This is the final and accepted manuscript version of an essay accepted as:
Gold, J.R. (2019) ‘Athens Charter (C.I.A.M.), 1933’, in A. M. Orum, ed. The Wiley
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell
See published source for correct citation.
Athens Charter (C.I.A.M.), 1933
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John R. Gold
Oxford Brookes University
[email protected]
1080 words
Abstract
Historians of town planning routinely emphasize the importance of the ‘Athens
Charter’, a document said to have emerged from C.I.A.M. IV, the Fourth Congress of
the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (C.I.A.M.) held in 1933.
Supposedly based on functional analyses of cities compiled by C.I.A.M.’s national
member groups, the Athens Charter was purported to be a consensual statement –
even a blueprint – of how Modern architects thought about the task of designing the
future city. After discussing the origins of C.I.A.M, this entry examines the history of
documents that stemmed from C.I.A.M. IV and questions whether any of them
represents an authentic statement of the organization’s shared views about urbanism.
It then notes that despite questions about validity, the belief that a definitive Charter
actually existed would play an important role in historical narratives that sought to
explain how architectural Modernism influenced the development of city planning in
the second half of the twentieth century.
Keywords:
architecture; historical geography; internationalism; modernity; urban geography;
functionalism; historiography
Main Text
The Athens Charter is the name given to a document advocating rational principles
of town planning that allegedly emerged from C.I.A.M. IV, the Fourth Congress of the
Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (C.I.A.M.), held in 1933.
C.I.A.M. was founded in June 1928 at La Sarraz (Switzerland) by 25 leading European
architects as a forum to promote Modern architecture. Two ensuing Congresses at
Frankfurt (C.I.A.M. II, 1929) and Brussels (C.I.A.M. III, 1930) examined topics of shared
concern connected with municipal housing. C.I.A.M. IV turned to the wider scale;
enlarging upon a philosophical orientation approved at La Sarraz, which held that urban
form was predicated by four key functions – work, residence, recreation and transport.
National member groups were asked to provide written and cartographic analyses of
major cities in their home countries on a standardised basis that would allow cross-
national comparisons. Notably, they would provide three large-scale maps suitable for
display, representing: areas for work, residence and recreation; the transport system;
and the city’s relationship to its region.
C.I.A.M. IV was scheduled for Moscow in 1932, so that its findings might help guide the
design of the USSR’s new industrial cities. However, after repeated requests for
postponements and recognition of growing Soviet antagonism toward Modern
architecture, it was decided to seek an alternative location. The Congress therefore
took place instead on a cruise vessel, the S.S. ‘Patris II’, on a return voyage between
Marseilles and Athens (29 July-14 August 1933).
At the end of the Congress, C.I.A.M. appointed Committees to oversee the process of
compiling the meeting’s deliberations on ‘The Functional City’. A document entitled
Constatations (‘Conclusions’), published in November 1933, provided outline
statements. Its content was surprisingly mild. There was, for instance, broad
commitment to functional analysis, but few specific recommendations about how it
might be applied. Moreover, apart from comments that envisaged modern technology
profoundly reshaping street patterns, the Constatations mostly specified ideas that
were then common currency. The reason was largely tactical. The agreed deadline for
publication in the periodical Annales Techniques was fast approaching. Given the sharp
disagreements between members, it was decided to concentrate on areas of initial
consensus leaving thornier issues for later resolution.
Work proceeded sporadically on two publications intended to give a fuller sense of
Modernist ideas about the Functional City: a ‘technical’ volume for professional
consumption and a ‘popular’ volume for a broader readership. In the event, funding
problems, political difficulties (especially for central and southern European architects)
and pervasive disagreements over fundamental principles delayed progress. Yet
notwithstanding, C.I.A.M.’s leadership intimated at C.I.A.M. V (Paris, 1937) that a
‘Charter of Town Planning’ had indeed been formulated from the materials prepared
for C.I.A.M. IV; a document officially referred to, for the first time, as the ‘Athens
Charter’.
