allen stan--foster hal--a conversation with kenneth frampton

7/22/2019 Allen Stan--foster Hal--A Conversation With Kenneth Frampton

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A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton

STAN ALLEN AND HAL FOSTER

OCTOBER 106, Fall 2003, pp. 3558. 2003 October M agazine, L td. and Massachusetts Insti tute of Technology.

Hal Foster:Our occasion is the recent publication of Labour, Work and Architecture(2002), but we sho uld also look back to Studies in Tectonic Cul ture(1995) andfurther back, given its wide readership, to

Modern Archi tectu re: A Cri t icalHistory(1980). Lets begin with your formation as an architect.Kenneth Frampton:I was trained at the Architectural Associat ion ( AA) in London from

1950 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 Lon don and sta rted to workfor Douglas Stephen and Partners, a relatively small practice in the City Center.I was an associate of th is offi ce unt il I left for the States in 1965.

Foster:Who m d id you conf ron t at the AA, in terms of teachers and fellow student s?

Frampton:My group at the AA is a lost generation in many ways. There were andstill are peers of considerable talent, but theyve had mixed careers. NeaveBrown is surely one of th em. He has had the long career as a housing architect,but it hasnt been easy for him. Perhaps the most talented of my generationwas Pa tr ick H od gkinson , who worked br iefl y with Alvar Aalto a s 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 bril l iant teacher, but thearchitectural talent he displayed as a student wasnt fulfilled. Arthur Kornwas important to the AA climate at the time; he was a Jewish migr from

Berlin 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,


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especially in Hertfordshire. As students, we also visited Hunstanton when itwas und er construction in t he early fift ies.

Foster:Thats the school by Peter and Alison Smithson, a landmark New Brutalistbuilding . . .

Frampton:Right. As it ha ppens, Peter Smithson was our design tutor toward t he endof my time at the AA, perhaps the most distinguished teacher of t hat moment .Foster:But t hey were a part o f the g enerat ion ah ead o f 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 shownStirlings work without making it quite clear that it wasnt by the Smithsons.At th at d ate th e neovernacular forms being used by all of them, especially forsma ll-scale cellular h ousing, were similar. Interestingly, they were infl uencedby a book called The Engli sh Villageby Thomas Sharp, an English plan ner whoana lyzed Br itish agr icultural villages and their cha racteristic cluster and linearformation. Already nostalgic, I would say, but also a great modification of the

tabula ra sa approach o f the mo dern mo vement in the interwar period.Foster:When you say your generation was semilost, do you also mean it was in the

shad ow of the generat ion of th e Smithsons and Stirling?Frampton:Im t alking abo ut my specifi c class at t he AA, an d some classes just don t

find their way. In fact a class or two after mine, in which Edward Jones was aleading fi gure, has effectively prevailed. I ha ve in m ind the current pract iceof D ixon Jon es ( Jeremy Dixon is his partner ). It is a successful mod ernBr itish practice, having passed th rough the postmodern mo ment . 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 the

beginning 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 a t P rinceton. H e 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 th e Smithsons and Stirling, they had an ambivalent rela-t ionship to the high modes of modern architecture. In the Smithsons

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Above: Ali son and Peter Smithson. Hunstanton school, Norfolk, England. 194954.Facing page: Nigel H enderson. Farm machinery, Colchester, England. 1960.


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writings there is a strong sense of having come to modernism late andinheriting an already formed tradition. B eing t aught by that generation, wasthere a further d ista ncing from tho se precepts for you and your peers?

Frampton:My fi rst-year master at th e AA was Leona rd Man asseh, who was a hot

architect at the time of the Festival of Britain (1951). The Festival alreadydisplayed a reformist position with regard to t he m odern 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 positionarch itecture should be socially accessible and n ot to o a ssert ive. The t wo mo staggressive structures in the festival were th e Do me and the Skylon .

Foster:In terms of other forces in play at th e time, what about Reyner Ba nha m an dthe Independent Group (IG ) in general?

Allen:Yes: when was New Bruta lism a rticulatedby Ban ham an d o th ersas a

counterpoint to that kind of populist architecture promoted by the Festivalof Britain?

