CIAM’s La Sarraz Declaration (1928)

Translated by Michael Bullock.

From Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1971).

The undersigned architects, representing the national groups of modern architects, affirm their
unity of viewpoint regarding the fundamental conceptions of architecture and their professional
obligations towards society.

They insist particularly on the fact that “building” is an elementary activity of man intimately
linked with evolution and the development of human life. The destiny of architecture is to express
the orientation of the age. Works of architecture can spring only from the present time.

They therefore refuse categorically to apply in their working methods means that may have been
able to illustrate past societies; they affirm today the need for a new conception of architecture
that satisfies the spiritual, intellectual, and material demands of present-day life. Conscious of the
deep disturbances of the social structure brought about by machines, they recognize that the
transformation of the economic order and of social life inescapably brings with it a corresponding
transformation of the architectural phenomenon.

The intention that brings them together here is to attain the indispensable and urgent
harmonization of the elements involved by replacing architecture on its true plane, the economic,
and sociological plane. Thus architecture must be set free from the sterilizing grip of the
academies that are concerned with preserving the formulas of the past.

Animated by this conviction, they declare themselves members of an association and will give
each other mutual support on the international plane with a view to realizing their aspirations
morally and materially.

I. General Economic System

1. The idea of modern architecture includes the link between the phenomenon of architecture and
that of the general economic system.

2. The idea of “economic efficiency” does not imply production furnishing maximum commercial
profit, but production demanding a minimum working effort.

3. The need for maximum economic efficiency is the inevitable result of the impoverished state of
the general economy.

4. The most efficient method of production is that which arises from rationalization and
standardization. Rationalization and standardization act directly on working methods both in
modern architecture (conception) and in the building industry (realization).

5. Rationalization and standardization react in a threefold manner:

(a) They demand of architecture conceptions leading to simplification of working methods on the
site and in the factory;

(b) They mean for building firms a reduction in the skilled labor force; they lead to the
employment of less specialized labor working under the direction of highly skilled technicians;

(c) They expect from the consumer (that is to say the customer who orders the house in which he
will live) a revision of his demands in the direction of a readjustment to the new conditions of
social life. Such a revision will be manifested in the reduction of certain individual needs
henceforth devoid of real justification; the benefits of this reduction will foster the maximum
satisfaction of the needs of the greatest number, which are at present restricted.

6. Following the dissolution of the guilds, the collapse of the class of skilled craftsmen is an
accomplished fact. The inescapable consequence of the development of the machine has led to
industrial methods of production different from and often opposed to those of the
craftsmen. Until recently, thanks to the teaching of the academies, the architectural conception
has been inspired chiefly by the methods of craftsmen and not by the new industrial
methods. This contradiction explains the profound disorganization of the art of building.

7. It is urgently necessary for architecture, abandoning the outmoded conceptions connected with
the class of craftsmen, henceforth to rely upon the present realities of industrial technology, even
though such an attitude must perforce lead to products fundamentally different from those of
past epochs.

II. Town Planning

1. Town planning is the organization of the functions of collective life; it extends both the urban
agglomerations and the countryside. Town planning is the organization of life in all regions.
Urbanization cannot be conditioned by the claims of pre-existent aestheticism: its essence is of a
functional order.

2. This order includes three functions:

(a) dwelling,
(b) producing,
(c) relaxation (the maintenance of the species). Its essential objects are:
(a) division of the soil,
(b) organization of traffic,
(c) legislation.
3. The relationships between the inhabited areas, the cultivated areas (including sports) and the
traffic areas are dictated by the economic and social environment. The fixing of population
densities establishes the indispensable classification.

The chaotic division of land, resulting from sales, speculations, inheritances, must be abolished by
a collective and methodical land policy.

The redistribution of the land, the indispensable preliminary basis for any town planning, must
include the just division between the owners and the community of the unearned
increment resulting from works of joint interest.

4. Traffic control must take in all the functions of collective life. The growing intensity of these
vital functions, always checked against a reading of statistics, demonstrates the supreme
importance of the traffic phenomenon.

5. Present-day technical facilities, which are constantly growing, are the very key to town
planning. They imply and offer a total transformation of existing legislation; this transformation
must run parallel with technical progress.

III. Architecture and Public Opinion

1. It is essential today for architects to exercise an influence on public opinion by informing the
public of the fundamentals of the new architecture. Through the baneful effects of academic
teaching, opinion has strayed into an erroneous conception of the dwelling. The true problems of
the dwelling have been pushed back behind entirely artificial sentimental conceptions. The
problem of the house is not posed.

Clients, whose demands are motivated by numerous factors that have nothing to do with the real
problem of housing, are generally very bad at formulating their wishes. Opinion has gone
astray. Thus the architect satisfies the normal prerequisites of housing only poorly. This
inefficiency involves the country in an immense expense that is a total loss. The tradition is
created of the expensive house, the building of which deprives a large part of the population of
healthy living quarters.

Through educational work carried out in schools, a body of fundamental truths could be
established forming the basis for a domestic science (for example: the general economy of the
dwelling, the principles of property and its moral significance, the effects of sunlight, the ill effects
of darkness, essential hygiene, rationalization of household economics, the use of mechanical
devices in domestic life, etc.).

3. The effect of such an education would be to bring up generations with a healthy and rational
conception of the house. These generations (the [112] architect’s future clients) would be capable
of correctly stating the problem of housing.
IV. Architecture and Its Relations with the State

1. Modern architects having the firm intention of working according to the new principles can only
regard the official academies and their methods tending towards aestheticism and formalism as
institutions standing in the way of progress.

2. These academies, by definition and by function, are the guardians of the past. They have
established dogmas of architecture based on the practical and aesthetic methods of historical
periods. Academies vitiate the architect’s vocation at its very origin.

3. In order to guarantee the country’s prosperity, therefore, States must tear the teaching of
architecture out of the grip of the academies. The past teaches us precisely that nothing remains,
that everything evolves, and that progress constantly advances.

4. States, henceforth withdrawing their confidence from the academies, must revise the methods
of teaching architecture and concern themselves with all those questions whose object is to
endow the country with the most productive and most advanced system of organization.

5. Academicism causes States to spend considerable sums on the erection of monumental

buildings, contrary to the efficient utilization of resources, making a display of outmoded luxury at
the expense of the most urgent tasks of town planning and housing.

6. Within the same order of ideas, all the prescriptions of the State which, in one form or another,
tend to influence architecture by giving it a purely aesthetic direction are an obstacle to its
development and must be vigorously combated.

7. Architecture’s new attitude, according to which it aims of its own volition to re-situate itself
within economic reality, renders all claims to official patronage superfluous.

8. If States were to adopt an attitude opposite to their present one they would bring about a
veritable architectural renaissance that would take place quite naturally within the general
orientation of the country’s economic and social development.

June 28th, 1928

The Declaration was signed by the following architects:

H.P. Berlage Pierre Jeanneret Gerrit Rietveld

Victor Bourgeois Le Corbusier Alberto Sartoris
Pierre Chareau André Lurçat Hans Schmidt
Josef Frank Sven Markelius Mart Stam
Gabriel Guévrékian Ernst May Rudolf Steiger
Max Ernst Haefeli Fernando García Mercadal Szymon Syrkus
Hugo Häring Hannes Meyer Henri-Robert von der Mühll
Arnold Höchel Werner Max Moser Juan de Zavala
Huib Hoste Carlo Enrico Rava