ABSTRACT
So far, this book has been focused on the spaces where childhood is shaped and lived. This chapter examines the discursive role of children in postwar architectural debates, and especially Team 10’s use of images of playing children to illustrate their presentations at CIAM. Team 10’s core members included the British architects Peter and Alison Smithson, Bill and Gill Howell, and John Voelcker; the American architect Shadrach Woods and the French architect George Candilis (both of them worked on Le Corbusier’s Unité); and the Dutch architects Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck. The group’s significance to architectural history resides in its humanist critique of modernism’s allegedly mechanistic planning theory, and its advocacy for an alternative approach that was oriented towards promoting individual and communal forms of identity and agency (Risselada and Heuvel 2005). The importance of Team 10 to this study resides in the panels its founding members presented at CIAM meetings, which interposed their urban planning theory with images of playing children. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Urban Re-identification Grille presented at CIAM 9 at Aix-en-Provence (1953), contrasted photographs of children playing in the streets of Bethnal Green with their unrealized Golden Lane housing scheme (Figure 6.4). The UR Grille has been canonized as a turning point in how the city is conceptualised at CIAM. The architects presented it as as a critique of the Functional City which separated and isolated the four main categories of city life: transportation, recreation, work and dwelling. Following CIAM 9, which exposed disagreement among architects, a group of “young” architects was formed to lead the X Committee to plan the tenth congress at Dubrovnik (hence the name of the group Team 10), in order to initiate an orderly transfer of leadership from the “old guard” who dominated the organization from its inception, Le Corbusier, Giedion, Gropius and José Luis Sert, to the “young generation” of architects who began their work at the War’s aftermath. CIAM 10 was led by Team 10 members, who led half of its working groups (E. Mumford 2000:247). It was there that Aldo van Eyck presented The Child in the City: the Problem of Lost Identity grille. The four part panel combined photographs of children playing in the city and playgrounds he designed for Amsterdam with a text that criticized modern functionalist planning from the point of view of how children experience and interact with the city (Figure 6.3). At the last CIAM at Utterlo (1959), van Eyck presented his perspective on reforming modern architecture using the example of his Amsterdam Orphanage, a building that would influence a generation of architects. The rise of Team 10 coincides with their use of images of images of children to argue for a different logic for urban planning, and to communicate concepts such as “cluster”, “change and growth”, “identity”, “inbetween”, “hierarchy of human associations”, and “harmony in motion” which they developed to enrich postwar architectural practice.
