JAMES PRESTINI'S COPY

CAN OUR CITIES SURVIVE?
J. L. Sert and C.I.A.M.

12.5 x 9.25 hardcover book with 260 pages with more than 300 photographs, diagrams and illustrations. Index. Introduction by Sigfried Giedion. An influential and seminal work on city planning CAN OUR CITIES SURVIVE? was published during the Second World War and was much cited in the rebuilding that took place in war's aftermath. The Book is based on the comprehensive proposals formulated by C.I.A.M. for town planning, including requirements of dwelling areas, recreation in cities, weekend/vacation recreation, workplaces, transportation, urban street systems, a total view of the city, and identifies the main barriers to large scale planning.

The International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded in June 1928, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the castle), and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general). CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art".

Other founder members included Karl Moser (first president), Victor Bourgeois, Pierre Chareau, Josef Frank, Gabriel Guevrekian, Max Ernst Haefeli, Hugo Häring, Arnold Höchel, Huib Hoste, Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), André Lurçat, Ernst May, Fernando García Mercadal, Hannes Meyer, Werner Max Moser, Carlo Enrico Rava, Gerrit Rietveld, Alberto Sartoris, Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, Rudolf Steiger, Henri-Robert Von der Mühll, and Juan de Zavala. The Soviet delegates were to be El Lissitzky, Nikolai Kolli and Moisei Ginzburg, although at the Sarraz conference they were unable to obtain visas. Other later members included Alvar Aalto and Hendrik Petrus Berlage. In 1931, Harwell Hamilton Harris was chosen as secretary of the American Group of CIAM.

The organization was hugely influential. It was not only engaged in formalising the architectural principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning.

As CIAM members traveled world-wide after the war, many of its ideas spread outside Europe, notably to the USA. The city planning ideas were adopted in the rebuilding of Europe following World War II, although by then some CIAM members had their doubts. Alison and Peter Smithson were chief among the dissenters. When implemented in the postwar period, many of these ideas were compromised by tight financial constraints, poor understanding of the concepts, or popular resistance. Mart Stam's replanning of postwar Dresden in the CIAM formula was rejected by its citizens as an "all-out attack on the city."

James Prestini ( 1908-1993) had a varied career as a mathematician, engineer, sculptor, professor of design, and woodturner. His artwork was influenced by his father, an Italian stonecutter, and by the Bauhaus aesthetic of Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe. From 1922 to 1924, Prestini attended a trade school in Westerly, Rhode Island, as an apprentice machinist. He earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering at Yale University in 1930 and attended Yale's School of Education in 1932. He also studied at the University of Stockholm in 1938 and the Institute of Design in 1939.

Prestini was a practitioner of the Bauhaus philosophy of art and craft, ideas that he expressed in the following quote from 1989: "Craft is the body of structure. Art is the soul of structure. Optimum creativity integrates both." He worked as a wood-turner from 1933-1953. He used straight-grained woods to create thin bowls with an appearance similar to glass and ceramics. In 1950 Edgar Kauffman, Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art commented on Prestini's contribution to modernism: "This feat has been Prestini's, to suggest within the limits of simple craft the human pathos of art and the clean, bold certainties of science. He has made grand things that are not overwhelming, beautiful things that are not personal unveilings, and simple things that do not urge usefulness to excuse their simplicityŠArt or not, craft or not, bowls or plain shapes, they speak directly and amply of our day to our day." He was part of a design team that won the Museum of Modern Art's furniture competition in 1948 with a jointless chair made from durable wood pulp.

Josep Lluís Sert (1902-1983) played a leading role in defining urban design education and practice. He created the first professional degree program in urban design at Harvard in 1959 and shaped the profession through projects in the Boston area and beyond. He received a degree in architecture in 1929 from the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura in his native Barcelona. In the subsequent decade, he was among the leading young Spanish architects, active in both CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture) and GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea). Sert gained an international reputation with his design for the Spanish Pavilion built for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Immigrating to the United States in 1941, he was from 1941 to 1958 a founding partner in Town Planning Associates, a design firm specializing in both architectural and urban design projects, with a particular focus on Latin America.

In 1958 Sert opened, with Huson Jackson and Ronald Gourley, Sert, Jackson & Gourley in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the firm's work included private residences, museums, and numerous large-scale commercial and educational commissions in the United States and abroad. The firm produced several buildings for Harvard University, including the Science Center, Holyoke Center, and Peabody Terrace. Sert served as Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design from 1953 until 1969. During his extraordinarily vibrant and productive tenure, he oversaw a variety of innovations in the curriculum, including the establishment of the first formal professional degree program in Urban Design.

"During the 1950s and 60s, urban design came to represent the physical shaping of cities through localized interventions rather than sweeping master proposals, and was increasingly characterized by the collaboration of professionals from a range of design backgrounds, and the arts," says Mary Daniels, Librarian, Special Collections, Harvard Design School. "Sert was instrumental in bringing together architects, landscape architects, and planners to engage in the formation of the city. Through his teaching and practice, he fostered the integration of the design disciplines at all scales of the urban framework, and the creation of new 'hearts of the city' that would become unique centers of collective vitality."

Herbert Bayer (1900 - 1985) lived the Bauhaus ideal of total integration of the arts into life -- he was a graphic designer, typographer, photographer, painter, environmental designer, sculptor and exhibition designer. He entered the Bauhaus in 1921 and was greatly influenced by Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky. He left in 1923, but returned in 1925 to become a master in the school. During his tenure as a Bauhaus master he produced many designs that became standards of a Bauhaus "style." Bayer was instrumental in moving the Bauhaus to purely sans serif usage in all its work. In 1928 he left the Bauhaus to work in Berlin. He primarily worked as a designer and art director for the Dorland Agency, an international firm. During his years at Dorland a Bayer style was established. Bayer emigrated to the United States in 1938 and set up practice in New York. His US design included work for NW Ayers, consultant art director for J. Walter Thompson and design work for GE. From 1946 on he worked exclusively for Container Corporation of America (CCA) and the Atlantic Richfield Corporation. In 1946 he moved to Aspen to become design consultant to CCA. In 1956 he became chairman of the department of design, a position he held until 1965. He was awarded the AIGA medal in 1970. Bayer's late work included work for ARCO and many personal projects including several environmental designs.

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