conversation with kenneth frampton-r.banham

A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton

STAN ALLEN AND HAL FOSTER

OCTOBER 106, Fall 2003, pp. 35–58. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hal Foster: Our occasion is the recent publication of Labour, Work and Architecture(2002), but we should also look back to Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995) andfurther back, given its wide readership, to Modern Architecture: A CriticalHistory (1980). Let’s begin with your formation as an architect.

Kenneth Frampton: I was trained at the Architectural Association (AA) in London from1950 to 1956. After that I went into the British Army for two years, which was aridiculous experience except for basic training. I then went to Israel for a year,which was a positive experience, architecturally speaking, in that it was asimpler country with a basic building technology. Within this limited scope,one was free to do what one wanted. I returned to London and started to workfor Douglas Stephen and Partners, a relatively small practice in the City Center.I was an associate of this office until I left for the States in 1965.

Foster: Whom did you confront at the AA, in terms of teachers and fellow students?Frampton: My group at the AA is a lost generation in many ways. There were and

still are peers of considerable talent, but they’ve had mixed careers. NeaveBrown is surely one of them. He has had the long career as a housing architect,but it hasn’t been easy for him. Perhaps the most talented of my generationwas Patrick Hodgkinson, who worked briefly with Alvar Aalto as a student,and then for Leslie Martin in Cambridge. He had a spectacular career at thebeginning, but then it faltered, and he spent the greater part of his lifeteaching at the University of Bath. He was a brilliant teacher, but thearchitectural talent he displayed as a student wasn’t fulfilled. Arthur Kornwas important to the AA climate at the time; he was a Jewish émigré fromBerlin who had worked for Erich Mendelsohn (he was also a close friend ofLudwig Hilberseimer). Korn indulged in a radical leftist discourse duringthis period. One of the things that now seems quaint is that in the 1950s,inside a relatively small school like the AA, there were student associationsaligned with three political parties: communist, socialist, and conservative.

This was also the prime era of the British welfare state, which in architec-ture affected school building in particular. After the Beveridge Report andEducation Act of 1944, there was a spate of rather brilliant school buildings,

especially in Hertfordshire. As students, we also visited Hunstanton when itwas under construction in the early fifties.

Foster: That’s the school by Peter and Alison Smithson, a landmark New Brutalistbuilding . . .

Frampton: Right. As it happens, Peter Smithson was our design tutor toward the endof my time at the AA, perhaps the most distinguished teacher of that moment.

Foster: But they were a part of the generation ahead of you, as was James Stirling.Frampton: The Smithsons had a rivalrous relationship with Stirling. In a CIAM IX

meeting at Aix-en-Provence in 1953, Peter Smithson seems to have shownStirling’s work without making it quite clear that it wasn’t by the Smithsons.At that date the neovernacular forms being used by all of them, especially forsmall-scale cellular housing, were similar. Interestingly, they were influencedby a book called The English Village by Thomas Sharp, an English planner whoanalyzed British agricultural villages and their characteristic cluster and linearformation. Already nostalgic, I would say, but also a great modification of thetabula rasa approach of the modern movement in the interwar period.

Foster: When you say your generation was semilost, do you also mean it was in theshadow of the generation of the Smithsons and Stirling?

Frampton: I’m talking about my specific class at the AA, and some classes just don’tfind their way. In fact a class or two after mine, in which Edward Jones was aleading figure, has effectively prevailed. I have in mind the current practiceof Dixon Jones ( Jeremy Dixon is his partner). It is a successful modernBritish practice, having passed through the postmodern moment. That genera-tion was able to distinguish itself and to sustain its creativity. My closestcolleague in London, John Miller, also did very remarkable buildings at thebeginning of his career in partnership with Alan Colquhoun, but they toowere affected by postmodernism and by the change in the British culturaland political climate. After a while Alan withdrew to devote his time to writingand teaching at Princeton. He was always a very powerful intellectual, and itwas a kind of fulfillment for him to move into scholarly work.

Stan Allen: To go back to the Smithsons and Stirling, they had an ambivalent rela-tionship to the high modes of modern architecture. In the Smithsons’

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Above: Alison and Peter Smithson. Hunstanton school, Norfolk, England. 1949–54.Facing page: Nigel Henderson. Farm machinery, Colchester, England. 1960.

writings there is a strong sense of having come to modernism late andinheriting an already formed tradition. Being taught by that generation, wasthere a further distancing from those precepts for you and your peers?

Frampton: My first-year master at the AA was Leonard Manasseh, who was a hotarchitect at the time of the Festival of Britain (1951). The Festival alreadydisplayed a reformist position with regard to the modern movement. Therewere exceptions, such as the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon, both ofwhich were rather Neo-Constructivist works. But the basic atmosphere, theprimary ethos, of the festival was very close to the populism of Stockholm1930: the famous Gunnar Asplund exhibition. According to this positionarchitecture should be socially accessible and not too assertive. The two mostaggressive structures in the festival were the Dome and the Skylon.

Foster: In terms of other forces in play at the time, what about Reyner Banham andthe Independent Group (IG) in general?

Allen: Yes: when was New Brutalism articulated—by Banham and others—as acounterpoint to that kind of populist architecture promoted by the Festivalof Britain?

Frampton: A key moment was the exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956), which involvedsome members of the IG. It was categorically opposed to the Swedish modernline of the Festival of Britain as well as to the more populist line of theLondon and Hertfordshire County Councils. At the same time Colquhounworked for the London County Council, designing neo-Corbusierian slabblocks in exposed concrete, loosely modeled after the Unité at Marseille. Allof this was an attempt to recover the rigor of the modern movement in someway. To an extent, the Golden Lane project proposed by the Smithsons forthe rebuilding of Coventry also tried to recover this spirit. Although it wasn’tLe Corbusier’s tabula rasa urbanism, it was meant to be more assertive, morerigorous. At the same time it also aspired to be rooted in a kind of nineteenth-century sense of community rather than in the postwar welfare state. It

wasn’t opposed to social welfare,but it hankered after thespontaneous social identity ofnineteenth-century urban cul-ture—hence the reference bythe Smithsons to Bethnal Greenin the East End of London.There was a connection here tothe photographs of NigelHenderson, who was also an IGmember. Hender son’s wife,Judith Stephen, was an anthro-pologist and social worker in theBethnal Green . . .

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Allen: Was there the sense, through the IG, that the boundaries between architectureand art worlds were porous?

