The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, founded in Switzerland in 1928, was related to earlier European avantgarde efforts, such as the German Werkbund’s 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, and to journals such as the Swiss ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen. Some of its initial impetus also came from Le Corbusier’s attempts to overturn the 1927 rejection of his entry in the League of Nations competition in favor of a Beaux-Arts design. The first CIAM meeting, sponsored by the French-Swiss noblewoman Hélène de Mandrot, resulted in the issuing of the La Sarraz Declaration, signed by 24 European architects, which demanded that architecture should be taken away from the classically oriented Beaux-Arts schools of architecture and linked to the general economic system. It invoked Taylorist ideas about the need to design for minimum working effort through the rationalization and standardization of building components and emphasized that architects should seek to influence public opinion in...