John Voelcker, Team 10 founder member: a view from the practice

Extract

Aldo van Eyck, in an interview twenty-five years after John Voelcker died [1], remembered him as follows:

There were, of course, other highly interesting men in Team 10, for their personality and intellect and passion; one of them was John Voelcker. He really thought about the great problems of urbanism. He was one of the first people, in Aix already, who talked about quantity, number and identity and in such a way that I thought ‘hey, now I have a new scale; somebody is tuned in rather differently, with a completely other approach […]

He wasn't the kind of person to organise himself to build. He did build several things, but not much. He was younger […] and anyway with the kind of ideas he had it wasn't easy to hook onto British building practice. His ideas went very far, though they were not utopian. John was a quintessential Team 10 thinker. He was urbanistically the best of the Team 10 thinkers, by far. He knew a lot, he was interesting, inclined and open.