Frampton: It was particularly so for the Smithsons. They were close to EduardoPaolozzi and Henderson, and together they staged the Parallel of Art and Lifeexhibition (1953). The Smithsons were also open to Art Brut, Dubuffet, andExistentialism. The Situationists were too much for them, I think, but theywere interested in CoBrA, and that already brought them toward Situationism.All of this was part of the Smithsons’ sensibility, but not of Stirling’s.

Foster: And you felt more sympathetic to whom?Frampton: Well, I was closer to Stirling personally. I don’t think I understood the

Situationist position then; I didn’t begin to appreciate it until the 1960s.However, in 1963, when I was technical editor of Architectural Design, we werethe first to publish an English translation of Constant’s New Babylon. I thoughtit was an astonishing text. Also, at that time in Architectural Design I supportedthe work of Yona Friedman, who often came to our editorial offices inLondon. He was famous for his space-frame, megastructural proposal ParisSpatiale. He was and still is a died-in-the-wool anarchist, fond of saying thingslike, “I think there is one art and it is cooking!”

Foster: There’s no easy fit between the Situationists and the IG and its followers.(Legend has it that when the Situat ionist s came to the Inst itute ofContemporary Art in London in 1960, mutual incomprehension prevailed.)In the simplest terms, the IG embraced certain aspects of emergent consumerculture, and the Situationists did precisely the opposite. I’d think you’d feelmore affinity with the latter, and be skeptical of Banham’s interests, say, inan imagistic architecture that worked to capture a Pop world on the rise—the work of Cedric Price, for example, and Archigram.

Frampton: Pop largely came out of This Is Tomorrow, especially with the work ofRichard Hamilton. My contact with Hamilton in the early 1960s also camethrough Architectural Design. I found Hamilton a very interesting figure, and Istill do. As for Banham, his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)was extremely influential. It was patently a model for my Modern Architecture:A Critical History (1980).

Foster: In what sense? Frampton: Banham organized his book in clear sections, with each one related to a

specific avant-garde movement; he also cited the protagonists themselves.Those two aspects struck me as very effective, and I emulated them.

Foster: What about his particular revision of the canon of modern architectureproduced by first-generation historians like Nikolaus Pevsner and SiegfriedGiedion—his claim that by leaving out Futurist and Expressionist architects,they had failed to articulate what was truly modern about modern architecture,that is, its expression of “the machine age”? That emphasis appears somewhatalien to you.

Frampton: It’s a complex issue. As you say, Banham’s book is energized by his

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rediscovery of Futurism, and I found that reappraisal very important. “TheFoundation and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) is earlier and in certainrespects more radical than subsequent Russian manifestoes, and it’s alwaysseemed to me to be the quintessential expression of avant-garde culture,above all rhetorically, in terms of its aggressive euphoria about modernity. Itis this opening with Futurism that drives the book and remains impressive.What is disturbing about Theory and Design in the First Machine Age—thisrelates to Colquhoun again, who made an important critique of the book,but it was also evident to me through my experiences at Architectural Design—is its total advocacy of Buckminster Fuller, a position I found untenable, andstill do. Banham ends with Fuller as the new deus ex machina of the scene.Also the effects of the States on Banham and on myself were completelydifferent. The United States politicized me in a way . . .

Foster: You’ve written about your primal scene coming to this country in 1965, flyingover New York and seeing enormous fields of lights across the megalopolis.How precisely were you politicized here?

Frampton: Primarily through my contact with students, at Princeton and elsewhere,moving toward 1968. It’s a short period really, 1965 to 1968, but the studentmovement was very important to me. Banham seems not to have been touchedby that experience; he evaded that question. Also, as you suggest, I’d neverseen production and consumption on such a scale before coming to theStates—gasoline, electrical energy, the whole lot. That made me very aware ofthe stakes, which could somehow be concealed in Europe then, at least tosomeone as naive as myself. Another factor is that I became more and moreinterested in the Russians. It’s interesting that, in Theory and Design in the FirstMachine Age, the Russians are left out. Banham virtually neglects the entireSoviet avant-garde just as Giedion and other received modern historieshad done.

Foster: How did you come to the Russians?Frampton: Aesthetically, to begin with.Foster: Through the Camilla Gray book, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922

of 1962?Frampton: Yes. I knew Camilla Gray personally. Through her and German filmmaker

Lutz Becker I met Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian émigré and founder of thearchitectural firm Tecton. We were all involved with Norbert Lynton’s BritishArts Council exhibition Art and Revolution at the Hayward Gallery in 1971.It’s not that Gray was so political herself; it’s that her book made me aware ofthe enormous energy of the Russian revolution from a cultural as well as apolitical point of view.

Foster: Tangentially perhaps, were you aware of the interest, among some of yourartistic contemporaries, in this same Russian material? The Gray book wasalso important to Minimalists like Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. Was that workin your field of vision then?


Frampton: No, it wasn’t. But something else was. In England I was influenced byAnthony Hill, who is exactly my age. He is a British Constructionist—asopposed to Constructivist—artist who contributed to this Anglo-Dutchmagazine Structure edited by Joost Bajlieu. Other members of this circle wereStephen Gilbert, an English Neo-Constructivist sculptor living in Paris; JohnErnest, an American émigré in London; and Kenneth and Mary Martin.Along with Victor Pasmore they were all inspired by Charles Biederman’s Artas the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), which is an all-but-mythic book,astonishing in its way, but somehow virtually lost. These people made meaware of Russian formalism and Theo van Doesburg’s Art Concret at about thesame time that the Gray book appeared.

Foster: Artists, then, more than architects: they are one source of your fascinationwith the tectonic—not only in Russian Constructivism, but also throughAnglo-Dutch Constructionism . . .

Allen: I wanted to ask about the example of Stirling. His engineering building atLeicester University is designed in 1959, and some of its elements have beencompared to Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club in Moscow(1927–28)—the form of its cantilevered auditorium in particular. If you thinkabout Stirling’s trajectory—from, say, his flats for Ham Common (1955–58),which is a weighty, brick architecture, wedded to the earth and influenced byLe Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul, to the Leicester building, which is by contrast alightweight, predominantly glass-and-steel architecture, an assembly of almostfound pieces, very dynamically composed—it is almost a demonstration caseof the positive influence of the Constructivist example. I don’t know how con-scious it was on his part.

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James Stirling and James Gowan.Engineering facility, Leicester

University, England (axonometric).1959–63.

Frampton: You’re right to recall Melnikov, but Aalto is present too in the way theinteriors of Stirling’s cantilevered auditoriums are furnished, as well as insome of the plasticity at the level of the podium. There’s also a six-story, brick-faced laboratory building, a bustle at the back of the tower, with clippedcorners along with isolated staircases and elevators, which owes something toLouis Kahn. So there’s a play between these influences and the more overt useof ferrovitreous construction, which has its roots not only in Constructivism,but also in the British nineteenth-century engineering tradition.

