Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism ebook

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

ŁUKASZ STANEK, DIRK VAN DEN HEUVEL

Introduction: Team 10 East and Several Other Useful Fictions

ÁKOS MORAVÁNSZKY

Humanizing Modernism: Oskar Hansen, Charles Polónyi and the Art of Sailing with the Wind

LEVENTE POLYÁK

Mapping Opportunities: The International Summer Schools of Charles Polónyi

MARCELA HANÁČKOVÁ

Team 10 and Czechoslovakia: Secondary Networks

CORNELIA ESCHER

Between CIAM and Team 10: The “East” and the Peripheries of CIAM

ALEKSANDRA KĘDZIOREK

Jerzy Sołtan and the Art and Research Unit’s Project for the Polish Pavilion at Expo 58

EEVA-LIISA PELKONEN

Helsinki–Warsaw, c. 1960

JELICA JOVANOVIĆ

Alexis Josic between Yugoslavia and France: Housing the Greatest Number

RENATA MARGARETIĆ URLIĆ, KARIN ŠERMAN

Workers’ University Zagreb: Team 10 Ideas in the Service of Socialist Enlightenment

MAROJE MRDULJAŠ, TAMARA BJAŽIĆ KLARIN

Zagreb Revisionists: “Social Standard” Architecture

ALEKSANDAR KUŠIĆ

New Belgrade Block No. 22: Order and Freedom

ALEKSANDRA KĘDZIOREK

The Museum of Modern Art in Skopje and the Potentiality of an Exhibition Space

ŁUKASZ STANEK

Oskar and Zofia Hansen: Me, You, Us and the State

Photo Credits

Index

ŁUKASZ STANEK

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When in 2012 I suggested a study of the work of the Polish architect, educator and Team 10 member Oskar Hansen by means of the concept of a fictitious “Team 10 East,” this study was intended to be a module within the broad research project on Hansen carried out by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. However, the presentations of its first results during the conference “Oskar Hansen—Opening Modernism” (June 6–7, 2013) and the workshop “Team 10 East” (June 8, 2013) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw proved that it is worthwhile to discuss postwar modern architecture from the perspective proposed by the Team 10 East project. Thanks to the generosity of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Erste Stiftung, it was possible to present this project in a separate book whose publication coincides with the opening of the Oskar Hansen exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

I would like to thank the participants of the conference and the workshop for their contributions and for our intense exchanges that followed, resulting in this publication. I would also like to thank Dirk van den Heuvel for our discussions about the project, which started on the margins of the EAHN conference in Brussels (2012), and which are registered in our joint Introduction to this book. My gratitude goes to all those with whom I had extended conversations while working on this project, and who inspired it in ways that cannot always be captured in footnotes, in particular Eve Blau, Tomasz Fudala, Mary McLeod, Ákos Moravánszky, Joanna Mytkowska, Joan Ockman, Łukasz Ronduda and Felicity D. Scott. Special thanks go to Aleksandra Kędziorek for assisting me with the editorial process. Aleksandra, together with Monika Stobiecka, was also responsible for collecting the archival material and making it available to all contributors to this book, which allowed discussions about many sources until now unaccounted for in architectural historiography. This presentation of previously unpublished archival material would not have been possible without the assistance of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Museum and particularly of Jola Gola, to whom I would like to express my gratitude. I would also like to thank Katarzyna Szotkowska-Beylin, who supervised the process at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, as well as Cain Elliott, who was responsible for the copyediting of the texts, and Mark Bence and Alan Lockwood, the proofreaders. The book was designed by Ludovic Balland Typography Cabinet as part of the Museum in Construction series, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Łukasz Stanek, October 2013

Łukasz Stanek is a lecturer at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester. Stanek wrote Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and he is currently editing Lefebvre’s unpublished book about architecture, Vers une architecture de la jouissance (1973). Stanek’s second field of research is the transfer of architecture from socialist countries to Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. On this topic, he published “Miastoprojekt Goes Abroad. Transfer of Architectural Labor from Socialist Poland to Iraq (1958–1989)” in The Journal of Architecture (17:3, 2012) and the book Postmodernism Is Almost All Right. Polish Architecture After Socialist Globalization (Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, 2012). He taught at ETH Zurich and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and received fellowships from the Jan van Eyck Academie, Canadian Center for Architecture, Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he was the 2011–2013 A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow.

