page_title: Athens Charter
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Athens Charter / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Low angle oblique USGS photograph.
context_page_description: The Athens Charter was a 1933 document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. The work was based upon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in the early 1930s.
  The Charter got its name from location of the fourth CIAM conference in 1933, which, due to the deteriorating political situation in Russia, took place on the S.S. Patris bound for Athens from Marseilles. This conference is documented in a film commissioned by Sigfried Giedion and made by his friend Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: "Architects' Congress."
  The Charter had a significant impact on urban planning after World War II.
context_section_description: 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.
  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.
  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.
  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.
  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.
  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?
  −Curtis, 1986, Modern Architecture since 1900, Phaidon, p293
caption: Pruitt–Igoe housing scheme in St Louis, Missouri
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