ARCH 222 HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE II PRESENTATION 11.05.2017 ZEYNEP YAĞCIOĞLU THE ATHENS CHARTER (1943) LE CORBUISER
The Athens Charter is a written manifesto which published by the Swiss architect and urban planner Le Corbusier in 1943. The book s context is about the Fourth Congress of CIAM as a summary which eventuated in a passenger boat from Marsellie, France to Athens, Greece and back again in 1933. It was first published in France and in those years that The Athens Charter was published, France was at the height of the German occupation and the Vicky government. To make the modern architecture and the urban planning more efficient, rational and hygienic; the charter can be interpreted as a condensed version of them as a total remaking of cities in the industrial world.
CIAM ( Congrés Internationaux d Architecture Moderne) is founded at the Chateau of La Sarraz, Switzerland in June 1928. Its purpose was to advance both modernism and internationalism in architecture and urban planning as an avant-garde association of architects. To do a service the interests of the society, CIAM saw itself as an elite group who revolutionize the architecture and city planning. Its members were consists of some of the best known architects of the twentieth century such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropious, and Richard Neutra, and also many of others who considered it for principles on how to formalize the urban environment in a rapidly changing world.
CIAM is considered of as an instrument of propaganda to improve the reason of the new architecture that was developing in Europe in 1920s from the beginning. There were twenty four architects from eight European countries in the congress who signed a joint declaration during the event. The organization was hugely influential because it was saw architecture and urban planning as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning rather than just engaged in formalizing the architectural principles of the modern movement.
The CIAM gave congress eleven times in different places and included different themes until 1959. CIAM 1 (1928), La Sarraz: Foundation of CIAM,CIAM 2 (1929), Frankfurt: The Minimum Dwelling, CIAM 3(1930), Brussels:Rational Land Development, CIAM 4(1933), Athens : The Functional City, CIAM 5 (1937), Paris : Dwelling and Recovery, CIAM 6 (1947), Bridgewater : Reaffirmation of the Aims of CIAM, CIAM 7 (1949), Bergamo : The Athens Charter in Practice, CIAM 8 (1951), Hoddesdon : The Heart of the City,CIAM 9 (1953), Aix-en-Provence: Habitat, CIAM 10 (1956), Dubrovnik : Habitat, CIAM 11 (1959), Otterlo : Organized Dissolution of CIAM by Team 10. The Athens Charter is the Fourth Congress of CIAM which has the theme The Functional City. Obviously, the congress was in 1933, yet it was published in 1943 by Le Corbusier.
Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of the Functional City which broadened CIAM s comprehension from architecture to urban planning which apply modern methods of architectural analyses and planning to the city as a whole. CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals based on an analysis of thirty three cities.
Chapel points out that the graphic approach to mapping was perhaps the primary defining characteristic of CIAM s Functional City cartography. Atlas of the Functional City presents results of research into the comparative city analyses. The members of the group who are mostly prominent European architects and urban planners prepared for the Fourth Congress of the CIAM in 1933, they felt that their field of expertise required new definition. The delegates engaged in a common city analysis in search for responses to Europe wide tendencies in social and economic development and to paradigmatic technological change. Mapping a broad range of European cities and metropolitan regions, the congress aimed to raise awareness regarding common challenges that the regions share.
As Atlas of the Functional City demonstrates, CIAM 4 produced not only a compilation of beautiful maps of thirty three European and colonial cities in 18 countries, they also delivered a new and influential approach to planning. The same scale plans cover five points: Opinions on existing cities, new settlements; the role of the historic buildings and parts of town in the modern city; principles of the orientation to the sun; size and situation of places for education and recreation; and the modern street and its relation to dwelling.
Le Corbusier argued that the plans to be presented with their conventional signs were expressions of our life: we must not make beautiful presentations in the manner of oriental rugs. The goal of preparing them was to establish urbanistic rules, to determine honest means of expression to prescribe to authorities. He insisted on the fundamental principle that urbanism was a three dimensional science, and stressed that height was an important one of those dimensions. The urbanist, he continued, must choose between two tendencies, to extend or to contract the city. If the latter course was chosen, concrete and steel must be used to preserve the essential joys of the sky, trees, and light. Le Corbusier emphasized that the base of CIAM s judgements must be dwelling, the first of a hierarchy of four functions: dwelling, work, amusement (soon changed to leisure ), and circulation.
As I mentioned above, in the Fourth Congress of CIAM, they analyzed thirty three cities and they determined the observations and requirements for them in four categories. First of all, in the habitation category, one of the observation in The Athens Charter is The population is too dense within the historic nuclei of cities, as it is in certain belts of nineteenth-century industrial expansion reaching as many as four hundred and even six hundred inhabitants per acre. But density can change with changing the height of the buildings and it must be laid down by the authorities. The other observation about leisure is Even when open spaces are of an adequate size, they are often poorly located and are therefore not readily accessible to a great number of inhabitants. So the land ordinance should possess a diversity that corresponds to the needs to be satisfied. The third example from the work part as a requirement is The industrial areas must be independent of the residential areas, and separated from one another by a zone of vegetation. The industrial city should extend along with traffic ways such as highway or railroad and a verdant zone will separate habitation from the industrial buildings. The last example about the traffic category from The Athens Charter is The pedestrian must be able to follow other paths than the automobile network. This can be thought as a reform in the pattern of city traffic.