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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athens Charter | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:00:56.016823+00:00 | kb-cron |
Additionally they said it was important to reduce commuting times by locating industrial zones close to residential ones and buffering them with wide parks and sports areas. Street widths and requirements should be scientifically worked out to accommodate the speed and type of transport. Finally, with regards to conservation, historic monuments should be kept only when they were of true value and their conservation did not reduce their inhabitants to unhealthy living conditions. The observations formed the basis of Josep Lluís Sert's book Can our cities survive? and were incorporated in Le Corbusier's Athens Charter published in 1943. The resolutions formed part of Le Corbusier's book The Radiant City published in 1935. The text of the Athens Charter as published became an extension of the content of The Radiant City and Le Corbusier significantly re-worded the original observations. As well as adding new material he also removed the urban plans upon which the original text was based. This treatment made the Athens Charter an abstract text of general value but also transformed the original force of the observations that were founded before on concrete references. Despite its title, the Athens Charter cannot be considered as the mutual outcome of the CIAM conference, which took place ten years earlier, but largely as an expression of Le Corbusier's individual concerns.
== Pre-war influence ==
The CIAM 4 meeting was influential among attending architects from Switzerland, France, England, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Greece, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Canada. After The Radiant City was published in France in 1935, Le Corbusier continued to develop his ideas of urban planning through a number of unrealised schemes. These included plans for Antwerp, Paris, Moscow, Algiers and Morocco. In the Netherlands, CIAM delegates visited the Van Nelle factory designed in part by Mart Stam that was to have formed a larger part of a Functional City design. CIAM 4 was the first congress that the influential MARS Group from England was represented. In 1935 MARS member Berthold Lubetkin and his practice, the Tecton Group completed Highpoint in Highgate, London. The project comprised 56 dwellings grouped together as two crosses on plan, eight dwellings per arm. Each dwelling is linked to a central service core but is separated from its neighbour by a balcony - a design feature that virtually eliminated noise transfer between dwellings. In 1937 with the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, Sert suggested that England and the United States may be the best place to focus CIAM's activities.
== Post-war influence == The Athens Charter had a huge impact on planning thought after World War II. However, its influence was more complicated because in the 1950s CIAM attempted to replace the Functional City described in the Charter with a different Charter of Habitat.
=== France === In 1946 Le Corbusier received a commission for projects in La Rochelle and St Dié. The urban plan allowed him to experiment with urban monumentality that had been somewhat underplayed in the Charter, but as part of the project he proposed eight Unité d'Habitation flanked by a civic centre. Although these proposals were unbuilt, he had more success in Marseilles where an initial study for three Unités resulted in one being built. In line with the Charter, the Unité was a north-south orientated block eighteen storeys high set in parkland. There is a public 'street' on levels 7 and 8 that provides various shops, offices and a hotel. On the roof there is a nursery school, a running track and a pool. It opened in 1952 but had begun to influence architects even before it was complete.
=== United Kingdom ===
The 1949 Housing Act in England paved the way for Local Authorities to provide a balance of housing types for a range of communities, not just the working class. In the socialist post-war atmosphere, architectural writer J M Richards praised Le Corbusier's Unité for "putting clean and healthy housing in a parkland setting". Between 1952 and 1958 London County Council built the Alton East and Alton West high-rise blocks in Roehampton. Alton East comprised 744 dwellings within mainly 10-storey blocks and Alton West was 1867 dwellings in 5-, 6- and 12-storey blocks. Both projects are set within parkland and have since been listed. In Sheffield in 1958, the city architect, Lewis Womersley, designed the Park Hill Estate. The product of an entire slum clearance, three times the size of the Unité, dwellings were housed in a series of high-rise structures connected by external decks. These 'streets in the air' are wide enough to incorporate bicycles and milk floats. Initial success came because whole streets were moved into adjacent dwellings on the new scheme. Harold Macmillan said it would "draw the admiration of the world". In Scotland, the Department of Housing for Scotland encouraged Local Authorities to build more unified and open schemes. The Functional City prescribed the separation of industrial zones from residential ones by parkland. This concept suited the regeneration of industrial decay in Scottish cities. From 1956 the Hutchesontown Gorbals area of Glasgow was redeveloped. The architect Robert Matthew designed one of the four areas using 18-storey blocks on a north-south axis that ignored local street patterns. The Golden Lane Estate in London was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who also designed the adjacent Barbican Estate. It has a variety of dwellings and a good provision of supporting community buildings. Like the Unité it has a terrace on the roof. The Smithsons (Alison and Peter Smithson) were against the four functions explored for the Functional City, renaming them House, Street, District and City. In the Golden Lane development the House became the family unit, the Street was an elevated access deck but the District and City lay outside the project's boundaries. Their work was never built at Golden Lane, but these ideas can be viewed in their book "Urban Structuring".
=== The Americas ===