Team 10 Meeting, Bonnieux, France,

1977. From Team 10: In Search of a Utopia

of the Present.
Reinier de Graaf
From C I A M t o Cyb e r spa ce :
A rc h i t ec t u re a n d t he Com m u n i t y
The community might be the most frequently
used term in architectural and urban discourse
over the last fifty years. For decades, rhetoric
invoking the community has endowed even
the most mediocre designs with an aura of
good intentions and thus implicitly condemned
designers who decline use of the word. The
community has served as a legitimization for
anything from Team X to New Urbanism, from
Pendrecht to Celebration, from Aldo van Eyck
to Larry Beasley. But what is the community?
Despite its prolific appearance, the frequency
with which community is used seems in-
versely proportional to the extent to which it is
truly understood.
* * * observing the eerie, almost tribal consensus
In July 1953, an international group of archi-
tects breaks away from CIAM, until then the
prevailing movement of modern architects.1
Critical of what they see as CIAMs overly
dogmatic functionalist approach, this group,
eventually known as Team X, believes in re-
establishing the relationship between architec-
ture and the human habitat. With the formation
of Team X the community becomes the focus
of modern architectural discourse.
Members of the group meet regularly,
generally in the garden of one their homes in
France, England or the Netherlands. 2 There is
an ample photographic record of these meet-
ingsthe same cast of characters appears
in different compositionsand the scene is
always the same: a circle of people, seated on
chairs or on the semi-manicured lawn below. 3
In every picture there is a tree, always slightly
1. Sigfried Giedion, ed., CIAM: A Decade of New Architecture.
(Zurich: Editions Gersburger, 1960).
2. Team 10 Online,accessed January 1, 2014. http://www.
team10online.org.
3. Alison Smithson, Team 10 Meetings: 1953-1984 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1991).
Issue 3
off-center. The intentionally domestic setting
of their meetings is as much a manifesto as any
outcome of the meetings, written or otherwise.
The wives invariably attend either that, or a
vast reservoir of female architects have failed to
make it into the history books.
It is never quite clear to what extent the
meetings are meant to be an exchange of views,
or whether they are essentially just a form of
bonding. Team Xs most articulate mantra, by
us, for us, a phrase encapsulated in a drawing
by Aldo van Eyck, 4 is equally ambiguous. The
most common interpretation suggests a certain
naivet associated with the period or an almost
tautological profession of good intentions, which
imply that people should be their own archi-
tects. Yet, studying the picture more closely,
DE GR AAF
that exists between members of the group, one
is also left with the impression of a strange
hubris, a sense of self-inflated significance of
the architectural profession and those practic-
ing it. Looking at the isolated, exclusive club of
architects gathered around the tree, the people
seem far away. It is as though we are witnessing
a strange precursor to the phenomenon of the
starchitect, where by us, for us ultimately
amounts to architecture for architects.
Some of the meetings produce written docu-
ments and in 1954 one such document, The
Doorn Manifesto, credited to the Smithsons,
argues that each local situation calls for its own
specific habitat concept.5 In the last sentence,
architecture, and not sociology, is unequivo-
cally quoted as the prime source of expertise
to solve societal issues: The appropriateness of
any solution may lie in the field of architectural
invention rather than social anthropology.6
4. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Team 10: In Search
of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006).
5. Alison Smithson, The Doorn Manifesto, in Team 10 Primer,
ed. Alison Smithson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974).
6. Alison Smithson, The Doorn Manifesto.
45
 Building on this, Jaap Bakema writes the book
From Chair to City: A Story of People and Space
in 1964, and goes one step further to equate the
history of mankind to the history of place-mak-
ing: buildings are supposed to represent the re-
lations of people living in them.7 This suggestion
is represented very literally on the books cover,
which depicts a mix of high-rise and low-rise
buildings as parents with their children.
For Team X, the built environment is both
the subject of blame and a hypothetical panacea
to social problems. However, despite the con-
fidence of their manifestos, the architecture of
Team X does little to change the way in which
residential neighborhoods continue to be built
over much of the 1950s and 1960s. The arrange-
ment of residential slabs changes into somewhat
more varied patterns, no longer exclusively dic-
tated by equal quotas of sunlight,
but now also arranged to create
a sense of place. (Meanwhile,
the places are often the size of a
football fieldto the extent that to
this day, I wonder whether there
is a direct correlation between the
CR ITIQUES
successes of Dutch soccer in the
1970s and the type of residential
neighborhoods most of the players
grew up in.)
In many ways, the community
becomes the paradigmatic feature
of the 1950s and 1960s: not only
in the architecture of Team X,
but also in academia, where the
discipline of sociology becomes
popular. The 1950s and 1960s are Aldo van Eyck, For us by us, presented as the Otterlo Circles,
a time of sociological experiments. CIAM X, Otterlo, Netherlands, 1959.
With the emergence of the middle
class as the new majority in post-World War II
society, the notion of class struggle, which had
been the dominating ideological feature in so-
cial and political theory at the beginning of the
century, increasingly fades into the background.
The focus now shifts to a theorization of human
relationships themselves. The main underly-
ing driver of the economic systemindividual
consumptioncomes under increased scrutiny.
With this focus come new, albeit frail, attempts
at the alternative forms of collectivity.
7. Jaap Bakema, Van stoel tot stad: een verhaal over mensen en
ruimte (Zeist: W. De Haan, 1964).
46
Already in 1950, the sociologist George A.
Hillery, Jr. publishes his A Research Odyssey:
Developing and Testing a Community Theory.
The books title is painfully appropriate as the
book is largely a journey across every conceiv-
able definition of community, ending up with 94
definitions in total. Unwittingly, the book is an
early indication of how prominent the search for
a new collectivity in postwar society has become
and will continue to be in the following decades.
The 1960s are not only the age of the com-
munity, but also the age of the commune. In
Berlin a group of ten men and women segregate
from society largely for political motives, living
under the name Kommune 1 (Commune 1). 8
Their main credoDas Private ist politisch
(the private is political)makes living in a com-
mune essentially a political statement against
the family as a bourgeois tool largely designed
to further consumption and to reaffirm class
segregation. 9 The Kommune 1 manifesto,
against the family and against consumerism, is
largely a form of agitation. It calls upon people
to raid warehouses and department stores as
bastions of consumption, which, together with
the family, Kommune 1 sees as the direct exten-
sion of the former national socialist government
of Germany, with the same people still in power
and the same mechanisms still in place.
8. Ulrich Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune1 Berlin 1967-69
(Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch; 2004).
9. Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune1 Berlin 1967-69.
P RO J E C T
 Inasmuch as Kommune 1 constitutes a
community, it is no longer a community which
is a reflection or a product of shared values of
society, but in fact the exact opposite: a form of
protest against society, where the shared rejec-
tion of particular mainstream values becomes
the primary source of bonding. Apparently, at
this point in history, the notion of the com-
munity can only exist on the condition of a
seemingly inevitable de-escalation of the scale
of consensus.
In the context of this realization, it is
interesting to note that the first moment that
Community Architect properly surfaces as an
official term is in the mid-1970s. In 1974, Rod
Hackney, together with the residents of Black
Road, Macclesfield, essentially devises a pilot
scheme for the renovation of a working class
Paradoxically, it emerges from an unexpected
alliance of protest and preservationagainst,
rather than with, the prevailing dogmas of
society as a whole.
The complex relationship between commu-
nity and society emerging from the aforemen-
tioned examples constitutes an interesting di-
chotomy, although perhaps the words are more
related than one would expect: in the German
language, community and society branch from
the same root word: Gemeinschaft (community)
and Gesellschaft (society).12 The community
(Gemeinschaft) is that which precedes society
(Gesellschaft) in terms of scale and level of
organization. Society is the institutionalized
version of the community. However, the mo-
ment society becomes the predominant form of
organization in terms of human relationships;
the community also becomes a
tool of rejection. In the face of a
larger society that seemingly fails
to deliver a lot of its promises,
the community is also that which
supersedes society.13
Who is society? There is no

