BRIEF HISTORY OF TEAM 10

Team 10  was a group of indivuduals came together rather than a strict organized group, the concept of membership or movement did not exist. They organized meetings between 1955 and 1981, it was then when they discussed about who was to be invited. Still, there was a core group which was different from invited members. They were the most active and longest-involved participants in Team 10, namely Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods. The core group started meeting first within the context of CIAM, which had become a venue for new generation architects after the war. Candilis had already been taking part in the CIAM meetings since the congress in Athens, 1933, while Bakema and Van Eyck had been involved in the discussions on the future of modern architecture since the ‘reunion’ congress in Bridgwater, 1947. Alison and Peter Smithson attended the congress in Hoddesdon in 1951 to hear Le Corbusier, and it was there that they met, among others, Candilis, Bakema and Van Eyck. They were the ones who would form part of the core of Team 10 after the dissolution of CIAM, as would Shadrach Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo.

Between  1953-81 was the time when the most intensive interaction occured betwen core participants. All of them participate the CIAM in 1953 except for De Carlo, he participate in 1955. The last official meeting of the Team 10 was in 1977, but in retrospect the core participants identify the demise of Bakema in 1981 as marking the end of Team 10. After loss of Bakema  and the dispute between Van Eyk and Smithsons the core group became disintegrated.

They do not have any theory, there was only one manifesto, which was The Doorn Manifesto of  1954. 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 called these programme new architecture. 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.

THE DOORN MANIFESTO

1. It is useless to consider the house except as a part of a community owing to the inter-action of these on each other.

2. We should not waste our time codifying the elements of the house until the other relationship has been crystallized.

3. 'Habitat' is concerned with the particular house in the particular type of community.

4. Communities are the same everywhere.
(1) Detached house-farm.
(2) Village.
(3) Towns of various sorts (industrial/admin./special).
(4) Cities (multi-functional).

5. They can be shown in relationship to their environment (habitat) in the Geddes valley section.

6. Any community must be internally convenient-have ease of circulation; in consequence, whatever type of transport is available, density must increase as population Increases, i.e. (1) is least dense, (4) is most dense.

7. We must therefore study the dwelling and the groupings that are necessary to produce convenient communities at various points on the valley section.

8. The appropriateness of any solution may lie in the field of architectural invention rather than social anthropology.

Holland, 1954

THE AIM OF TEAM 10

Team 10 is a 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. But it is more than that.

They came together in the first place, certainly because of mutual realization of the inadequacies of the processes of architectural thought which they had inherited from the modern movement as a whole, but more important, each sensed that the other had already found same way towards a new beginning.

This new beginning, and the long build-up that followed, has been concerned with inducing, as it were, into the bloodstream of the architect an understanding and feeling for the patterns, the aspirations, the artefacts, the tools, the modes of transportation and communications of present-day society, so that he can as a natural thing build towards that society's realization-of-itself.

In this sense Team 10 is Utopian, but Utopian about the present. Thus their aim is not to theorize but to build, for only through con-struction can a Utopia of the present be realized.

For them 'to build' has a special meaning in that the architect's responsibility towards the individual or groups he builds for, and towards the cohesion and convenience of the collective structure to which they belong, is taken as being an absolute responsibility. No abstract Master Plan stands between him and what he has to do, only the 'human facts' and the logistics of the situation.

To accept such responsibility where none is trying to direct others to perform acts which his control techniques cannot encompass. requires the invention of a working-together-technique where each pays attention to the other and to the whole insofar as he is able.

Team 10 is of the opinion that only in such a way may meaningful groupings of buildings come into being, where each building is a live thing and a natural extension of the others. Together they will make places where a man can realize what he wishes to be.

Team 10 would like to develop their thought processes and language of building to a point where a collective demonstration (perhaps a little self-conscious) could be made at a scale which would be really effective in terms of the modes of life and the structure of a community.

ALDO VAN EYCK (1918-1999)

Aldo Ernest van Eyck was born on 16 March 1918 in Driebergen, the Netherlands. Between 1919 and 1935 he lived in London, where his father was a correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper NRC. After studying at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, van Eyck studied architecture from 1938-42 at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich where he became acquainted with the international avant-garde. He remained in Zurich until the war ended and married fellow student Hannie van Roojen.

