Team 10 East
 by Łukasz Stanek

Team 10 East never existed. In difference to the short-lived CIAM-Ost, the first generation of Central European architects was impaired in terms of exchanges with the West and might have been reluctant to assume a unified identity which would seemingly confirm the division of the continent imposed by the Iron Curtain. Yet what was shared by the members of the Team 10 from the region, such as Oskar Hansen from Poland and Charles Polónyi from Hungary, and the followers from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, was not only their hindered mobility, but also their affiliation with Central European architecture culture and the experience of architecture practice in state socialism. This talk discusses the research project Team 10 East which focuses on the contributions of architects from socialist Europe to the discourse of the Team 10, and their specific reading of questions of modernization, consumption, community, and everyday life. Among these questions, that of the state was particularly relevant, and the projects of Oskar Hansen were exercises in radical reformism, requiring and envisaging the (socialist) state as both powerful and self-limiting agent of the processes of urbanization. Rather than being a retroactive manifesto, Team 10 East revisits the work of Hansen and others according to their conditions and aspirations, aiming at an account that is both historically founded and speculative.

Łukasz Stanek is senior lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, the University of Manchester (UK) and associate visiting professor at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan (USA).