Kenneth Frampton
This account of my involvement with the particular mode of beholding known as critical regionalism could perhaps more properly be titled “The Genealogy of Critical Regionalism.” As far as I am concerned, the concept dates to 1962, when I became the technical editor of the British magazine Architectural Design, a position that I held for just under three years before coming to the United States to teach at Princeton University. Stirling and Gowan had only just completed the Leicester University Engineering Building, and in February 1964 we devoted a considerable number of pages in the magazine to document that work. In the same year, the Economist Building was completed and in 1966 came the swan song of Brutalism, Reyner Banham’s book The New Brutalism.1
These British developments suggest that Brutalism was, in some sense, a regional manifestation, a kind of proto-postmodern sequel to the utopian thrust of the modern movement in its prime. By this I mean the constructivist/purist ethos and the progressive social line that it was broadly associated with prior to the denouement of the Second World War. Around 1963, some eighteen years after the end of the war, during the still enduring postwar, welfare state period—I first felt that a more locally rooted architectural culture could be found in the “city states” of continental Europe than in the equivalent British provincial cities. I began to play with the idea that on the Continent (as we British still referred to it then) and, above all, in the belatedly unified nation-states of Germany, Italy, and the Swiss Federation, one could still identify an intimate connection between the work of a particular architect and the city in which he or she lived and worked. And it was through this all but mythical notion that my coeditor Monica Pidgeon and I began to feature in Architectural Design certain architects and works that seemed to be grounded in a particular urban milieu. We brought these connections into focus in the magazine; we published features on such architects as Aris Konstantinidis in Athens, Ernst Gisel in Zurich, Gino Valle in Udine, and Oswald Mathias Ungers in Cologne. We somehow overlooked Carlo Scarpa’s particularly fertile connection to Venice, although we published his work, notably his Gavina showroom of 1963. At the time I postulated the notion that there was, in each of these instances, a mutual identification between the architect and the society in which he worked. I thought then, as to some degree I still do, that the way to achieve an authentic, inflected, but still modern architectural culture was to return as a rear guard ploy to grass roots. All of this anticipated the emergence of critical regionalism in the early 1980s. However, the term had yet to be coined.
Toward the end of the 1970s, after a stint on the faculty of the Royal College of Art in London, I found myself back in New York, teaching studio and history/theory at Columbia University alongside Robert Stern. Stern was then riding on the crest of the stylistic postmodern wave; his ideological basis, at the time, embodied Robert Venturi’s concept of the “decorated shed” as it had appeared in Venturi’s canonical text of 1966, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.2 Stern dominated the discourse in the Columbia studios during this period, and I was compelled to recognize that the socioculturally radical modern project in architecture, as in other fields, no longer carried the conviction that it had prior to the tragic outcome of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing disaster of the Second World War. This, then, was my assessment of the predicament of the postmodern condition in architecture, as I wrote in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, the first edition of which appeared in 1980:
Also in 1980 Paolo Portoghesi presented a stylistically postmodern architecture exhibition, The End of Prohibition, at the Venice Biennale titled The Presence of the Past. Although I had already declared my veneration for the work of Alvar Aalto as a fundamental ground for a critical modernity, this did not prevent Stern from inviting me to Venice as part of the American delegation to assist with the organization of Portoghesi’s Biennale. One visit to Venice was enough for me, however. I promptly resigned once I understood where “the end of prohibition” was going to end up: that is, in the false fronts of the Strada Novissima built by the operatives of Cinecittà, designed by a spectrum of architects ranging from Stern to Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas to Leon Krier—Krier being the only one to insist that his false front be made of real materials.
The Venice Biennale experience stimulated, as a reaction, my 1983 essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” which first appeared in Hal Foster’s anthology, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.4 Also influencing my essay was a critical response to Modern Architecture: A Critical History. Architectural Design had published a design profile on the book with commissioned reviews by leading architects and critics, including Alan Colquhoun, David Dunster, Rafael Moneo, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Demetri Porphyrios, Manfredo Tafuri, and Bruno Zevi. All of those invited agreed to write something with the exception of the Czech émigré, architect, and phenomenologist Dalibor Vesely, who was then teaching in the school of architecture at Cambridge. To my chagrin, Vesely refused, saying that what I had tried to elucidate in my final chapter had been handled much more succinctly and profoundly by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in a 1961 essay titled “Universal Civilization and National Cultures.”5 I immediately sought out this text, which oriented me toward what would soon become the philosophical basis of my regionalist argument. This finally came to light in “Towards a Critical Regionalism.”
Ricoeur’s evocation of the time-honored distinction between civilization and culture had a decisive and lasting impact on my way of looking at the world, so much so that I cannot forgo quoting his words here. Despite the slightly dated tone, his appraisal of the predicament of modernization is still as pertinent now as it was half a century ago, when France was in the throes of divesting itself of its last colony:
In “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” I followed Ricoeur’s words with my “Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” which included culture and civilization; the rise and fall of the avant-garde; critical regionalism and world culture; the resistance of the place-form; culture vs. nature topography: context, climate, light, and tectonic form; and visual versus tactile.