Frampton:A key mom ent 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 fo r th e Lon don Count y Council, designing neo -Corbusierian slabblocks in exposed concrete, loosely modeled after the Unit at Marseille. Allof this was an attempt to recover the rigor of the modern movement in someway. To an extent, t he G olden Lane project propo sed by the Smith sons for

the rebuilding o f Co ventr y also t ried to recover this spirit . Although it wasntLe Corbusiers tabula rasa urbanism, it was meant to be more assertive, morerigorous. At the same t ime it also aspired to be rooted in a kind of nineteenth -century sense of community rather than in the postwar welfare state. I t

wasnt opposed to social welfare,b u t i t h a n k e r e d a f t e r t h espon ta neous social identity ofnineteenth-century urban cul-turehence the re ference bythe Smithsons to Bethnal Greeni n t h e E a s t E n d o f L o n d o n .

There was a connection here tot h e p h o t o g r a p h s o f N i g e lHenderson, who was also an IGm e m b e r . H e n d e r so n s w i f e ,Judith Stephen, was an anthro-pologist and social worker in theBethnal G reen . . .

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Allen:Was there the sense, through the IG , tha t the boundar ies between architectureand art worlds were poro us?

Frampton:It was particularly so for the Smithsons. They were close to EduardoPaolozzi and Henderson, and together they staged the Parallel of Art and Life

exhibition (1953). The Smithsons were also open to Art Brut, Dubuffet, andExistentialism. The Situationists were too much for them, I think, but theywere interested in Co BrA, and tha t already brought t hem to ward Situationism.All of th is was part o f th e Smithsons sensibility, but no t of Stirlings.

Foster:And you felt more sympathetic to whom?Frampton: Well, I was closer to St irling person ally. I do nt t hink I under stoo d t he

Situationist position then; I didnt begin to appreciate it until the 1960s.H owever, in 1963, when I was techn ical editor of Archi tectural Design, we werethe first to publish an English translation of Constants New Babylon. I thoughtit was an astonishing text. Also, at that time in Architectural Design I supportedthe work of Yona Friedm an, who o ften came to our editor ial offices in

Lond on . H e was famous for his space-fram e, megastructural pro posal ParisSpatiale. H e was and still is a d ied-in-th e-wool anarchist, fon d o f saying t hing slike, I t hink there is one art a nd it is cooking!

Foster: Theres no easy fit between the Situationists and the IG and its followers.( L e g e n d h a s it t h a t w h e n t h e S i t u a t i o n i st s c a m e t o t h e I n st i t u t e o fCon tempora ry Art in Lond on in 1960, mutua l incomprehension prevailed.)In the simplest terms, the IG embraced certain aspects of emergent consumerculture, and the Situationists did precisely the opposite. Id think youd feelmore affinity with the latter, and be skeptical of Banhams interests, say, inan imagistic architecture that worked to capture a Pop world on the rise

the work of Cedr ic 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 Archi tectural Design. I found Hamilton a very interesting figure, and Istill do. As for Banham, his Theory and Design in the First M achine Age(1960)was extremely infl uent ial. It was patent ly a m odel for my Modern Archi tecture:A Cri t ical H istory(1980).

Foster:In what sense?Frampton: Ban ham organ ized 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 th em.

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

Frampton:Its a complex issue. As you say, Banhams 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 its 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 t he First M achine Agethisrelates to Colquhoun again, who made an important critique of the book,but it was also evident to me through my experiences at Archi tectural Designis its total advocacy of Buckminster Fuller, a position I found untenable, andstill do. Banham ends with Fuller as the new deus ex machinaof the scene.Also the effects of the States on Banham and on myself were completelydifferent . The U nited Sta tes politicized me in a way . . .

Foster:Youve written about your primal scene com ing to th is coun tr y in 1965, fl yingover New York and seeing eno rmo us fi elds of light s across the mega lopolis.

H ow precisely were you politicized here?Frampton:Primarily through my contact with students, at Princeton and elsewhere,

moving toward 1968. Its 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, Id neverseen production and consumption on such a scale before coming to theStatesgasoline, 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. Its interesting that, in Theory and Design in the First

Machine Age, the Russians are left out. Banham virtually neglects the entireSoviet avant-garde just as Giedion and other received modern historieshad do ne.

Foster: H ow did you com e to t he Russians?Frampton:Aesth etically, to begin with.Foster: Through the C amilla Gra y book, The Great Experiment: Russian Ar t 18631922

of 1962?Frampton: Yes. I knew Camilla Gray personally. Through h er and German fi lmma ker

Lutz Becker I met Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian migr and founder of thearch itectural fi rm Tecton . We were all involved with Norber t Lyntons Br itishArts Council exhibition Art and Revolu tionat the Hayward Gallery in 1971.