Dirk van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. He is the head of the recently established Jaap Bakema Study Centre at the New Institute in Rotterdam, a collaborative research initiative between TU Delft and the New Institute. Van den Heuvel is curator of “Open: A Bakema Celebration,” the Dutch contribution to the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Together with Max Risselada he authored Team 10—In Search ofaUtopia of the Present (NAi, 2005) and Alison and Peter Smithson. From the House of the Future toaHouse of Today (010, 2004). Together with Mark Swenarton and Tom Avermaete, he is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Architecture and the Welfare State (Routledge, 2014). He is an editor of the online journal for architectural theory Footprint and of DASH—Delft Architectural Studies on Housing. He was also an editor of the Dutch journal OASE.

ŁUKASZ STANEK DIRK VAN DEN HEUVEL

INTRODUCTION: TEAM 10 EAST AND SEVERAL OTHER USEFUL FICTIONS

Team 10 East never existed. Team 10, the breakaway group of architects that disbanded the CIAM organization in the late 1950s in order to renew modern architecture, did not include separate regional branches nor a special group of architects from Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to the short-lived CIAM-East, founded in the 1930s by architects from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, there was no similar attempt within Team 10. The participants of Team 10 meetings from Poland, including Oskar Hansen and Jerzy Sołtan, Charles Polónyi from Hungary and Radovan Nikšić from Zagreb in Yugoslavia, as well as other Yugoslav followers and those from Czechoslovakia, would have been reluctant to assume a unified identity that would serve to confirm the division imposed on the continent by the Iron Curtain.

What these architects shared with their Team 10 colleagues from Western Europe was the ambition to advance architecture and urban design in view of the technological and social development of Europe after the period of postwar reconstruction. Like Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods, architects from socialist countries believed that the tenets of prewar modern architecture and functionalist urbanism did not offer sufficient basis for addressing the challenges faced by postwar societies, including technological progress, personal mobility, the increasing importance of leisure, varying scales of human associations and multiple modes of belonging. In response, these architects, just like their colleagues from the West, searched for new architectural solutions: open relational systems that allowed for growth and change; supposedly nonhierarchical structures that lent themselves to appropriation by inhabitants; and spatial configurations that combined permanent and temporary elements that allowed for the expression of individual subjectivity and the coherence of larger collectives.

What distinguished most architects of the fictitious Team 10 East, a name in use throughout this volume, was their affiliation with Central European architectural culture and, above all, the experience of architectural practice in state socialism. In the conditions of the Cold War, this experience included working under politically authoritarian regimes and dealing with the consequences of the political economy of state socialism for the production of space, especially central planning and the (partial) de-commodification of land.

Rather than being a retroactive manifesto, Team 10 East is a generative conceptual tool that grasps at an understanding of what was shared by these fellow travelers of Team 10. It is not the intention of this book to suggest that the work of the architects under discussion is exhausted by their contribution to the Team 10 discourse; nor that their work is to be strictly judged according to the criteria of Team 10. The “East” in the title of the book refers to their specific position from which modernism was rethought, even if it did not always coincide with figures operating from “behind” the Iron Curtain. This is why the book includes texts on Jerzy Sołtan, Charles Polónyi and Alexis Josic (Aljoša Josić) who traveled across Cold War divides that, besides making them drop the diacritical marks in their names, granted them a comparative perspective on the specificity of working in the sphere of real existing socialism. Likewise, architects from Yugoslavia held a separate position as citizens of a socialist country that was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, and which tried to strike a strategic balance between the two blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Similarly, we find a group of Finnish architects practicing within a non-socialist welfare state under the conditions of a “neutrality” carefully negotiated with the Soviet Union.

Contrary to the widespread perception that Team 10’s discourse was limited to the Western European welfare state, with occasional excursions to former European colonies and the U.S., this book shows how the key themes and concepts of this discourse were given a differentiated understanding in European socialist countries and the countries included into “socialist globalization.” 1 State socialism is seen not only as a condition of oppression, but also as a challenge to and an affordance of architectural practice and imagination, with such contributions as Hansen’s biotechnological urbanism for socialist Poland, Polónyi’s projects for the postcolonial countries linked to the Socialist Bloc, the projects for Liberec in Czechoslovakia by Miroslav Masák and SIAL Liberec and the rethinking of social standards in the work of the “Zagreb revisionists.”

