TEAM 10 PRIMER
Alison Smithson [Editor]
Alison Smithson [Editor]: TEAM 10 PRIMER [WITH ADDITIONAL REPRINTS FROM VARIOUS ISSUES OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN]. [Tonbridge, Kent: Whitefriars Press, August 1965] First edition. Square quarto. Photographically-printed stiff wrappers. Sewn, perfect-bound signatures. 76 pp. Photographs, sketches and diagrams. Bibliography. Two fold-outs. Wrappers edgeworn and chipped at spine heel and crown. Textblock thumbed with edgewear to both upper corners. A good copy of the rare first, stand-alone edition of the TEAM 10 PRIMER, originally appearing in the December 1962 issue of Architectural Design.
12 x 12 booklet consisting of a 48-page black and white Primer, followed by 28 pages of two-color reprints from Architectural Design (1962-1964). Team 10 Members listed in the August 1965 Square-Format Primer: Jaap B. Bakema and Aldo van Eyck (Holland), Georges Candilis and Shad Woods (France), Alison & Peter Smithson (England), John Voelcker and Jerzy Soltan (Poland), Gier Grung (Norway), Ralph Erskine (Sweden) and José Coderch (Spain).
Illustrates the positions of the members of Team 10, a groundbreaking group of young architects that broke from the modernist vision of Gropius, Le Corbusier and others. Team 10's theoretical framework, disseminated primarily through teaching and publications, had a profound influence on the development of architectural thought in the second half of the 20th century, primarily in Europe.
- Preface
- Team 10 Primer
- Role of the Architect
- Urban Infra-structure
- Grouping of Dwellings
- Doorstep
- Bibliography
- Reprints from Architectural Design
Team 10 was a group of architects and other invited participants who first assembled in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of C.I.A.M.. The first meeting formally under the name of Team 10 took place in Bagnols-sur-Cèze in 1960; the last, with only four members present, was in Lisbon in 1981. Team 10's core group consists of the seven most active and longest-involved participants in the Team 10 discourse, namely Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods. Other participants include José Coderch, Ralph Erskine, Amancio Guedes, Rolf Gutmann, Geir Grung, Oskar Hansen, Charles Pologni, Brian Richards, Jerzy Soltan, Oswald Mathias Ungers, John Voelcker and Stefan Wewerka. They referred to themselves as "a small family group of architects who have sought each other out because each has found the help of the others necessary to the development and understanding of their own individual work."
Team 10's core group started meeting within the context of CIAM, the international platform for modern architects founded in 1928 and dominated by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion. After the war CIAM became the venue for a new generation of modern architects. The younger members who instigated the changes in CIAM formed a much wider group than the later core of Team 10. After the eighth congress in Hoddesdon, the individual national groups of CIAM set up ‘youngers’ sections, whose members generally took a highly active part in the organization. The intention was to rejuvenate CIAM, but instead a generation conflict started to dominate the debates, triggering a lengthy process of handing over the control of the CIAM organization to the younger generation. After the tenth congress in Dubrovnik in 1956, organized by a representative group from the younger generation which was nicknamed ‘Team 10’, the revival process of CIAM began to falter, and by 1959 the legendary organization came to an end at a final congress in Otterlo. An independent Team 10 with a partly changed composition subsequently started holding its own meetings without declaring a formal new organization.
There is a variety of reasons why Team 10 and its particular core participants emerged from this process. They certainly belonged to the most combatant, outspoken and eloquent ‘youngers’. They also shared a profound distrust of the bureaucratic set-up of the old CIAM organization which they refused to continue. But perhaps more importantly, they were initially part of the most active and dominant CIAM groups, namely those from the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, which were run by the second, so-called middle generation of modern architects. This observation partly explains why there are no German participants to the Team 10 discourse in the early years; due to the Second World War most of the first and second generation of modern architects had fled the country to the UK and the USA. This migration also explains the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to post-war CIAM, which was quite different from the pre-war years, when modern architecture was dominated by developments on the European continent.
There was no unequivocal Team 10 theory or school in the traditional sense. There was only one manifesto, the Doorn Manifesto of 1954, and that had been assembled within the older CIAM organization before Team 10 came into being. Even this one manifesto was moreover a subject of dispute between the Dutch and English younger members of CIAM. Mention may be made of two other brief public statements which were sent into the world in 1961 in the aftermath of the dissolution of CIAM – the ‘Paris Statement’ and ‘The Aim of Team 10’. They stated the new group’s intentions to continue to meet, but can hardly be called a programme for a new architecture. According to the introductory text of the Team 10 Primer, the individual members ‘sought each other out, because each has found the help of the others necessary to the development and understanding of their own individual work’. It could be argued that the only ‘product’ of Team 10 as a group was its meetings, at which the participants put up their projects on the wall, and exposed themselves to the ruthless analysis and fierce criticism of their peers.