Its not tha t G ray was so po litical her self; its tha t her bo ok made me aware ofthe enormous energy of the Russian revolution from a cultural as well as apolitical point of view.

Foster:Tan gent ially perhaps, were you aware of th e interest, amo ng some o f yourartistic contemporaries, in this same Russian material? The Gray book wasalso import an t to Minima lists like Car l And re an d D an Flavin. Was tha t workin your fi eld of vision th en?



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Frampton:No, it wasnt. But something else was. In England I was influenced byAnthony Hill, who is exactly my age. He is a British Constructionistasopposed to Constructivistartist who contributed to this Anglo-Dutchmagazine Structureedited by Joost Bajlieu. Other members of this circle were

Stephen Gilbert, an English Neo-Constructivist sculptor living in Paris; JohnErnest, an American migr in London; and Kenneth and Mary Martin.Along with Victor Pasmore they were all inspired by Charles Biedermans Artas the Evolu t ion of Vi sual 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 Doesburgs Ar t Concretat about thesame time th at the G ray book appeared.

Foster:Artists, then, more t han architects: th ey are one source of your fa scinationwith the tectonicnot only in Russian Constructivism, but also throughAnglo -Dutch C onstruction ism . . .

Allen:I wanted to ask about the example of Stirling. His engineering building at

Leicester University is designed in 1959, and some of its elements have beencom par ed to Ko nsta nt in Melnikovs Rusakov Wor kers Club in Moscow(192728)the fo rm o f its cant ilevered auditor ium in pa rticular. If you t hinkabout Stirlings trajectoryfrom, say, his flats for Ham Common (195558),which is a weighty, brick architecture, wedded to the earth and influenced byLe Corbusiers Maisons Jaoul, to the Leicester building, which is by contrast alightweight , predomina nt ly glass-and-steel architecture, an assembly of almostfound pieces, very dynamically composedit is almost a demonstration caseof th e positive infl uence of th e Construct ivist example. I don t know how con-scious it was on his part .

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James Sti rling and James Gowan.Engineeri ng facil i ty, Leicester

Uni versity, England (axonometri c).195963.


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Frampton:You re r ight to recall Melnikov, but Aalto is present too in the way theinteriors of Stirlings cantilevered auditoriums are furnished, as well as insome of the plasticity at the level of t he pod ium. Theres also a six-stor y, br ick-faced laboratory building, a bustle at the back of the tower, with clipped

corners along with isolated staircases and elevators, which owes something toLouis Kahn. So theres a play between th ese infl uences and the more o vert useof ferrovitreous construction, which has its roots not only in Constructivism,but also in the Br itish nineteenth-century engineering tradition .

Allen: So Stirling d id not h ave to get it by way of Russian C on struct ivism.Frampton:H e didn t really, and he wouldnt h ave mad e th at reference anyway.Foster: When you come to this country, you confront consumer society more

directly tha n in England ; youre a lso a ffected by political development s, thestudent movement in particular; and youve rediscovered radical Soviet artand architecture as well. Whats the situation at Princeton when you arrive in1965? I assume thats before Michael Graves is there.

Frampton: No, Graves was there, and Peter Eisenma nin fact Eisenma n invited me.Foster: And there was Tma s Maldon ado from t he n eo -Ba uhausian H ochschule fr

Gestaltung in U lm.Frampton:Yes. H e was ama zing, an d b rough t th ere by Robert G eddes, 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 famouscon crete-br idge h ome in Mar d el Plat a ( 194345). Emilio was a wunderkind:upon gra duat ing, he immediately became a teacher at Pr inceton. Im sure itwas Emilio who persuaded Geddes to invite the Argentine Maldonado as a

visiting professor. Maldonado had a strong influence on my politicization. Icame upo n Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civi li zati onthrough him; as it happens,I also heard Marcuse lecture at Princeton. Colquhoun was also switched on toth is line of t hin king at t he t ime. We still see some eviden ce of t his inColquh ouns book Modern Archi tectu re (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 wasnt a Marxist on his arrival,tho ugh h e was substant ially infl uenced by Manfred o Tafur i later on . ButMaldonado was the key for me. He was an aphoristic teacher in the sense thatjust a sentence or two would susta in on e . . .

Foster: Didnt Maldonado also represent, in part, the failure of the Ulm project to

regain control of the forces of production, that is , the recuperat ion 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 ano ther kind o f mod ernism.

