“Another aspect is the tension in the modern movement between avant-gardism and the idea of a home.”
Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) is a prominent British architect, critic, historian, and professor of architecture at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. The leading design firm Knoll has described Frampton as “architecture’s sharpest and most prolific lecturer and writer.”
Frampton achieved notoriety (and influence) in architectural education with his essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism” (first published as part of The Anti–Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press, 1983). In his essay, Frampton assumed a critical stance toward postmodernism, with its whimsy and ornamentation; but he also derided the placelessness and lack of identity of Internationalism. Instead, he proposes architecture rooted in the modern tradition yet tied to its geographical and cultural context. By becoming more “local” in its forms, a home becomes more connected to regional weather patterns. As Frampton put it in his essay: “Critical Regionalism necessarily involves a more directly dialectical relation with nature [.]”
He has authored many books, including American Masterworks: The Twentieth-Century House (Rizzoli, 1995) and Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Oxford University Press, 1980). A collection of Frampton’s writings over a period of thirty-five years was published under the title Labour, Work and Architecture (Phaidon, 2002).
Frampton studied architecture at the Guildford School of Art and later at the AA (Architectural Association School of Architecture) in London.
Kenneth Frampton, on the issue of tradition and change, discusses the tension between avant-gardism and nostalgia. He points out how the work of Frank Gehry and other star architects, while impressive, have “a strange kind of spectacular rootlessness.” Innovation has a price, says Frampton, but so does kitsch sentimentality. Looking toward the future, Frampton suggests we may need to abandon the notion of an individual home altogether in favor of more communal, high-density housing.
At the risk of being reductive, as you have been richly and diversely prolific, one might characterize your work as that of an architectural historian engaged in a project to define American architectural modernism in immutable terms. Do you think American architectural modernism has gone “off message”? And if so, what has that meant for housing?
Kenneth Frampton: Of course, one could say it’s not just American architectural modernism that has gone off message. But if we concentrate for a moment on America, I think it’s good to think about the Case Study House Program, which was launched by John Entenza in Southern California after the Second World War, and the postwar idea of the good life in California in relation to those houses. A lot of the young families that were clients of the Case Study houses and similar houses of that period were very ready to live a modern life, which was perhaps easier to do in the climate of Southern California than elsewhere. It’s very clear that the modern American domestic tradition in the twentieth century reached some kind of fulfillment in Los Angeles in the forty years between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. On the East Coast, upwardly mobile or middle-class people with money tend neither to live in modern houses nor to have a particularly modern lifestyle. Robert Stern will do buildings that are recognizably modern with a capital M. But most of his upper-middle-class clients, at least as far as residential architecture is concerned, want a pseudo-colonial house. And that’s what they get.
One might add that the so-called New Urbanism has advocated the same nostalgic imagery, basically. And it’s fused with the American home-building real estate industry in terms of what is salable. I believe that certain banks, on the East Coast anyway, have second thoughts about loaning money to build modern houses because of their perceived lack of resale value. So a kind of middle-class and upper-middle-class consensus has developed about what is a desirable residence. The imagery is more or less simulated, but the actual details of the windows, the entrance, and all the rest are very crudely handled. They’re not refined works.
Another aspect is the tension in the modern movement between avant-gardism and the idea of a home. Frank Lloyd Wright was very successful at creating a progressive, middle-class American image of the home without being kitsch. He brought this to a particularly high level in the Usonian houses, between 1932 and 1940, more or less. He must have built, in his life span, something like two hundred Usonian houses. I’ve often said to students that I think that house was the last attempt to render the American suburb as a place of culture for middle-class people with relatively limited means. There isn’t a continuation of that culture in quite the same way as Wright intended. We could think of that as “going off message,” to use your terminology.
Your question made me think of Clarence Stein, who, in the 1950s, published a book called Toward New Towns for America, which was about the greenbelt resettlement towns that were built under the Roosevelt New Deal. They weren’t Wrightian, but they were remarkable middle-class communities. Collective housing of that quality is very hard to find in the United States at this moment.
What do you mean by saying that Wright created an “image of the home without being kitsch”?
