NOTES
- Tzonis , Alexander . 2003 . “Introducing an Architecture of the Present: Critical Regionalism and the Design of Identity,” . In Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World New York : Prestel . in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis,.
- 1981 . “The Grid and the Pathway,” . In Architecture in Greece Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre, 15: 164–78.
- A+U A version of the text titled “Why Critical Regionalism Today?” appeared in 236 (May 1990): 23–33. The 1981 essay was published in Fur eine andere Architektur (Darmstadt: Fischer Taschenbuch), 121–34.
- Tzonis . “Introducing an Architecture of the Present,” . 20
- I follow Fredric Jameson's discussion of the theme of temporality. See n51 below.
- The Seeds of Time Jameson's observation on “critical” is predicated on a situation that the regional itself is part of global identity.—Jameson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 204. The title of this essay is in part motivated by Jameson's reading of Kenneth Frampto.'s text on critical regionalism.
- 2005 . Harvard Design Magazine For a critique of the idea of critical, see George Baird, “‘Criticalit.’ and its Discontents,” 21 (Fall 2004-Winter 2005): 16–21. Also see Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (Spring-Summer): 104–9. These two texts draw their argument on the idea of the end of ideology and/or history.
- Lefaivre and Tzonis . “Why Critical Regionalism Today?” . 29
- 1965 . Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press . Using the term “defamiliarisation”, Russian literary theoretician Victor Shklovsky suggested that the power of art is to draw ones attention and this is achieved when art discloses itself beyond the habitual way of digesting its form. See his trans. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis. For the application of “defamiliarisation” to theorising architecture, see Tzonis and Lefaivre, Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1986).
- Zizek , Slavoj . 1999 . The Ticklish Subject London : Verso . The entire book is recommended to those who are interested in issues such as “identity”, “multiculturalism”, and “nation/state”.
- Jameson . The Seeds ofTime 190
- Hartoonian . 1997 . Modernity and its Other College Station : Texas A & M University Press .
- Tzonis . Critical Regionalism 10
- 2002 . A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present London : Verso . Here is how Fredric Jameson plots the differentiation he suggests: according to him, all three countries, America, Germany, and the Soviets ‘had vibrant modernisms in the 1920s and until they were abruptly cut short around the same time in the early 1930s. At the aesthetic level, this situation certainly justifies Haberma.'s well-known slogan of modernism as an unfulfilled promise, and an unfinished project. ‘He continues:.’ What is crucial for us is not only that they did not develop artistically, but that they also failed to reach their moment of theorisation, which is to say, in out present context, the moment in which some properly “modernist” aesthetic practice could be codified in the form of and ideology of modernism.'—Jameson, 167.
- Foster , Hal . 2003 . Design and Crime 100 London : Verso . In criticism of the present culture of the visual, Foster underlines the usefulness of “strategic autonomy” for critical practice. His argument is based on the historicity of 1920s modernism, when the situation was foggy enough for the subject to claim autonomy from the fetishism of the past: thus the modernist tendency to couple the idea of progress with that of the machine.
- 1993 . Principles of Art History Cambridge and London : The MIT Press . In analysing the art of past times, nineteenth century art historians tried to reconcile the concept of autonomy with social context. Their goal was to periodise the history of arts. Cf. Heinrich Wölfflin, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950); Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History andTheory.
- According to Robert MacLeod . 1836 . Contrasts one of the most significant contributions of A. W. N. Pugin's was to articulate a direct relationship between the function of a product and its society.—Cf. MacLeod, Style and Society: Architectural Ideology in Britain 1835–1914 (London: Roba, 1971), 9.
- 1998 . The Fate of Place Berkeley : University of California Press . For example: Edward S. Casey,.