Frampton: Alexander Kluge was also involved with Ulm in the early days in thedepartmen t of com municat ions, which was the fi rst section to be closed. Theradical discourse developed by Maldonado, Claude Schnaidt , and Guy



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Bonsiepe inside Ulm before its dissolution in 1968 was important to me. Iforget exact ly when Maldonado came to Princetonit must have beenaround 1967, just before th e closure of U lm.

Allen:The Ulm project would have faced an uphill battle in the context of 1960s

American consumer culture. On the o ther h and , there were designers in theStates working with industryfor example, in the industrial design departmentat Cra nbro ok. Was there any engagement bet ween t hose European fi guresand American fi gures like Cha rles and Ray Eames or Ha rry Bertoia?

Frampton: I do nt 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 articulated

at that point?Frampton: That moment is difficult for me to characterize. It was centered on the

strange displaced family that Eisenman, through his charisma, gatheredaround himself: Mar io G andelsonas, Dian a Agrest, myself, Ton y Vidler, an d,somewhat later, Kurt Forster. While were not all Europeans, were certainlynot Americans. Eisenma n m ade t his kind of interna tion al coterie, which in asense ha d a lways been h is intention . When I fi rst went to Pr inceton, he o rga-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,fa ir ly confused weekend seminars. Eisenman was disappointed in me

because I wouldnt become, as he put it , the Siegfried Giedion of thegroupone naivet laid on top of another there. Later we repaired oursplit, and in 1972 I became involved with the Institute for Architecture andU rba n Stud ies in New York. We st arted t he journ al Oppositionsout of thisstrange amalgam of Agrest and Gandelsonass Francophile semiotics, Vidlersemerging Tafur ianism, Eisenman s formalist pred ilection s, an d my ownborn-again socialism. In the fi rst issue I published the essay In dustr ializat ionand 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 weve reached this point in our conversation without ment ion-

ing Hannah Arendt, who was also a key influence in politicizing me. TheHuman Condi t ion (1958) was and still is an important reference for my work.Its no t a Marxist thesis, but cert ainly a political on e.

Foster:When did you encoun ter the book?Frampton:In Lon don there was a fertile fi gure nam ed Thom as (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 student s better tha n m ost academics. H e put me on tothe book, and by coincidence I read it when I first came here. It seemed to

me a key to the States, to the condition of advanced capitalist productionand consumption, which I h ad never really und erstood befo re. My fi rst essayin Oppositionsis patently influenced by Arendt: it opens with the Cartesiansplit between appearance and being as a basis of the scientific methodbutalso as the precursor of a great cultural predicament.

Allen:It seems useful here t o d ifferent iate your th inking fro m Tafur is. 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. That

comes to be inserted in to Tafur is discour se. But my interest in Arend t doesdistinguish us, and with Arendt begins my susceptibility to Heidegger, Arendthaving been his pupil. Here there is a split in my position, which has alwaysirrit ated som e people, such as Tony Vidler, who surely views my combinin g ofHeideggerian and Marxist critiques as a scandal. This was already evident inthe early year s of Oppositionsas a kind of tension between us.

Foster: What were the other fo rces in play? If Agrest and Gandelsonas were interestedin French semiotics, and you were drawn to Frankfurt School cr itique with anArendt ian t wist, wha t were the o ther impo rtant d iscourses?

Frampton: At the t ime Eisenman was interested in Noam Chomsky and his

grammatical notion of deep structure. At some point he shifted his groundfrom Chomsky to Derrida. I cant 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 Peterfor good reason, I supposeand he was never thatinterested in Chomskys 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 Bar thes in Par is , to the Inst i tu te . So Peter was in t roduced toFrench structuralism th rough Diana and Mario, but it didnt h ave a stronginfluence on him. However, i t was necessary background for his la ter

fascinat ion with D errida.Foster: Many architects and artists use theory on the basis of analogy: its more a

source of mod els to be adapted t han a genealog y 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 hereoften theyhave led the wayand in some ways it has been a very productive exchange.But freq uent ly too it has seemed a hit-an d-run relat ionship.



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Frampton: Its almost a rationalization. The reference produces the thematicinthe sense of an ideological as well as an operat ional th emat ic.

Allen:In this context its important to recall that Octoberwas published out of theInstitute at that time. I recall seeing Rosalind Krauss deliver Notes on the

Index as a lecture there tha t would have been aro und 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 cr itical, experimenta l 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 gro up ident ity?