At the same time, the concept of Team 10 East is a lens that allows for a more differentiated view on the Team 10 discourse as a whole, stretched between 1953, the year when the future members of Team 10 met for the first time at the ninth CIAM conference in Aix-en-Provence and when Stalin died, and 1981, when Team 10 ceased to exist due to the death of Jaap Bakema and when the Soviet Union was still the major rival of the U.S. and the West, even though by then this (second) superpower had become entangled in the Afghanistan war while its ossified nomenklatura was incapable of preventing the gradual collapse of state socialism. In light of the alternative welfare-distribution systems competing within state socialism, it became possible to reassess the contributions by Team 10 to the welfare state system in general. Such a perspective also allows for the redefinition of the various modes of association and self-identification of the group members, including their political alignment and the international and regional networks in the context of the Cold War. Ultimately, this perspective highlights the various historical continuities at work between the socialist project and postwar architectural discourse.

Mobility and Scales of Association

Most of the narratives in this book begin with the postwar congresses of CIAM. Many participants in the 1949 Bergamo congress recalled the young Oskar Hansen, who publicly criticized a speech by Le Corbusier. With the support of Jerzy Sołtan, this critical voice was integrated as a member of the renewed CIAM and its network. Hansen started with the CIAM Summer School in London in 1949 and then was invited to subsequent CIAM meetings.2 Other members of CIAM from Central Europe acted as ferrymen for their younger compatriots: József Fischer, who had no chance of acquiring a passport from the socialist regime in Hungary himself, had Charles Polónyi invited to the meeting in Otterlo instead (1959).3 [FIG. 1] Such intergenerational solidarities might explain why these architects were attached to the idea of continuing CIAM and some, like Jerzy Sołtan, shared their affiliation with both groups, which was facilitated by his contacts with Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius, Josep Lluís Sert and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a professor from 1961 onward. Hansen also crossed borders between architectural groups; besides his links to Team 10 and CIAM, he was associated with GEAM (Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Mobile) and claimed that his work developed the ideas of the “situationist movement.” 4

Much of this ecumenical approach stemmed from the desire of architects from socialist countries to be a part of debates in the West, while being less concerned about the ideological differences that emerged from these debates. Participating in them was a sufficiently difficult task, and if one compares the list of architects from the region who were present at the Otterlo meeting with the list of those who had agreed to attend, one sees the challenges they faced. Both Sołtan and Hansen arrived from Poland; from Yugoslavia Nikšić and Zvornimir Radić agreed to come, but only the former arrived; the Hungarians Fischer and Pál Granasztoi accepted the invitation, but did not come, while Polónyi attended instead; in spite of their intention to come, Václav Rajniš and Karel Stráník from Czechoslovakia never arrived.5In the years to come, Hansen and Polónyi would attend Team 10 gatherings until the 1966 meeting in Urbino, although invitations continued to be sent until the end of Team 10 in the early 1980s. Polónyi could still make it to the Team 10 seminars as organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University (1971–1972) [FIG. 2] and the 1973 conference in Berlin.

Several chapters in this book show that these “difficulties” in mobility can themselves be used to unpack the position of architects in the state socialist system. They faced financial shortages to pay for travel, lacked permission to leave state architectural offices, had to be delegated by their supervisors and receive endorsements from official institutions such as architects’ organizations, not to mention these architects’ political biographies, which were carefully vetted by regime institutions in charge of issuing passports. Sometimes, socialist countries’ postcolonial allies offered alternative locations for professional exchanges with Western colleagues: such an opportunity was provided for Polónyi by the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi, Ghana, where he was teaching in the 1960s.6 Partners in the West were increasingly aware of these obstacles, and the jokes about Sołtan and Hansen being communist spies or even double agents, as well as Bakema being called “the Tito of Team 10,” convey something of the Cold War atmosphere that defined the period. [FIG. 3] Unlike the Union internationale des architectes (UIA), organized as an “architectural United Nations” with careful balances across Cold War divides,7 the contacts between architects from socialist countries and Team 10 were often mediated through short-term apprenticeships and “secondary” networks.8 These were often more important than formal gatherings. The 1956 conference in Dubrovnik, for example, did not become a meeting place for CIAM and Yugoslav architects, as only the Zagreb architect Drago Ibler attended, since he was in charge of organizing the running of the meeting. Therefore, the planned “Yugoslav CIAM group” never materialized.9