- 1988 . Architecture: Meaning and Place New York : Rizzoli . Cf. Christian Norberg-Schulz,. Interestingly enough, discussing the work of Austrian historian Joseph August Lux, Mark Jarzombek suggests that one symptom of ‘the strong attachment among German bourgeois intellectuals to the age of romanticis.’ might be related to architects‘and historian.’ ‘interest in the Romantic-era concept of genius loci.’—Jarzombek, “Joseph August Lux: Werkbund Promoter, Historian of a Lost Modernity,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, 2 (June 2004): 203. Central to this view of the genius loci is the desire to make a balance between modernisation and traditions of architecture seen through transcendental values of Catholicism.
- Heidegger , Martin . 1971 . “Building Dwelling and Thinking,” . In Poetry, Language, Thought New York : Harper and Row . in trans. A. Hofstadler, 149.
- The idea is not limited to Hitchcock; one can also explore the importance of technique and abstract painting in the historiography of Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner.
- Mumford , Lewis . 1967 . The South in Architecture 106 New York : DaCapo Press .
- Mumford . The South in Architecture 103
- Mumford . The South in Architecture 91 Mumford makes it clear that his sympathy with “romantic theorists” differs from those of Pugin in England, and the American Upjohn. Similar to the “lovers of classics”, Upjohn, according to Mumford, made the same mistake by ‘making out of the architecture of the Middle Ages a fixed ideal.’ (89).
- 1993 . Santa Monica : The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities . Aspects of which are discussed in Harry F. Mallgrave, ed., Otto Wagner.
- 1948 . The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin For a brief view of the lectures presented in the gathering mentioned, see (Spring).
- 1963 . There are two sources of expressionism: German Expressionism, and Romanticism. Expressionism did indeed distance itself from painting and sculpture even before the outbreak of World War I. Expressionism can be defined as the expression of inner emotions; in art it could be defined in terms of the expression of the visual aspects or the structure of the form. Mumford seemed to use “expressionism” in terms of the discourse of organicism at work since the nineteenth century. In a 1962 symposium at Columbia University, “expressionism” was discussed as one important subject for historicising modern architecture. In this gathering Hitchcock said: ‘Expressionism was intended to be a new architecture as Art Nouveau had been, with a certain “form will”.’ Some forms delight, others do not. Expressionistic architecture is overtly emotional, and not Sachlich. It is aimed at an emotional response. It is not subjective, but it has some subjectivity in it.”—”Architecture 1918–28: From the November Group to the C.I.A.M. Functionalism and Expressionism,” proceedings of a symposium held May 4–5, 1962, Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University, 41.
- “Architecture 1918–28,” 10.
- 1947 . Architecture Culture 1943–68 Quoted in Joan Ockman, ed., (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 109. The article was first published in New Yorker, October 11
- 1944 . “Nine Points on Monumentality,” . In Architecture Culture New York : Philosophy Library . See J. L. Sert, F. Leger, S. Giedion, in Ockman, ed., 29. The article was originally published in Paul Zucker, New Architecture and City Planning.
- Bowie , Andrew . 1990 . Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche 24 Manchester : Manchester University Press .
- 1993 . Modern Architecture New York : Da Capo Press . Criticising the available languages of skyscrapers built in American big cities, only F. L. Wright's Larkin Soup factory received Hitchcoc.'s endorsement. The building, according to him, ‘has an expression in design truly integral with the engineering.’ The other tall buildings, he continues, ‘display the futility of attempting to leave aesthetic expression to the surface without truly affecting the economic and functional principles which determine the development of the whole.’—Cf. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, (1929,), 104.
- 1948 . The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin Quoted in a symposium held in Museum of Modern Art titled “What is Happening to Modern Architecture.” For a summery of the presentations, see (Spring): 4–21.
- He concludes that . “ ‘the extreme, or polar, topics do not seem to be the most important ones historically, but rather those national institutions or cases of individual architects that reflect several not necessarily closely related aspects of the contemporary scene in the 1930s.’ ” . In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians —Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The Decade 1929–39” in 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 5.
