"All architecture is colored by the problem of the house." — Jean Hélion
"Housing is the only material of the city." — Le Corbusier
"Architecture is not about creating space, but about creating relationships." — Riken Yamamoto
Two seemingly contradictory ideas — "house versus housing" — the first from the words of a painter, Jean Hélion, and the second from an architect, writer, painter, and urban planner, Le Corbusier, the grandfather of modernism. The third quote is from Yamamoto, last year's Pritzker Prize laureate, who built his career on the foundation of housing and the experience of shared and public spaces. When my friend Reza Amirrahimi, editor of Memar magazine, shared with me a seemingly simple question — "Why, when we talk with architects about life, do they only mention houses and rarely apartments or collective dwellings?" — I began to recall everything that has been said and done about the house in the history of architecture. Thirty seconds later I entered the question into ChatGPT and in less than that a ten-thousand-word article came out, as if this question had already been written! Upon closer examination, I realized it was about a thousand words repeated ten times, saying that architects prefer the freedom of expression the house affords them over the difficulties they must endure with housing and compliance with regulations. Dear architecture students, please do not use ChatGPT to write your papers — this software is deeply unintelligent! ... and often produces recycled garbage...
After that terrifying experience with ChatGPT, I asked myself: why is so much attention given to single-family houses? This question took me back to when I began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where the first project for all first-year students was to design a single-family house. I remember fiercely arguing with some of the older professors that the house is not an appropriate first project for young students, because it is a complex program requiring intellectual maturity and a particular position within architecture — especially if it is to be a synthesis, a thesis that describes architectural innovation and the essence of a society's life. This article is an attempt to open a discussion about life and to examine when, how, and why architects became disinterested in the problem of housing. But first, we must recount the story of the modern house.
The House, the Villa, the Thesis. Throughout modern history, the "house" has been the starting point of architecture for most architects. A place for privileged individuals and those who had the cultural practice of commissioning an architect to display their wealth, culture, understanding, and patronage of the arts. In the twentieth century, very few houses were commissioned from architects by ordinary people. This can be traced back to the early moderns, such as Frank Lloyd Wright with the Robie House (for Mr. Frederick Robie) and Fallingwater (for Liliane and Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., owners of the Kaufmann department store chain). These are prominent examples of how an architect begins his thesis built upon repetition, openness, horizontality, and spatial composition. Wright's insistence on designing everything — from door handles to beds, chairs, furniture, and interior and exterior lighting — is a clear message of architecture as an autonomous and particular art. His famous dictum that "architecture is organic" begins with the integration of the building into its site, as a way of declaring that architecture is one with its landscape and context. (Images 1 and 2)
1 — Fallingwater sections, Frank Lloyd Wright, © Library of Congress. 2 — Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright, © Library of Congress.
Critique and Commentary
Le Corbusier used the Villa Savoye (for Pierre Savoye, a wealthy industrialist) as a complete display of all his theories about architecture and the evolution of modern life. He consolidated the idea of the house as a machine for living, and argued that if urban planning is not at the center of the architect's attention, industry will drive the population to the suburbs — the solution being the Radiant City (his book published in 1933), where nature and buildings must live together and become one in the city. (Images 3 and 4)
Mies van der Rohe and the Tugendhat House (1928–30) is a thesis about how architecture mediates between site and building. Attention to detail, to the composition of materials and colors, are all pleasurable in this early work. The Barcelona Pavilion was also built at the same time, but it is not a house. Although Alan Colquhoun claims that the foundation of all Mies's work is the German Pavilion built in Barcelona in 1922. (Image 5)
3 — Villa Savoye and the Five Points of Architecture. 4 — Villa Savoye, main staircase and ramp leading to the rooftop, connection with distant views, city in the distance, © Author. 5 — Tugendhat House, distant view, city in the distance, © Author.
