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Sony Devabhaktuni 3 Merceinspace

Keiji Ito 14 Sampling

Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Thomas Weaver 20 Deserta

Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Thomas Weaver 27 In Conversation with Tim Street-Porter

Mathew Aitchison 34 Who’s Afraid of Ivor de Wolfe?

Tom McDonough 40 The Decline of the Empire of the Visible

William Firebrace 47 Eyes Aquatic

Mark Campbell 63 Going Back to Greenville

Owen Hatherley 64 One Better than Stonehenge Mark Crinson 71 Stirling in Wonderland

Thomas Daniell 78 The Fugitive

Dirk van den Heuvel 82 The Kasbah of Surburbia

Will McLean 90 A New Unintended Equilibrium of Functions

Braden R Engel 95 The Badger of Muck and Brass

Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez 104 Bacardí Breezer

Vivien Stern 108 Bricks of Shame?

Christopher Pierce 112 Gaudí’s Gatekeeper

114 Contributors

62

The Kasbah of Suburbia

Dirk van den Heuvel

Piet Blom and family, c 1974To celebrate the completion of the Kasbah,

Blom released a cockerel and a few dozen chickens© NAi, Rotterdam

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The last ten years have seen Holland become a very different country from the late 1990s, when an unlikely coalition government of social-democrats and neo-liberals oversaw the full embrace of the internet economy, the reshaping of the country’s cities, the blurring of ideo-logical differences and the promotion, conscious or otherwise, of an unprecedented middle-class kind of hedonism. In architecture it also brought us that highly slippery phenomenon, super-moderni-ty, which was awkwardly branded as superdutch. But looking at Holland today, in 2011, it’s hard to remember that easy, supercool embrace of the superlight, the optimistic diagramming of everyday consumerism, the cheerful surrender to the forces of globalism from which something as local or downright parochial as Dutchness could be reinvented as if by datascape magic. There is a new sensibil-ity pervading Dutch society today, a new kind of populism that can-not solely be blamed on our new right-wing government, supported by the Islamophobic Freedom Party of Geert Wilders. More plausi-bly, the situation was aggravated by the credit crunch, which brought the country’s building industry to an immediate grinding halt. More than ever before, project developers now aim to build ‘what the peo-ple want’. Instead of superdutch, a retrograde Dutch revivalism seems to dominate. Paradoxically, in architecture this revivalism was not a local invention. It was brought to us by the Disney archi-tects Michael Graves and Robert Stern and the Luxemburger Rob Krier, who, already at the end of the 1990s and as part of the new wave of globalisation, started to build ministries, shopping centres and complete suburbs in a rather alienating mixture of Dutch motifs that featured pitched gables and lots of brick detailing – all very ‘contex-tual’ in the postmodernist sense of the word.

Yet one should not confuse the current conservative mindset with any issues of style (introspection actually seems a better word for it). One unanticipated consequence of the globalised economy were flows of immigration that created a whole new stratum of working classes living together in Dutch suburbs and cities. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century a much more pessimistic mood had set in, compounded by the threat of Muslim extremism – something made very real by the political killing on an Amsterdam street of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Thus by 2011, not only has the idea of multiculturalism apparently come to an unhappy end, but now anything vaguely cosmopolitan or internationalist is also under attack. Curtains are closed, fences put up, streets are under surveillance, neighbourhoods watched and cameras installed. From across the political spectrum there are calls for more police on the streets and for plans to better ‘integrate’ immigrants into Dutch culture – a familiar diatribe echoed by other former welfare-state parliaments across Europe. The once permissive, anti-authoritarian society is no more. Restoration is the word.

To fully grasp the underlying forces behind these changes is quite a task, not least because of all the manifold paradoxes at play, which go far beyond any easy kind of rhetoric, either from the Right or the Left. For instance, the populist Right, traditionally most conserva-tive when it comes to sexual etiquette, now fiercely promotes equal rights for both women and for gays, whereas the secular Left, histor-ically fighting a feminist cause, now finds itself uncomfortably defending all sorts of religious rights, such as women being able to continue to wear headscarves or veils. The confusion only grows when one realises that today’s right wing is actually born from the same permissive culture it consistently

loves to bash – that is, the leftist, anti-authoritarian project of the 1960s and 70s. It was only through this ideological–cultural mar-riage project that individual citizen’s liberties were eventually recog-nised by law and society at large. But this was a very different period in Holland’s recent past, and also a relatively prosperous one, when windows, literally as much as metaphorically, were thrown wide open. Rather than right-wing populism, this period was character-ised by a self-righteous, left-wing diversity that consistently ridiculed the stifling protestant values of sobriety, modesty and conformity. Instead, the exotic was fully embraced, nationalism abandoned and migrant workers were warmly welcomed as colourful representa-tives of other, more sensuous ways of living.

