Jordi Viñals y Xavier Bosch: What was your level of involvement in Team X developments and ideas? When you were working with C-J-W, did you have an important role in Team X meetings or did you only keep punctual contact with some members?
Manfred Schiedhelm: No, I wasn’t invited, not at that time. But after Berlin I was constantly invited. But I had a dialogue with the people before that. And I participated in 4-5 meetings.
JV & XB: The atmosphere of the meetings was sometimes awful…
MS: Tough! Very tough!
JV & XB: Maybe that was the interesting point…
MS: Yes, it was! It was difficult between certain people. Aldo Van Eyck was a very difficult person. God!! And Alison Smithson, she was also not very easy. And forever fighted! I mean, not physically…they really fought on an intellectual level! Differences in their opinions and arguements. But after the week, you came home and you said: “Oh shit, I’ll never go again!” And then, another week passed and: “oh, this guy was right, maybe he was right”…and this way. But it always came out that I had learned something from other points of view. And this is very interesting!
JV & XB: So, these kind of arguements between Aldo and the Smithsons as well as the beginning of Woods’ illness, do you think they could have caused the disappearance of Team X?
MS: It was just a question of age. At a certain point, when Bakema died, that was very difficult and then somehow the group fell apart, in the end of the 70s, I think. But if you think of the Bauhaus, it was maybe 10 years maximum. And that’s enough! Or if we see a man like Pierre Chareau, the Glass-house man in Paris, he did one building which made him famous. It was fantastic! And that was, you know, he did one thing in his life and that made him famous! That was a fantastic piece of architecture!
JV & XB: After the Second World War, during the reconstruction of the old city-centers, cities such as Rotterdam developed a master plan made to order. Why was Frankfurt a competition?
MS: Germany had a long tradition of competitions. And after the war, all was rebuilt and there were lots of them. But that was an invited competition, as was the Berlin competition. And there were others, like Hauptstadt Berlin and so on… there were lots of competitions! I think it’s a good culture, although now it’s very difficult to be like so.
JV & XB: Talking about the continuity of TEAM X, is there any group who has continued the ideas of CIAM?
MS: I don’t know, I think it doesn’t work like that. It’s something that falls apart and something else comes to light. I mean, all the team X members suffered under Postmodernism. Postmodernism was a sort of taking pieces from history and using them. There were good guys like Charles Moore, he was very good. But, the step that postmodernism meant, it was not a broad way of thinking, just a sort of “operetta”. I don’t see it as a continuation.
JV & XB: And one last question, coming back to Le Corbusier and his Hospital of Venice. There is unquestionably a link between these two projects. Do they have any relationship to one another?
MS: This is a big question. We had a meeting at Delft University with Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente. And I don’t know! There was....Woods met Le Corbusier in the street, in Paris, in front of his office. And Le Corbusier said: “what are you doing?” And Woods answered: “Oh, we have just begun a competition for Berlin” and he said to Le Corbusier: “Would I come and explain it to you?” And Le Corbusier said: “Don’t worry, I can read plans, I don’t need to be explained how to read a plan”. So we sent him the plans. Some months later the “Renaissance” would come up.
But I talked to Guillermo a long time and he said: “That’s nonsense, it’s something breaking the time also!” But there was a very interesting meeting in Delft. Guillermo and I were invited to be the old guys. It’s nice! And it was also interesting, I mean, it was crazy to see what people, what art historians think we have thought in those days. You can’t imagine what I thought! I thought thousands of things which never came to my mind!
JV & XB: Thanks a lot for your time.
