Nation-building Modernism and European post-war debates: Glikson's ‘Integral Habitational Unit’ and Team 10 discourse

Extract

The September 1965 meeting of Team 10 in Berlin was another occasion on which the ‘family’ gathered to present and discuss projects and ideas. Like other Team 10 meetings, issues of modernisation, inhabitation, post-war reconstruction, the welfare state, consumer society and the role of the architect were subjects of heated debate. After the famous 1959 meeting in Otterlo at which Team 10 emerged out of CIAM, the core group members were still trying to determine the character and size of their group, which would enable them to reach some kind of unity while maintaining a diversified outlook. The list of 30 invitees included familiar names alongside a few newcomers, among them the Israeli, German-born planner-architect Artur Glikson, who had been invited to join the meeting by Aldo van Eyck. The gathering was to be informal but, unlike invitations to previous meetings, this one, sent by Shadrach Woods, did not propose any specific theme. The meeting was motivated partly by the establishment of the new branch office of Candilis-Josic-Woods in Berlin, set up to supervise construction of the Free University. Presentations took place at the Akademie der Künste, in the Hansaviertel, the showcase district for modern architecture built in the latter half of the 1950s [1, 2].