Team 10 Meeting, Bonnieux, France,

1977. From Team 10: In Search of a Utopia

of the Present.

Reinier de Graaf

From C I A M t o Cyb e r spa ce :

A rc h i t ec t u re a n d t he Com m u n i t y
The community might be the most frequently
used term in architectural and urban discourse
over the last fifty years. For decades, rhetoric
invoking the community has endowed even
the most mediocre designs with an aura of
good intentions and thus implicitly condemned
designers who decline use of the word. The
community has served as a legitimization for
anything from Team X to New Urbanism, from
Pendrecht to Celebration, from Aldo van Eyck
to Larry Beasley. But what is the community?
Despite its prolific appearance, the frequency
with which community is used seems inversely proportional to the extent to which it is
truly understood.
*

In July 1953, an international group of architects breaks away from CIAM, until then the
prevailing movement of modern architects.1
Critical of what they see as CIAMs overly
dogmatic functionalist approach, this group,
eventually known as Team X, believes in reestablishing the relationship between architecture and the human habitat. With the formation
of Team X the community becomes the focus
of modern architectural discourse.
Members of the group meet regularly,
generally in the garden of one their homes in
France, England or the Netherlands. 2 There is
an ample photographic record of these meetingsthe same cast of characters appears
in different compositionsand the scene is
always the same: a circle of people, seated on
chairs or on the semi-manicured lawn below. 3
In every picture there is a tree, always slightly
1. Sigfried Giedion, ed., CIAM: A Decade of New Architecture.
(Zurich: Editions Gersburger, 1960).
2. Team 10 Online,accessed January 1, 2014. http://www.
team10online.org.
3. Alison Smithson, Team 10 Meetings: 1953-1984 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1991).

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off-center. The intentionally domestic setting

of their meetings is as much a manifesto as any
outcome of the meetings, written or otherwise.
The wives invariably attend either that, or a
vast reservoir of female architects have failed to
make it into the history books.
It is never quite clear to what extent the
meetings are meant to be an exchange of views,
or whether they are essentially just a form of
bonding. Team Xs most articulate mantra, by
us, for us, a phrase encapsulated in a drawing
by Aldo van Eyck, 4 is equally ambiguous. The
most common interpretation suggests a certain
naivet associated with the period or an almost
tautological profession of good intentions, which
imply that people should be their own architects. Yet, studying the picture more closely,
observing the eerie, almost tribal consensus
that exists between members of the group, one
is also left with the impression of a strange
hubris, a sense of self-inflated significance of
the architectural profession and those practicing it. Looking at the isolated, exclusive club of
architects gathered around the tree, the people
seem far away. It is as though we are witnessing
a strange precursor to the phenomenon of the
starchitect, where by us, for us ultimately
amounts to architecture for architects.
Some of the meetings produce written documents and in 1954 one such document, The
Doorn Manifesto, credited to the Smithsons,
argues that each local situation calls for its own
specific habitat concept.5 In the last sentence,
architecture, and not sociology, is unequivocally quoted as the prime source of expertise
to solve societal issues: The appropriateness of
any solution may lie in the field of architectural
invention rather than social anthropology.6
4. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Team 10: In Search
of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006).
5. Alison Smithson, The Doorn Manifesto, in Team 10 Primer,
ed. Alison Smithson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974).
6. Alison Smithson, The Doorn Manifesto.

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Building on this, Jaap Bakema writes the book