My advocacy of a resistant cultural strategy was directly indebted (as I made clear through my citation of their work) to Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s canonical essay of 1981, “The Grid and the Pathway,” in which they coined the term “Critical Regionalism.” In their essay, they compared the topographic rationalism of Aris Konstantinidis’s “grid” to the organic topography of Dimitris Pikionis’s “pathway” in the paved, rubble-stone staging ground built on Philopappos Hill outside the Acropolis in Athens in 1959. From this comparison, Tzonis and Lefaivre made the first pertinent formulation of critical regionalism:
A number of critiques and countercritiques of this thesis have appeared over the past thirty years, including my own 1990 essay “Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” in which I distanced myself somewhat from this view.8 In my 1995 book, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, I tried to reground some kind of resistant argument in what I had the temerity to call “the poetics of construction.”9 Then came a brilliantly sympathetic critique of my thesis by someone who was totally outside the field of architecture, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, whose book The Seeds of Time presented, among other things, the following judgment on the cultural/political limitations of critical regionalism. In his brilliant counterthesis, Jameson returned to the idea of the decorated shed.
In their 2003 book Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, Lefaivre and Tzonis categorically dismissed my Critical Regionalist position as chauvinistic.11 What they no doubt meant by this, although they did not spell it out, is that it was too regressively Heideggerian. Many other criticisms followed, notably those in Vincent B. Canizaro’s 2007 reader, Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition.12 Of the many critiques in that book, none is perhaps as inadvertently prejudicial as Keith Eggener’s “Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism,” wherein he cites Marina Waismann to the effect that “the Latin American version of regionalism is quite different from that proposed by Kenneth Frampton or Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre…and that it should be properly understood as a divergence rather than a resistance.”13 Both Eggener and Waismann tended to regard critical regionalism as a superimposition of concepts originating in the center rather than on the periphery. Although I never categorically stated as much, I feel that this mode of beholding is as pertinent to the center as to the periphery, inasmuch as the juggernaut of civilization in the form of maximizing technology is a threat at a time when the difference between center and periphery is less and less relevant, and when the consumerist tendency to commodify everything, everywhere, continues unabated. For example, the traditional urban fabric of London is being as relentlessly destroyed by freestanding, commodifying high-rise buildings as, say, the traditional urban fabric of Kurashiki in Japan, which after the Second World War was still intact.
In 1986 in my reformulation of critical regionalism in the second edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, I allowed the voices of the periphery to speak for themselves.14 I cited Álvaro Siza Vieira for his Beires House in Portugal (1976) and for the importance he gave to the idea of transformation, anticipating his ironic slogan: “Architects don’t invent anything, they just transform reality.” Elsewhere I quoted Luis Barragán for the memories of his childhood in the Mexican village of Mazamitla, which he recalled with the words, “No, I have no photographs, I have only the memory,” and Harwell Hamilton Harris for his distinction between regionalisms:15
Three years after writing “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” I began to move away from this position largely because whenever I lectured on the subject in the United States I was met with the objection, particularly by students, that there were no roots of a regional culture or identity remaining in their particular location, despite the evident variations in climate, geology, etc. I thought to myself then, as I do now, that this was to some extent the consequence of universal air-conditioning as a maximized technology. In any event, I moved away from this allegorical theme to focus not on technology as an end in itself as per the British high-tech movement, but rather on the tectonic as a “poetic of construction.” I based my four Cullinan Lectures at Rice University in Texas in 1986 on the architects Auguste Perret, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, and Jørn Utzon; the lectures formed the core of Studies in Tectonic Culture. As noted earlier, my writings informed Jameson’s critique of critical regionalism in The Seeds of Time, in which he wrote:
After four decades of involvement with critical regionalism, where do I stand now with regard to the predicament of architecture in an increasingly globalized world? One possible response is to focus on the finite capacity of the earth to sustain the regeneration of the human species as a whole. In the latest edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, I discussed the last twenty years of pluralist production under the rubric of the following six categories: Topography, Morphology, Sustainability, Materiality, Habitat, and Civic Form.18 These categories were discussed under a gloss drawn from a seminar held in New Zealand and published under the title, Is Capitalism Sustainable?: Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology. The gloss came from Martin O’Connor’s contribution to the seminar, in which he stated:
In many respects such an overriding “ecopolitical” critique brings one back to the possibility of critical regionalism as a kind of one-off, quixotic site of resistance. While it is not able to alter the dominant spectacular, technoscientific global corporate discourse, it is nonetheless still able to articulate a resistant place-form within a smaller society, which, here and there, may maintain a dissenting cultural and political position.
1 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism (London: Architectural Press, 1966).
2 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 1966).
3 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4th ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 343.
4 Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).
5 Paul Ricoeur, “Universalization and National Cultures,” in History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 276–83.
6 Ibid., 276–77.
7 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981): 178.
8 Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural Design 60, no. 3–4 (1990): 19–25.
9 Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, ed. John Cava (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
10 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 202–3.
11 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich and London: Prestel, 2003).
12 Vincent B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).
13 Keith Eggener, “Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism,” in Canizaro, 204.
14 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 2nd ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), last chapter.
15 Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragan (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976).
16 Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Regionalism and Nationalism” (address to the Northwest Regional Council of the AIA, Eugene, Oregon, 1954).
17 Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 197.
18 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 4th ed., Part 3, Chapter 7.
19 Martin O’Connor, “Codependency and Indeterminacy: A Critique of the Theory of Production,” in Is Capitalism Sustainable?: Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology (New York & London: Guilford Press, 1994), 55.