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 favor of the new architectural
approaches. By its second congress, held in Frankfurt in 1929, CIAM began to be the
most important international organization of the Modern movement in architecture, with
delegates on its governing council, the CIRPAC (Comité International pour la Realisation
des Problèmes d’Architecture Contemporaine) from Belgium (Victor Bourgeois),
Denmark (Ed Heiberg), Germany (Ernst May), England (C.J.Robertson, later replaced by
Wells Coates), Finland (Alvar Aalto), France (Le Corbusier), Hungary (Farkas Molnár),
Italy (Alberto Sartoris), the Netherlands (Mart Stam), Norway (Lars Backer), Poland
(Szymon Syrkus), Sweden (Sven Markelius), Switzerland (Hans Schmidt), Spain
(Fernando Garcia Mercadal, later replaced by Josep Lluis Sert), the United States
(Richard Neutra), and the Soviet Union (Moisei Ginzburg), along with its Swiss
president, Karl Moser, and secretarygeneral, Sigfried Giedion, a Zurich art historian and
critic. Its membership shifted many times over the rest of its history, although Le
Corbusier and especially Giedion remained central throughout, until the decision in 1959
by a group of former CIAM “youth members” led by Alison and Peter Smithson and
Aldo van Eyck to cease using the name.
The published results of the second and third congresses included plans from the
associated exhibitions that traveled across Europe, the first on housing for the lowestincome
wage earners and the second on the rational site organization of housing districts.
The approach taken reflected the ideas of the architectural avant-garde at the time: the
importance of efficiently designed, sanitary, and well-lit minimum apartment housing and
the related need to site the buildings for repetitive low-cost construction and maximum
solar exposure for every unit. By 1931 a self-selected core group within the congress,
which included Le Corbusier, Giedion, and the new president, the Dutch town planner
Cornelis van Eesteren, determined that the next congress, to be held in Moscow in 1932,
should be devoted to the theme of the “Functional City.” In contrast to what he called the
“cardboard architecture” of classical urbanism, van Eesteren and other CIAM members
advocated an approach to city planning based on the most rational siting of “functional
elements,” such as workplaces and transportation centers. This idea was linked to the
belief that city planning should be based on the creation of separate zones for each of the
CIAM “four functions” of dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation, an idea already
stated in part in the La Sarraz Declaration. Changes in Soviet architectural policies led to
repeated postponements of the fourth congress, and it was eventually held on a cruise
ship traveling from Marseilles to Athens and back in July-August 1933. CIAM members
from Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France,
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Hungary, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland,
and Yugoslavia analyzed the same-scale plans of 33 modern cities prepared by CIAM
groups from most of these countries, along with additional plans from Dalat, Vietnam;
Bandung, Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia); and Baltimore, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
The disputed results of this congress were eventually published in Greece in late 1933
and formed the basis of what Le Corbusier would later style La Charte d’Athènes ( The Athens Charter).
After 1933 CIAM was greatly affected both by the Soviet shift toward what came to
be known as socialist realism, which often resulted in an overscaled neoclassicism, and
by the Nazi proscription of the Modern movement in Germany. CIAM activities were
ended in the Soviet Union, and German CIAM members such as Walter Gropius and
Mies van der Rohe eventually relocated to Harvard University (1937) and the Illinois
Institute of Technology (1938) in the United States, respectively. After several years of
delegate meetings, the fifth CIAM congress was held in Paris in 1937 on the theme of
“Housing and Recreation.” Associated with this congress was Le Corbusier’s “Pavilion
des Temps Nouveaux” at the 1937 Paris Exposition, which included large murals
illustrating the CIAM four functions and a display of the CIAM 4 “doctrine of urbanism,”
which he termed La Charte d’Athènes . Following this, Giedion, who gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures
at Harvard in 1938–39, advocated that the next CIAM congress be held in the United
States, but no CIAM congresses occurred again until 1947. In the interim Giedion and
Sert set up a New York CIAM chapter in 1944, and Le Corbusier went from attempting
to influence the occupation Vichy government to successfully allying himself with the
Allied victors. CIAM and La Charte d’Athènes , finally published in Paris in 1943, became immensely
influential in the postwar years, particularly in Latin America and eventually in the
decolonizing nations of the former European empires. This was due both to Le
Corbusier’s own efforts, such as his working with Brazilian architects in Rio de Janeiro
in 1936 and with Argentine architects on several occasions, and to the efforts of Sert,
who developed urban master plans with Paul Lester Wiener in Brazil, Peru, Colombia,
Venezuela, and Cuba. Sert became president of CIAM in 1947, but the first two postwar
congresses, CIAM 6, held in Bridgwater, England (1947), and CIAM 7, held in Bergamo,
Italy (1949), were unable to develop any clear new approaches. CIAM 8, “The Heart of
the City,” held near London in 1951, was more successful in this regard and was one of
the earliest efforts to discuss the issue of urban public space in the transformed postwar
circumstances of modern architecture. Its combining of the Italian and Polish CIAM
groups’ concerns about historic centers with Le Corbusier, Sert, and Wiener’s fascination
with the design of new monumental cores suggested a different basis for modern
architecture beyond the design of social housing, one that looked both backward to the
classical tradition and forward to a later generation’s interest in reconstituting urbanity in
late 20th-century cities.
In 1952 the CIAM Council decided to begin efforts to hand over CIAM to the “youth
members,” and the first step in this direction was to increase their participation at CIAM
9, which was held in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1953. In the confused developments
that followed, a youth group charged with organizing the tenth congress and eventually
known as Team X (Ten) emerged, with Alison and Peter Smithson of England, Aldo van
Eyck and Jacob Bakema of the Netherlands, and Georges Candilis as important voices.
CIAM 10, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), in 1956 was the last regular
CIAM congress, and there the decision was made to dissolve all existing CIAM groups.
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A selected group of 30 members, including members of Team X, were to plan the next
congress. This was eventually held at Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1959 and was published
as CIAM’ 59 in Otterlo. At this congress it was decided to discontinue the use of the name CIAM.
CIAM’s influence on architecture and architectural education has been extensive,
ranging from the plans of the new capitals of Chandigarh, India (Le Corbusier, Jeanneret,
Fry, and Drew, 1950), and Brasilia, Brazil (Costa and Niemeyer, 1955), to efforts such as
the Harvard Urban Design program, established by Sert in 1960. Although the name
CIAM was no longer used, in many ways Team X, which lasted until 1981, was a
continuation of some aspects of CIAM, including the latter’s emphasis on the importance
of a small avant-garde of like-minded architects meeting to develop urbanistic doctrines
and the use of architectural magazines and visiting design teaching positions to
disseminate ideas. Much of the criticism of CIAM since its demise has concerned its
specific formal strategies of urban reorganization, which were deliberately intended to
break with all previous pat-terns of urban development to help bring into being a more
rational and collectivist society. By the 1950s CIAM members were themselves
questioning specific aspects of these “functional city” strategies, although they did not
challenge the basic premises of CIAM activities. Since 1960 CIAM has been extensively
criticized and is usually understood as an extension of the work of Le Corbusier; in part
this is true, but it oversimplifies the organization’s complex history.