Somewhere in the east of Holland, in the former industrial town of Hengelo, we find a quiet testimony of those carefree days. At the edge of one of its slumbering suburbs sits the so-called Kasbah (1969–74), a housing estate designed by Dutch architect Piet Blom (1934–1999). Between typical streets lined with respectable terrace housing and manicured front gardens, the Kasbah appears as a rather dense conglomerate of 184 red-tiled, pitched-roof houses all raised above ground level by concrete stilts. In the vast undercroft below are accommodated all sorts of spaces usually absent from suburban developments, such as work and leisure facilities. At the same time this undercroft also creates a natural place for more banal everyday activities such as car parking and storage. The whole complex sits rather elegantly within its surroundings, each side of the latent superstructure being manipulated so as to casually respond to its specific edge condition. For example the south side overlooks a sunny lawn and pond, and its corresponding double-height ground-floor spaces form a galleria which is occasionally used as a small market. The north side also meets the street with a double-height arcade, this time housing a series of smaller shops, studios and the local pub, with its corny name, the Kasbar. Open spaces delineated and deliberately left void within the whole devel-opment provide room for collective facilities such as gardens and even a small theatre; along the Kasbah’s two shorter sides are a school and a playground, built into the western edge, while the east side opens out onto the surrounding countryside, offering a surpris-ingly picturesque vista. Originally conceived as a generic, repeatable model for improved mass housing, the Hengelo Kasbah now sits as a very specific place with its own distinct history and community.

And yet one can still say (and this is a recurrent criticism of the project) that the Kasbah’s potential – in particular its undercroft – remains largely unfulfilled. In its original conception the underbelly spaces were designed as a kind of situationist terrain vague – an open landscape appropriated by that favourite figure of the postwar Dutch avant-garde, Johan Huizinga’s carefree homo ludens: the seer, magi-cian, artist, poet and child who holds the key to that mythopoeic cosmological order beyond modernist rationalism. Because of its failure to cast middle-class man in these terms, the Kasbah is usually dismissed as yet another manifestation of the delusional optimistic excesses of the socially engineered society. Ironically its architect was also critical of the whole undertaking. Blom never felt entirely comfortable with the idea of a suburb as the ideal location for his utopian housing block, which he had meticulously tailored to

replace the functional city concept that had dominated urban planning practices from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Born and raised in the infamous Amsterdam

Overleaf: Piet Blom, plans and sections of different house typologies, The Kasbah, Hengelo, 1969

© nai, Rotterdam

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Klaus von Amsberg. The Provo activists themselves were a loosely organised group of individuals, partly defined by political protest, partly by artistic outrage and provocation. Alongside their self-titled journal, of which only 15 issues were published, their so-called ‘white plans’ form their most tangible legacy. The most famous of these were the ‘white bicycle plan’ for collective bike ownership and the ‘white car plan’, which proposed the introduction of electric cars as a more environmentally friendly transport system. A later ‘white wives plan’ involved a tremendously liberal sexual education pro-gramme, while the ‘white housing plan’ called for mass squatting to fight real estate speculation and a ‘white chicken plan’ (‘chicken’ being Amsterdam slang for a police officer) aimed to disarm the police and transform them from a repressive institution into a phil-anthropic social workforce. In a nutshell these schemes established the new socio-cultural mentality that would dominate 1970s Holland and lend the country an air of laissez-faire hippy tolerance that would define its national identity for many years to come.

As testimony to the power of this political context, on a drawing of the ground floor of the Urban Roof project, between the columns and access points of the raised houses, Blom inserted hand-written

slogans and atmospheric refer-ences to the Provo interven-tions. It’s a ludic mix of politi-cal statements and romantic allusions, but also of darker urban fantasies, religious ref-erences and new economic rea-lities. The drawing still reads like a mix of Cobra poetry and psycho-geographical situation-ist mapping. The freed urban space was made up of points and spheres of attraction, diver- sion or repulsion, not unlike Constant Nieuwenhuys’ dynam-ic labyrinth of New Babylon. This interest in a new kind of

playful urban space was fundamental for Blom and his attempt to turn around the prevailing housing typologies for the Dutch wel-fare state. His fascination with upsetting established institutions was also reflected in the name of Blom’s new office, Workshop for Public Works, which was founded after he received the commission to design a university refectory building – ominously called the Bastille, in Enschede, in the east of Holland, not too far away from the Hengelo Kasbah.