Already in 1950, the sociologist George A.
From Chair to City: A Story of People and Space
Hillery, Jr. publishes his A Research Odyssey:
in 1964, and goes one step further to equate the
Developing and Testing a Community Theory.
history of mankind to the history of place-makThe books title is painfully appropriate as the
ing: buildings are supposed to represent the rebook is largely a journey across every conceivlations of people living in them.7 This suggestion
able definition of community, ending up with 94
definitions in total. Unwittingly, the book is an
is represented very literally on the books cover,
early indication of how prominent the search for
which depicts a mix of high-rise and low-rise
a new collectivity in postwar society has become
buildings as parents with their children.
and will continue to be in the following decades.
For Team X, the built environment is both
The 1960s are not only the age of the comthe subject of blame and a hypothetical panacea
munity, but also the age of the commune. In
to social problems. However, despite the conBerlin a group of ten men and women segregate
fidence of their manifestos, the architecture of
from society largely for political motives, living
Team X does little to change the way in which
under the name Kommune 1 (Commune 1). 8
residential neighborhoods continue to be built
over much of the 1950s and 1960s. The arrangeTheir main credoDas Private ist politisch
ment of residential slabs changes into somewhat
(the private is political)makes living in a commore varied patterns, no longer exclusively dicmune essentially a political statement against
tated by equal quotas of sunlight,
but now also arranged to create
a sense of place. (Meanwhile,
the places are often the size of a
football fieldto the extent that to
this day, I wonder whether there
is a direct correlation between the
successes of Dutch soccer in the
1970s and the type of residential
neighborhoods most of the players
grew up in.)
In many ways, the community
becomes the paradigmatic feature
of the 1950s and 1960s: not only
in the architecture of Team X,
but also in academia, where the
discipline of sociology becomes
Aldo van Eyck, For us by us, presented as the Otterlo Circles,
popular. The 1950s and 1960s are
CIAM X, Otterlo, Netherlands, 1959.
a time of sociological experiments.
With the emergence of the middle
class as the new majority in post-World War II
the family as a bourgeois tool largely designed
society, the notion of class struggle, which had
to further consumption and to reaffirm class
been the dominating ideological feature in sosegregation. 9 The Kommune 1 manifesto,
cial and political theory at the beginning of the
against the family and against consumerism, is
century, increasingly fades into the background.
largely a form of agitation. It calls upon people
The focus now shifts to a theorization of human
to raid warehouses and department stores as
relationships themselves. The main underlybastions of consumption, which, together with
ing driver of the economic systemindividual
the family, Kommune 1 sees as the direct extenconsumptioncomes under increased scrutiny.
sion of the former national socialist government
With this focus come new, albeit frail, attempts
of Germany, with the same people still in power
at the alternative forms of collectivity.
and the same mechanisms still in place.
7. Jaap Bakema, Van stoel tot stad: een verhaal over mensen en
ruimte (Zeist: W. De Haan, 1964).

46

8. Ulrich Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune1 Berlin 1967-69

(Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch; 2004).
9. Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune1 Berlin 1967-69.

P RO J E C T

Inasmuch as Kommune 1 constitutes a

community, it is no longer a community which
is a reflection or a product of shared values of
society, but in fact the exact opposite: a form of
protest against society, where the shared rejection of particular mainstream values becomes
the primary source of bonding. Apparently, at
this point in history, the notion of the community can only exist on the condition of a
seemingly inevitable de-escalation of the scale
of consensus.
In the context of this realization, it is
interesting to note that the first moment that
Community Architect properly surfaces as an
official term is in the mid-1970s. In 1974, Rod
Hackney, together with the residents of Black
Road, Macclesfield, essentially devises a pilot
scheme for the renovation of a working class

10. Charles Knevitt, Community Architect Mark 1: an interview

with Rod Hackney who works in small scale community
rehabilitation projects, Building Design (July 11, 1975).
11. Nick Wates, Community Architecture: CA is here to stay,
Architects Journal 175:23 (June 9, 1982): 42-44.
12. Julien Freund, German Sociology in the time of Max Weber,
in A History of Sociological Analysis, eds. Thomas Burton

DE GR AAF

Paradoxically, it emerges from an unexpected

alliance of protest and preservationagainst,
rather than with, the prevailing dogmas of
society as a whole.
The complex relationship between community and society emerging from the aforementioned examples constitutes an interesting dichotomy, although perhaps the words are more
related than one would expect: in the German
language, community and society branch from
the same root word: Gemeinschaft (community)
and Gesellschaft (society).12 The community
(Gemeinschaft) is that which precedes society
(Gesellschaft) in terms of scale and level of
organization. Society is the institutionalized
version of the community. However, the moment society becomes the predominant form of
organization in terms of human relationships;
the community also becomes a
tool of rejection. In the face of a
larger society that seemingly fails
to deliver a lot of its promises,
the community is also that which
supersedes society.13
Who is society? There is no
such thing! There are individual
men and women and there are
families.14 These words, spoken by
Margaret Thatcher in 1987 seem
to indicate a strange full cycle,
especially when positioned next
to the manifesto of Kommune 1
that, albeit for different reasons,
contained an equally fierce assault
on society. Twenty years later,
Jaap Bakema, Van stoel tot Stad; een verhaal over mensen en ruimte
the notion of a society that can
(From Chair to City; A Story of People and Space), 1964.
be entrusted with any collective
taska society which acts for the
neighborhood in the face of imminent demoligreater goodappears to be equally rejected by
tion.10 The ample press campaign that ensues
supporters and opponents of the family. The
result is an ideological vacuum in which the
brands the effort with the slogan: Its only
community has become an ideological propWorking Class conservation!11 With the extenerty claimed by both the left and the right.
sive proliferation of this slogan into the media,
In the context of this ideological disarray,
community architecture is bornin combinasomething interesting happens in architecture
tion with an early form of residents particias well. Over the course of the 1980s, the compation, that other great 1970s phenomenon.
Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
13. Ferdinand Tnnies, Community and Civil Society, Jose
Harris, ed., Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis, trans.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
14. Margaret Thatcher, Interview with Douglas Keay, Womans
Own (September 23, 1987).

