Closing debate 
by Dirk van den Heuvel

Among the Team 10 documents compiled by Alison and Peter Smithson we find notes on meetings that never took place. The Smithsons mentioned in particular the ones to be held in Portugal and in Amsterdam around 1980, which never happened among others because of the death of Jaap Bakema in 1981.

The topics listed by the Smithsons as possible subjects for discussion pertain to questions of global and regional migration, displacement and cross-cultural exchanges: How can cultures work together, how can they enrich and extend each other, especially so in the case of the North and the South, between Portugal and Morocco, Europe and North Africa? And referring to Pancho Guedes’ work in South Africa and Aldo van Eyck’s Mothers’ House in Amsterdam, the Smithsons asked their fellow architects engaged in the Team 10 discourse: What sort of places can one imagine to build for so-called ‘guest’ workers and for displaced people?

The histories and cultures of the Iberian Peninsula provide an appropriate and inspirational background to look into these urgent issues, the relentless trauma of the experience of modernity, then and now. In terms of Habitat and environmental thinking in the broadest senses, what insights are to be gained from history? Can architecture offer relief, or hope?

Dirk van den Heuvel is associate professor at TU Delft – Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. He is currently the head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.