François Fromonot argues that the Farnsworth House is a model for Mies's American career. All his works, including the Lake Shore Drive apartments and all the office buildings, are grounded in the theories developed in that famous house designed for Dr. Farnsworth. (Images 6 and 7) Hans Scharoun and the Schminke House (for Fritz Schminke, owner of a noodle factory in Löbau, Saxony) was completed in 1930 and appeared on the cover of the book Modern Architecture published in 2002, to show that modernism is not limited to Le Corbusier and the Villa Savoye. (Images 8 and 9) The Schminke House is a perfect example of many laws of modern architecture. Spaces suspended between platforms, floor-to-ceiling glass (free plan, free facade, functional use of space), and architecture encompassing the design of everything from door handles to ceiling lamps. Scharoun is better known for his large public buildings such as the Berlin Philharmonie and the Berlin State Library, but he undertook numerous residential projects and was one of the few major German architects who did not emigrate to the United States during the Nazi period. His most outstanding housing projects were built in the interwar years. Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea — this house embodies some of Aalto's most important reflections on the relationship between life and nature. (Image 10) This project is a sequel to a series of collective housing projects commissioned from Aalto by the same client. He had designed residential areas in various parts of Finland, characterized by row houses, semi-detached houses, and low-rise apartment blocks adapted to the local landscape and conditions. The A. Ahlstrom Company's plan for urban development and construction in the Kauttua ironworks area is an excellent example of Aalto's attention to repetition and specificity. (Image 11) Housing attitudes and practices cannot be discussed solely through Western perspectives; however, this article can touch briefly on practices in Asia and particularly Japan in the twentieth century, especially after Hiroshima. The Japanese were the only Asians who participated actively in CIAM, due to their close ties with Le Corbusier. Western eyes were largely closed to China until the early 1970s. The first glimpse of China for Western audiences came through the masterwork of the celebrated Italian director Antonioni. His famous film "Chung Kuo, Cina," later rejected by the Chinese government as a slander and not immediately screened, was only a narrow window into Mao's China. But Japan has a completely different story, for in becoming Westernized it nevertheless insisted on its own identity through what was called "Japaneseness." Kiyonori Kikutake, the Sky House — the only dwelling I discuss here, because its maker was one of the key figures of the Metabolism movement (he invented the word "metabolism") in Japan. The main mission of the Metabolist movement was to house Japan's growing population during its economic boom. All the projects were about how Japan should deal with its ever-increasing population in a very small territory, and also expressed the powerful autonomy of the Japanese nation after the terrible American atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (Image 12) The Sky House played an important role in the development of Kikutake's architecture, particularly his focus on structural design and the integration of the Japanese spatial language of the wall-less interior. It was also a very important reference for how he later focused on floating buildings. (Image 13)
This search for unique houses can extend into the 1960s and the first quarter of the twenty-first century, but few contemporary houses can claim to be their architect's thesis. An exception occurs with Greg Lynn's Embryological House (1997–2001), which celebrates mass customization and leads to the mass production of unique products — the American dream: to be individual and different. Perhaps this unrealized house was truly the beginning of the end? One may conclude that the "house" as a type was a synthesis of the architect's most important ideas — their thesis for a lifelong search for a language. However, toward the end of the twentieth century, it did not take long for the house to become a mirror of the client's social standing, and most architects abandoned the thinking and proposing of new theories or the invention of a new language. Thus housing became a product for the developer's return on investment.
6 — Farnsworth House skeleton and entrance, 1945–1951. 7 — Lake Shore Drive Apartments and plan.
8 — Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, Oxford History of Art. 9 — Minimal, functional, extraordinarily modern, and spatially delightful to live in. 11 — Terraced house (apartment block without stairs) at Kauttua, for senior staff of the company. Photo: Elina Liukkonen, Alvar Aalto Foundation.
10 — Villa Mairea, interior and plan, 1937–39.
12 — Kikutake's Marine City. 13 — Sky House, K. Kikutake, 1958.