These trajectories of circulation were reflected in preferences for models of CIAM’s reorganization. The figure of Sołtan is a case in point: his increasing mobility between Poland and the U.S. in the 1950s, followed by his decision to stay in the U.S., was paralleled by the shift in his views on the “future of CIAM.” From being an advocate of architects from Eastern Europe, Sołtan moved to arguing that the “future CIAM” must be inclusive, open to “the average architect from all over the world.”10However, this advice contradicted the vision of Team 10 favored by the Dutch and English members—as an avant-garde group that defined the dismantling of CIAM in two steps. First, as of 1953, younger architects were invited to become official members, and second, as of 1956, national representation at CIAM conferences was replaced by invitation on the basis of personal merit, as proposed by the CIAM Reorganization Committee, which included Team 10 members Bakema, Smithson and Woods. The regional and national CIAM branches were made “autonomous,” which meant that in practice they were dissolved.11

The dismantling of national groups as the basis for the new CIAM did not mean that an effort was not made to secure a certain degree of regional representation: for the first large Team 10 meeting in Royaumont (1962), invitations were sent out to the U.S. (Christopher Alexander, Charles Eames, Louis Kahn), Japan (Kenzo Tange, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Fuhimiko Maki), India (Balkrishna Doshi) and Brazil (Lucio Costa). Amancio Guedes would bring projects from Africa, there were Scandinavian and Mediterranean architects on the list (Geir Grung, Giancarlo De Carlo, José Coderch, Fernando Távora, among others), as well as a range of architects from the U.K., Germany, France and the Netherlands, and last but not least, architects from Poland and Hungary (Hansen and Polónyi).12 However, the general tendency within Team 10 was to integrate, and when in the 1968 edition of Team 10 Primer, Alison Smithson identified “Team Japan” as a special group, the reason was to contrast a separate cultural identity that differed from what Smithson called the “Team 10 way of thinking.” Team Japan was described with such shortcuts as “big thunder styles,” “‘noise’-creating” and “‘Samurai’ architecture,” in contrast to the supposedly proper “Team 10 thinking” that was described as “stress-free” architecture and “reticent acts of quietude” 13 and understood as an attempt to arrive at a specifically European approach. Smithson only listed European architects as core members of the group and this included Polónyi and Sołtan, whom she crucially insisted was a member from Poland, despite his new domicile in the U.S.14

A European Tradition?

Architects from socialist countries, including Charles Polónyi, were inclined to embrace this vision of a shared European tradition as the foundation for the “Team 10 way of thought,” with Polónyi summarizing the contribution of the group as follows:

Jaap Bakema’s moral responsibility of the Great Number as well as his Dutch rational hopefulness; Alison and Peter Smithson’s worry about the loss of difference, nuances of scale, appropriateness, and the loss of the still wonderful idea of the working compactness of the village, town, city; and the Mediterranean self-evidence of the works of Candilis-Josic-Woods, accompanied by the writings of Shadrach Woods; Ralph Erskine’s dreams of a friendly society; Louis Kahn’s explorations of hierarchical organizations; the architectural quality reached in the buildings of Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo, and Reima Pietila [sic].15

However, what comes to the fore in this melancholic list is less a unified European tradition and more a number of individual reinterpretations of particular regional sensitivities, that, with the obvious exception of Kahn, might be broadly classified as Mediterranean and northern. Architects from socialist countries would add the architectural tradition of Central Europe to this classification. [FIG. 4]

Bringing together fellow travelers of Team 10 from socialist countries revealed their alliance with the modernist architectural traditions of the region. This included attention to the national—and nationalist—dimension of modernism in Central Europe and the complex relationships between modernism, modernization and nation-building in this region during the early 20th century. Within the broader framework of modernization efforts, various lines of modern architecture, art and design were embraced by the governments of the new nation-states emerging between the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas in the wake of the First World War.16 This included avant-garde architecture, and in the contested territories of Central Europe after the First World War, such as Moravia and Silesia, modern architecture was interpreted as a rupture with the past and an embodiment of the new nation-states. This national dimension is very present in the Linear Continuous System, the urbanization model proposed by Oskar Hansen for socialist Poland. The four bands of urbanization suggested by Hansen were intended to link up the country and integrate the territory of the new state, whose borders had shifted west following agreements between the victors of the Second World War. This relationship between modern architecture and nation-building became particularly relevant for those architects from Central Europe who, like Polónyi, were designing in postcolonial states faced with the challenge of nation-building in territories that were characterized by ethnic divisions and culturally dependent on their former colonizers.

