-founder of GATEPAC and GATCPAC (in Saragossa and Barcelona, respectively) in 1930, as well as ADLAN (Friends of New Art) in Barcelona in 1932, participated in the congresses as of 1929, and served as CIAM president from 1947 to 1956.
The organization was hugely influential. It was not only engaged in formalizing the architectural principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning. The fourth CIAM meeting in 1933 was to have been held in Moscow. The rejection of Le Corbusier's competition entry for the Palace of the Soviets, a watershed moment and an indication that the Soviets had abandoned CIAM's principles, changed those plans. Instead it was held onboard ship, the SS Patris II, which sailed from Marseille to Athens.
Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of "The Functional City", which broadened CIAM's scope from architecture into urban planning. Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals. These proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1943, when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily edited form as the "Athens Charter."
As CIAM members traveled worldwide after the war, many of its ideas spread outside Europe, notably to the USA. The city planning ideas were adopted in the rebuilding of Europe following World War II, although by then some CIAM members had their doubts. Alison and Peter Smithson were chief among the dissenters. When implemented in the postwar period, many of these ideas were compromised by tight financial constraints, poor understanding of the concepts, or popular resistance. Mart Stam's replanning of postwar Dresden in the CIAM formula was rejected by its citizens as an "all-out attack on the city."
The CIAM organisation disbanded in 1959 as the views of the members diverged. Le Corbusier had left in 1955, objecting to the increasing use of English during meetings.
For a reform of CIAM, the group Team 10 was active from 1953 onwards, and two different movements emerged from it: the New Brutalism of the English members (Alison and Peter Smithson) and the Structuralism of the Dutch members (Aldo van Eyck and Jacob B. Bakema).
Max Huber (1919-1992) moved to Milan in order to avoid being drafted into the Swiss army. He worked for Studio Boggeri until Italy joined the war in 1941, forcing Huber to return to his home country where he collaborated with Werner Bischof and Emil Schultness on the influential art magazine 'Du.' As a member of the art group Allianz he exhibits his abstract artwork at the Kunsthaus Zurich with Max Bill, Leo Leuppi, Richard Lohse and Camille Graeser.
After the war Huber returned to Milan where he rubbed shoulders with the postwar Italian intelligentsia [Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, Franco Fortini, Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni and Albe Steiner] all who shared the belief that design had the capacity to restore the human values misplaced during the war.
From 1950 to 1954 Huber worked for the department store La Rinascente, also known as "Elle Erre", the time Albert Steiner was art director of their Advertising Office. The two also worked on the VIII Triennale di Milano. With Achille Castiglioni he designed large-scale installations for RAI, Eni and Montecatini. In 1954 Huber was awarded the prestigious Compasso dπOro and in 1958 he travels to the US as a speaker to the First International Seminar on Typography (New York Art Directors Club).