The long-awaited monographs appeared in the early 1940s. J.P. Sert (1942), by then
working in the USA, published the popular version as a large-format book entitled Can
Our Cities Survive?. Le Corbusier produced the scientific volume in wartime France as a
62-page booklet entitled The Athens Charter (1943). When structuring their texts, both
followed the lines of C.I.A.M.'s `Town-Planning Chart' (a lightly amended version of the
Constatations), but the results were free-ranging interpretations of the original that
were also quite different from one another. Sert, for example, made extensive use of
available visual materials, gathered from round the world, which seemed broadly
sympathetic to the idea of the ‘Functional City’. For his part, Le Corbusier produced a
characteristically doctrinaire, if cavalier application of rational principles to city design
that substantially justified his own position.
In short, therefore, scrutiny of the proceedings and publications of C.I.A.M. shows that
no uncontested Charter ever emanated from the 1933 Congress. Mythic status,
however, can be more important than actuality and there were several major reasons
why it suited key parties to assert that such a document indeed existed.
The first stemmed from the needs of the architects. Emerging battered from recent
traumas, the re-established C.I.A.M. was not averse to supporting the notion that its
pre-war antecedent had produced a crusading document that offered far-sighted
solutions appropriate to the challenges of the times. All the necessary elements were
apparently there to guide the transformation of existing urban agglomerations into
‘organised, flawlessly hygienic and structurally transparent urban machines’ (Bosman,
1993: 6). As such, the Athens Charter served to give powerful ideological support to
Modern architects’ claim for an important stake in postwar city reconstruction.
The second source of support for the existence of a monolithic Athens Charter came
from historical scholarship. Historians were faced with accounting for the dramatic
changes that occurred in the skyline, appearance, land-use patterns, and circulation
systems witnessed in cities throughout the world between roughly 1955-and 1975. If it
could be argued that these elements owed their rationale to an overarching blueprint
laid down earlier by an influential international body, they then had a powerful tool in
explaining the changes taking place. Equally, when the mood quickly became hostile to
architectural Modernism at the city scale, it was easy to view the Athens Charter, in the
words of a prominent commentator, as the ‘most Olympian, rhetorical and ultimately
destructive document to come out of C.I.A.M.’ (Frampton, 1992: 270).
Ultimately, the continuing reputation of the Athens Charter depends on whether or not
the plurality inherent in C.I.A.M. generally and the 1933 Congress in particular are
recognised. If that plurality is recognised, the Athens Charter will assume its proper
place as an enlightening episode in the formation of the Modern Movement and its
struggles to address the city scale. If not, the 1933 Athens Charter will retain its
misleading landmark status in narratives constructed about the impact of architectural
Modernism on contemporary city planning.
SEE ALSO [cross-references]
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References
Bosman, J. (1993) “Editorial: Functional City?', Werk,Bauen und Wohnen, 4: 6-7.
Frampton, K. (1992). Modern Architecture. London, Thames and
Hudson
Le Corbusier. 1943. La Charte d'Athènes. Paris: La Librairie Plon.
Sert, Josep Lluís. 1942. Can Our Cities Survive?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Suggested Readings
van Es, Evelien, Harbusch, Gregor, Maurer, Bruno, Pérez, Muriel, Somer, Kees and
Weiss, Daniel. eds. 2014. Atlas of the Functional City: CIAM 4 and Comparative
Urban Analysis. Nieuwe ‘s-Gravelandseweg, Netherlands: Thoth.
Gold, John R. 1997. The Experience of Modernism. London: Spon.
Gold, John R. 1998. “Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the Functional City,
1933-43”. Town Planning Review, 69: 221-43.
Mumford, Eric. 2002. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Somer, Kees. 2007. The Functional City. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Author Biography:
John R. Gold, Professor of Urban Historical Geography in the Department of Social
Sciences at Oxford Brookes University, is the author or editor of 19 previous books
on urban and cultural subjects. He is currently working on the third of his trilogy on
architectural modernism in Great Britain, entitled The Legacy of Modernism: modern
architects, the city and the collapse of orthodoxy, 1973-1990. In addition, he and
Margaret Gold are working on Festival Cities: Culture, Planning and Urban Life since
1918 (Routledge, 2017).