Allen: So Stirling did not have to get it by way of Russian Constructivism.Frampton: He didn’t really, and he wouldn’t have made that reference anyway. Foster: When you come to this country, you confront consumer society more

directly than in England; you’re also affected by political developments, thestudent movement in particular; and you’ve rediscovered radical Soviet artand architecture as well. What’s the situation at Princeton when you arrive in1965? I assume that’s before Michael Graves is there.

Frampton: No, Graves was there, and Peter Eisenman—in fact Eisenman invited me. Foster: And there was Tómas Maldonado from the neo-Bauhausian Hochschule für

Gestaltung in Ulm.Frampton: Yes. He was amazing, and brought there by Robert Geddes, Dean of

Architecture at the time, and not by Graves and Eisenman. An important con-nection here was a Princeton student of mine, Emilio Ambasz, of Argentineorigin, who was an ex-pupil of Amancio Williams, designer of the famousconcrete-bridge home in Mar del Plata (1943–45). Emilio was a wunderkind:upon graduating, he immediately became a teacher at Princeton. I’m sure itwas Emilio who persuaded Geddes to invite the Argentine Maldonado as avisiting professor. Maldonado had a strong influence on my politicization. Icame upon Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization through him; as it happens,I also heard Marcuse lecture at Princeton. Colquhoun was also switched on tothis line of thinking at the time. We still see some evidence of this inColquhoun’s book Modern Architecture (2002): for whatever else it is, it is surelya Marxist history. And though he might not admit it, I think Colquhoun wasalso politicized by the United States. He wasn’t a Marxist on his arrival,though he was substantially influenced by Manfredo Tafuri later on. ButMaldonado was the key for me. He was an aphoristic teacher in the sense thatjust a sentence or two would sustain one . . .

Foster: Didn’t Maldonado also represent, in part, the failure of the Ulm project toregain control of the forces of production, that is, the recuperation ofmodernist design by capitalist rationalization? Unlike some of your peers,the recognition of that failure did not lead you to any postmodern position;it made you recommit to another kind of modernism.

Frampton: Alexander Kluge was also involved with Ulm in the early days in thedepartment of communications, which was the first section to be closed. Theradical discourse developed by Maldonado, Claude Schnaidt, and Guy


Bonsiepe inside Ulm before its dissolution in 1968 was important to me. Iforget exactly when Maldonado came to Princeton—it must have beenaround 1967, just before the closure of Ulm.

Allen: The Ulm project would have faced an uphill battle in the context of 1960sAmerican consumer culture. On the other hand, there were designers in theStates working with industry—for example, in the industrial design departmentat Cranbrook. Was there any engagement between those European figuresand American figures like Charles and Ray Eames or Harry Bertoia?

Frampton: I don’t think so.Foster: So some parts of the modernist project seemed completely appropriated,

while other parts were newly rediscovered; there was the enormous problemof a rampant consumer culture, which repositioned architecture dramatically;and you also undergo a powerful politicization. How did you mediate thesedifferent forces as you moved from Princeton to Columbia and the Instituteof Architecture and Urban Studies? What positions began to be articulatedat that point?

Frampton: That moment is difficult for me to characterize. It was centered on thestrange displaced family that Eisenman, through his charisma, gatheredaround himself: Mario Gandelsonas, Diana Agrest, myself, Tony Vidler, and,somewhat later, Kurt Forster. While we’re not all Europeans, we’re certainlynot Americans. Eisenman made this kind of international coterie, which in asense had always been his intention. When I first went to Princeton, he orga-nized a group called CASE, Committee of Architects for the Study of theEnvironment. It was a rather inclusive group that held a number of hot,fairly confused weekend seminars. Eisenman was disappointed in mebecause I wouldn’t become, as he put it, “the Siegfried Giedion of thegroup”—one naiveté laid on top of another there. Later we repaired oursplit, and in 1972 I became involved with the Institute for Architecture andUrban Studies in New York. We started the journal Oppositions out of thisstrange amalgam of Agrest and Gandelsonas’s Francophile semiotics, Vidler’semerging Tafurianism, Eisenman’s formalist predilections, and my ownborn-again socialism. In the first issue I published the essay “Industrializationand the Crisis of Architecture” (1973), which was a somewhat naive attemptto adopt a Benjaminian approach to historical phenomena, which I thenpursued in Modern Architecture.

Somehow we’ve reached this point in our conversation without mention-ing Hannah Arendt, who was also a key influence in politicizing me. TheHuman Condition (1958) was and still is an important reference for my work.It’s not a Marxist thesis, but certainly a political one.

Foster: When did you encounter the book?Frampton: In London there was a fertile figure named Thomas (Sam) Stevens, who

had taught at the Liverpool School of Architecture, a leading trainingground in the postwar period (it produced Colin Rowe, among others). At

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the AA he was a talking head par excellence with a B.A. in art history fromthe Courtauld and a photographic memory. Stevens was the kind of personwho stimulates young students better than most academics. He put me on tothe book, and by coincidence I read it when I first came here. It seemed tome a key to the States, to the condition of advanced capitalist productionand consumption, which I had never really understood before. My first essayin Oppositions is patently influenced by Arendt: it opens with the Cartesiansplit between appearance and being as a basis of the scientific method—butalso as the precursor of a great cultural predicament.

Allen: It seems useful here to differentiate your thinking from Tafuri’s. You’reworking from some of the same sources, such as Benjamin and Adorno, butthere are important differences. The reference to Arendt is one thing thatdistinguishes you.

Frampton: There are also overlaps, such as the young Italian Massimo Cacciari andhis manifest interest in an existential, phenomenological approach. Thatcomes to be inserted into Tafuri’s discourse. But my interest in Arendt doesdistinguish us, and with Arendt begins my susceptibility to Heidegger, Arendthaving been his pupil. Here there is a split in my position, which has alwaysirritated some people, such as Tony Vidler, who surely views my combining ofHeideggerian and Marxist critiques as a scandal. This was already evident inthe early years of Oppositions as a kind of tension between us.

Foster: What were the other forces in play? If Agrest and Gandelsonas were interestedin French semiotics, and you were drawn to Frankfurt School critique with anArendtian twist, what were the other important discourses?