Frampton: What I mean is that the imagery should not be nostalgic. It should convey a sense of well-being through the organization of space, the quality of the materials, the refinement of the detailing, the convenience of the arrangement of fittings and furnishings, and the refinement of the landscape in relation to it being a closed, domestic domain. I think one could specify all those values without any of them being overdetermined from a nostalgic point of view.
When you were writing American Masterworks: The Twentieth-Century House, what criteria guided your choices? What formal considerations and design expressions were you collecting together in the book?
Frampton: I’ve often asked myself, “What is it that justifies including a particular house in the book rather than another?” If you think about what is produced, lots of houses could be characterized as modern. So why select a certain one? It’s not just intuition. Part of it has to do with image, in that all thirty-four houses represented in the book have a very striking and immediately apparent image. In talking to students and other colleagues, I’ve always been rather loath to use the term “image,” but this question of an image of a work is important. It’s not sufficient for the work to have a strong image if when you go closer and get inside it, there’s nothing else. I thought about including a John Lautner house, but what’s disappointing about Lautner is that while the image is powerful, when you go deeper into the houses, they’re rather loosely formulated. There’s not much care taken with the details. There’s no follow-through with Lautner houses. They’re all rhetoric, both inside and out.
I coined from my own usage a concept of “micro space.” I think the way the interior of the space is articulated in relation to the human body and in relation to the overall frame of the house is extremely important. A particularly good example of that is Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House, where however delicate (sometimes to the point of fragile) Schindler’s furniture is, the relationship of the scale of that furniture to the light and to the windows is all very integrated without being oppressive.
Those qualities are very evident in the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, of course. But they are also present in Richard Neutra’s work. Neutra and Schindler were both, in a way, acolytes of Wright. But apart from Wright, and together with Gregory Ain and others, Neutra and Schindler created the Southern California style. Certainly Pierre Koenig could be included in that group, but I am also thinking of someone more of Ain’s generation—J. R. Davidson maybe. In Esther McCoy’s book on California architects, The Second Generation [Gibbs Smith, 1984], she deals with this generation that came after Wright, including Raphael Soriano and Harwell Hamilton Harris. These people aren’t Wrightian, but they follow the line coming from Wright. They pay extremely close attention to the hierarchical space inside the house, the sequence of spaces, and the scale as the body moves through the house.
For the book, I tried to select houses where that was the case, where the impact of the image was manifested in what happens afterward. I included a Craig Ellwood house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian house, Steven Holl’s house in Texas, and an art deco residence in Cranbrook by Eliel Saarinen, which is the first in the sequence. All of them have this quality, I think.
I suppose if you tried to push back a bit further, you would come to the English Arts and Crafts house and to architects like Richard Norman Shaw, where the character of the house is to some extent an expression of both the architect and the client, and also of a way of life. I think one could argue that the English Arts and Crafts house was to a certain degree nostalgic for a vernacular that no long existed and was some exemplification of a “country life.” Both the architect and the client valued that country life, and the character of the house was very much bound up with that.
Perhaps one could say the same of the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson. But the image of Richardson’s houses is slightly different. It’s more patrician than the British Arts and Craft house. It seems to me that Richardson, after the Civil War, has a very clear idea of what could be an alternative American civilization. That is what Wright inherits from Richardson. The greatness of Richardson lies in the fact that after the Civil War, he is able to imagine and realize both public buildings and domestic works that represent the United States as something other than a secondhand version of European culture. The European Romanesque becomes the vehicle for Richardson to express an American culture both publicly and privately. Wright builds on that and tries to take it further with more originality—much more, of course.
A lot of your work studies important individual architects, often highlighting emerging innovators. What is it about our times that we are suddenly celebrating our more accomplished architects as cultural stars? Their prominence seems to be based on the hope and expectation that they are solving some social challenges for us. Are they addressing the right problems?