Le Corbusier, in 1927 and then in 1923, theorized his Five Points of Architecture in the Villa Savoye (and the Villa La Roche) and demonstrated what new architecture could be. The Villa Savoye is as much the foundation of all his theories and a theoretical house (notoriously difficult to live in, according to non-architects) as it is undeniably the thesis and infrastructure of all his theories and buildings, including his urban architecture and thoughts on cities of the future. The sketch below (Image 14), which was presented when he was lecturing in Argentina, shows that even if this house was designed for Poissy near Paris, it could be rotated and built in Biarritz to respond to the southern sun and climate, or even brought to Argentina and adapted to its climate. He demonstrates how the house must be complete as a "machine" so that it can be mass-produced and turned into something for everyone, stacked to become housing, multiplied to become a city. Is this in complete opposition to Greg Lynn's Embryological House, or is it precisely the same idea proposed a hundred years earlier? (Image 15) As stated, houses like the Villa Savoye, the Schminke House, and many of Adolf Loos's houses are superb examples of architects' primary ideas — not only in the search for other ways of living, but in their contribution to the state of the societies in which they were built. Adolf Loos and the house for Tristan Tzara (one of the founders of Dadaism) and his wife Greta Knutson (a Modernist painter) in 1925 is also a debate with Le Corbusier on the theories of the free plan and Raumplan. For Loos, the frame of reference is traditional craftsmanship, a socially determined task. For Le Corbusier, the division of labor between design and execution constitutes the core of the architectural process. The brief and the instrument of its realization are formulated through new technologies and industrial capabilities. The Paris house is clearly a critique of its own culture and of the bourgeoisie and their preoccupation with ornament. Here he strips the facade of all unnecessary decoration, his absolute genius in reinterpreting classical orders on the dominant street facade. (Image 16) Rem Koolhaas and the last nail in the coffin of the most famous houses of the twentieth century. This house is both a synthesis of all Koolhaas's ideas about life and the city, and a genuine synthesis of the ideas of many other twentieth-century architects. His interpretation of the free plan, the free facade, the roof garden, the pilotis, the land, structure and space,
as well as color, painterly composition, and ultimately the relationship with the city — and the house as a place to reflect on the city — are clearly legible in this single-family house. (Images 17 and 18)
Three Years Before the Start of the Twenty-First Century... In 1997, ANY (Cynthia Davidson and Peter Eisenman) published its 19/20 issue under the title "The Virtual House," with Joan Rajchman as guest editor. An invitational competition was launched, and architects such as Toyo Ito, FOA (Farshid Moussavi + Alejandro Zaera-Polo), Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind were invited. This issue was a confrontation between a collection of writings by critics and philosophers on the question of the "virtual" and the idea of the virtual house. This was the apex of critical theory, which drove the meaning of the house to oblivion. This event was followed by a major exhibition at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York) in July 1999 titled "The Un-Private House." (Image 19) This description is highly exaggerated — the houses were carefully hand-picked by Terence Riley, claiming to offer a preview of what was to come in the following century. All the houses demonstrate that the only way we can live is to spend more than a million dollars transforming an old house or more than five million dollars designing a new one. In a sense, then, Terence Riley is right that this is the future — but only if we accept that the future belongs exclusively to people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the oligarchs who control 90 percent of the world's wealth.
Back to the Future. Forty-three years before the "Un-Private House" exhibition, Peter and Alison Smithson had designed the House of the Future for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, held at the Olympia exhibition center. "The House of the Future was never designed for real production, but for theoretical discussion. It was planned around a garden — a courtyard with natural light and private open space; it had few windows in the exterior walls, allowing houses to be placed directly next to one another. To provide views, there was no roof, but an elevated platform so that exhibition visitors could look down into the house from above. Household appliances and work areas were hidden in cabinets to provide a large open living space." (Image 20)
14 — Greg Lynn, Embryological House, 1997. 15 — Villa Savoye as the primary material of urban structure.
Through this imaginary house, Alison and Peter Smithson both critiqued and affirmed their separation from the grandfather of modernism, Le Corbusier. The House of the Future has to this day been the subject of competitions, because "the future" is timeless. Examining the role of exhibitions, publications, and competitions in the public perception of architecture, as the only remaining way to experience what is important, is crucial.
Why Don't We All Live in Houses? So if the house is the ideal synthesis of a way of living in our societies, why don't we all live in single-family houses? Is it simply because land is scarce and therefore expensive? Or because the same plot of land that accommodates a house (for one family) of 200 square meters can provide
twenty apartments (for twenty households) and multiply the land value for the land owner twentyfold? Perhaps it is not so simple — the housing problem is complex because it relates to politics, economics, and social responsibility. And this leads us to the main reason why CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) declared between 1928 and 1960 that housing is the most important element of urbanism. The second congress, held in Frankfurt in 1929, was presided over by Ernst May, then head of the city's housing, planning, and building department, who invited CIAM members to participate in this highly significant meeting. Housing for low-income groups was the central theme of this congress, and on the wall of Ernst May's office hung drawings by CIAM members, all at the same scale. These drawings were later published in "Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum," edited by J. Hoffmann, in Stuttgart in 1930.
