Casbah: a brief history of a design concept

collectively assumed the leadership of the Dutch architectural journal, Forum [1]. In a remarkable series of 23 issues between 1959 and 1963, they formulated a vision of collective form as the highest imperative of the architectural act. In defining a spatial medium for social content in architecture, the Forum group’s contribution was among the most seminal of its generation. Their critical ability transformed the intellectual content of urban design and social housing and helped to formulate and promote a new cultural agenda for the profession. The Forum editorial board included Apon, van Eyck, Bakema, Boon, Hardy and Hertzberger. Among these, Aldo van Eyck was the intellectual catalyst with a vision of the magazine’s potential to influence the culture of practice. Beyond the limited membership of the editorial board the group was strongly associated with the intellectual leadership of Team 10 – whose work and writings frequently appeared in Forum. Together they initiated a process of critique which was to open the culture of Modernism to post-war thought and philosophy. In its uncompromising commitment to the primacy of social issues as the potential source of a new architecture and urbanism, the group was unparalleled as a cultural force. Besides its propagation of a humanist agenda for the practice of architecture, Forum promoted certain models and methods of design. These were based upon a preference for an architecture and urbanism of configurative patterns. The key term was, of course, structure, and the search for the motifs and structuring devices of an urban architecture was to become the seminal medium of their design approach. For van Eyck, at least, these ideas were influenced by his knowledge of the writings of Structural Anthropology. As interpreted by architects this literature had diverse paths of relevance. The most direct was perhaps the anthropological field research model as a method for gathering knowledge. There is evidence of such proto-architectural activities in both Forum and at Team 10 meetings such as that at Otterloo in 1959 (Newman 1961). One of the general achievements of this generation was its contribution to an emerging epistemology for design, a new openness to the past as a source of knowledge, and the legitimization of precedent in design. For the Forum group the access to precedent was through the medium of configurative order. Underlying structure might be expressed as an abstracted two-dimensional pattern or threedimensional spatial matrix. Preferred anthropological or historical sources were those which provided examples of geometrically complex structuring orders. This second influence of Structuralist thought provided the idea of underlying structural orders. By analogy, the