Virtual CIAM MuseumVirtual CIAM Museum

CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), the modernist architects’ congress and events organisation, operated internationally. Like its successor, Team 10, it can be analysed in network terms. In order to create a picture of the network and explore its connections, an interactive visualisation prototype has been developed on the basis of the correspondence of CIAM member Jaap Bakema (1914-1981). The prototype allows visitors to navigate between people, places and archival documents.

In 1959, Jaap Bakema organised the final CIAM conference at the Kröller-Müller museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. At the event, it was decided to wind up the CIAM group. A new organisation for international exchange had yet to emerge, although a group around Bakema was moving towards establishing its own platform. Later known as Team 10, this group included Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods and others.

As an alternative to CIAM and to continue its international communication, Bakema set up a correspondence network: the so-called Post Box for the Development of the Habitat. The idea was as simple as it was effective: the members could send in any materials, designs or ideas they wanted to share. Bakema would collect them and distribute them in a newsletter. ‘Postman Bakema’, as he signed himself, produced 18 such newsletters up to 1971. The Post Box is now an archive of exchanges between the various international avant-garde architects who contributed to it during the 1960s, among them the Team 10 members obviously, but also Japanese Metabolists like Kenzo Tange, and others including Oskar Hansen, Yona Friedman and Hans Hollein. Topics ranged from the future direction of modern architecture to the new concept of the megastructure typology, and planning policies as developed by Unesco. The Post Box correspondence archive is now part of the Nieuwe Instituut collection in Rotterdam.

Claudia Mainardi began to map and investigate the correspondence archive as part of her PhD research on biennials, triennials and their global networks. Information designer Giacomo Nanni created the interactive visualisation and the tool that allows visitors to navigate through the letters and documents that were exchanged by the prominent designers who belonged to the network. The 18 newsletters are also included in the visualisation.

The interactive web platform Post Box for an Open Society, designed by the Experimental Jetset, was an earlier experiment with the same material. The Post Box was created for the Dutch exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.

Claudia Mainardi is an Italian architect and researcher. Together with her collective Fosbury Architecture, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2023. Mainardi is a PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her research forms a part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project TACK, Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing, coordinated by the ETH Zurich, and included a secondment at the Nieuwe Instituut.

Giacomo Nanni is a web and information designer based in Berlin. He works with large datasets from digitised collections, archives, photographs, texts and maps. He designs web applications, books and interactive visualisations. He is particularly intrigued by the way information is curated and the role that technologies play in this.

The Correspondence Network of Jaap Bakema is a project by Claudia Mainardi and Giacomo Nanni, realised as part of the EU-sponsored project TACK: Communities of Tacit Knowledge in Architecture, in collaboration with Dirk van den Heuvel and the Jaap Bakema Study Centre.