Athens Charter
The Athens Charter (French: Charte d'Athènes, Greek: Χάρτα των Αθηνών) was a 1933 document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier.
The work was based upon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 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 Marseille.
The design maintained the idea of high-rise housing blocks, free circulation and abundant green spaces proposed in his earlier work.
Le Corbusier exhibited the first representations of his ideas at the third CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930 and published a book of the same title as the city in 1935.
At a meeting in Zürich in 1931, CIAM members Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Siegfried Giedion, Rudolf Steiger and Werner M. Moser discussed with Cornelis van Eesteren the importance of solar orientation in governing the directional positioning of low-cost housing on a given site.
Van Eesteren had been chief architect of Amsterdam's Urban Development Section since 1929 and the group asked him to prepare a number of analytical studies of cities ready for the next main CIAM meeting planned to be in Moscow in 1933.
[5] In 1932 Le Corbusier's Palace of the Soviets competition entry failed to gain acceptance from the jury and, due to the political conditions in Russia, CIAM's agenda became increasingly ignored.
[6] The fourth CIAM conference took place on board the S.S. Patris, an ocean-going liner journeying from Marseilles to Athens in July 1933.
In addition, Le Corbusier and the group who had met earlier in Zürich hosted a meeting to state the core goals of the Functional City.
-Mumford, 2000, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, The MIT Press, p85 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.
[11] The text of the Athens Charter as published became an extension of the content of The Radiant City[12] and Le Corbusier significantly re-worded the original observations.
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.
[13] 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.
[14] 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.
[15] 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.
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".
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.
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.
Meanwhile, In Tel Aviv in 1963 CIAM member Jacob B. Bakema designed a Functional City proposal based upon Le Corbusier's Algiers scheme.
[32] 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.
[34] 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.