- 1997 . The Brown Decades New York : Monacelli Press . The statement should be read in the context of the author's reading of Mumfor.'s (New York: Dover Publications, 1931). According to Francesco Dal Co, Mumford's book.’ reveals a contradiction characteristic of Mumford's thought. The contradiction consists in the impossibility of finding a correct synthesis between the consequences of technical and scientific conquest and the values of tradition.’—Dal Co, “Winners and Losers, Interpreting the Mumford of the Brown Decades,” in R. E. Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, 198.
- Interestingly enough . Architecture Australia in a recent interview in Australia, Frampton suggested that ‘this visit to Australia has been interesting because participating in a sequence of public presentations has provoked me into thinking about how critical regionalism might be related in a more specific way to the issue of the tectonic or the “poetics of construction”.’—Frampton, interviewed by Maryam Gusheh, 93, no. 5 (September-October 2004): 98–99.
- Foster , Hal . Crime and Design 103
- 2003 . Transcritique: On Kant and Marx Cambridge and London : The MIT Press . Discussing “parallax” in Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani says: ‘I.'s something like ones own face in the sense that it undoubtedly exists but cannot be seen except as an image.'—Karatani, 47.
- Greenberg , Clement . 1961 . “Avant-garde and Kitsch” . In Art and Culture: Critical Essays Boston : Beacon Press . in, 5.
- Greenberg , Clement . 1986 . “Towards a Newer Laocoon” . In Collected Essays Chicago : The University of Chicago Press . (1940), in, 28.
- Greenberg , Clement . “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 32. Greenberg continues ‘the history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium, which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plan.'s denial of efforts to “hole through” it for realistic perspectival space' (34). This is a provocative statement even though his understanding of “functionalism” . as the medium of architecture is rather reductive.
- Jameson , See . The Seeds of Time 194
- Frampton . 1980 . Modern Architecture: A Critical History London : Thames & Hudson .
- Frampton . 1983 . “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” . In Perspecta 20: 147–61. In this article Frampton maps the thematic of “critical regionalism” without over toning the dichotomy between “national culture” and civilization. Also see Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 16.
- 1980 . Modern Architecture and the Critical Present This subject is discussed in Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of his Objects,” in Frampton, ed., (London: Academy Editions, 1982), 7. This issue of Architectural Design Profile was published on the occasion of Frampton's publication of Critical History
- 1980 . In Frampton's Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Walter Benjamin is mentioned twice, and Martin Heidegger once. Quotations from Benjamin's famous essays “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), and “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1930) are chosen to make an opening for the introduction of the book, and the last chapter of the first part respectively. Heidegger, instead, is chosen for the final chapter of the edition of the book. The juxtaposition of these two thinkers for the opening and closing sections of the book is of significance, aspects of which are discussed in the footnote below.
- 1977 . The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays New York : Harper and Row . The essay was first published in 1954. See Martin Heidegger,. What makes the association between Heidegger and Benjamin interesting is the following: that the bridge, discussed in Heidegger's 1954 essay, is presented as an analogue to amalgamate technique, material, and utility. At the same time Heidegger presents the bridge as an artifice having the capacity to evoke the sense of “nearness” while keeping the two banks of the river apart.
- Frampton . “Place, Production, and Scenography,” . In Modern Architecture in 297.
- Burger , Peter . 1984 . Theory of Avant-Garde Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . See also this author's discussion in “Avant-Garde: Re-Thinking Architecture,” Modernity and its Other, 103.
- Habermas . “Modernity: An-Incomplete Project,” . In The Anti-Aesthetic in Foster, ed., 3.
- A Singular Modernity Discussing the rise of neotraditionalism in the Third World societies, Jameson argues that in these societies ‘nothing but the modern henceforth exists.’ He continues, ‘with the qualifications that under such circumstances, where only the modern exists, “modern” now be baptised postmodernity. Here too then, but on a social and historical level, the temporality that modernisation promised has been eclipsed to the benefit of a new condition in which that older temporality no longer exists, leaving an appearance of random changes that are mere stasis, a disorder after the end of history.’—Jameson, 20.
- The New York Five's timely departure from the language of late modern architecture was seen as a radical alternative to postmodern simulation of historical forms.
