What it was – what it is – what it will be
... What, then, are the essence and meaning of the Athens Charter? Many of its principles were already present earlier, but exclusively within the sphere of strictly professional and scientific bibliography of urbanism, scattered across professional (and rare) journals, in specialist books or in their even more specialized chapters. The Athens Charter unified them, briefly and concisely in one place, permeating them in many ways with a completely new spirit.
That way—and at the same time rejecting all those principles of urbanism that were not founded on a scientific approach or no longer followed the current and urgent problems of urbanism and cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which persisted in classical urban theory—as well as through its polemical style, the Athens Charter gained the meaning of a manifesto, capable of shaking all outdated and no longer adequate views on urbanism.
In that sense, the Athens Charter is not just a professional document but to a good extent also a political plea for social reforms, as preconditions for the construction of a new city.
There is no doubt that a certain degree of idealism is present here and there in the Athens Charter. For example: “Architecture is the key to everything” (91). Worst of all, there are indeed architects who still sincerely believe in that. But with a little sense of reality, we will know that architecture is far from being such a key, as it seems that it itself needs a key for liberation from some overheated doctrines, fashion trends, and scientific marginality.
But can one reproach people who wrote the Athens Charter for such an ultra-position at a time when they had to prove what is obvious, and in particular, can today's architects reproach them for that, when even today the position of architecture is threatened daily? At that time at least “academicism” held strong positions, whereas today even that support is lacking.
Are we not witnesses to repeatedly dilettantish choices of locations, and thereby the formation of defective structures of cities and regions, and are we not exposed to intentions to reduce urbanism to the role of “drawer” of decisions made outside the framework of expertise?
Even if architecture is not “the key to everything”, it is at least the handle on the door that leads toward some paths of solving many complex problems of man.
Precisely because of such increasingly frequent phenomena, as well as due to real failures of the urbanism of our time, we must not lose sight of its successes, and especially we must respect and defend the works of our classics, all the more so because many of them are still relevant and, by all indications, needed in practice.
Excerpt from the article by Ante Marinović-Uzelac: “The Athens Charter”,
published in the journal ARHITEKTURA, Nos. 189–195, Zagreb, 1984–1985.