Address list of the newsletter of the Post Box for the Development of the Habitat, compiled by Jaap Bakema, copyrights Collection Nieuwe Instituut Collection Nieuwe Instituut/ BAKE, g120-1

At the last CIAM conference held in Otterlo in 1959, members of Team 10, including Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Daniel van Ginkel, Blanche Lemco, and John Voelcker, enacted an ironic funeral procession, presumably carrying CIAM to its grave. It was captured on film by Jaap Bakema.

After the demise of CIAM, Bakema initiated a newsletter to keep the network updated. Between 1959 and 1981 he compiled eighteen such newsletters, which comprised a summary of contributions he received from around the world. ‘Postman Bakema’, as he called himself, would send these to CIAM’s old guard, the core of Team 10, institutions such as UNESCO, and a broader circle of fellow travellers including Yona Friedman and the Japanese Metabolists.

Bakema’s personal archive holds various address lists related to this correspondence network. These objects trace a global community bound together by the sharing of architectural and urban ideas around the notion of habitat.

Submitted by
Dirk van den Heuvel teaches architecture at TU Delft and heads the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, the research collaboration between the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, and TU Delft.

This object is part of the TACK Exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen / Unspoken Knowledge / Le (savoir) non-dit”, in the section “Codes and Communities”.