Another sketch from the Urban Roof study, ‘human anno 1965’, shows the section of the new concept as a clear variation on the raised superstructures of Friedman and Constant. Three lower zones form the basis of the new city not only in terms of its structure and traffic flows, but also socially. In zone 3, for example, the ground level is designated as ‘city’, ‘contact’ and ‘us’ – or in the words of Blom, ‘the societal space, the reason why you live somewhere’. Hovering above the ground level, zone 4 is reserved for the ‘I’, ‘the small cells of the city – realised via the technocracy – kind of living

minimum’. These cells offer an affordable ‘living start’ and yet can be expanded as the size and affluence of the families living with-in them grow. The whole scheme represents

working-class neighbourhoods of the Pijp and the Jordaan, Blom would rather have built the block in the centre of his home town, where the scheme could have revitalised the messiness of the dis-tricts he loved so much and which at the time were under threat of sanitisation and demolition. The Hengelo Kasbah, then, was at best a suburban, somewhat diluted demonstration of his alternative urban model.

Although completed in 1974, the overall concept behind the Kasbah dates back to the mid-1960s when Blom presented his study ‘Wonen als stedelijk dak’ (‘Living as Urban Roof’). Still in his early 30s, Blom had already had special issues of Dutch architectural jour-nals devoted to him and was a real cult-hero, largely through the complicated relationship he enjoyed with his mentor Aldo van Eyck. It was van Eyck who discovered Blom’s talent when he arrived at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Before enrolling as a student, Blom had finished a vocational training – he was a construction worker and draughtsman aspiring to become an architect. In his first year at the academy, van Eyck’s teachings opened up his perspective on the world. But enlightenment worked both ways. Van Eyck, a well-educated, widely travelled public intellectual of incredible erudition, would describe Blom’s talent as if he were as exotic as the African people of the Dogon he so much admired: ‘this man is supremely naive, he has that kind of supreme intelligence which na-ive people have’. Van Eyck later brought Blom’s student pro-jects with him to Team 10 meet-ings, positioning his work at the heart of a debate on the future of modern architecture and planning. These student de-signs were also published in Forum, the journal edited by van Eyck, Jaap Bakema, Herman Hertzberger and others during those crucial years of 1959–62, and were very close to van Eyck’s own approach to architecture, which he himself defined as ‘steps towards a configurative discipline’ and which would later be labelled Dutch structuralism.

Synthesising his earlier student designs Blom’s 1965 Urban Roof study showed a new step in the development of his ideas for the (sub)urbanisation of the country. With a single radical gesture all houses were to be lifted off the ground, creating a ‘roof’ while establishing a free space underneath for more impromptu events and encounters, more or less similar to the ad hoc atmosphere of the working-class neighbourhoods in which he had grown up. Although Blom identi-fied Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale as a key reference, the study also has traces of the influence of the anti-authoritarian anarchist Provo movement, which between 1965 and 1967 would have a major impact on Dutch culture, and on Amsterdam in particular, through its happenings, deliberately organised to disrupt public life and challenge local authorities. Although these actions were by nature pacifist, the movement really established a reputation for itself in 1966 when a smoke bomb was thrown during the royal wedding of Princess Beatrix and her German groom

