The absence of common ground on architecture and the city marked the practice and the debate in the 1960s, contrasting with the context of the heroic generation of the early CIAM, three decades before.

Portuguese architect Fernando Távora, reporting the Royaumont Team 10 meeting in 1962 in the journal ‘Arquitectura’, stated that the perception of this impossibility of consensus shouldn’t be considered pessimism but awareness of reality, and that the individual responsibility of the architect, in a framework of “(...) no concrete, clear, precise truths, is a question that more acutely arises, since responsibility is always linked with possibility of choice (...)”.

Less than a decade later, in 1970, Ramon Puig published his criticism on the poor quality of the architecture that was being vastly produced in standard housing in the Spanish territory, a pessimistic architecture, or even a subarchitecure, as he named it. Result of a passive and conformist behaviour of its authors, of the pessimism, ignorance and disbelieve in the capabilities of architecture, it prevailed in the architectonic panorama of the time, he argued. In addition, Carlos Duarte signaled the focus of architectural journals on the exceptional projects, whose quality contrasted with the ordinary production that created the desolate landscapes that were being built - a tendency that would prevail in the following decades.

This session aims to address these questions, the disconnection between the debate, incorporating both a growing attention to the complexity of society and an increasingly distant and utopian avant-garde from the everyday practice that led the extensive transformation of the built environment. Did these and other critics’ production create new challenges and tensions in the practice of architecture? Was the Critic an active voice and important player in the 1960s public debate on the city and collective housing creation? What role played periodicals, singular reflections and reference texts?