Reading #5: Team 10

Sometimes when I'm reading the articles for class I like to pretend that the information I'm reading is related to something else.  For example, Team 10 reminds me of the rebellious teenage offspring of the tightly-wound parent that was the CIAM.  The loose grouping of architects seemed to stick their middle finger to the air and say, "I'll never do what my father did!" and try to rid the world of crimes against architecture and urbanism.  On that note, I also liked to think of the members of Team 10 as a league of superheroes.  But anyway.

The biggest flaw of Team 10 was that the core group seemed to forget that there's no "I" in "team" and by maintaining their own outspoken philosophies about architecture and urbanism, they contributed to their own dissolution.  Each member, for the most part, believed in the philosophy that architecture can be built on society's own natural drive, the relationships between people, their "habitats", and their communities, but they faced many disputes and heated discussions that likely ultimately hindered their ability to apply the philosophy that was their common ground. Idealism always seems to have a way of bringing out the worst in people.

Architects seem to run into trouble when they start trying to analyze people.  The Modernists' ideals were based on the idea of industry and mass production, essentially reducing people to no more than Consumer #3275 or Inhabitant #8014.  It kind of worked for Corbu's Unite' d'Habitation, but failed spectacularly in Pruitt Igoe.  Team 10 was focused on getting to the root of people's behaviors and patterns, sort of looking at the underlying motivations for people as a society while simultaneously emphasizing individuality.  It's hard for an architect or a designer to accommodate the different levels of a person's identity - as anonymous part of a population, or as Susie Smith the accountant from Lincoln, Nebraska who one day dreams of owning a condo in Fiji.  And while we all like to think of ourselves as unique beautiful snowflakes, looking at us as a crowd one can see that we move in similar and predictable ways.  So then why shouldn't our "habitats" be similar and predictable?  Also, in our quest to be at the forefront of technology or individuality, we disconnect ourselves from our population and our environment, isolating ourselves and making our internal world the only thing we see, not the sameness or different-ness of our habitats, so then does it matter if we have cookie-cutter urban centers?