- 1985 . Oppositions Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . See Frampton's editorial, “On Reading Heidegger,” 4 (1974): 1–4; also Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity. This Italian thinker presents a fresh departure from the phenomenological reading of Heidegger. It is needless to describe the extent to which Vattimo's discourse was significant for this autho.'s approach to the tectonic.—Hartoonian, Ontology of Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- 2000 . Architectural Theory Review By “culture of building”, I recall tropes accumulated throughout the history of architectural theory and practice. I am thinking of ‘ideas concerning inside/outside relations, the dialogical rapport between column and wall, the tectonic achieved by symbolic embellishment of a constructed form, and that of the earth-work and the frame-work discussed by the nineteenth century German architect Gottfried Semper.’—Hartoonian, “Five Points: Unweaving the Old Cloth,” vol 5, no. 1,: 44–55.
- Hartoonian . “Avant-Garde: Re-Thinking Architecture,” . In Modernity and its Other in 103. This dimension of Frampton's position is dismissed in Jameso.'s reading of “Critical Regionalism”.—Jameson, The Seeds ofTime, 185–205.
- Frampton . 2005 . “Critical Regionalism Revisited: Reflections on the Mediatory Potential of Built Form,” . In Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalisation, and the Built Environment California : Stanford University Press . in M. Umbach and B. Huppauf, eds., 193.
- Suter , Ursula . 1994 . “The ‘Neues Baue.’ by other means: The International Building Brigades in the Soviet Union,” . In Daidalos 54: 49.
- 1998 . Technology, Place and Architecture New York : Rizzoli . Regardless of what his critics say, the fact remains that Frampton's esteem for the culture of building and the need to transform nature into landscape (architecture), are important subjects for critical practise even today. As he puts it succinctly,.’ this evocation of the earthwork returns us to the issue of global urbanization and to the fact that the reintegration of land-form into built-fabric is crucial today if we are to be able to mediate in any way the consequences of metropolitan developments.'—Frampton, “Introduction,” in, 12.
- 2002 . Perspecta 33: Mining Autonomy Cambridge and London : The MIT Press . The idea of how to subdue “reason” is central to Kant, and critical theory. In thinking of Ledoux with Kant, Hubert Damisch concludes that architecture is an object of history and thought, ‘a thought that is itself bound by conditions.’ He continues, architecture ‘is constituted on this principle insofar as it is an object of desire, where the will—as Kant says—find its determination.’ And yet, as insofar as architecture ‘is a thing to construct—is subjected to constraints that attest, even in the constructive order, to the force of symbolic.’—Damisch, “Ledoux with Kant,”, 15.
- 2004 . Tracing Modernity London and New York : Routledge . This is true if one considers architects such as the early Mario Botta, Alvaro Siza and Tadao Ando whose built projects informed Frampton's formulation of critical regionalism. One might go further and associate Frampton with that school of architecture that ‘aims to provide deeper meaning not by returning to older systems of belief, but through the creation of new values in and through art.’ This position has, according to Gabriele Bryant, ‘its roots in the literary debates of romanticism and the philosophy of German idealism, which exerted a profound influence on art and architectural theory from 1800 onward.’—Bryant, “Projecting modern culture: ‘Aesthetic fundamentalis.’ and modern architecture,” in, 69.
- 1995 . Ontology of Construction; Cambridge and London : The MIT Press . The following discussion draws from this author's work on the tectonic: esp. Hartoonian, and Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture.
- 1996 . Gottfried Semper New Haven : Yale University Press . On Gottfried Semper's notion of Stoffwechsel, see Harry F. Mallgrave, 284. For further elaboration on these issues see this author's book reviews in Architectural Theory Review 9, no. 2 (2004): 111–14, and 10, no. 1 (2005): 137–41, respectively.
- 2006 . Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality London and New York : Routledge . This has encouraged me to differentiate Gottfried Semper's notion of theatricality from theatricalisation, a visuality permeating contemporary neo-avant-garde architecture.—Cf. Hartoonian,.