43 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Athens Charter"
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chunk: 3/3
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter"
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category: "reference"
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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date_saved: "2026-05-05T16:00:56.016823+00:00"
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instance: "kb-cron"
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---
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Lúcio Costa's conception of the plan for Brasília saw the city as a manifestation of the Functional City. Like Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, it was seen as a method of imposing order, progress and stability to Brazil's new capital. Like Le Corbusier, Costa and Oscar Niemeyer aspired to produce a city based upon equality and justice.
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In a variation of the Functional City, Sert designed married-student housing for Harvard University in 1964. Known as Peabody Terraces it was made up of three main towers set in lawns and sheltered pedestrian routes. It avoided the usual vacuum at the base by grading the scale between the towers and the lawns.
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=== The rest of the world ===
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In Japan in 1957, Kunio Maekawa designed the Harumi Apartment block in Tokyo based upon the idea of the Unité. Meanwhile, In Tel Aviv in 1963 CIAM member Jacob B. Bakema designed a Functional City proposal based upon Le Corbusier's Algiers scheme.
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== Criticism ==
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The Pruitt–Igoe housing scheme in St Louis, Missouri was designed in accordance with CIAM ideals for the Functional City. It was made up of 14 storey blocks and is often claimed to have won an American Institute of Architects award when it was built in 1951, but no evidence of such exists. Charles Jencks proclaimed that the death of Modern Architecture was on 15 July 1972 at 3.32pm when the Pruitt–Igoe housing scheme was demolished with dynamite.
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Architectural critic Reyner Banham was concerned that the supposed universality of the Charter concealed a very narrow view of architecture and planning that overly constrained the members of CIAM. The emphasis on tall high-density housing amongst wide, green spaces effectively killed research into other areas of urban housing.
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In planning terms the Charter had set rigid geometries for urban planning, increasingly there became an awareness of words like 'neighbourhood', 'cluster' and 'association' that demanded a more organic approach to the image of the city.
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Even by 1954 during the Aix-en-Provence meeting of CIAM the younger generation riled against the pre-war utopian ideals that the Charter represented. This disillusionment would lead to the formation of Team X at the Dubrovnik meeting of CIAM that would eventually lead to the breakup of the Conference as an organisation.
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In the case of Brasília, whilst Niemeyer remained faithful to the ideas of zoning and green spaces, his revised urban utopia became based upon a smaller city with a high vertical concentration of people with increased pedestrian facilities. In 1958 he had warned that his utopian dream could not be fulfilled unless society itself was reorganised to suit it. At its inauguration the city was branded a Kafkaesque Nightmare with an Orwellian environment.
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To reduce the matter to high density when no due attention was given to communal facilities was to court disaster; to create open space without greenery was to devalue the idea of the community living in nature. The imitations of the Unité usually involved such drastic omissions. Does this mean that the prototype should be blamed for the later disastrous variations?
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−Curtis, 1986, Modern Architecture since 1900, Phaidon, p293
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== Recent history ==
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In 2003 the European Council of Spatial Planners wrote a new version of the Charter.
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== Trivia ==
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J. G. Ballard's book High Rise is set in a 40 storey block set in parkland with other high-rises in central London. On the tenth floor is a wide concourse with supermarket, shops and gymnasium and a swimming pool. On the 35th floor there is a smaller swimming pool, a sauna and a restaurant. As the affluent tenants embark upon an orgy of destruction, Ballard tells the story of how the whole block slowly degenerates into chaos.
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== Citations ==
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== References ==
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== External links ==
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The Athens Charter in the context of CIAM history
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"New" Charter of Athens, 1998
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"New" Charter of Athens, 1994
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The New Charter of Athens 2003 Archived 21 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine
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Architects' Congress, a film by László Moholy-Nagy |