Team 10 Primer ed. by Alison Smithson (review)

Leonarab,Vol. 2, pp. 201-204. PergamonPress1969. Printed in Great Britain GUY 8. Metraux, CorrespondingEditor Readers are invited to recommend books (within the scope of the journal) to be reviewed. Only books in English and French can be reviewed at this stage. Readers who would like to be added to Leonardo’spanel of reviewers should write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests and specialization . Nous serions reconnaissants h nos lecteurs de bien vouloir nous indiquer les livres-congus dans l‘esprit de notre revue-qui pourraient faire l’objet d‘un compte-rendudanslesprochainsnumdros. Seuls les ouvrages rddigdsen anglais ou enfrangaispeuvent &re pris en considdrationpour le moment. Les lecteurs qui ddsireraient figurer parmi les critiques de liures peuvent s’adresser au Fondateur-Directeur de Leonardo, en indipant leurs intdrgts particuliers et leur spdcialisation. Team 10 Primer. Ed. Alison Smithson. Studio Vista, London, 1968. Thisbook is a republicationin hard cover format of the original ‘Team 10 Primer’ which was first publishedin Architectural Design in 1962and which hassinceseentwosubsequentpaperbackreprintings. This third and therefore presumably definitive edition contains additional preface material by all of the originalTeam 10memberswith the exception of Candilis. From these prefaces it is evident that while the intervening years have served to amplify individualpositionsinitiallyadopted, they have also had the effectof inducinga powerfulbut disconcerting pessimism. Itnow seemsinconceivablethat the significanceof this work should have largely remained unacknowledged at the time of its first publication. Its format was then regarded by many as confusing;its thought was then consideredlooseand its import as obscure. Theseinitialobjectionsmay stillindeed be made but the interimhas tended to prove the value of the overallinsight that was contained within the Primer when it was first published six years ago. Cedric Price’s contemporary critique of the Primer totheeffectthat “‘mobility’didnotrequireinvesting with significance simply because it was there” has now a rather ironicring,giventhat Price’s ownwork since has been nothing if not a celebration of locomotion and that five years further on mobility is more with us than ever, tending to render the creation of a significant human environment daily more precarious. M a n y o f Price’s criticisms were in any case already incorporated within a highly auto-critid text and his stance apropos the Primer bordered then, as his work has since, upon that which Van Eyck has since labelled as unpoetic Utopianism. The rigour of the Team 10 position lies in its attempt to formulate a viable modus operandi for the architect in an admass society and Van Eyck‘s rhetoricalquestionas to ‘howan architectcan build a counterform to a society without form’ remains central to this predicament. The significanceof the Primerresidesaboveallelseinitsacutecritiqueofthe now obvious anomaliesof the pre-war CIAM/Neue Sachlichkeitposition;an expose of its irrelevancies which were by no means so obvious six years ago. Yet asearly as 1956Alisonand Peter Smithsonwere to write as follows:-‘The social structure of which the town planner has to give form is not only differentbut much more complex than ever before. The various public services make the family more and more independent of actual physical contact with the rest of the community and turned in on itself. Such factors would seem to make incomprehensible the continued acceptance of forms of dwellingsand their meansof accesswhichdiffervery littlefrom thosewhich satisfiedthe socialreformer’s dream before the first world war’. Team lo’s repudiation of CIAM corresponds directly to its inheritanceof CIAM responsibilities. The powerfulaspect of the Team 10heresylies in its conscious attempt to come to terms with the harsh realitiesofarchitecturalpracticeinthemid-twentieth century. The individual and partial stand which it collectively chose to make public in 1962 is still discernible today, however modified by a lapse of sometimes almost 15 years between an architect’s initial statement and his more recent preface. Thus we find the Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck still as concerned as ever with fundamental human values 14 201 202 Books-Livres and with the hierarchic continuum of architecture and urbanism. He continues to argue even more persuasively against the inroads now being made upon thehuman realmbytheblandishingimpositions of a technological euphoria. Indeed a similar disturbing and astringent pessimism is latent in all these postcripts; sowe are not at all surprised to find the hypersensitive Coderch writing in Barcelona in 1967 as follows...