Jaap Bakema, Van stoel tot Stad; een verhaal over mensen en ruimte
(From Chair to City; A Story of People and Space), 1964.
neighborhood in the face of imminent demoli-
tion.10 The ample press campaign that ensues
brands the effort with the slogan: Its only
Working Class conservation!11 With the exten-
sive proliferation of this slogan into the media,
community architecture is bornin combina-
tion with an early form of residents partici-
pation, that other great 1970s phenomenon.
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such thing! There are individual
men and women and there are
families.14 These words, spoken by
Margaret Thatcher in 1987 seem
to indicate a strange full cycle,
especially when positioned next
to the manifesto of Kommune 1
that, albeit for different reasons,
contained an equally fierce assault
on society. Twenty years later,
the notion of a society that can
be entrusted with any collective
taska society which acts for the
greater goodappears to be equally rejected by
supporters and opponents of the family. The
result is an ideological vacuum in which the
community has become an ideological prop-
erty claimed by both the left and the right.
In the context of this ideological disarray,
something interesting happens in architecture
as well. Over the course of the 1980s, the com-

10. Charles Knevitt, Community Architect Mark 1: an interview
with Rod Hackney who works in small scale community
rehabilitation projects, Building Design (July 11, 1975).
11. Nick Wates, Community Architecture: CA is here to stay,
Architects Journal 175:23 (June 9, 1982): 42-44.
12. Julien Freund, German Sociology in the time of Max Weber,
in A History of Sociological Analysis, eds. Thomas Burton
Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
13. Ferdinand Tnnies, Community and Civil Society, Jose
Harris, ed., Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis, trans.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
14. Margaret Thatcher, Interview with Douglas Keay, Womans
Own (September 23, 1987).