Piet Blom, sketch for the ‘Living as Urban Roof’ study, 1965

© nai, Rotterdam

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a vertical zoning system designed to replace the four functions of ciam (dwelling, work, recreation, transport), and is predicated on differences of scale while accommodating changes over time. Like ciam, however, or the Japanese metabolists or the projects by Fried-man and Constant, the study reads technology and technocracy as prerequisites, and not just as part of the project for a Dutch welfare state but as ‘the pure socialist idea’. Despite proclamations like this, the Urban Roof is actually not an especially clear-cut political con-cept. Perhaps aware of this, Blom provocatively states that ‘this is belief’; it ‘is biology not urbanism’. And as if to finally underline all this radical theo/bio/sociology, we see a small plane with a pacifist sign cruising over the new cityscape trailing a banner that reads ‘out of nato’. Ironically, then, the Urban Roof idea was ultimately real-ised – as the Kasbah in Hengelo – in the new suburb of Groot Driene, at the very edge of a new development overlooking the countryside, under perfect welfare-state conditions and as the result of a gen-erous government subsidy. Blom did design Kasbah plans for other sites, such as Zaandijk, Monnickendam, Wijk bij Duurstede and, at the instigation of Roel van Duijn – a former Provo activist who had somehow managed to win a seat as a city alderman in the 1970s – even Amsterdam. None of these schemes, though, was ever built. But even as a one-off, it is still quite astonishing to see how the Kasbah captured the mood of the time – not only in terms of its cultural aspira-tions within the context of a welfare state riddled with in-numerable paradoxes, but also in terms of its architecture. Seen retroactively, the Kasbah now appears as an ordered serialist ‘mat’ of red-tiled, pitched-roofed houses, per-fectly situated between brutalism and Dutch structuralism on the one hand, and pop art and incipient postmodernism on the other. In response to this uniqueness, the Kasbah was immediately recog-nised as an iconic project, confirming Blom’s growing reputation (although his more outspoken Provo ideas would also draw a lot of criticism from his fellow architects). Further details can easily be provided about its architectonic qualities and characteristics, but probably the more conspicuous aspect of its historiography, and Blom’s achievements as a whole, remains how they were suppressed from Team 10 history, most notably by Alison Smithson.

In 1974, the year the Kasbah was completed, Alison Smithson had started writing the history of the Team 10 meetings. Earlier she had been made responsible for editing the Team 10 Primer of 1962, but in the 1970s this had become a much more personal, retrospective project. In nei-ther her account of the Rotterdam meeting of 1974, nor in her seminal essay on mat-

building, which appeared in Architectural Design, did she even men-tion the Kasbah, even though a Team 10 group had just visited Hengelo to see it for themselves. Urban myth has it that upon arrival she and her husband Peter simply refused to get out of their car, while the other Team 10 members eagerly explored the building. How, though, do we view this? As a hilarious act of British snobbish-ness (or, as Peter Smithson would describe it, a ‘cultivated attitude’)? Or as plain professional envy, or perhaps just sincere disapproval of a project unworthy of attention?

The only indirect reference to the Hengelo visit in Smithson’s mat-building essay is a swipe at so-called ‘casbah-ism’. She then used another project – Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer building for the Apeldoorn insurance company, which was visited on that same Team 10 trip – to criticise what she described as an ‘off-shoot of the mat-building phenomenon’. Her preferred exemplar of this typology was the Berlin Free University by Candilis, Josic and Woods, which

Team 10 had visited just the year before, in 1973. Clearly she felt some lines of defini-tion had to be drawn, but in hindsight it is hard to see why the Kasbah, as well as the Centraal Beheer build-ing, did not deserve some-thing more appreciative. The omission seems all the more glaring considering that the Smithsons them-selves had been working on a new urban plan for Kuwait City which displayed nu-merous similarities to these Dutch projects, such as a completely raised structure of buildings with a new urban space for exchange and encounter situated below. But rivalry between the Smithsons and the Dutch had always been intense, right from the outset of the

Team 10 discourse. Unhappy paradoxes and misunderstandings abound, starting, of course, with Blom’s constant absence: the Smithsons and Blom never met; van Eyck would always speak for Blom.

Part of the ongoing debate between the Smithsons and the Dutch focused on the use of appropriate language to define their various allegiances. For example, the Israeli architect Arthur Glikson, a guest at a number of Team 10 meetings, distinguished two particular standpoints within the group – one of ‘understatement’ and the other of ‘overdesign’. Shadrach Woods and the Smithsons were on the side of understatement, while van Eyck and Hertzberger appeared allied to overdesign. The Smithsons were always siding with an ordinary, anonymous vernacular, as they argued in their

1973 book, Without Rhetoric (and demon-strated in built form, at Robin Hood Gardens). In contrast, the Dutch looked for a language that consistently articulated

Piet Blom, coloured illustration for the ‘Living as Urban Roof’ study, 1965

© nai, Rotterdam

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individual units and cells, corners, doorsteps and other spatial tran-sitions. In an interview from the late 1990s, Peter Smithson would explain that he found form and structure in Dutch structuralism to be confused. Explicitly referring to Blom’s work, he argued that it was actually highly formalistic. Yet this is probably too easy a dis-missal. Rather, in this debate and its endless characterisations and affiliations, one sees a divide between two different principles of organisation at work – one that thinks of the city as a set of diverse systems working only loosely together, and the other that tries to develop a coherent, all-encompassing language fully integrating architecture and urban planning.