Frampton:Yes. On e thing we had in commo n was an almost total d ista nce from t hework of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Allen:Yet th e Ventur is did nt seem to enter d irectly into th e deba tes at th eInstitute; th e real prot ago nist was Robert Stern or perhaps Vincent Scully.

Frampton:This split goes back in part to the Committee for the Study of theEnvironmen t. In t ho se da ys we were all jammed together, the so-called Yale-Ph iladelphia axis of Scully an d th e Ventur is, and th e Pr inceton -Colum biaaxis of Eisenman, Graves, and the so-called Five Architects, with a smallaff i l ia ted circle at tached to Columbia grouped around Jack Robertson.Things were polarized when Scully became aligned with Stern and theVenturis through his book The Shingle Style Revisi ted. 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, G raves, Ch arles Gwat hm ey, John H ejduk,

and Richard Meier); and th e Silvers, who were on t he West Coa st .Foster:What about the later provocation of the young Rem Koolhaas? He writesDeli ri ous 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 heintend ed h is learn ing from New York to t rump t he Ventur is Learning fromLas Vegas (1972) in tha t regard . What did his emergence do to t hose debates?

Allen:Despite your critical sta nce toward Koolhaas now, I always thought you h ad alot in common with him in those early days. For starters, you overlapped atDouglas Stephen an d Partn ers with Elia Zengh elis, Koolhaass teacher at the

AA, who was a founding member of Office for Metropolitan Architecture(OMA) with him in 1975. And you wrote an article for Archi tectu ral Designcalled Two or Three Thin gs I Know abo ut Them ( 1977) a t a t ime whenyou, Rem, and Elia had a common interest in reclaiming something of theprogressive social an d a esthetic po tent ial of Russian C on struct ivism.

Frampton: I designed the Craven Hill Gardens apartment office building for theDouglas Stephen offi ce in th e early 1960s, and tha t 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 by

Zenghelis and Koolhaasbut I didnt prevail.Allen:How different this history might have been. At some point Koolhaas andGerr it Oorthuys made a celebrated tr ip 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 combinat ion) 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 Deliri ous New Yorkat the Institute. It was a lateralmove not aligned with the Institutes attempt to reconstitute a rigorous modernarchitectural position. It was also considered a more aggressive and vitalresponse to the kind of populist crit ique launched by the Ventur is.

Foster: This momen t of t he In st itute occurred when New York Cit y was bankrupt,the economy in deep recession, a nd advanced architecture was largelydivorced from actual building. H ence the r ise of paper architecture?

Frampton:Yes, alth ough it was th e Museum o f Modern Art th at d eveloped t ha trubric . As far as the Inst itute was concerned, a gunshot marriage wasarranged with the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) through Arthur

Drexler, 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 197276, so the Institute was parad oxically prod uctive th en. B utin general youre 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 b y architects such a s Richard Meier and G iovann i Pasanella, andtheir work was published and debated in Oppositions. The Europeans werefascinated by these projects, but it also turn ed o ut to be th e fi nal episode, a tleast in this country, of the modernist dream of combining progressive

arch itectural fo rm with progressive social programs.The Wallace Harr ison exh ibition in 1979 was an import an t mom ent at

the Institute. It typified Koolhaass enthusiastic embrace of everything thatboth high-modern and neo-avant-garde positions rejected. At least the sky-scraper s in Del i ri ous New Yorkhad the pa t ina of h istory. The H arr isonmaterial was too close, and hence more uncomfortable, especially for anolder generation practicing at that time. It almost seemed like a parody of



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modernism. There is an important tension in Koolhaas between a fascina-tion with the progressive aspects of the modernist projectConstructivism,for exampleand an embrace of popular cul ture and bad tas te . TheHarrison exhibition seemed to signal a shift toward a different version of

mass culture.Frampton:It was a countert hesis to n eo -Miesianism and the whole high -mod ernline 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 t ime) all of these posit ionsseemed 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 to

exist in inverse proportion to actual building, as if the former compen-sa ted somewha t fo r the l a t t e r . In a funny wayand th is i s t o jumpaheadsome of these fantasies about architecture have come true. AsFreud says of the art ist in I n t roductory L ectu res, He has thus achievedthrough his fantasy what originally he had achieved only in his fantasyhonor, power, and the love of women (underline he) . Form followsfant asy, or in d reams begin b ig projects.

Frampton: Rems sense of pu blicity is very stron g. P erha ps in t he la st ana lysis thisder ives from P eter Cook and Archigram, who pa ved th e way in the m ediat icsta kes. Impo rta nt elemen ts in t he ea rly Koolhaa s/Zenghelis OMA publicit y

machine were the beautifully illustrated renderings of their early projectsmade in both instances by their wives, Madelon Vriesendorp and ZoeZenghelis.