Issue 3 47
CR ITIQUES
Kommune 1, Berlin, Germany, 1968.
munity continues to dominate the architec-
tural discourse; however, it becomes less and
less clear who its protagonists really are. In the
early 1990s a manifesto is published arguing for
the restoration of existing urban centers and
towns within coherent metropolitan regions,
the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs
into communities of real neighborhoods and
diverse districts, the conservation of natural
environments, and the preservation of our built
legacy.15 Although evidently taking a cue from
the Team X theorists, this is an excerpt from
a very different type of manifesto: the Charter
of New Urbanism, published for the first time
in 1993. New Urbanism, whilst practicing a
15. Charter of the New Urbanism, accessed February 11, 2013,
http://www.cnu.org/charter.
48
similar rhetoric to Team X, is an almost anti-
thetical movement to Team X, with its actors
having very different political associations,
and ultimately realizing (or at least represent-
ing) a very different style of architecture. The
architects from Team X were primarily agents
of a large public sector, while the architects
of the New Urbanism are mostly agents of the
private sector. Their most notorious achieve-
mentCelebrationis a town commissioned
and managed by the Disney Corporation, with
Disney performing many of the tasks previously
performed by the public sector.16
To what extent can a type of urbanism
that puts itself at the service of private, at
16. Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration, U.S.A.: Living
in Disneys Brave New Town (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2000).
P RO J E C T
times gated, communities such as Celebration inhabit progressively starts to acquire trac-
credibly make moral claims about society as a tion in the late 1990s. Community planning
whole? It is clear that the community of the expands from architecture and urbanism into
New Urbanists is a very different community a multi-disciplinary approach: an exclusive
than the community of Team X: not a product type of expertise simultaneously claimed by
of society at large, but of a society of parts and technology firms, management consultants
partial interests. In the context of the New Ur- and even public institutions, all claiming
banism movement, the community has come to possess unique knowledge of the subject.
to equal a concept of division, thus ensuring Vancouver, consistently at the top of so called
the breakdown of any possibility of a commu- livable cities lists18 today is as much a form of
nity at large. knowledge as it is the name of city in Canada.
Still, there is one important thing that Team In a state of near bankruptcy as recently as the
X and the New Urbanists have in common: the 1970s the city makes a remarkable turnaround
fact that the com- during the 1990s,
munity is viewed as a largely at the hands
product of spatial pa- of one man.19 With
rameters. Throughout little conventional
their discourse, the planning options left
community remains at his disposal, the
a fairly straightfor- head of the Van-
ward notion, defined couver Municipal
through spatial Planning Department
proximity in an practically invents
orderly progression of the term community
scales: the neighbor- planning. Com-

DE GR AAF
hood, the city and the munity planning
nation. However, the becomes synonymous
decade that follows with everything that
turns everything is good for the city: a
upside down. vibrant public realm,
In a globalized integrated (green)
economy, where cities public space, sustain-
increasingly compete able infrastructure,
in economic terms, etc., albeit more in
the community the form of a perpet-
becomes an economic ual announcement of
notion, no longer de- things to come than
fined by territory, but in the form of real ur-
by economic interde- Charles Knevitt, Community architect mark 1: an inter- ban transformation.
view with Rod Hackney, Building Design 258 (1 July 1975).
pendence. Employ- Community plan-
ment communities ning becomes hype:
turn into urban communities. McDonalds, for the first real evidence of a merger between
instance, creates local training programs and urbanism and marketing.
funds youth sport and community charity in Even if Vancouver itself does not change
many American cities.17 that much, the perception of Vancouver
As a consequence, the idea that communi- certainly does. In the 90s real estate prices
ties can and should be shaped through and escalate dramatically, and Vancouver becomes
beyond the built environment which they a success story, almost irrespective of any

17. Claudio Vignali, McDonalds: think global, act localthe 19. Larry Beasley, Planning the Global City: Vancouver, Abu
marketing mix, British Food Journal 103:2 (2001): 97-111. Dhabi and the World, address given at the University of Toronto
18. Economist Intelligence Unit, Best Cities Ranking and Urban Lecture Series, Toronto, Canada, November 16, 2011.
Report (New York: The Economist, 2013).

