Athens Charter - Pre-war Influence

Pre-war Influence

The CIAM 4 meeting was made up of architects from Switzerland, France, England, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,Brazil and Canada. Architects who returned to their own countries with the message of the Athens Charter.

After The Radiant City was published in France in 1933, Le Corbusier continued to develop his ideas of urban planning through a number of unrealised schemes. These included plans for Antwerp, Paris, Moscow, Algiers and Morocco.

In the Netherlands, CIAM delegates visited the Van Nelle factory designed in part by Mart Stam that was to have formed a larger part of a Functional City design.

CIAM 4 was the first congress that the influential MARS Group from England was represented. In 1935 MARS member Berthold Lubetkin and his practice, the Tecton Group completed Highpoint in Highgate, London. The project comprised 56 dwellings grouped together as two crosses on plan, eight dwellings per arm. Each dwelling is linked to a central service core but is separated from its neighbour by a balcony - a design feature that virtually eliminated noise transfer between dwellings.

In 1937 with the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, Sert suggested that England and the United States may be the best place to focus CIAM's activities.