In 1946, van Eyck moved to Amsterdam and worked there from 1946 until 1951 for the urban development division of the city’s Department of Public Works under Cor van Eesteren and Jacoba Bridgwater. He designed more than 700 playgrounds, which he continued to design long after setting up his own practice in 1951.

Van Eyck gained international recognition with his design of Amsterdam’s Municipal Orphanage (1955-60). His best-known works include the Pastoor Van Ars Church in Loosduinen (1963-69), the temporary sculpture pavilion at Sonsbeek (1965-66) and the PREVI housing in Lima, Peru (1969-72). He built the Hubertus House — a house for single parents and their children — during his partnership with Theo Bosch (1971-82) when the two of them also were responsible for the urban renewal and some of the new buildings in the Nieuwmarkt district of Amsterdam. In practice with his wife Hannie since 1983, he built the ESTEC building for the European Space Agency in Noordwijk (1984-89), the Protestant Church for the Moluccan Community in Deventer (1991-92), and the Auditor’s Office Building in The Hague (1992-97). 

Van Eyck was the wordsmith of Team 10, of which he was a core member from the very beginning in the 1950s until the very end. At the last CIAM congress (1959) he presented his ‘Otterlo Circles’, a diagram visualizing his syncretic approach to design, bringing together the classical, modern and vernacular traditions in architecture. Other key terms and evocative mottos include the shift from ‘space and time’ to ‘place and occasion’, ‘vers une casbah organisée’, the greater reality of the doorstep, the in-between realm, twin phenomena, reciprocity and relativity. Most of his ideas and concepts are explained in his unpublished typescript ‘The Child, the City and the Artist’ (1962); key articles by his hand are ‘The medicine of reciprocity tentatively illustrated’ and ‘Steps toward a configurative discipline’, both published in Forum, when he was part of the editorial board, which also included Bakema and Hertzberger, among others (1959-63).
Van Eyck found much of his inspiration in the world of art, notably his contemporaries of Cobra, and the poetry movement of ‘de Vijftigers’, as well as in non-western cultures such as the African Dogon which he would visit various times.

Van Eyck’s effects on the Dutch architecture scene can hardly be overestimated; two of these are the development of so-called Dutch structuralism with Piet Blom and Hertzberger as its best-known representatives, and the achievements of urban renewal, especially in Amsterdam and its Nieuwmarkt district. Van Eyck taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1959, and he was a professor at Delft University of Technology from 1966 to 1984. He received numerous distinctions and prizes among which the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1990. In 1994 he and his wife were awarded the Dutch BNA-kubus.

He died on 14 January 1999 in Loenen, the Netherlands.

ALDO VAN EYCK'S UTOPIAN DISIPLINE

An Enriched Reality

Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999), the focus of this and the following chapter, told his utopian architectural stories in three principal ways: written presentation of his vision, emblematic expression of it and various attempts to realize it with buildings. Van Eyck’s essay ‘Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline’ (1962) was a compelling textual expression of his story; the Amsterdam Orphanage (1957–1960) was among his most convincing constructed expressions of it, and the Otterlo Circles (1959) was an exemplary emblem of it. In each, van Eyck transcribed an increasingly enriched expression of his utopian vision for a new dynamic reality. ‘Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline’ stands as van Eyck’s most comprehensive statement of his architectural principles.2 It was an attempt to elaborate on a systematic working method, a configurative discipline, which, according to van Eyck, would entail exploration of dynamic complexity that could be organized fugally to maintain a comprehensive whole. He argued that his new theory and practice of architecture would deliver more compassionate human habitats than orthodox modern architecture could ever hope to deliver.