Issue 3 49
 real physical change. 20 It is a model, soon to guise of anonymity? Can a new new world,
be exported to cities as diverse as Abu Dhabi, offering the possibility to start over, augment
Rotterdam and Dallas. The former civil servant ones shortcomings and redefine relation-
meanwhile wears an Armani suit, travels ships? Milan Kundera wrote that in terms of
around the world in a private jet and regularly human relationships we can never know what
comes back from retirement to spread the gos- we want, because the general rehearsal of life
pel of Vancouverism to struggling cities and is life itself. 22 If we are to believe the creators of
aspiring communities worldwide. virtual communities such as Second Life, that
Municipal planners are not the only ones to is no longer true: their Metaverse offers the
create their own versions of the communities possibility of an endless trial and error, where
of the future. The opposite also happens with humansor, rather, avatarscan interact, free
the emergence of community
planning or grassroots move-
ments defined by broad neighbor-
hood participation. In the most
extreme cases this can amount to
an overall surrender to local pow-
ers. In Rio de Janeiros favelas it is
gangsthe only remaining form of
efficient organizationwho run
the systems of justice and order.
The community is what emerges
when society turns its back.
More and more the formation of
communities seem to rely on exclu-
CR ITIQUES

sion and voluntary isolation. In the

United States, the public sector has
relegated the management of cities
to corporations. Communism (the
only political system to elevate the
community to a global political
doctrine) once spanned a third of
the globe; today it is the exclusive
property of insular states like North Scene from Akihabara. Akihabara District, Tokyo, Japan.
Korea. Religion, the cement that
held society together, is increasingly
a means to secede from a society no longer under from the limitations of reality. 23 Property and
its spell, turning religious communities into a services are traded for a virtual currency that
refuge for a diverse definition of believers. Sects every now and thenin a strange moment of
build consensus on a shared rejection of all that interference between the virtual and the real
which refuses to conform to their singular spiri- can be exchanged for hard cash. Products and
tual truths. Others find their answers through services are granted a first lease on life before
silence and mystery: Scientology; Freemasons; they see birth in the real community (with
the Omertatheir bond stems from the joint Second Lifes virtual schizophrenia clinic as an
knowledge of that which cannot be said. ironic climax). 24 The virtual used to be viewed
Is the internet a last refuge?21 Are we wit- as an extension of the real, but increasingly the
nessing a rebirth of the community under the virtual is that which precedes the real, a test

20. About Vancouver, City of Vancouver, last modified
January 22, 2013, http://vancouver.ca/green-vancouver/
about-vancouver.aspx.
21. Elizabeth Grosz, Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Real: Some
Architectural Reflections, in Architecture from the Outside:
Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
22. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York:
Harper & Row, 1984)
23. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
24. Mayo Clinic, accessed January 1, 2013, www.secondlife/
destinations/mayo-clinic.

50 P RO J E C T
bed where every fact of life is preemptively aug-
mented before it sees the light of day. It seems
the general rehearsal for life is no longer life
itself, but all that is acted out in cyberspace.
Tokyo, December 2013, the Akihabara
district: the streets are busy; the shops, which
appear to be doing well, sell DVDs of Japanese
games. 25 But the games are no longer limited to
the shops. Fetishes to feature in the games have
meanwhile found their way into the streets. The
electric wires spanning high above the railroad
Scene from Akihabara: Enjoying Real Life with a 2D girlfriend.
Akihabara District, Tokyo, Japan.
overpass cut into the vagina of a mammoth ver-
sion of a young girl in a school uniform sitting
on top. The accidentally passing train seems to
emerge like a giant penis. An Otaku: a name for
a local resident (after a character in one of the
games); he shares his meal with a 2-dimensional
print of his virtual girlfriend propped up next
to him, a real-life version of the games that are
being traded in the district. In Akihabara, the
games and the virtual community built around
them have become a reality. The community
has come full cycle.
25. Jakob Nabuoka, User Innovation and Creative Consumption in
Issue 3
Po s t s c r i p t
Thirty years ago, as a student, I witnessed
the tail-end of sociology as a subject taught
at the Architecture Faculty of the TU Delft.
Strangely, the abandonment of the one subject
that attempted to approach the community as
a sciencebased on empirical researchco-
incided with an unprecedented popularity of
the term within the architectural profession,
allowing its rhetoric about the community to
go largely unchecked. The com-
munity evolved from something
that could be given physical shape
(Team X) to something that
largely became a virtual construct,
either as the subject of market-
ing (Vancouver) or as an exclu-
sively digital existence online. If
Vancouver marks the point where
Community Architecture is
abandoned as something physical,
the Akihabara district, despite
its apparent absurdity, marks a
strange return: the notion of the
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community as a physical phenom-
enon, or at least as proof of the
need for the physicality of com-
munity, with all the associated
relevance for form, style, design
and maybe even architecture.
Perhaps it is time to revisit
the notion of the community in
all of the complexity it deserves.
Architectures preoccupation with
its own relevance for the commu-
nity has long prevented real knowledge of the
community. The community is now the shared
subject of architecture, business, religion, poli-
tics and the internet. What seems to be missing
is an integrated research into how the commu-
nity is manifested and manipulated within all
of these domains.
Japanese Culture Industries: The Case of Akihabara,
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 92:3 (2010): 205-218 .
51