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Team 10

Bagnols-sur-Ceze, France
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Team X - Meeting in Otterlo

Team 10, referred to as Team X or Team Ten, was a group of architects and other invited participants who assembled starting in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of C.I.A.M. and created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire approach to urbanism. They disclosed with the Manifesto Doorn, which reflect ideas of architecture and urbanism. The members exposed, discussed and analyzed architectural problems, so that their writings were not dogmas, but ideas and opinions.

The group's first formal meeting under the name of Team 10 took place in Bagnols-sur-Ceze 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 Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods. 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.

Participants

Participants as Jose Coderch, Ralph Erskine, Pancho Guedes, Rolf Gutmann, Geir Grung, Oskar Hansen, Reima Pietila, Charles Polonyi, Brian Richards, Jerzy Soltan, Oswald Mathias Ungers, John Voelcker, and Stefan Wewerka where relevant for their contributions. Other architects were present at some meetings, among them remember the names of Christopher Alexander, Fumihiko Maki, Jean Prouve, Kenzo Tange, James Stirling, Ignazio Gardella and Gino Valle.

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. Two different movements emerged from Team 10: the New Brutalism of the English members (Alison and Peter Smithson) and the Structuralism of the Dutch members (Aldo van Eyck and Jacob Bakema).

From the eighth congress of the CIAM questions posed to the functionalist model, which flows into the ninth CIAM crisis and preparing for the tenth of an alternative proposal to be made by the new generation of architects. In the tenth CIAM these architects raise a new proposal, which by its nature causes the dissolution of this organization. Ideas can meet Team X on three major principles: Association, Identity, and Flexibility.

Association

The principle of Association opposes the functional scheme of the Athens Charter, proposing an urban planning that takes into account how people groups. Considers four growing categories of grouping are: House, Street, District and City. The House is identified with a home, as a constituent unit of society, unlike the idea of the house as Existenzminimum of functionalist thinking.

Unlike Functionalism they not use the abstract term of living because for Team X, which has influences of existentialist philosophy and structuralist anthropology, the house is a way of building space according to different values, ways of living, and occupy the territory. Street is the social meeting place where groups and individuals are brought into contact with each other and with the outside world. They understand that functionalism had replaced the Street Corridor by a green space corridor between built blocks. It then tries to recover the street as a social meeting place. The District is defined as an area within the city where the inhabitants share some things in common. The City is defined as an intellectual community. The intention of Team X is sociologically mark that a city needs to develop a sense of community by the inhabitants.This way of thinking is connected with other disciplinary currents of the time, especially the existentialist philosophy and structuralist anthropology.

Identity

The identity results from the need to recognize the space for the consolidation of the need to belong. They will say that is not about finding the way in the city but knowing that one is someone living somewhere. They criticize what they see as abstract and anonymous urban environments, produced by functionalism, to which Van Eyck defined as a hygienic and nothing organized. Believe necessary items such as buildings or groups of buildings that form appropriate to the function for which they were intended, allow to study the changes that occur in their environment and to serve as signs of identity for the inhabitant.

While the mid-60s Aldo Rossi published The architecture of the city and he linked the identity to collective memory, related to historical monuments, Team X develops the concept of identity is not as permanence of the past but as construction the new city. A clear example of this attitude is the Project for Reconstruction of Coventry, where aerial structure and continuous proposal by Smithson passes over the ruins, without any intention to rebuild the lost form or seeing the remains of the cathedral as another thing a monument, a beautiful work of the past, as considered modern thought.

Flexibility

Team X said that the essential phenomenon of cities is not growth, but the change - therefore urban structures should be designed willing to grow and change. The Smithson will talk about permanently noisy city, claiming that the city can not arrive at a configuration that is final. They said that the work of each architect had to allow a later architect continue the construction of the city from where they had left. They reject the concept of urban planning because changes would be an unpredictable phenomenon and therefore the only thing you can do is operate in the city trying to do the best in each case.

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Bagnols-sur-Ceze, France
thedani, September 18th, 2020
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