This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 1933, a group of architects boarded a ship called the SS Patrice II and set sail from Marseille, France toward Athens, Greece.

On board were several of the world's most famous modernist architects and

artists.

Erno Goldfinger, the Corbusier, Alvar Alto, and dozens of others representing more than 15 countries.

There was a silent film made of the voyage that shows grainy shots of the architects on deck

of the ship in short-sleeved white shirts and sunglasses, cigarettes

in their mouths, their hair blowing gently in the breeze as they listen to lectures.

One of the architects wrote in this journal,

We eat and drink copiously, and we're all half naked.

The architects were on the ship for the International Congress of Modern Architecture,

commonly known by its French acronym, Ciam.

That's senior producer Katie Mingle,

and I'm going to hand this story over to her now.

So, yeah, the architects were on this boat trip for a C.N.

meeting, but more specifically, they were there to talk about how to plan a better city.

The members of CM thought that cities were too congested, too noisy and polluted and chaotic, and they thought that some of these problems

could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones.

So separate everything, everything, housing, working, recreation, the traffic,

separate all the kinds of traffic, so pedestrians, the cyclists, cyclists cars the trains it would mean the end of

congestion that's Zef Hamel I'm Zef Hamel and I'm a planner.

Hamel spent a bunch of years working for the city of Amsterdam as the head of the Urban Planning Department.

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