16 — Tristan Tzara House, 1925. 17 — Pool facing toward the city of Paris, photo: Nasrine Seraji. 18 — Villa dall'Ava, street entrance.
19 — The Un-Private House, curated by Terence Riley. 21 — Poster and stamp of the International Building Exhibition, Berlin, 1987.
20 — House of the Future, Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.
Displaying Life, Living, the Arts, and the Noble Purpose of Industry. Exhibitions have been of great importance in disseminating progress. The display of societies' achievements in technology, construction, architecture, architectural thinking, theory, urban development, and all scientific advances. Every architect and architecture student knows that major changes in architecture have emerged from experimental proposals that were described, debated, and written about at exhibitions since the end of the nineteenth century. As I noted, CIAM began with an exhibition — perhaps a small, bourgeois private exhibition — but it led to one of the most important and vital debates about housing as the primary (and only) material for developing our cities. The Deutscher Werkbund, as it is known, was an association of architects, craftsmen, and artists who had come together through their shared philosophies to promote the arts through education, publications, lectures, and exhibitions. The Werkbund's first exhibition opened in 1914, only three months before the start of the First World War. The Werkbund Housing Exhibition of 1927 was perhaps the first time that housing architecture came to the forefront of public attention. Housing became one of the most important "building types" that architects engaged with. Mies van der Rohe (with Lilly Reich) was the principal architect who invited some 17 architects including Le Corbusier, Poelzig, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, and others to design the new Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart, and to express their larger ideas about modern life, the modern movement, and new ways of living. CIAM's next step was to promote urban planning through housing as the most important material for the city. A series of exhibitions in the later decades of the twentieth century, modeled on earlier exhibitions, drew attention to the capacity of architecture to develop large portions of cities as well as to experiment with new ways of urban living.
IBA 1986–1993. The International Building Exhibition (IBA) of 1987 was an architectural and urban planning concept by the government of Berlin, to restore the center of West Berlin as a residential place. This was the idea of Hans Stimmann, Director of Building at the Berlin Senate. Early postwar urban development in Germany rejected historical building structures. Entire neighborhoods were demolished and replaced with entirely new buildings. Josef Paul Kleihues, appointed as the principal planner and architect, invited many international architects from ten countries — among them Gottfried Böhm, Mario Botta, Peter Eisenman, Vittorio Gregotti, John Hejduk, Herman Hertzberger, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Leon Krier, Rob Krier, Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling — and this approach began in many European capitals as the most effective way of drawing politicians' attention to housing. (Image 21)
Nexus World Housing, Fukuoka, 1991. Diane Sudjic, editor of Blueprint magazine, said earlier that Fukuoka is to Japan what Dover is to England: the entry point to the country and the traveler's first image of it. This small city — "small by Japan's grandiloquent parameters" — is where Arata Isozaki organized an international architecture exhibition in the style of the original German model of famous events such as the Weissenhof Siedlung Stuttgart (1927) and the International Bauausstellung Berlin (1980 onwards). As Mies and Kleihues had done before — Isozaki assembled a group of contemporary architects: Michael Graves, Stanley Tigerman, Rem Koolhaas, Christian de Portzamparc, Steven Holl, Mark Mack, Osamu Ishiyama, and Oscar Tusquets. The Nexus housing complex was a turning point worldwide. Globalization and neoliberalism had reached maturity, and only the super-wealthy could afford to live in one of Rem Koolhaas's or Steven Holl's beautiful apartments. Housing had become a product of financial investment — no longer government policy, but developers' transactional products. (Images 22 and 23) These exhibitions were perhaps the last breaths of collective housing as an important chapter in the architecture of living.
"Housing is Back!" was the title of my lecture in Vienna in 1998, which was later turned into a book by Peter Ebner of the same title — an attempt to return attention to collective housing. Its sequel, "Housing Goes Further," I had titled "Housing Goes Outside." (Image 24) My title, as a provocation, was meant to attract architects' attention to a genre that had apparently been forgotten. In that lecture I was defending the process of experiencing architecture through collective housing, since approximately 90 percent of the material of our cities
22 — OMA, Nexus World Housing, 1988–1991. 24 — Sections, units of housing as a group of stacked living units. https://hicarquitectura.com/2024/10/oma-nexus-world-housing
is housing. (Image 25) In the early years of the twenty-first century, when individualism and neoliberal societies were at their height, some developers and architects — particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands — worked with the idea of maximum variety in apartment types within a single building. (Image 26)
This was intended to increase density and make building on the same plot — or in MVRDV's case, the Silodam above water — possible. The idea of stacked houses had its roots in MVRDV's earlier project, which decomposed the idea of a single dwelling into two separate houses for two couples on one site. (Image 27)
24 — "Housing is Back!" and "Housing Goes Further!"