The essay is primarily a theoretical statement motivated by van Eyck’s effort to draw principles out of his then recently completed and occupied Amsterdam Orphanage building. While the structure could aptly illustrate the intent of the essay, no illustrations of it, or of any building, were included with its original publication. Nor did van Eyck refer directly to his building in the essay text. Without illustrations to direct or limit their understanding of his intentions, sympathetic readers have had to interpret his words according to their own imagination. Van Eyck’s statement was a plea for enrichment of contemporary practice, rather than justification of one style over another: he wanted to let his words stand on their own without colouring a reader’s sense of them. The message of ‘Towards a Configurative Discipline’ is generative rather than prescriptive; van Eyck was arguing for a shift in mentality, not a particular outcome. Van Eyck wanted to evolve a way of thinking about architecture and urbanism that would be as widely applicable as it was free of any suggestion that constructed results should look a particular way. The record of his practice bears this out. Although he never abandoned the vision presented in his essay, the buildings he produced during the next four decades were never simplistic stylistic restatements of the discipline he proposed. What he demanded, though, is that buildings act in certain ways, which stands out as the utopian message of ‘Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline’.

Whole Parts

Unification of elements into a complex and legible larger whole, at all scales ranging from an individual building to an entire city, was the main objective of van Eyck’s configurative discipline. . Accordingly, rather than getting lost, individual elements constitute a whole in which they remain intelligible as articulated forms in themselves. Practicing a configurative discipline would, van Eyck believed, make buildings and cities into comprehensible patterns, offering welcoming places for the human occasions they shelter. On the other hand, richly textured patterns and reciprocity among parts would make buildings and urban environments into what van Eyck called counterforms, forms that are complementary to human complexity and interrelatedness because they can receive and contain existence in all its contradictory depth. Bodies and buildings are unities harmonized from diversity (not simply a synthesis of it). In both, individuality is identifiable through a relation to a collective. Modern buildings are unique wholes made from extensible parts; analogously, an embodied person can elaborate his or her uniqueness only as a member of a collective.

Relativity

 The understanding is a theory based on the hypothesis that all motion is relative, suggesting that understanding is always relational rather than absolute. Relativity theory states that although light has a constant velocity, there is no observable absolute motion, only relative motion. Accordingly, time is relative. In light of the importance of relativity for van Eyck, is crucial to emphasize that relativity is not relativism. Because relativity proposes a reality made up of interdependent relations, it is ultimately a theory of unity. Relativism, on the other hand, is a vision of atomized reality.

Reciprocity

According to van Eyck, the interdependent relations of relativity form a web of reciprocal associations. In certain respects, reciprocity describes relativity and by extension, the kind of interdependent relations a configured architecture facilitates. Reciprocity is primarily a condition of mutuality understandable as a back and forth relation. Accordingly, inside and outside have an equivalent rather than an opposed value. Even so, they are not the same. Reciprocity is a mutual action characterized by a balanced give and take. For a building ‘to breathe both in and out (as we do)’, as van Eyck demanded, its organization would need to be in accord with the balanced give and take of reciprocity. Van Eyck argued that as a coequality of parts, reciprocity can make the lived realm comprehensible and full, legible because articulation of each part, including rooms and houses (but not only these), would establish a web of determined relations.
Twinphenomena

Van Eyck’s notion of reciprocity, although it suggests reconciliation of split phenomena, has little to do with Robert Venturi’s notion of complexity and contradiction which presents twinphenomena binarily as a display of irreconcilable oppositions. Reconciliation of twinphenomena, though, does  not  subsume individual parts into a new, fully unified entity. Rather, twinphenomena suggests the coexistence of individual parts conventionally characterized as split phenomena, associated as elements of a richer whole. This application of the principles of relativity to a method, such as a configurative discipline, depends on the particular situation of their individual elaboration. Twinphenomena are counterparts coexisting in reciprocal relation to one another, which is why van Eyck believed they could rejoin abstractly split phenomena such as inside and outside.

Inbetween

A human habitat, van Eyck argued, ought to provide for fundamental human ambivalence by reconciling twinphenomena in an inbetween realm. By doing so, buildings and cities could become counterforms to ambivalence among other individual and social conditions. Examination of van Eyck’s work reveals just how much in-between places preoccupied him. Van Eyck’s plea, it is worth noting, was no call for buildings to look like people. Rather, he wanted his buildings (buildings and cities generally) to be biomorphic, not anthropomorphic: the latter suggests that a building is humanlike, that it looks human. On the other hand, the former suggests that a building be lifelike, a place where it is good to live.