The suppression of the Kasbah from Team 10 history itself has a history. When van Eyck passionately presented Blom’s ‘Noah’s Ark’ student project at the Royaumont meeting in 1962 it drew a stinging response from the Smithsons. Probably more than any other project, ‘Noah’s Ark’ embodied the full integration of architecture and plan-ning as envisioned within Team 10 circles. It proposed the large-scale urbanisation of the Amsterdam region by way of a vast system of inter-locking grid structures based on massive, polycentric units each housing 10–15,000 peo-ple and projected between the cities of Haarlem, Alkmaar, Amsterdam and Hilversum. Van Eyck heralded it as the ultimate illustration of his Albertian credo that the house should be like a small city and the city like a big house. But in the exchanges that followed the presenta- tion the discussion became completely derailed. Respond-ing to van Eyck’s exhaustive explanation of the Blom scheme, Alison Smithson in-sisted that it entailed an apparently endless repetition of units and that some sort of Gestapo mentality emanated from the proposal. Peter Smithson, too, chipped in and cited the city–house analogy as something that had been taken too literally:

We’re looking for systems which allow things to develop as they need to develop without compromising each other. Here you have a system which takes literally the concept that the city is a big house; but the city is not a big house; it is a completely false analogy, a false image.

This rift between the Smithsons and van Eyck became a key ele-ment in developing a Blom myth. After Blom received a similar kind of criticism from his teachers at the Amsterdam Academy he was reported to have destroyed his own models by throwing them down the stairs – only a couple of diagrams and a few fuzzy photographs of the model taken by Kisho Kurokawa at the Royaumont meeting survived the incident. Compounding this par-ticular episode was the subsequent exchange between Blom and the office of Le Corbusier. The Chilean architect Guillermo Jullian de la

Piet Blom, sketch for the ‘Living as Urban Roof’ study, 1965

© nai, Rotterdam

Fuente, who worked for Le Corbusier at the time, attended the Royaumont meeting and invited Blom to come over to Paris to the Le Corbusier atelier in the rue de Sèvres. The Paris visit only survives in anecdotes and interviews – there are no actual written accounts – but this of course only fuels the myth. The story is important, however, since it suggests a triangulation between Blom and Le Corbusier’s Venice hospital design, and the projects of Candilis, Josic and Woods, especially their competition designs for the Free University and the unrealised design for Frankfurt city centre. Collectively their projects mark a shift within modern architectural discourse from a vertically organised city to a close-knit, high-density horizontal one, with an emphasis on pedestrian movement. A decade later we see the built results – the Free University and the Kasbah – which as Alison Smithson herself pointed out, shed new light on van Eyck’s orphanage which was designed and built as early as 1955–60.

Whether valid or inappropriate, the house–city analogy was a recurring trope inside Team 10 circles, implying a revision of the relation between architecture and urban design. The North African kasbah, as much as the one in Hengelo, was certainly one of its clearest visualisa-tions. Two other key ex-amples used in the Team 10 discourse were the Roman amphitheatre in Arles and the Diocletian’s Palace in Split – historical structures that, just like the kasbah, were capable of accom-modating change, or even an entirely different program-me, over time. Yet the kasbah was by far the favourite, almost magical metaphor for the future of modern archi-tecture. It captured an exotic interest in the non-western

and pre-modern and at the same time was a fantastic example of a vernacular tradition in which architecture and urbanism were fused to bring out an almost socio-biological unity of community and identity.

Ultimately it was van Eyck more than anyone else in and around Team 10 who appropriated this metaphor as his own. He did so by adopting the slogan ‘Vers une “casbah” organisée’, which he had print-ed in the famous 1959 issue of Forum, ‘The Story of Another Idea’, and handed out at the Otterlo congress that year in Henry van de Vel-de’s Kröller Müller museum. The issue was a manifesto-like stock- taking of the debates within ciam and the beginnings of Team 10. In its last pages various schemes for new districts were proposed as examples of a possible new direction. The first four designs were by Bakema for the Rotterdam districts of Pendrecht and Alexanderpolder. The last one was by Blom – his student project, ‘The cities will be in-

habited like villages’, a precursor to the ‘Noah’s Ark’ design. The conclusion unambiguously stated that architecture and urban planning were to be replaced by a new ‘discipline’ that

ern art? And what do we make of the fact that van Eyck spoke of the ‘casbah organisée’ and not the kasbah per se? The archives and his-torical accounts don’t offer much help. One can only speculate on the awkward contradictions within architectural slogans and politi-cal realities. For instance, look how the ‘casbah organisée’ comes terribly close to Le Corbusier’s ‘architecture or revolution’, and the idea of architecture being the ultimate tool to overcome political ine-qualities. In any case, what is clear is how the kasbah is not just a pret-ty image of peaceful harmony but a means of contesting an estab-lished order, just like all those too easily celebrated categories – the everyday and the vernacular. In essence, therefore, the kasbah is the paradigm deployed both to disrupt the established discourse and to begin a new one, with new players and new rules.

