Team X

This week's readings were all about the studies and ideas that were brought to the table by Team X (mostly known as Team 10).  The past few weeks have been very difficult reads, and very difficult to blog about but I am still trying to wrap my mind around what we are trying to learn here from the works and ideas that we are studying from the CIAM and Team X.

The following is a description of what Team X's goals are and why they initially chose to start meeting.
Aim of Team 10 has been described as follows:
Team 10 is a group of architects who have sought each other out because each has found the help of the others necessary to the development and understanding of their own individual work. But it is more than that.
They came together in the first place, certainly because of mutual realization of the inadequacies of the processes of architectural thought which they had inherited from the modern movement as a whole, but more important, each sensed that the other had already found same way towards a new beginning.
This new beginning, and the long build-up that followed, has been concerned with inducing, as it were, into the bloodstream of the architect an understanding and feeling for the patterns, the aspirations, the artefacts, the tools, the modes of transportation and communications of present-day society, so that he can as a natural thing build towards that society's realization-of-itself.
In this sense Team 10 is Utopian, but Utopian about the present. Thus their aim is not to theorize but to build, for only through con-struction can a Utopia of the present be realized.
For them 'to build' has a special meaning in that the architect's responsibility towards the individual or groups he builds for, and towards the cohesion and convenience of the collective structure to which they belong, is taken as being an absolute responsibility. No abstract Master Plan stands between him and what he has to do, only the 'human facts' and the logistics of the situation.
To accept such responsibility where none is trying to direct others to perform acts which his control techniques cannot encompass. requires the invention of a working-together-technique where each pays attention to the other and to the whole insofar as he is able.
Team 10 is of the opinion that only in such a way may meaningful groupings of buildings come into being, where each building is a live thing and a natural extension of the others. Together they will make places where a man can realize what he wishes to be.
Team 10 would like to develop their thought processes and language of building to a point where a collective demonstration (perhaps a little self-conscious) could be made at a scale which would be really effective in terms of the modes of life and the structure of a community.
It must be said that this point is still some way oft.

The first thing that I want to discuss is a quote from Kenneth Frampton's Team 10 Book Review.  I am very interested in the thought from the following passage that comes after some talk from Frampton in response to Van Eyck's question:  "how an architect can build a counter-form to a society without form.."  What Frampton has here is another quote in regards to Van Eyck but this one is from Alison and Peter Smithson:

"The social structure of which the town planner has to give form is not only different but much more complex than ever before.  The various public services make the family more and more independent of actual physical contact with the rest of the community and turned in on itself.  Such factors would seem to make incomprehensible the continued acceptance of forms of dwellings and their means of access which differ very little from those which satisfied the social reformer's dream before the first world war."

This passage brings out a lot of truths about today's society and what is accepted still today when we talk about social environments and the way we access our public spaces.  As Lamb even included in today's discussion he talked about the article which he read about how Generation X does not accept most of the buildings that have been left to us.  This leaves us with a lot of unused/unwanted buildings.  I find truth in this as well because we are on a direction of contemporary architectural style in our designs today so what we have left from the modernist/post-modernist and structuralists generation are no longer accepted or wanted.  

So back to the idea of today's civic organization and how we access it, I am reminded of Kenzo Tange's A Plan for Tokyo: Toward a Structural Reorganization.  Kenzo Tange talks about his attempts to restructure and reorganize Tokyo because at the rate of growth the city faces, they must adapt and change their ways of circulation and the ways in which they access the public spaces in the city.  I feel that we have, in fact, become more independent on the physical contact of with the rest of our communities and I blame this problem on technology.  I feel that we as a civilization and as humans have over complicated our lives through technology and I firmly believe that technology will be the ultimate demise of our species.  I love to daydream on the days of the late 19th century and early 20th century where it was required to interact socially and it was necessary to physically make something happen because we have completely lost that aspect in our lives.  I feel that we will only continue to get worse and as we do this we will yet again look at our situation and have to restructure and reorganize our cities and our transportation methods just as Kenzo Tange was working on for Tokyo.

This link is to a video of Kenzo Tange's firm and a building done in Tokyo.  I like this mainly because they briefly talk about methods that are required for today's building.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHU_zVM968s