Book Review

Comparative/World

Eric Mumford has written a detailed, richly illustrated history of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (International Congresses of Modern Architecture, or CIAM). CIAM was the name both of a series of meetings of self-proclaimed "modern architects" and of an organization that planned those meetings and promoted the views of its leading members. The organization was founded in Switzerland in 1928 and dissolved in the Netherlands in 1959. It was always dominated by Western Europeans and their concerns, although it included members from all corners of Europe. It became more truly international during and after World War II.

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The picture that emerges from this book shows that CIAM was never a monolithic organization with a single purpose. The architects and planners who founded CIAM in 1928 shared a desire to promote modern solutions to the challenges of urban life. They saw themselves as members of an avant garde, who could work together in spite of their artistic and political differences. However, their apparent unity ebbed considerably within five years, which, ironically, is the very time at which CIAM's best-known programmatic statements were being formulated and publicized. In its later years, it was described by one of its members, P. A. Emery, as an "intellectual drugstore . . . where each person finds what he has come to seek" (p. 228). Some of the "drugstore" quality can be applied to CIAM even at its inception, when French and German-language versions of resolutions used different concepts that reflected different outlooks of French and German-speaking members (p. 25). Similarly, there were two alternate authoritative versions of the conclusions reached at the famous congress of 1933 (pp. 86–87).

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