Frampton: At the t ime Eisenman was interested in Noam Chomsky and hisgrammatical notion of deep structure. At some point he shifted his groundfrom Chomsky to Derrida. I can’t recall exactly when, but he made thatmove almost overnight: the grammatical approach of Chomsky was carriedover into a deconstructive register through Derrida. Foucault was never areference for Peter—for good reason, I suppose—and he was never thatinterested in Chomsky’s politics.

Allen: Eisenman found Chomsky on his own, and that interest in linguistics ledhim to invite Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, who had studied withRoland Barthes in Paris, to the Institute. So Peter was introduced toFrench structuralism through Diana and Mario, but it didn’t have a stronginfluence on him. However, it was necessary background for his laterfascination with Derrida.

Foster: Many architects and artists use theory on the basis of analogy: it’s more asource of models to be adapted than a genealogy of concepts to be developed.This speaks to the porosity to theory in architecture and art circles over thelast three decades. Of course, critics are hardly exempt here—often theyhave led the way—and in some ways it has been a very productive exchange.But frequently too it has seemed a hit-and-run relationship.


Frampton: It’s almost a rationalization. The reference produces the thematic—inthe sense of an ideological as well as an operational thematic.

Allen: In this context it’s important to recall that October was published out of theInstitute at that time. I recall seeing Rosalind Krauss deliver “Notes on theIndex” as a lecture there—that would have been around 1977. Eisenman con-tinues to refer to the notion of the index, and he also felt there was an affinitybetween his work and Conceptual art, Sol LeWitt in particular. A sense of com-mitment to a critical, experimental project characterized the Institute then.

Foster: Did you circle your different wagons against the common enemy of anemergent postmodern architecture? Did that opposition help to produce akind of group identity?

Frampton: Yes. One thing we had in common was an almost total distance from thework of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Allen: Yet the Venturis didn’t seem to enter directly into the debates at theInstitute; the real protagonist was Robert Stern or perhaps Vincent Scully.

Frampton: This split goes back in part to the Committee for the Study of theEnvironment. In those days we were all jammed together, the so-called Yale-Philadelphia axis of Scully and the Venturis, and the Princeton-Columbiaaxis of Eisenman, Graves, and the so-called Five Architects, with a smallaffiliated circle attached to Columbia grouped around Jack Robertson.Things were polarized when Scully became aligned with Stern and theVenturis through his book The Shingle Style Revisited. Then these factionsbroke into three groups (all of this is slightly mythical, of course): the so-called Grays, who represented the Yale-Philadelphia scene; the Whites, whowere the New York Five (Eisenman, Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk,and Richard Meier); and the Silvers, who were on the West Coast.

Foster: What about the later provocation of the young Rem Koolhaas? He writesDelirious New York (1978) at the Institute. On the one hand, he too wasopposed to the postmodernism of the Grays. On the other hand, his bookrecovered a modernism distinct from that of the Whites, a Surrealist one inpart, and it also proposed a very different sort of urbanism: clearly heintended his “learning from New York” to trump the Venturis’ Learning fromLas Vegas (1972) in that regard. What did his emergence do to those debates?

Allen: Despite your critical stance toward Koolhaas now, I always thought you had alot in common with him in those early days. For starters, you overlapped atDouglas Stephen and Partners with Elia Zenghelis, Koolhaas’s teacher at theAA, who was a founding member of Office for Metropolitan Architecture(OMA) with him in 1975. And you wrote an article for Architectural Designcalled “Two or Three Things I Know about Them” (1977) at a time whenyou, Rem, and Elia had a common interest in reclaiming something of theprogressive social and aesthetic potential of Russian Constructivism.

Frampton: I designed the Craven Hill Gardens apartment office building for theDouglas Stephen office in the early 1960s, and that is already a kind of Neo-

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Constructivist building. So already by then I was involved in Constructivismfrom an architectural standpoint, and Zenghelis was partially influenced bythat work. Intimate history is an intricate business. When Alvin Boyarskybecame director of the AA in 1971, I was the rival candidate, sponsored byZenghelis and Koolhaas—but I didn’t prevail.

Allen: How different this history might have been. At some point Koolhaas andGerrit Oorthuys made a celebrated trip to Moscow and brought back drawingsby Ivan Leonidov . . .

Frampton: Exactly. As it happens, I first met Rem in Delft at an exhibition of RussianConstructivism curated by Oorthuys and Max Risselada in late 1969. I workedon a version of that exhibition staged at the Institute in summer 1971 (myconnection with the Oorthuys and Risselada continued for a long time).Koolhaas came to the Institute via Cornell, where he had studied briefly withColin Rowe (a strange combination) and with O. M. Ungers. Bernard Tschumialso came to the Institute around this time, having taught at the AA as well.And, as you say, Rem wrote Delirious New York at the Institute. It was a lateralmove not aligned with the Institute’s attempt to reconstitute a rigorous modernarchitectural position. It was also considered a more aggressive and vitalresponse to the kind of populist critique launched by the Venturis.

Foster: This moment of the Institute occurred when New York City was bankrupt,the economy in deep recession, and advanced architecture was largelydivorced from actual building. Hence the rise of “paper architecture”?

Frampton: Yes, although it was the Museum of Modern Art that developed thatrubric. As far as the Institute was concerned, a gunshot marriage wasarranged with the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) through ArthurDrexler, curator of design at MoMA, and Ed Logue, director of the UDC, anda low-rise housing development was built in Brooklyn as a result. This was inthe period of 1972–76, so the Institute was paradoxically productive then. Butin general you’re right about the lack of building. That was the last momentof the UDC as far as housing goes: the federal government cut the 221D3Program, and that more or less put an end to such housing.

Allen: The UDC is sometimes overlooked today, yet there were significant buildingsconstructed by architects such as Richard Meier and Giovanni Pasanella, andtheir work was published and debated in Oppositions. The Europeans werefascinated by these projects, but it also turned out to be the final episode, atleast in this country, of the modernist dream of combining progressivearchitectural form with progressive social programs.

The Wallace Harrison exhibition in 1979 was an important moment atthe Institute. It typified Koolhaas’s enthusiastic embrace of everything thatboth high-modern and neo-avant-garde positions rejected. At least the sky-scrapers in Delirious New York had the patina of history. The Harrisonmaterial was too close, and hence more uncomfortable, especially for anolder generation practicing at that time. It almost seemed like a parody of


modernism. There is an important tension in Koolhaas between a fascina-tion with the progressive aspects of the modernist project—Constructivism,for example—and an embrace of popular culture and bad taste. TheHarrison exhibition seemed to signal a shift toward a different version ofmass culture.

