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The title of this chapter is taken from a book
published by Pierre Loze in 1999, which was the
result of a series of interviews he conducted with
Philippe Samyn.
1
Before examining the content
of these interviews, we should point out that
the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernism’, ’modernity’,
’functionalism’ and ‘
ciam
’ have been the subject
of much misunderstanding. Functionalism has
been the source of wild misinterpretation. From
Sullivan’s ‘form follows function’
2
to ‘function
gives rise to form’ (attributed to Henry van
de Velde), most of the time it is a question of
mechanical, quantifiable function, despite the
stated lyricism of Le Corbusier (who was not very
much of a functionalist in the strict sense of the
term), and in spite of remarks by J.B. Bakema and
Ionel Schein on the function of the form.
3
This question will not be dealt with in detail in the
present chapter, but it is nevertheless worth noting
that modernism, like the Bauhaus, was not a single
movement. Jacques Aron explored this in Anthologie
du Bauhaus
4
and Hilde Heynen also discussed it in
Architecture and Modernity,
5
in which she pointed out
the importance – and sometimes the ambiguity – of the
work and the enigmatic writings of Adolf Loos, whose
practice of Raumplan still has much to teach us. As
mentioned earlier, it was the decisive action of Team 10
that hastened the disbanding of
ciam
at their eleventh
congress in Otterlo in 1959.
6
After this, modernism
was to change its look and to integrate new forms
of research. During the 1960s and early 1970s, there
were at least three works that undermined the founda-
tions of modernism. The most important, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities,
7
was written by the
American sociologist Jane Jacobs. In it, she showed
the limitations of urban zoning as set out in the precepts
of the Athens Charter (but whose origins, of course,
date back to the nineteenth century, citing in particular
Camillo Sitte’s L’art de bâtir les villes
8
and the early
twentieth-century work of Louis Van der Swaelmen,
Préliminaires d’art civique mis en relation avec le ‘cas
clinique’ de la Belgique).
9
One should point out that,
with the exception of Brasilia, the Athens Charter was
implemented only very fragmentarily. The second work
was Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
10
by
Robert Venturi. This rather entertaining book on archi-
tectural form claims to show that univocal functionalism
gives rise to a tedium that can only be relieved by a
mixture of irony and old baroque formulae. Finally, we
should mention the equally entertaining book by Charles
Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture,
11
one of a series of titles on the same subject, which
takes up, in a picturesque and often provocative fashion,
the theses of Robert Venturi (which themselves were
taken from Learning from Las Vegas).
12
In the end, it was an English architect, Maxwell
Hutchinson, who best defined the primary objectives
of modernism in The Prince of Wales: Right or Wrong?
An Architect Replies.
13
This was a response to A Vision
of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture, Prince
Charles’s conservative, upper-middle-class (though
populist) pamphlet about the ‘disadvantages’ of mod-
ern architecture, which holds that it is better to live in
a nice little cottage in the country than in a sordid flat
in a council housing block. Lastly, leaving the world of
architecture, we note that the French philosopher Jean
Duvignaud in 1960 published a book with the elegant
title of Pour entrer dans le
xx
e
siècle (To Enter the 20
th
Century).
14
While the book is essentially devoted to
literature, philosophy and politics, it is possible, read-
ing between the lines, to see a path towards a larger
dimension, one encompassing, say, architecture and
urban planning. One could legitimately wonder how
to enter the twenty-first century, in terms of both
CHAPTER 6
BECOMING MODERN
01-359
Procter & Gamble offices,
Strombeek-Bever, 1998
Walter Gropius
Bauhaus building,
Dessau, 1926
01-386
Totalfina service station,
Hellebecq, 1999–2000