When working on export contracts in Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria and Ethiopia, Polónyi made reference to his earlier resettlement projects in rural Hungary and his later scheme for the Balaton region there. This belief that Central European architects had specific tasks and obligations toward rural areas, villages and small towns was another theme shared by the members of the Team 10 East group. Indeed, the recognition of this fact had been one of the reasons for creating CIAM-East, and it was at the center of the CIAM-East meetings in Budapest, Brno and Zlin in 1937, and on Mykonos in the Cyclades in 1938, which were attended by architects from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia.17 In particular, it was the Hungarian architect Virgil Bierbauer who addressed the question of the underdevelopment of rural territories. In Hungary, where the development of the countryside had been the focus of broad debates since the late 19th century, the decisive shift was to recognize villages as settlements where over half of the country’s population lived in almost feudal conditions, which could only be addressed through a nationwide modernization project.18This argument was spelled out in Bierbauer’s paper “Les bases de la reconstruction rurale en Hongrie,” where he argued that an architectural intervention was dependent on the architect’s alliance with powerful players. These included the state, which, according to Bierbauer, needed to create a network of centers to concentrate the social, economic, cultural and technical facilities of the rural population, and cooperatives intending to pool small farmers’ land and organize production and other aspects of life for those involved. Only then would urgent architectural interventions become possible, including plans of the collective buildings of each settlement, and type plans of housing for agricultural workers, both individual and collective.19It was this very challenge of providing equal living conditions for all that Hansen acknowledged to be at the root of his Linear Continuous System, which was meant to link villages and small towns with the general welfare-distribution network and thereby provide inhabitants with social standards that were previously limited to urban populations.20

Team 10 and the Socialist Project

Following Alison Smithson’s focus on the European architectural tradition as the shared cultural basis of the Team 10 architects, one may detect a common system of references, as well as internal differences within the group. However, this perspective obscures the deep political divisions within Team 10. The 1968 edition of the Primer is a case in point. Edited by Smithson, the book carefully staged a polyphonic consensus among the members of the group by maintaining a unified level of generality in their lamentations on the state of affairs in housing, town planning and politics, and thereby abstracting from the specifics of Cold War oppositions.21 [FIG. 5]

Nevertheless, looking at the Team 10 discourse through the lens of its fictitious Eastern group shows that, more often than not, what first appears as cultural differentiation actually points to fundamental political differences inscribed within the context of the Cold War. For instance, we might point to the postulate of “openness” shared by all members of Team 10, from Hansen’s idea of Open Form to the Smithsons’ designs of an “open city.” Those versed in European art history might have linked the notion of “openness” to Heinrich Wölfflin’s “open form”; those interested in British political philosophy might see a connection with Karl Popper’s “open society”; those acquainted with French philosophy would look to Henri Bergson’s “open totalities”; readers of post-structuralism would envisage “open structures”; yet others could relate this concept to the “opening” of Marxism after and against the Stalinist “closure,” which itself can be taken in different directions, from Henri Lefebvre to Leszek Kołakowski, Adam Schaff, György Lukács, Ágnes Heller and the Yugoslav Praxis group. These references, ranging from Popper’s anti-Marxism to Marxist dissidents from within the Socialist Bloc, make it clear that the discourse on “openness,” rather than being a shared concept, was actually a field of political dissensus that was covered by the conciliatory tone of Team 10 publications.

Likewise, the key Team 10 concept of the “greatest number” makes this dissensus even more evident. Those working in socialist countries could not have missed this concept’s affinity with Marxist discourse on the “masses” as the progressive subject of history. Hence architects like Hansen argued there was essential proximity between the “problem of the greatest number” and the project of socialism.22 The consequences of such a position would reach far beyond what the Western members of Team 10 would have embraced, including an overarching program for the state expropriation of land, both in cities and in the countryside, which was one of the premises of Hansen’s Linear Continuous System.23 By contrast, the “greatest number” meant something very different in the work of Candilis-Josic-Woods when applied in France to migrants from the countryside and from the former French colonies—work that was based on Candilis’ earlier experience with the colonial administration in North Africa.24Yet another elaboration of the term can be found in the work of the Smithsons, who referred to the rise of a new “middle-class society” where the norms and aspirations of prewar society were seemingly leveled out and the former limits to social mobility had been removed.25The Smithsons also quoted the concept of the “Great Society” as used by Aneurin Bevan, the Minister for Health who initiated the National Health Service and was also involved in drawing up the new Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which enabled the implementation of large-scale housing programs for the next decades, including the planning of New Towns.26