Frampton: It was a counterthesis to neo-Miesianism and the whole high-modernline held by MoMA, to the formalist line of the White Architects as well.But it was also a counterthesis to the Venturi-Stern position. It was a step-ping aside from all these positions.

Foster: From a distance (which was mine at the time) all of these positionsseemed provocative: the recovery of a Corbusierian modernism with theWhites, the return of Beaux-Arts practices and Enlightenment typologieswith the postmoderns, the semi-Surrealist designs of the early OMA, theconceptual daring of paper architecture, and so on. But they also seemedrhetorical, often extremely so, and this rhetorical extremity seemed toexist in inverse proportion to actual building, as if the former compen-sated somewhat for the latter. In a funny way—and this is to jumpahead—some of these fantasies about architecture have come true. AsFreud says of the artist in Introductory Lectures, “He has thus achievedthrough his fantasy what originally he had achieved only in his fantasy—honor, power, and the love of women” (underline “he”). Form followsfantasy, or in dreams begin big projects.

Frampton: Rem’s sense of publicity is very strong. Perhaps in the last analysis thisderives from Peter Cook and Archigram, who paved the way in the mediaticstakes. Important elements in the early Koolhaas/Zenghelis OMA publicitymachine were the beautifully illustrated renderings of their early projectsmade in both instances by their wives, Madelon Vriesendorp and ZoeZenghelis.

Allen: Beyond publicity, there was also an atmosphere of experimentation at theInstitute, a laboratory-like feel that was very productive. Because nothing wasgetting built, there was an intense exploration of forms, sources, andmeans of representation. That was the positive side of the period, and itwas very much incubated at the Institute.

Foster: It was in this climate that you wrote Modern Architecture: A Critical History.How did that come about?

Frampton: I was commissioned to write that book in 1970; it took me ten years tofinish. The person who commissioned it was Robin Middleton, who wasthen an acquisit ions editor at Thames and Hudson. As it happens,Middleton had succeeded me as technical editor of Architectural Design.The book was much longer than what the publisher wanted, so there was aconstant struggle to write as economically and laconically as possible—that perhaps explains part of its density.

Foster: You’ve talked about its relation to Banham’s Theory and Design in the First

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Machine Age. What other points of reference existed for you, especially interms of how you developed your canon of twentieth-century architecture?How calculated was the book in its recoveries and revisions?

Frampton: Certainly Leonardo Benevolo was an influence, first his Origins ofModern Town Planning (1963; translated 1967) and then his History ofModern Architecture (1960; translated 1971). Tony Vidler was also an importantinfluence, in particular in the chapter “Tony Garnier and the IndustrialCity,” which was informed by many conversations with him.

Foster: But did you feel, as Banham did in 1960, that Pevsner, Giedion, andBruno Zevi had somehow got the history wrong?

Frampton: I never found Pevsner’s book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936),particularly interesting. I still find Giedion stimulating, when returningcasually to the pages of Space, Time, and Architecture (1941). But Banham’sbook was my model.

Foster: But did you, like Banham, feel that there was another kind of modernarchitecture to foreground, another story to tell? That’s my question.

Frampton: Mainly it’s a question of the architecture of the Left. Banham omittedthe Left architects of the Weimar Republic almost completely: HannesMeyer is absent, along with Otto Haesler, whereas both are featured in mybook. Unlike Banham, I realized that New Deal architecture had to beacknowledged. The same goes for the New Monumentality as formulatedby José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion in 1943. This was avery important development, especially in relation to Soviet Realism andthe Indian architecture of British imperialism. Indeed, for the entireinterwar period, that aspect of modern building culture that wasn’t tied toradical social projects had to be treated: hence the passages on ItalianRationalism, Nordic Doricism, Lutyen’s New Delhi, the American ArtDeco movement , Rockefeller Center—they each find their place inModern Architecture: A Critical History, in part under the rubric of NewMonumentality. (I was indirectly influenced here by Clement Greenberg’s“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.) Then too Banham didn’t deal withAalto really, or the whole Scandinavian movement for that matter, andthese are also discussed in my book.

Allen: Does the last interest go back to your experience of British architecturein the 1950s and its closeness to the Scandinavian model?

Frampton: That came a bit later. The Leslie Martin office, which I mentionedearlier, was closely related to Aalto’s position. And Martin was also animportant patron of New Brutalism. The Leicester engineering buildingwas given to Stirling by Martin through the University Grants Commissionwhere Martin was indirectly responsible for giving out faculty buildings tovarious architects all over the country. The History Faculty Building atCambridge also came to Stirling via Martin. Patrick Hodgkinson assumedan Aalto position as well, and he designed the brick-faced dormitory at


Caius College, Cambridge, in this manner for Martin. The work of theMartin office was always in brick and somewhat organic: it was an effort tocreate a kind of normative modern brick tradition for the English situation.

Foster: Your work differs in other ways from how prior historians have presentedmodern architecture. Whereas Pevsner looked back to the socialist reformmovements of the nineteenth century for the origin of his story, and EmilKaufmann turned to the typological forms of the Enlightenment for hisbeginning, and Giedion was focused, perhaps more transhistorically, onquestions of space, you have followed two lines of inquiry fairly consis-tently: an attention to the tectonic, which has become more and moreforegrounded in your work, and an emphasis, developed through Arendt,Aalto, and others, on place creation. Can you talk about how those twoconcerns emerged, and what the relationship is between them? Somemight assume that a stress on structure might interfere with a sensitivityto place. . . .

Frampton: My preoccupations arise out of the direct experience of makingbuildings, at the societal as well as the professional level. Even though it’snot explicitly elaborated, I tend to approach historical material throughthe eye of an architect: I ask myself what is the predicament faced by thearchitect in making a particular work in a physical setting at a given historicalmoment. That attention binds my two concerns together—place on theone hand and structural expressivity on the other. Both preoccupationshave to do with finding some basis on which architects can ground theirpractice in what Heidegger refers to as a destitute time.

On my first visit to the States in 1965 I was accompanied by JamesGowan (the ex-partner of Stirling), who remarked of the New Jersey suburbs:“It looks as though it could all be blown away tomorrow.” That sense ofplacelessness was more evident perhaps to a European forty years agothan it would be today. Hence there followed the task of trying to estab-lish places as sites of resistance. As for the stress on the tectonic, well,while it might have derived from my interest in Constructivism, it becamemore conscious as a result of my desire to resist the tendency to reducearchitecture to images.

Foster: So in part it was developed in resistance to the emergence of a postmoderndiscourse of scenographic architecture.

Frampton: Yes. If you want to split the two, the concern with place was articulatedin relation to the reality of the megalopolis, and the emphasis on structureto the postmodern reduction of things to images.

