The Aim of Team 10
Aim of Team 10 has been described as follows:
Team 10 is a group of architects who have sought each other out because each
has found the help of the others necessary to the development and understanding
of their own individual work. But it is more than that.
They came together in the first place, certainly because of mutual realization
of the inadequacies of the processes of architectural thought which they had
inherited from the modern movement as a whole, but more important, each sensed
that the other had already found same way towards a new beginning.
This new beginning, and the long build-up that followed, has been concerned
with inducing, as it were, into the bloodstream of the architect an understanding
and feeling for the patterns, the aspirations, the artefacts, the tools, the
modes of transportation and communications of present-day society, so that he
can as a natural thing build towards that society's realization-of-itself.
In this sense Team 10 is Utopian, but Utopian about the present. Thus their
aim is not to theorize but to build, for only through con-struction can a Utopia
of the present be realized.
For them 'to build' has a special meaning in that the architect's responsibility
towards the individual or groups he builds for, and towards the cohesion and
convenience of the collective structure to which they belong, is taken as being
an absolute responsibility. No abstract Master Plan stands between him and what
he has to do, only the 'human facts' and the logistics of the situation.
To accept such responsibility where none is trying to direct others to perform
acts which his control techniques cannot encompass. requires the invention of
a working-together-technique where each pays attention to the other and to the
whole insofar as he is able.
Team 10 is of the opinion that only in such a way may meaningful groupings of
buildings come into being, where each building is a live thing and a natural
extension of the others. Together they will make places where a man can realize
what he wishes to be.
Team 10 would like to develop their thought processes and language of building
to a point where a collective demonstration (perhaps a little self-conscious)
could be made at a scale which would be really effective in terms of the modes
of life and the structure of a community.
It must be said that this point is still some way oft.
Primer Preface 1968
Here Team 10 tries to explain, in a similar edited form to the original Primer,
what we stand for today, why a republication of the Primer is of point, and
why, because of our continually evolving attitude, the Primer is still a valid
document for students of architecture to whom it was first directed in December
1962.
source: Alison Smithson (ed.), Team 10 Primer, MIT Press 1974 (first edition
1962, revised edition 1968)