But how did things eventually turn out in the Hengelo suburb of Groot Driene? Nothing seems to be further removed from the Algerian kasbah than the one in Hengelo. Site visits to the project show, some-what surprisingly, that the Kasbah as built has withstood the test of time rather well, and that the current condition is not nearly as drab

as other celebrated models of 1970s architecture. Its inhabitants, for instance, formed their own housing association and took on the responsibility of co-running the complex. And just as happened with the Marseille Unité, the Kasbah has regained much of its earlier attraction, even charm, and is now more middle-class than ever. This of course is a devastating assessment in light of Blom’s desire for the messiness of the ‘real’ kas-bah and especially the messiness of Amsterdam’s old Jordaan, which he cher-ished so much and which

he would lovingly describe – eulogising, for example, the smell of the place, and not just the sweet aromas of the food and groceries, but the odour and rancid ‘stench of the broads’.

At the same time, the Hengelo Kasbah is something of a vessel, carrying cultural values and a kind of social potential into the future, just like Noah’s Ark. One can see this especially in the undercroft space – the building’s great innovation. Its ambiguity is its most important quality, embodying both the promise and failure of the urban space as envisaged by Provo and Team 10 – an open space meant for encounter and exchange, but also somewhere terribly vul-nerable to vandalism. That the Kasbah was built in quiet Hengelo may well have been its salvation. Had it been built in Amsterdam one wonders whether it would have survived at all. Although now dor-mant, it can perhaps be revived again when the current political climate of introspection and xenophobia makes way for a new Dutch spring in the wake of the one in the Maghreb. Even though nobody knows

how the current street revolutions in North Africa will end, they also bring hope to Europe and a reminder that contesting established order should remain the main goal, always.

would encompass both architecture and planning as a ‘necessary, creative condition’. The concluding words read: ‘inevitably, a digni-fied Habitat will be realised. One that will bear similarities to an orderly kasbah, as unlikely as this may seem today.’ After this state-ment four pages were filled with details of the Blom project. The final page contained van Eyck’s ‘casbah organisée’ slogan with two added images of American pueblos.

Still, however, the reference remains an enigma – why the kasbah? To be sure the metaphor was never really an innocent one, especially when one considers that its romantic and picturesque associations with an unthreatening Arab urbanity are really a construct of Euro-pean colonisers and tourists. But one wonders whether the archi-tects were fully aware of those aspects at the time. What the kasbah did convey was their attempt to come to some sort of universal world architecture, a transcultural appropriation and identification with the ‘other’ to overcome the failings of western functionalism, even to dissolve any notion of a specific western identity. Van Eyck, in partic-ular, felt consistently legitimised by the artistic avant-gardes of the antebellum – notably the surrealists. The ‘incorrect’ insertion of the pueblo vil-lages to illustrate the call for a ‘casbah’ architecture is a clear demonstration of this universal understanding of human culture, as is van Eyck’s famous diagram of the Otterlo Circles, in which he brings together the three traditions of the classical, the modern and the vernacu-lar as if there were no barri-ers of historical hierarchies and interdependencies be-tween them.

The kasbah reference was also a homage to the young ciam groups of the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria (among them Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods, future core members of Team 10). These groups had presented the most interesting surveys and designs at the 1953 ciam conference at Aix-en-Provence. Organised by these Team 10 youngsters, the following ciam conference was initially planned for Algiers, yet the bloody war of independence made this impossible and so they were forced to relocate to Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. By 1959 Morocco had gained its independence, but the war in Algeria was still being fought. The kasbah reference cannot, therefore, be uncoupled from the very beginnings of Team 10 and its relations to North Africa. Yet it remains hard to grasp the extent to which the ‘casbah organisée’ was also intended as a political statement. After all it was from the actual kasbah that the Algerian freedom fighters planned their assault on the elegant European quarter of the city where the cosmopolitan middle-class lived and worked. The kasbah was at the very heart of an uprising against the French elite.

What, then, could the kasbah possibly mean once relocated to the secluded northern European forests of Otterlo and the privileged, genteel interior of a Dutch museum of mod-

Aerial view of the newly completed Kasbah, c 1974

© klm Aero

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