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Kommune 1, Berlin, Germany, 1968.

48

munity continues to dominate the architectural discourse; however, it becomes less and
less clear who its protagonists really are. In the
early 1990s a manifesto is published arguing for
the restoration of existing urban centers and
towns within coherent metropolitan regions,
the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs
into communities of real neighborhoods and
diverse districts, the conservation of natural
environments, and the preservation of our built
legacy.15 Although evidently taking a cue from
the Team X theorists, this is an excerpt from
a very different type of manifesto: the Charter
of New Urbanism, published for the first time
in 1993. New Urbanism, whilst practicing a

similar rhetoric to Team X, is an almost antithetical movement to Team X, with its actors
having very different political associations,
and ultimately realizing (or at least representing) a very different style of architecture. The
architects from Team X were primarily agents
of a large public sector, while the architects
of the New Urbanism are mostly agents of the
private sector. Their most notorious achievementCelebrationis a town commissioned
and managed by the Disney Corporation, with
Disney performing many of the tasks previously
performed by the public sector.16
To what extent can a type of urbanism
that puts itself at the service of private, at

15. Charter of the New Urbanism, accessed February 11, 2013,

http://www.cnu.org/charter.

16. Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration, U.S.A.: Living

in Disneys Brave New Town (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2000).

P RO J E C T

17. Claudio Vignali, McDonalds: think global, act localthe

marketing mix, British Food Journal 103:2 (2001): 97-111.
18. Economist Intelligence Unit, Best Cities Ranking and
Report (New York: The Economist, 2013).

DE GR AAF

inhabit progressively starts to acquire tractimes gated, communities such as Celebration

tion in the late 1990s. Community planning
credibly make moral claims about society as a
expands from architecture and urbanism into
whole? It is clear that the community of the
a multi-disciplinary approach: an exclusive
New Urbanists is a very different community
type of expertise simultaneously claimed by
than the community of Team X: not a product
technology firms, management consultants
of society at large, but of a society of parts and
and even public institutions, all claiming
partial interests. In the context of the New Urto possess unique knowledge of the subject.
banism movement, the community has come
Vancouver, consistently at the top of so called
to equal a concept of division, thus ensuring
livable cities lists18 today is as much a form of
the breakdown of any possibility of a community at large.
knowledge as it is the name of city in Canada.
Still, there is one important thing that Team
In a state of near bankruptcy as recently as the
X and the New Urbanists have in common: the
1970s the city makes a remarkable turnaround
fact that the comduring the 1990s,
munity is viewed as a
largely at the hands
product of spatial paof one man.19 With
rameters. Throughout
little conventional
their discourse, the
planning options left
community remains
at his disposal, the
a fairly straightforhead of the Vanward notion, defined
couver Municipal
through spatial
Planning Department
proximity in an
practically invents
orderly progression of
the term community
scales: the neighborplanning. Comhood, the city and the
munity planning
nation. However, the
becomes synonymous
decade that follows
with everything that
turns everything
is good for the city: a
upside down.
vibrant public realm,
In a globalized
integrated (green)
economy, where cities
public space, sustainincreasingly compete
able infrastructure,
in economic terms,
etc., albeit more in
the community
the form of a perpetbecomes an economic
ual announcement of
notion, no longer dethings to come than
fined by territory, but
in the form of real urCharles Knevitt, Community architect mark 1: an interby economic interdeban transformation.
view with Rod Hackney, Building Design 258 (1 July 1975).
pendence. EmployCommunity planment communities
ning becomes hype:
turn into urban communities. McDonalds, for
the first real evidence of a merger between
instance, creates local training programs and
urbanism and marketing.
funds youth sport and community charity in
Even if Vancouver itself does not change
many American cities.17
that much, the perception of Vancouver
certainly does. In the 90s real estate prices
As a consequence, the idea that communiescalate dramatically, and Vancouver becomes
ties can and should be shaped through and
beyond the built environment which they
a success story, almost irrespective of any
19. Larry Beasley, Planning the Global City: Vancouver, Abu
Dhabi and the World, address given at the University of Toronto
Urban Lecture Series, Toronto, Canada, November 16, 2011.