Frampton: Recently, I was asked by Thames and Hudson to write an additional chapter to the book Modern Architecture: A Critical History to cover 1985 to 2005. An enormous production of architecture has taken place worldwide in those twenty years. It was virtually impossible to select what to include and what to exclude. I mention that because in the introduction to that chapter, I talk about this question of the brand or the celebrity architect—the star architect—and the way such architects have a tendency to become almost commodities in themselves and the problematic character of the work. These people are talented, of course, but the work has a strange kind of spectacular rootlessness. Frank Gehry is the prime example, but there are other figures, of course, like Rem Koolhaas and so on.
Are they addressing the right problems? Well, I don’t think they’re solving any social challenges. They’re simply doing spectacular work. It is dramatic, theatrical, at its best a sort of overwhelming spectacle. It’s particularly true of Gehry, for example, of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. When you enter the building, there’s nothing in it. It’s really a substandard structure inside; once you finish with the spectacular skin and the shape, the building has no quality. Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, may be the best building of that genre that he’s done, but he’s also stuck with that genre.
The system of star architecture takes place at a price. All over the world are very talented architects who could do superior work, but some clients aren’t even open to the possibility. They simply want the name. And going for the name is a closed circuit.
Sadly, the competition system has always been rather weak in the United States. Whereas in some European countries, for example, in Scandinavia in general and Finland in particular, also Spain, a lot of public building is decided by competition. It may be changing now, but it was a very different cultural proposition in which municipal governments of medium-sized communities would hold a competition for a particular public building, either a completely open competition, which wasn’t always a good idea, or a limited competition, which would often produce better results. In the United States, people just don’t hold competitions. Trustees decide to hire an architect, or the developer wants a certain architect. So there is no competition; the person is just commissioned.
The problem is at the level of architectural culture in the society as a whole. Newspapers ought to be able to do that job of evaluating architecture and educating the public. But it’s very difficult to develop in the society a culture of architecture that is broader, less prone to manipulation by the media, and less subject to fashion. The whole question of intercity competition with brand architects is a closed loop. I don’t want to say that buildings of quality never get produced that way. The Guthrie Theater, by Jean Nouvel, in Minneapolis, for example, might be better than usual. I don’t know; it’s hard to judge by the photos.
There are good architects in this country: Steven Holl, for example. I suppose he is on the edge of being a celebrity architect, but he’s an architect of real quality. Michael Maltzan is a young Los Angeles architect who is of considerable quality. I think he’s much more interesting than Frank Gehry.
In Studies in Tectonic Culture, you suggest that modern architecture is as much about structure and construction as it is about space and abstract form, and you study a long history of architecture as a constructional craft. Please talk about the theme of the book and its relationship to our present moment in residential design.
Frampton: In the end, it comes down to the idea of relative autonomy, of certain artistic fields versus others. One of the aspects of architecture from the point of view of relative autonomy is that it is constructed. This makes it very distinct from figurative art and even from quite a lot of abstract art. It’s very distinct from film, theater, dance, and so on. You could say that the fact that it is constructed is fundamental. The subtitle to Studies in Tectonic Culture is The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. And the attempt, in writing that book for teaching purposes, is to constantly emphasize this question of the constructed work and the poetics of that discourse of structure and construction as a modern tradition that goes back a long way, and as some kind of guarantee, in a sense, that one would resist the reduction of architecture to superficial images, to cinegraphic form, and to spectacle. So even though I use the term “image” in relation to the house—and I think the image work of architecture has importance—that image should be integral with its spatial organization, its structure, and its construction. It should be inseparable from those other dimensions. That’s what Studies in Tectonic Culture was trying to argue for.
As for this present moment in residential design, I’ve often said to myself (and sometimes to students, but not so much publicly) that one of the problems that the architectural profession and schools of architecture face is that the true challenge of residential design is ignored or refused. The challenge is how to imagine a viable land settlement pattern for a modern middle class that is capable of giving the image of shelter, security, and home but is not kitsch. It’s a complex question that has to be formulated on a wide front.
You could argue that the individual house is a problem in itself. In the end, I would argue that one shouldn’t live in individual houses; one should live more collectively. In the past, I’ve been involved with low-rise, high-density housing, and I still believe in the concept. But it is very difficult to convince the society that one can live a valued middle-class life like that. Such is the unreal premium placed by clients, banks, and mortgage companies on the individual private house standing on its own ground.