25 — The Endless House, Vienna, 50-unit apartment building.
27 — Double House, 1995–97.
26 — Silodam, MVRDV, 2003.
One cannot help but recall Le Corbusier pulling out one of the Unité d'Habitation apartments as a model for the industrialization of architecture — although it is equally a new way of collective living. (Images 28 and 29) In the Silodam, architects respond to the social desire for every apartment to be different, and to the developers' desire to offer the widest possible range from cheapest to most expensive — housing as a product, just like (micro to grand series 7) Mercedes cars! (Image 30) For every taste, for every budget, for every household, there is always a Mercedes. (Image 31) Housing as mass-customized products for every taste and every budget?
28 — Double-height, two-aspect apartments, sea views and mountain views. 29 — Unité d'Habitation, a single apartment type. 30 — Silodam types, MVRDV. 31 — Mercedes-Benz online catalogue.
The Housing Material of Our Cities. I was invited to organize an exhibition on housing in Paris. I decided to treat this challenge as a research/architecture project in my studio. The Housing Material of Our Cities was a book and exhibition catalogue, published alongside an exhibition at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris in 2007. This exhibition allowed us to think deeply about what it means to house a society, and why we are moving rapidly toward an inability to invent new ways of living. (Image 32) To prepare the exhibition, we looked at one hundred years of collective housing construction in Europe from the 1900s and the World Exposition in Paris. The opening pages of the book begin with the poster for the publication of the Garden City Manifesto in 1902, by Ebenezer Howard, the British urban planner who was convinced that mankind should live in a rural environment and be in direct co-habitation with nature. The map of Letchworth and his famous phrase "the healthiness of the countryside — the convenience of the city" opened the book. (Image 33) The following 450 pages take the reader through a major cross-section of the twentieth century's efforts to house the European population, particularly after the two great world wars, ending with the opening of the exhibition in 2007. The book assembles a collection of economic, political, and social structures that guided architecture and architects in the great reconstruction of war-devastated cities. (Images 34 and 35) Twenty years have passed since our first studies of collective housing in Europe. Most countries of the world, and virtually all European cities, have an enormous deficit in the production of affordable housing; architects simply draft what developers want — the smaller the unit (not quite the famous "existenzminimum"), the more apartments in a building, the more return on investment for the developer. (Image 36)
33 — Ebenezer Howard and Letchworth, pages 20–21 of The Housing Material of Our Cities, © Nasrine Seraji. 34 — Pages 170–171 of The Housing Material of Our Cities, © Nasrine Seraji. 35 — Torres Blancas, Madrid.
32 — The Housing Material of Our Cities, book and exhibition, 2007.
36 — Developers killed experience. Architects are no longer needed to draw plans produced by AI — who needs an architect when AI can do it in a fraction of the time?
38 — R. Yamamoto, Soho Housing Beijing, 2004, 700,000 m². 39 — Riken Yamamoto, Jian Wai Soho, Beijing, China, 2004. 40 — R. Yamamoto, Okoze House — an experimental housing unit demonstrating the efficiency of lightweight aluminum as a building material, courtesy Shinkenchiku-sha.
37 — R. Yamamoto and Farm Shop, early housing experiments, Hokkatubo Housing Complex, 1988–1991.