Allen: Princeton in the 1970s and ’80s became identified with postmodernismin architecture, especially the formalism of Graves. I wonder if that wasincipient in the earlier period. Tony Vidler, for example, developed a differ-ent genealog y of modernism, going back to the eighteenthcentury—hence his interest in Ledoux, and his account of typology as a

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symbolic, primarily representational construction—as opposed to youridea of history, which looks more to the example of Pevsner, or a socialprogram that responds to the new means of industrial production. Besidesproviding a common catalog of formal sources, Tony’s move could be seento underwrite the postmodern operation—Graves in particular and theemphasis on representation in general. This seems to be a deep fault line,which you articulate as the distinction between the scenographic and theontological.

Frampton: I think that’s right: I believe his position was more in the postmoderndirection.

Foster: Could we focus on the tectonic for a minute? On the one hand, you claimstructural expressivity, or tectonic integrity, as a value in all architecture. Onthe other hand, you also identify, as a primal scene of architecture in the West,as a traumatic moment that changes it forever, the institutional separation ofarchitecture from engineering—it’s almost a foundation myth of modernarchitecture for you (in fact you give it a date, 1747, when the École des Pontset Chaussées is founded). Two questions. First, do you stress the tectonic inarchitecture in part as a way to recoup this division, this “dissociation of sensi-bility” between architecture and engineering? Sometimes it is as if modernarchitecture at its best for you takes over the structural principle from engi-neering, makes its own, and then advances it as a means of rapprochementwith engineering. Second, can you reflect on your own habit of thinking here?How much do lapsarian stories of before-and-after determine your writing—narratives of unities in the distant past (of integrated architecture andengineering, of an active polis adept at place creation and public appearance,and so on) versus divisions in the interminable present?

Frampton: The division of labor is one of the basic predicaments that underliesmodern life altogether. And, looking back, one can identify particularmoments when that division was not so virulent in its effects. Until therewas a precise science of statics, for example, structural engineering couldn’tbe separated from architecture, and learning through doing, as an empiri-cal way of achieving structures, predominated. It was a pre-professional,guild-based practice wherein the secrets of building were passed on frommaster to apprentice—that is, the knowledge was contained in the actualprocedures of making things. Thus no division existed between the personwho drew the scheme and the person who executed it. For lay people theexistence of these two different figures, the builder on the one hand andthe architect on the other, has always been confusing. Even Renzo Piano’sfather, an established builder, is supposed to have said to him when hedeclared his aspirations to be an architect, “Why go to architecture school?That’s ridiculous. We know how to build.”

Perhaps I have sidestepped your question a little, and shifted it awayfrom engineering to building, but the two are connected. My primary


concern is with a poetics of construction rather than engineering as such,although the one can flow into the other. After all, structural engineersalso have to be concerned with the process of making, of detailing, andthis is the point at which a poetics of construction is combined with staticsto determine the way a joint is bolted or welded. Formal considerationsthat are potentially poetic come into play. All of this is an attempt to resistthose forces that impinge upon the realization of the environment in negativeways because of the division of labor—as with, for example, the new disciplineof the project manager whose function is to prevent the architect fromtalking to the client.

Allen: Even worse is the emergence of “value engineering.”Frampton: These are sub-professions that have their own narrow goals. And they

tend to prevent a more integrated cultural form from coming into existence.Allen: We have moved now from Modern Architecture to Studies in Tectonic Culture.

Your earlier statement about your Heideggerian and Marxist sides beingat war is interest ing: a simplist ic way of putt ing it would be that theMarxist is in the forefront in Modern Architecture and the Heideggerian inStudies in Tectonic Culture. But it’s more complicated. For example, you saythat the division of labor is one of the basic predicaments that underliesmodern life, and in Tectonic Culture you look for those privileged momentsin which certain figures—architects like Jørn Utzon, Carlo Scarpa, RenzoPiano, or Alvaro Siza—are still able to perform an integration, but underthe now much more difficult conditions of modernity where the divisionof labor is a fact of life.

Frampton: There are interest ing issues here. I have a fr iend named PauloMartins Barata, who wrote a doctoral thesis on Siza’s work from a tectonicstandpoint. Even though I’m committed to the consistent and remarkableevolution of Siza’s architecture over a long period of time, there’s not

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Alvaro Siza. Architectural School, Porto,Portugal (perspective). 1988.

much that can be considered overtly tectonic in it. There are small-scaleelements—window and door frames, perhaps, certain spanning componentshere and there—but in the main, Siza’s work is not tectonic in its character, asopposed to, say, Utzon’s. This brings up the difficult question of the limits ofsculpture versus architecture: where does structural expressivity lie betweensculpture on the one hand and architecture on the other? How can onedemonstrate this difference by example, or, more precisely, how can onedemonstrate the limits of the sculptural versus the tectonic within architec-ture? For me this is a point at which one may discriminate between FrankGehry and Enric Miralles, say. In almost all of Miralles’s work the tectonic ele-ment is closely integrated with the sculptural. In Gehry’s case, apart from hisvery early work, there’s no interest whatsoever in the tectonic. He’s onlyinterested in plast icity, and whatever makes it stand up will do—hecouldn’t care less. That’s very evident in Bilbao.

Foster: Isn’t there a distinction too between an autonomy that the sculpturalseems to assume and a sitedness that the tectonic aspires to achieve?

Frampton: Perhaps, but if you take the model of Gottfried Semper and discriminatein a simplistic way between light and heavy structures, you get a differentreading. By its very nature, the heavy gravitates toward the earth, and so istelluric in character, while the light tends to reach for the sky because it isusually framed, skeletal, and aerial. If you think about building in thesevery generic terms, the sculptural then tends to emerge more naturally outof the earth and out of the plastic character of the earthwork.

Foster: So the terms can be reversed.Allen: It has to do with the way the structure is realized. The assembled charac-

ter of l ight st ructures is almost self - ev ident , and the v iewer canreconstruct the process of construction. The sculptural unity of Gehry’swork is by definition scenographic inasmuch as the plastic, “carved” char-acter of his shapes is at odds with their necessarily part-by-part realization.In Miralles’s work, on the other hand, it is possible to understand how thepieces are put together to create his forms, however elaborate and sculp-tural they may be.

Frampton: It’s also clear how they relate to the ground. In my view a more elaboratetheorization of all these relationships still remains to be done. I was recentlyreading Merleau-Ponty, and there are very interesting passages in ThePhenomenology of Perception that point to the potential of the body to experi-ence at a microlevel the space made available in architectural form. From thispoint of view the elaboration of the program should avoid any formalisticshort-circuiting of what one might call the ontological potential.

