ABSTRACT
The reason that buildings like this were so common place in the 1960s and 70s was because of an unprecedented consensus that swept the architectural establishment earlier in the century. Established in 1928 in Switzerland by the aristocratic art-patron Hlne de Mandrot, the architect-planner Le Corbusier and the architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) became the official body of modern architecture and planning, aggressive in its disdain for the architectural tradition. One of the most common assumptions about the architecture over the last few decades, quite simply, is that it should be exciting and stimulating. The speakers at the Social City' conference, convened in Venice in 2006 by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), were also fully assured of the ease with which architecture could reform society, behaviour and the mind.