The concept of “participation” can be taken as a third example. What architects in Zagreb and Belgrade deemed an architectural interpretation of the self-management system in socialist Yugoslavia, and what Hansen saw as a consequence of socialism, took on an entirely different meaning in West Africa. There, Charles Polónyi saw residents’ participation in the construction of their own houses to be an indispensable ingredient for tackling urbanization with insufficient resources. This can be contrasted with the Terni project by Giancarlo De Carlo (1969–1974), which was commissioned by the Italian national steel corporation for its workers and their families. In the Byker Wall project by Ralph Erskine in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1968–1981), participation by users aimed both to gain information about their preferences and to organize shared responsibility.27From the early 1960s, the discourse in France or Britain regarding participation had been used by several architects to oppose the paternalism of the welfare state while announcing the emergence of a new system of governability, while in socialist countries it was launched by those who wanted to dispose of the remnants of the Stalinist regimes, taking either reformist or dissident positions. In spite of these differences, participation of inhabitants always required a program of their education and the rethinking of models of governance—all key topics for Team 10, which called for specific answers in response to local conditions.

These divergent paths to the concepts of “openness,” “greatest number” and “participation” make it clear that Team 10 discourse was essentially structured by what it almost always silenced: the socialist project. Herman Hertzberger addressed this intuition when he stated that “in architecture Team 10 and CIAM as well are the equivalent of socialism.” He immediately qualified this: “I’m not saying literally. Maybe Giancarlo De Carlo is the only one who directly linked politics and architecture. Bakema certainly did not and Aldo van Eyck did it in a more philosophical way.” 28 Hertzberger went as far as to suggest a connection between the breakdown of socialism and the end of Team 10. Even Alison Smithson, who was certainly not a Marxist, would testify that Sweden was to her the ultimate example of a society where everyone was “wonderfully equal, equal, equal….” The “Scandinavian invention of Social Democratic architecture,” she wrote, “with its clean blend of rational functionalism and response to use, related to climate worthiness that was rooted in a still memorable vernacular.” 29 To that representation she would add: “to my generation, the flags of Stockholm’s Exhibition of 1930 signaled a joyful promise of a friendly, trusting society that believed socialism meant a togetherness of one extended family.” 30

This socialist imagination, itself heterogeneous and taking various directions, was the yardstick for Team 10 projects, and it constituted one of the main lines of continuity between modern architecture before and after the war. In the case of the prewar CIAM, it included admiration for architecture in the Soviet Union, not only during its initial avant-garde phase but also after the introduction of socialist realism, which led Hans Schmidt to argue for a more careful rethinking of the relationship between modern architecture and the past.31 Particularly strong were alliances between modern architects and social-democratic municipalities or progressive housing cooperatives in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lyon, Prague, Rotterdam, Vienna and Warsaw, as well as the garden cities of the Paris suburbs. Many of these experiences reverberated in the welfare-state project after the Second World War, and in a 1978 interview Peter Smithson qualified the immediate postwar period as follows: “At the time I would have said I was a socialist as well. It simply seemed like a good cause. I suppose everyone of my generation would say the same thing. If you would ask Bakema the same question you would get a similar answer, because a generation felt this way.” 32 The affiliation between the welfare-state project and the Team 10 architects was evident in the work of the Smithsons, as well as other members of Team 10 from France, Italy and the Netherlands, whose designs were largely based on state commissions. However, already by the late 1960s and early 1970s the Smithsons viewed the initial project of the postwar years as morally perverted and they would speak most disdainfully of the “labor union society” and its all-pervasive materialism.33 Disillusioned, they opposed the collective subjectivity that they felt the welfare-state system had produced; instead, they preferred a society composed of individuals with a sense of obligation, responsibility, creativity and “reasoned choice.”