Foster: This last reference also speaks to your affinities, conscious or not, withyour generation of Minimalist and site-specific artists who are concernedwith an idea of the sculptural as sited, indeed as phenomenological, inresistance to other kinds of forms and experiences that you call sceno-


Above: Enric Miralles andCarme Pinós. Olympic archery

ranges, Barcelona. 1992. Right:Jørn Utzon. Bagsvaerd Church,

near Copenhagen, Denmark.1976. Below: Utzon. Bagsvaerd

Church (section). 1976.

52 OCTOBER

graphic. But even in the early 1960s, these effects were present not only inPop art but in image culture at large, to the degree that they encourageda kind of disembodiment of the viewer and a dissolut ion of place.Ironically, there are also some convergences between these Minimalist andPop trajectories.

Allen: In this regard I was interested to read your critique, in Labour, Work andArchitecture, of Swiss German Minimalism (Peter Zumtor, Herzog and deMeuron, and others). It speaks to Hal’s point, and there’s an interestingoverlap with his essay “The Crux of Minimalism”: the project to recoverphenomenological depth in the experience of the work of art can alsoopen up onto an unanchored kind of subject-effect. The same Minimalismthat can support the kind of place-making and recovery of perception thatyou advocate can also lead to a play of sheer surfaces and a renderingindifferent of perception that you scorn.

Frampton: Certain aspects of early Minimalism in art were very place-oriented,and they could generate, out of very few elements, a very strong symbolicpresence, however esoteric—an arresting physical presence and not animagistic one. That kind of position is difficult for architects due to thevery complexity of building—the way it has to respond to the life-worldand also be integrated within it to some extent. That is a burden thatmight drive the architect to displace the significant effects exclusively tothe surface.

Foster: At the same time you also insist that architecture is privileged, not justdistinguished, by its engagement not only with the life-world, but also withearth in a Heideggerian sense. There’s a primordialism in your thought, acommitment to Semperian materialism, even anthropology, and for somepeople this insistence on origins and earth makes your work . . .

Frampton: Conservative. . . .Foster: But for you this dimension touches on an essence of architecture: that

architecture is, in the first instance, about marking the earth (you invokeVittorio Gregrotti on this point) before it is about constructing space oreven making shelter, and certainly before expressing symbols or typologiz-ing forms. This marking is not just a heuristic or historical fiction for you;it is an essential part of architecture that subsists, or that should, for you.As Stan says, you value architects who are able to articulate this marking,to pronounce it, even or especially under adverse conditions, in a desti-tute time.

Allen: Here, too, the reference to Minimalism is important, for example in thecase of Tado Ando. And here we come full circle: in the art world theMinimalists were trying to build on the unframed experience of architec-ture as opposed to the framed experience of the traditional art work . . .

Frampton: Escaping the gallery by moving into architecture and beyond . . .Allen: Exactly. And now some of that opening out gets cycled back into the


architecture of Ando and others. Can it maintain that sense of unframedexperience, or is it recontextualized in a new institutional frame?

Frampton: This raises many questions. There’s a peculiar confrontation, or perhapsconvergence, between phenomenological and ontological proclivities inarchitecture and the critique of instrumental reason deriving from JurgenHabermas, for example. This is one place where architecture should positionitself, in part at least, because surely one of the great challenges in the worldtoday is that technoscience continues its relentless modernization of theworld without redress. One problem that faces society is how to deal withthis dynamic—with a rate of change that is so rapid that the species canbarely assimilate it . The unbalanced development of technoscience sodestroys references that other kinds of cultural mediation can hardly takeplace. Architecture is confronted head-on with these value crises or aporia ina way that other cultural fields are not.

Allen: So what is specific to architecture as a discipline—its relative slowness,durability, and being wedded to place—can be seen as progressive ratherthan nostalgic, at least to the degree that the dominant forces today tendin the opposite direction—toward speed, replaceability, and movement.

Frampton: Right, as long as architecture doesn’t exclude appropriate technology,because such technology can be progressive too—for example, servomech-anisms that control the temperature of a room more precisely. Thistechnology can still be situated, as it were, in an earthwork, that is to say, in acultural domain. The two things can be brought together rather than set ina false opposition.

Foster: It seems, though, as if you treat architecture here in part as a stand-in forother forces or actions. If the architect as culture hero is a compensatoryfigure for an artistic avant-garde that no longer exists elsewhere (a popularavant-garde no less, or so the New York Times Magazine has recently claimed),then the architect as resistance fighter is also a compensatory figure for akind of political agency that seems difficult to achieve in other terms. Insome of your recent work you allude to this intractable problem—that noneof this architectural resistance can be truly effective without real transforma-tions in building codes, urban zonings, environmental laws . . .

Frampton: I can hardly deny it. But there’s a counterthesis to be made here, which Imention at the beginning of Labour, Work and Architecture. When you lookthrough the best professional magazines—which are primarily Spanish andItalian, above all Architecturra Viva edited out of Madrid by Luis FernandezGaliano—and you look at architecture worldwide, the quality of current archi-tecture at its best is quite remarkable in terms of how it’s conceived, built, andequipped at the technical level. What is curious about publications like the NewYork Times is how narrow-minded they are. It represents some kind of negativelyprovincial idea of what is chic on the local landscape. It has no comprehensiveoptic, no apparent understanding of what is happening elsewhere.

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Foster: This is a dialectical moment in your thought—as opposed to your tendency tolapsarian narratives. For the most part the image and the media are onthe side of the forces of evil for you, but here there is an instance in whichimages of progressive architecture are mediated around the world to positiveeffects. Do you also have a similarly dialectical account of the effects ofthe computer on architectural practice and pedagogy?

Frampton: In Labour, Work and Architecture I cite the engineer Peter Rice to theeffect that the computer can restore the tact ile quality of building.Perhaps it’s romantic, even nostalgic, but he argues that computer tech-nology can be used to achieve very refined structural forms that would beas self-evident and engaging as the pioneering ferrovitreous forms of thenineteenth century, and would thus move ordinary people to wish totouch them. It’s a populist idea, having to do with accessibility again, thenotion that there shouldn’t be a gulf between ordinary people and the builtenvironment. Rice evokes the computer as a tool that would permit thiskind of contact (I assume he’s referring to his experience working withPiano on the Centre Pompidou). Yes, I do see a dialectical dynamic there.And, as you say, I see it in the media too: on the one hand everything isdriven by images, reduced to a cycle of stimulus and response, of productionand consumption, driven by the novelty of fashion; on the other hand thereis the positive side whereby we become aware of architectural production ofgreat quality throughout the world. This last makes one even more skepticalof the star system and of the way certain figures are overvalued as a result.