Right-size

By reconciling rather than resolving twinphenomena, the in-between realm encourages an approach in which each part is clearly articulated as equal but different. In turn, articulation of each part of a whole and the whole itself requires that each part be given what van Eyck named right-size, a condition arrived at by considering parts in terms of themselves and reciprocally with all other parts of any given whole. Van Eyck’s interpretation of relativity as a universal principle was crucial for his conceptualization of right-size, which is not so much a question of absolute scale as it is a concern for the ‘right or correct effect of size’.

THE WORKS OF ALDO VAN EYCK

Amsterdam Orphanage, at Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1955 to 1960.

Auditor's Office, at the Hague, Netherlands, 1992 to 1997.

Catholic Church for Pastor van Ars, at the Hague, Netherlands, 1963 to 1969.

ESTEC Centre, at Noordwijk, Netherlands, 1984 to 1989.

Hubertus House, at Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1973 to 1978.

Moluccan Church, at Deventer, Netherlands, 1983 to 1992.

Padua House, at Boekel, Netherlands, 1980 to 1989.

PREVI Housing, at Lima, Peru, 1969 to 1972.

Temporary Sculpture Pavilion, at Sonsbeek, Netherlands, 1965 to 1966.

Tripolis Office Complex, at Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1990 to 1994.

Wheels of Heaven Church, project, 1966.

MUNICIPAL ORPHANAGE ,Amsterdam 1955-1960

 Inspired by the programme endorsed by orphanage director Frans van Meurs and by the latter's recommendations for the character and layout of the new children's home , Van Eyck tried from the outset to reconcile the advantages of a centralized structure with those of a decentralized pattern of pavilions.In the final design, the pavilion system was transformed into a continious but  perforated built volume within which both the pavilions and the main block are identifiable.
   The enterance court forms in essence the hearth of the building ,around which the central functions are grouped.An elevated section containing rooms for resident staff articulates the central court into a forecourt and a courtyard.The entrance court is adjoined by a spacious lobby where the building's two internal streets intersect.The residential units are arranged along these internal streets.Each unit consists of a common living room with facilities and a portion with a number of dormitories.The residential units are arranged in a staggered formation, giving ezch of them and individual outdoor space that communicates both with the internal street and the outside world.Each internal street terminates in a large communal space, the festivities hall and the gym respectively.The result is a building with a polycentric structure, with an articulation of large and small-both inside and outside- in successions of units, each defined in its own right, while interlocking rhytmically.The complex is simultaneously outward-looking and introverted.Underlying this balance is a stristly upheld, almost classical , architectural order, consisting of columns, load-bearing walls and architraves which combine to form a square grid of beams.The many roof domes on top of the grid provide a continuous spatial articulation.Although this grid of beams did not emerge until late in the design process, when the orginally flat roof was replaced by the domes,it plays an important part in the articulation of the sections of the building and their linkages..The grid also engenders diagonal directions which are important to the Orphanage building.These diagonals are not literally and physically expressed in materials , but are implicit in the structure.Occupation of the building is governed by the orthogonals ,but movement -both literal (circulation) and figurative (the spatial dynamic) is governed by the diagonals.This complementarity is a hallmark of the plan , with its equilibria of 'twin phenomena' (part/whole,unity/diversity,open/closed).

   The architraves of the grid ensure both the equivalance of columns with walls,and the unity of this system with the multi-domed roof ; but above all they mark the divisionles of internal space.It is not just a matter of demarcating the building as a whole ,but also of its spatial components such as the larger domes,the pavilions and internal streets- as well as their counterforms, the patios and courts.By mounting the glass walls free from the architraves at certain points,Van Eyck created ambivalent zones where the boundary delimination is softened and penetrable.
   The architraves are also important in the light of the configurative process.This process may be understood in its simplest form as a multiplication of basic units,done is such a way as to reproduce the identity of the smallest component in the identity of the whole.The house is in this sense conceived as a little city and the city as a huge house.Through the repetition , this fundamentally fugal procedure evokes an infiniteness,which is balanced at all levels of multiplication by the articulation and experience of the finiteness of the abovementioned spatial components.The configurative process is thus capable of articulating the orphanage both in its extensiveness and its boundedness.