| Popis: |
The “lateness” of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne after 1945 (Matteoni 1992), its indecisiveness on the issue of “habitat” (Bonnet 1997), and its eventual disbandment (Mumford 2000) are synonymous in architectural historiography with the characterization of postwar modernism as a period “anxious” to find a clear direction (Goldhagen 2000). Conventionally, the termination of CIAM has been described as a self-dissolution initiated by a split along both generational and discursive lines (Kourniati 2006), which “younger” CIAM members characterized as the origin of Team 10 (Smithson 1982), and which “older” members identified instead with the moment of their own disengagement (Sert et al. 1961). This narrative however does not account for external factors and for the broader context that CIAM was part of as a non-governmental organization with consultative status to the United Nations, from the East-West relations that characterized the Cold War (Moravánszky et al. 2017) to the emergence of the Global South (Aggregate 2022). To address this gap, the paper reflects on possible methodologies for relating CIAM’s well-known public discourse to its lesser-known organizational processes, from internal paperwork to publicity strategies (Kalpakci 2017). Its focus is on the informal pact that CIAM and the Union Internationale des Architectes (UIA) stipulated in 1946, whose purpose was to arrange the roles and obligations for both organizations in the international field, but whose integrity was thereafter broken multiple times. The paper presents first the argument that this breach of contract contributed decisively to CIAM’s termination, suggesting that its omission from public narratives preserved CIAM’s reputation as that of a self-determined avant-garde till the end, and reflects then on the research approaches that have been applied to analyze the impact of this informal agreement on postwar modernism. |