Real Existing Modernism and Its Revisions

These qualities rather exactly coincided with what Oskar Hansen had in mind when imagining the socialist society for which he proposed the Linear Continuous System. If for Aldo van Eyck the crisis of modernist urbanism stemmed from the “failure to govern multiplicity creatively,”34Hansen argued that the Linear Continuous System responded to this crisis by proposing a model of governance for socialist Poland that offered maximal freedom and choice for every individual, and allowed them to be mobilized within the collective. In Hansen’s words, “the classless, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical character of the housing form for society in the Linear Continuous System […] should make it clear how everyone is dependent on the collective and the collective is dependent on the individual.”35

For Hansen, the new socioeconomic regulation of socialist Poland—a centrally planned economy as well as a socialized land market and construction industry—was the necessary precondition for implementing the Linear Continuous System. The socialist state was not only an indispensable agent for the execution of Hansen’s project, it was also the object of that project. In other words, Hansen’s architecture was not simply instrumental in the modernization processes as determined by the regime, but it was also conceptualized as a contribution to debates about the direction that modernization should take.36

This ambition to discuss alternative scenarios for socialist modernization, and hence alternative scenarios for modernization of socialism, was shared by most of the protagonists of this book. As Łukasz Stanek shows, Hansen’s Linear Continuous System was a contribution to debates concerning the reform of socialist governance in 1970s Poland. Yugoslav architects were also rethinking the capacity of architecture to mobilize the population toward participation in political decisions, economic activities and social exchange according to the principles of socialist self-management, and to develop it beyond its Fordist phase.37The language of Team 10 architecture was particularly suitable for this task, and Block No. 22 in New Belgrade, as described by Aleksandar Kušić, is a case in point: designed as an interplay of the free articulation of cells between fixed points, this housing ensemble offers a snapshot of the ambitions, and disappointments, of an architecture designedto be appropriated by its inhabitants. Similarly, the spatial flexibility of the Workers’ University in Zagreb aimed to have a pedagogical effect: to stimulate workers’ intellectual and artistic capacities and their socialization processes, indispensable for advanced economic and political activities, as Renata Margaretić Urlić and Karin Šerman show. The Workers’ University was one of many proposals through which Zagreb architects aimed to subvert ossified typological patterns and bureaucratic mainstream modernization procedures, as discussed by Maroje Mrduljaš and Tamara Bjažić Klarin. Their chapter shows that some buildings designed according to the Team 10 principles of additive structure and functional flexibility proved to be particularly suitable when the financial shortages of real existing socialism allowed only parts of these buildings to be completed.

This paradoxical commensurability between the socialist state and open morphologies was very different from what Sołtan and his team imagined in early post-Stalinist Poland for the Polish Pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels, described by Aleksandra Kędziorek. The search for an alternative to the housing neighborhoods, as they were built in socialist Czechoslovakia, resulted in urban structures that paralleled the work of Candilis-Josic-Woods. In particular, their reinterpretations of the traditional European city were guided by a renewed architectural language. An example of such an approach was the project for Liberec’s lower-town center by Miroslav Masák and his team, analyzed here by Marcela Hanáčková, which integrated a new urban structure into the old fabric of the town by means of differentiated scales of urban experience, spatial complexity and a mixture of urban functions. Also for Polónyi, the Team 10 principle of “minimal intervention” seemed appropriate for urbanization schemes that respected and developed existing settlement patterns, social structures and local characteristics in the countryside of socialist Hungary, as discussed by Levente Polyák.

All these proposals were formulated within the specific institutional, economic, social and intellectual conditions of state socialism in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. They were often critical of the ways in which several tenets of modernism had been mobilized by socialist regimes within modernization programs since the 1950s. This “real existing modernism” 38 was the immediate context for the work of the protagonists of this book, who contested, challenged and revised these realizations, and suggested alternatives. Rather than postulating that modernism should be abandoned, they explored its potentiality within a shared and interlinked set of references, concepts, images and experiences, and by this exploration they expanded the set in question. In these discussions, the lines between architecture, policy and politics were almost immediately intersected, since political actors determined the production of space in socialist states. These intersections could have taken many forms, as Stanek shows in his study of how Hansen’s projects were perceived by the regime in Poland: from “productive” criticism introducing corrections to the course taken, through to “reformism” that did not fully grasp the possibilities of change provided by socialist states; irresponsible “utopianism” that might have led to state resources being squandered; stubborn “dogmatism” that misunderstood the logic of the historical moment; dangerous “revisionism” undermining the fundamentals of the Party; or political “dissidence” that sometimes took the form of an overidentification with the regime in order to take the Party at its word.