Allen: The computer can be subsumed by the media, in which case its capacityto produce and reproduce images endlessly is foregrounded. But the computeralso allows for rapid prototyping, milling, and computer-aided manufac-turing in a way that permits a partial recovery of the means of productionfor architects. It puts them in closer contact with the material, as opposedto the building industry’s tendency to hold them at arm’s length from theprocess of construction. You talked earlier of the separation of the archi-tect from the client and from the builder; there’s now the hope thatcomputer design and fabrication might allow the architect a greaterdegree of control.

Frampton: Provided it doesn’t become in itself a form of fetishization. I was thinkingof a rather unexpected example of such a positive use: Ove Arup andPartners’ recovery of reinforced stone arches, which wouldn’t be possiblewithout computer calculation and the precision cutting of stone because ofthe precise interfaces required in the arch between each voussoir. Here thedigital is oriented not toward the future but toward a revitalization of thepast—it’s a stone arch, for God’s sake. And yet, I suppose, it might befetishizing to use a stone arch at all. This raises interesting questions aboutfetishization in relation to program, for example, or to landscape. There’s arisk that the production of a certain component will be fetishized in a way


that unbalances the work as a whole. We often tend to overvalue a demonstra-tion of “the new way” for its own sake.

Allen: You’re quite critical of some British high-tech architecture for preciselythat reason.

Frampton: Yes. One is sometimes caught between admiration for the manifestationof sheer technical skill in a building—its luminosity as a technical object—and the suspicion that fetishized construction is the only important featureof the work. It would be very hard to make the worlds of Siza and Pianomeet, for example, and Piano is a more complicated and mediated high-tech architect than Richard Rodgers or Norman Foster.

Allen: Before we end, I want to ask about your relation to a younger generationof critics. Your essay “Utilitarian versus Humanist Ideals” (1969) in Labour,Work and Architecture, concerning Hannes Meyer’s and Le Corbusier’sschemes for the League of Nations building, was an important point ofreference for Michael Hays. Hays accepts your identification of Meyerwith the utilitarian and Le Corbusier with the humanist ideal, but he givesthose values a different interpretation. He has constructed a defense ofMeyer’s functionalist position as radically post-humanist—that his indiffer-ence to composition, say, has a progressive force in itself. And for Haysthe humanism of Le Corbusier is a form of compromise with bourgeoisaesthetics. How productive do you think this version of Frankfurt SchoolMarxism might be in the architectural context? How do you see your workin relation to his? I mention Hays because he is a critic and historian ofmy generation with whom you might expect a strong dialogue. . . .

Frampton: Your question makes me think again of the limits of any particularhistorical moment. Is it unfair to suggest that the critical rigor upheld byHays and possibly by Tafuri, in their defense of the anticompositional andthe antihumanist, is still a form of waiting, as it were, for the revolution-ary moment when a radical transformat ion might occur and a newcondition come into being? In all of my thinking there is a revisionistacceptance of the fact that this is hardly likely to happen, that this optionmight not be available anymore. Then the question arises: which is themore realist of the two positions? It’s not that I’m against what HannesMeyer represented, but on a broader historical front, I have to ask whichposition is the more operatively critical.

Allen: You’ve implied that Meyer’s functionalism might be adapted to underwritethe technocrat ic architecture of postwar America, as opposed to LeCorbusier’s humanism, which still might hold out some possibility of resistance.You point out that Meyer, for example, devotes the entire ground place ofthe League of Nations scheme to the car, and provides six times the amountof parking required by the brief.

Foster: For you personally, though, the possibility of the Meyer position seemedlost by the time you came to the States; it was lost somewhere between

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your encounter with your AA teacher, the student of Hilberseimer, in themid 1950s and your encounter with Maldonado at Princeton in the late’60s. Already in the early ’30s that position was under enormous strain.Most intellectuals who had adopted a Left-Fordist position, for example,had given it up, or were about to.

Frampton: The Spanish Civil War has always seemed to me the watershed in thisregard.

Allen: Yet you have remained engaged with contemporary architecture in a waythat Hays is not and Tafuri was not. Even if it means accepting some ofthe contradictions of your own position, since, as you’ve suggested, it’svery hard to reconcile Piano, Ando, and Siza—to pick only three figuresthat you’ve supported.

Foster: Have those contemporary engagements changed your historical thinking atall? Have they opened up other figures in the past for you? That can be oneeffect of continued engagement as a critic—to stay enlivened as a historian.

Frampton: Yes. For example, they have made me want to reread GermanExpressionism; I’ve never paid sufficient attention to Erich Mendelsohn inthis regard, and his position is very interesting. But this prompts anotherkind of reflection: when we look at a body of work, we often have the delusionthat it should all be of a piece, but humans are not like that in the end,and history isn’t either. So there are moments where things are achievedand have a resolution, to be followed by moments when they can’t beattained any longer, either because of history or because the subject haschanged. Perhaps it’s important in both critical and historical work toidentify not careers as entities but specific works within an overall body ofproduction.

Allen: On that score, the two books that we’ve focused on are very different.Modern Architecture is a book that, in a sense, had to be written, and it’scomprehensive in its treatment of different figures. For me Studies in TectonicCulture is more original and more complex. It’s also more personal, a bookin which you look in depth at a number of key figures, and through thatoperation construct a historical genealogy for critical work that follows. Inthat respect it speaks to the present in a way that Modern Architecture does not.Put another way, if we pay attention to the subtitles, we have the passagefrom “A Critical History” to “The Poetics of Construction.”

Frampton: Part of the challenge, whether one is on the side of making work orof criticizing it, is developing a strategy of sidestepping—sidestepping a tendencytoward closure that seems to constrain the living present in such a waythat you sometimes feel you can’t do anything. The value I’m placing onworld production these days is just such an attempt to come out of myown closure by identifying value in a wide variety of work. This closureexists inside architecture schools as well, where the discourse often becomesfixated on one scene, and hence we get an unbearable level of repetition at


school exhibitions, a proliferation of forms with nowhere to go. One almostsuffocates from their elaboration. So it’s time, without disowning past attach-ments, to approach the architectural world differently. This move also haspolitical implications at a time when we are faced with the near-completeclosure of the Right over environmental development in the United States andelsewhere as well.

—New York City, May 29, 2003

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conversation with kenneth frampton-r.banham

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