The discourse of CIAM urbanism, 1928--1959

If CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) was not what its Secretary-General, Sigfried Giedion, thought that it was--an avant-garde organization devoted hastening the "inevitable" acceptance of an architecture and an urbanism profoundly in touch with the modern Zeitgeist--then what was it? In this dissertation I argue that CIAM, founded in 1928 and dissolved by 1959, was an attempt by a coalition of architects to rejoin radical politics and vanguard art. Its trajectory is interpreted here as the history of an essentially political idea, that of the vanguard party, joined to a set of aesthetic practices which have come to be called the Modern Movement in architecture.The seven chapters of the dissertation cover the entire history of CIAM from its founding in 1928 to its breakup in 1959. The first two chapters, largely based on secondary sources and close analysis of CIAM publications, discuss the formation of the CIAM urbanistic discourse in it first decade. The remaining chapters are all based on detailed archival research in the US and Europe, and examine the "transplantation" of CIAM to North America and corresponding changes in the CIAM discourse, considering these in light of the changing cultural climate of the late 1930s into the 1950s. The third and fourth chapters examine facets of this new context, while Chapter Five examines CIAM's largely unsuccessful efforts to determine the form of postwar reconstruction in Europe. Chapter Six focuses on the efforts to shift the CIAM agenda toward civic centers and the "heart of the city." The concluding chapter traces the "death of CIAM" in the 1950s and the effort by the "younger generation" of Team Ten to build a new urbanistic discourse on the ruins of the older CIAM one.This dissertation was undertaken in the belief that a study of CIAM's creation of a vanguard discourse of modern urbanism is a necessary step in my ongoing effort to understand the often dangerous intersections between architectural design and urban development. If one accepts that the history of modern architecture and urbanism has been driven far more by political and cultural factors than by technological change, then comprehension of the various CIAM efforts to establish itself as a vanguard party between 1928 and 1959 is an important aspect of the intellectual genealogy of modern urbanism.