There is no longer any collective thinking or struggle over the question of how we should live, or about the future of housing in our societies — as there was in the CIAM years, or in all those building exhibitions. But why is this, really? The most celebrated architects of our time undertake very few housing projects; some of the most important housing movements go back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Japan. Riken Yamamoto, the 2024 Pritzker Prize laureate, has worked continuously on the housing problem — where has this taken the architectural community? If the Pritzker family senses the trend and establishes a global architectural culture to promote the role of architecture worldwide, then Yamamoto's selection last year is a sign of how we should turn the page on the twentieth century to invent new housing models for the twenty-first century — the century of scarcity, the century of climate disaster, the century of water and material shortages. (Image 37)
Among Yamamoto's impressive housing projects in Beijing (his birthplace) is the JIAN WAI SOHO project, in which he repeats the same module from smallest to largest, fearlessly. Never has such uniformity been so beautiful and serene. (Images 38 and 39) Riken Yamamoto: "We were searching for a completely abstract form of architectural expression. We hoped these buildings would acquire their character not through the postmodern design that was fashionable in Beijing at the time, but through the activities of people on the basement and ground floors and in various other locations." (Image 40)
And Finally...! The first fifty years of the twentieth century were glorious years of experiment and social progress, especially after two world wars. The subsequent decades confirmed that architecture was at a critical crossroads. Housing is no longer designed by architects — it is a financial product drawn up to meet the most basic needs of investors based on hundreds of existing plans. The 2008 financial crisis was rooted in the American mortgage system and the greed of financial providers who created a housing bubble and dragged the world toward bankruptcy. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been a sobering experience for all architects — a shortage of materials and resources across the world. New buildings in China, which had generated an illusion of financial supremacy and a construction boom, were halted in 2021 due to overbuilding, which has now left China with a large number of ghost cities. (Image 41) Le Corbusier in his famous book Towards a New Architecture called out "Messieurs les architectes." Now it is time, almost one hundred years later, to call out again to all the architects of the world — to stop building useless monuments for a group of financial providers whose sole goal in life is to make one percent of the world wealthier. I invite all my architect friends and partners to reconsider our building practices. I go so far as to plead that we stop building, and instead think about what it means not to demolish — to rediscover everything the moderns built in the past century and to repair the millions of homes and apartments in desperate condition. What does building with a minimum mean? What does refusing demolition require? What does working with reality demand? What does stopping the design of buildings that require air conditioning mean? What does thinking before saying yes entail? I invite all of you, my fellow Iranian architects, to write a new manifesto — this is the beginning of one: a new manifesto toward the repair of our planet!... How do we stop global warming — undoubtedly the most challenging and vital design question of the century? The hypothetical project of repair confronts us with the problems of decarbonization, material scarcity, climate migration, poverty, and inequality, as well as a complete transformation of geopolitics. The twentieth-century economic models, largely based on growth, are no longer endorsed by some respected economists. Architecture and construction have always been generators of social change and economic growth. Perhaps it is now time to design the reduction of growth. In the face of climate urgency, we as architects must be forward-looking and creative. We cannot ignore the imperative to stop designing new buildings. This does not mean without architecture; retrofitting, adaptive reuse, repair, reprogramming, in-filling, restoration, care, and attention are the urgent concerns of architecture! As a new deadline it is meant to continue... (Image 42)
* Nasrine Seraji, AADipl FRIBA. Distinguished Professor of Architecture, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou, China. Full Professor of Architectural Design, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. NASA Limited — New Agency for Architectural Speculation; Paris, France.
Notes: 1 — Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 159. 2 — Interestingly, this meeting was the first time non-European architects, particularly Kenzo Tange, Kunio Maekawa, and Junzo Sakakura from Japan, were officially recognized. Coincidentally, Maekawa and Sakakura had worked for Le Corbusier between 1928–1930 and 1931–1936, respectively. CIAM 8 is notable not only for the global recognition of Japanese architects but as the precise point at which Le Corbusier's star began to fade against Team X — which should be duly noted. ArchDaily — Michael Holt — "Kikutake's Sky House, Where Metabolism and Le Corbusier Meet," 19 February 2014. 3 — "Chung Kuo, Cina" is a film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972. 4 — "This exhibition examines 26 contemporary houses designed by a group of leading international architects, whose projects reflect the evolution of the private home in response to recent architectural innovations and changing cultural conditions." MoMA website. 5 — Peter and Alison Smithson were members of CIAM and also founding members of Team X. 6 — The exhibition ran from March 6 to March 31, 1956. 7 — https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/2/what-the-future-looked-like/327341956-/house-of-the-future
41 — Ghost cities in China, millions of speculative empty housing units awaiting demolition. 42 — Juliet and Romeo, Clermont-Ferrand, 2013 — let us keep the trees and repair the buildings.