CIAM, Team X and urban space in Brazilian housing communities: The Terras Altas Community in Pelotas

Abstract

The CIAM has been established as a forum for the discussion and dissemination of new ideas on urbanism since the end of the 1920s. Modernists believed that the city design would promote a more equal world and that the urban structure could be shaped rationally and functionally so as to reach social well-being. However, the schematism and excessive rationalization that conceived standard housing as having no relation to the identity of the dwellers caused a lot of critique by the younger generations within the CIAM itself. Team 10 sought to retrieve concepts of the traditional city and create a greater sense of community and identity, a construction of more immediate relationships between the family nucleus and the social group, between the residence and the collective spaces. This article is a reflection on the circulation of these “universal” ideas and their local applications focusing on a housing community in the city of Pelotas. That urbanization project shaped in the 1980s is a rich example for study because in it one can identify the presence of the different views of the city in the 20th century. The CIAM principles were present at the moment of its conception, but they were already “contaminated” by the critique of the functionalist city after World War II. This legacy, viz. the Team 10 legacy, has enabled the transformation of the housing community into a “neighborhood” full of intense urban animation, and this can be noticed in the “spontaneous city” that began to be built soon after the urbanization process started.

Key words: CIAM, Team 10, housing community in Pelotas, Terras Altas Community.