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real physical change. 20 It is a model, soon to

guise of anonymity? Can a new new world,
be exported to cities as diverse as Abu Dhabi,
offering the possibility to start over, augment
Rotterdam and Dallas. The former civil servant
ones shortcomings and redefine relationmeanwhile wears an Armani suit, travels
ships? Milan Kundera wrote that in terms of
around the world in a private jet and regularly
human relationships we can never know what
comes back from retirement to spread the goswe want, because the general rehearsal of life
pel of Vancouverism to struggling cities and
is life itself. 22 If we are to believe the creators of
aspiring communities worldwide.
virtual communities such as Second Life, that
Municipal planners are not the only ones to
is no longer true: their Metaverse offers the
create their own versions of the communities
possibility of an endless trial and error, where
of the future. The opposite also happens with
humansor, rather, avatarscan interact, free
the emergence of community
planning or grassroots movements defined by broad neighborhood participation. In the most
extreme cases this can amount to
an overall surrender to local powers. In Rio de Janeiros favelas it is
gangsthe only remaining form of
efficient organizationwho run
the systems of justice and order.
The community is what emerges
when society turns its back.
More and more the formation of
communities seem to rely on exclusion and voluntary isolation. In the
United States, the public sector has
relegated the management of cities
to corporations. Communism (the
only political system to elevate the
community to a global political
doctrine) once spanned a third of
the globe; today it is the exclusive
Scene from Akihabara. Akihabara District, Tokyo, Japan.
property of insular states like North
Korea. Religion, the cement that
held society together, is increasingly
a means to secede from a society no longer under
from the limitations of reality. 23 Property and
its spell, turning religious communities into a
services are traded for a virtual currency that
refuge for a diverse definition of believers. Sects
every now and thenin a strange moment of
build consensus on a shared rejection of all that
interference between the virtual and the real
which refuses to conform to their singular spirican be exchanged for hard cash. Products and
tual truths. Others find their answers through
services are granted a first lease on life before
silence and mystery: Scientology; Freemasons;
they see birth in the real community (with
the Omertatheir bond stems from the joint
Second Lifes virtual schizophrenia clinic as an
knowledge of that which cannot be said.
ironic climax). 24 The virtual used to be viewed
Is the internet a last refuge?21 Are we witas an extension of the real, but increasingly the
virtual is that which precedes the real, a test
nessing a rebirth of the community under the
20. About Vancouver, City of Vancouver, last modified
January 22, 2013, http://vancouver.ca/green-vancouver/
about-vancouver.aspx.
21. Elizabeth Grosz, Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Real: Some
Architectural Reflections, in Architecture from the Outside:
Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

50

22. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York:

Harper & Row, 1984)
23. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
24. Mayo Clinic, accessed January 1, 2013, www.secondlife/
destinations/mayo-clinic.

P RO J E C T

bed where every fact of life is preemptively augmented before it sees the light of day. It seems
the general rehearsal for life is no longer life
itself, but all that is acted out in cyberspace.
Tokyo, December 2013, the Akihabara
district: the streets are busy; the shops, which
appear to be doing well, sell DVDs of Japanese
games. 25 But the games are no longer limited to
the shops. Fetishes to feature in the games have
meanwhile found their way into the streets. The
electric wires spanning high above the railroad

Po s t s c r i p t

DE GR AAF

Thirty years ago, as a student, I witnessed

the tail-end of sociology as a subject taught
at the Architecture Faculty of the TU Delft.
Strangely, the abandonment of the one subject
that attempted to approach the community as
a sciencebased on empirical researchcoincided with an unprecedented popularity of
the term within the architectural profession,
allowing its rhetoric about the community to
go largely unchecked. The community evolved from something
that could be given physical shape
(Team X) to something that
largely became a virtual construct,
either as the subject of marketing (Vancouver) or as an exclusively digital existence online. If
Vancouver marks the point where
Community Architecture is
abandoned as something physical,
the Akihabara district, despite
its apparent absurdity, marks a
strange return: the notion of the
community as a physical phenomenon, or at least as proof of the
need for the physicality of community, with all the associated
relevance for form, style, design
and maybe even architecture.
Perhaps it is time to revisit
the notion of the community in
Scene from Akihabara: Enjoying Real Life with a 2D girlfriend.
all of the complexity it deserves.
Akihabara District, Tokyo, Japan.
Architectures preoccupation with
its own relevance for the community has long prevented real knowledge of the
overpass cut into the vagina of a mammoth vercommunity. The community is now the shared
sion of a young girl in a school uniform sitting
subject of architecture, business, religion, polion top. The accidentally passing train seems to
tics and the internet. What seems to be missing
emerge like a giant penis. An Otaku: a name for
is an integrated research into how the commua local resident (after a character in one of the
nity is manifested and manipulated within all
games); he shares his meal with a 2-dimensional
of these domains.
print of his virtual girlfriend propped up next
to him, a real-life version of the games that are
being traded in the district. In Akihabara, the
games and the virtual community built around
them have become a reality. The community
has come full cycle.

25. Jakob Nabuoka, User Innovation and Creative Consumption in

Japanese Culture Industries: The Case of Akihabara,
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 92:3 (2010): 205-218 .

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