Team 10 was a group of architects who emerged from the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne). The group acquired the name Team 10 because they were charged with organizing the tenth congress at the ninth CIAM congress in the summer of 1953. The ninth CIAM Congress in the early 1950s ended in conflicts with representatives of the older generation such as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Gideon. Team 10 criticized the functional separation between housing, work, leisure, and transport in urban planning called for in the pre-war Charter of Athens, propagating instead the interconnectedness of housing, street, district, and city.



The context for this discussion was a presentation by the architects George Candilis and Shadrach Woods at the congress. There they introduced a grid, a sort of explanatory chart with pictures and text, in which they showed not new architectural or urban planning designs but a Boonville or shantytown that internal Moroccan migrants had erected on the outskirts of Casablanca. This shantytown was presented as a teaching model for the architects and town planners of the next generation. The young architects were also able to present their colleagues with a completely planned and realized building that they had constructed alongside the shantytowns in Casablanca as a sort of experimental structure for ‘Muslims’. This structure and the presentation of the so-called Gamma Grid had a lasting influence on the younger generation of architects worldwide, since modernism appeared here to have adapted to local climatic and ‘cultural’ conditions and abandoned its universalist path. The new ideas of Team 10 and their critique of the older generation ultimately led to the dissolution of the CIAM as an organization, and the members of Team 10 began to develop their projects and organized meetings independently up until the death of Jaap Bakema in 1981. (MvO)



“On this point we should be very clear, and therefore it is indispensable first of all to clarify the basic differences between planning ‘for’ the users and planning ‘with’ the users.” Giancarlo De Carlo (De Carlo 1992: 211)



Scources: Baghdadi, Mustafa (1999): Changing Ideals in Architecture: From CIAM to Team X. In: (Hg.) William O'Reilly: Architectural Knowledge and Cultural Diversity, Lausanne.

Candilis, Georges (1978): Bauen ist Leben. Ein Architekten-Report. Stuttgart.

Mumford, Eric (2000): CIAM discourse on urbanism, 1928-1960. Cambridge, Mass.

Smithson, Alison (1968): Team 10 Primer. Cambridge, Mass.

http://www.team10online.org/