Allen:Beyond pub licity, there was also an a tmosphere of experiment at ion at theInstitute, a labora tor y-like feel that was very prod uctive. Because not hin g wasgett ing built , there was an intense explorat ion of forms, sources, andmeans of representation. That was the positive side of the period, and itwas very much in cubated at t he In stitute.

Foster:It was in th is climate tha t you wrote Modern Architecture: A Cri t ical H istory.Ho w did that come about?

Frampton:I was commissioned to write that book in 1970; it took me ten years to

finish. The person who commissioned it was Robin Middleton, who wasthen an acqu is i t ions ed i tor a t Thames and Hudson . As i t happens ,Middleton had succeeded me as technical editor of Archi tectu ral Design.The bo ok was much lon ger th an what th e publisher wanted , so th ere was aconstant struggle to write as economically and laconically as possibletha t perha ps explains part of its density.

Foster: Youve talked a bout its relat ion to Ba nh ams Theory and Design in t he 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?H ow calculated was the b ook in its recoveries and revisions?

Frampton:Certainly Leonardo Benevolo was an influence, first his Ori gins of

M odern Town Plann in g(1963; translated 1967) and then his H istory ofModern Architecture(1960; translated 1971). Tony Vidler was also an import antinfl uence, in part icular in the chapter Tony Ga rnier and the In dustrialCity, which was info rmed by man y conversation s with him.

Foster: But did you feel, as Banham did in 1960, that Pevsner, Giedion, andBrun o Zevi had someho w got the histor y wrong?

Frampton:I n ever foun d Pevsners book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936),particularly interesting. I still find Giedion stimulating, when returningcasually to the pages of Space, T ime, and Architectu re(1941). But Banhamsbook was my model.

Foster:But did you, like Banham, feel that there was another kind of modern

architecture to foregro und , ano th er stor y to tell? Thats my question .Frampton:Mainly its a question of the architecture of the Left. Banham omitted

the Left arch itects of th e Weimar Republic almost completely: H ann esMeyer is absent, a long with O tto H aesler, whereas bot h a re featured in mybook. Unlike Banham, I realized that New Deal architecture had to beacknowledged. The same goes for the New Monumentality as formulatedby Jos Luis Sert, Fernand Lger, and Sigfried Giedion in 1943. This was avery important development, especially in relation to Soviet Realism andthe Indian architecture of Brit ish imperialism. Indeed, for the entireinterwar period , that aspect of modern b uilding culture tha t wasnt tied to

radical social projects had to be treated: hence the passages on ItalianRationalism, Nordic Doricism, Lutyens New Delhi, the American ArtDeco movement , Rocke fe l le r Cen terthey each f ind the i r p lace inModern Architectu re: A Cri t i cal H istor y, in part under the rubric of NewMonumentality. (I was indirectly influenced here by Clement GreenbergsAvant-Garde and Kitsch of 1939.) Then too Banham didnt deal withAalto really, or the whole Scandinavian movement for that matter, andth ese are a lso d iscussed in my boo k.

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 Mart in offi ce, which I m ent ioned

earlier, was closely related to Aaltos position. And Martin was also animportant patron of New Brutalism. The Leicester engineering buildingwas given to Stirling b y Martin t hro ugh t he U niversity G ran ts Com missionwhere Martin was ind irectly respon sible for g iving o ut fa culty 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



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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 n orma tive modern brick tradition for th e English situat ion.

Foster: Your wor k differ s in ot her ways from ho w prior h istor ian s ha ve presented

mod ern a rchitecture. Whereas Pevsner looked ba ck to th e 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 at tent ion 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 relat ionship is between them? Somemight assume that a stress on structure might interfere with a sensitivityto pla ce. . . .

Frampton:My preoccupations arise out of the direct experience of makingbuildings, at the societal as well as the professional level. Even though itsnot 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 part icular work in a physical setting at a given h istor icalmoment. That attention binds my two concerns togetherplace on theone hand and structural expressivity on the other. Both preoccupationshave to do with finding some basis on which architects can ground theirpract ice in what H eidegger refers to as a destitute time.

On my first visit to the States in 1965 I was accompanied by James

Gowan (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 m ight h ave d erived from my interest in Con struct ivism, 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 resista nce to the emergence of a postmoderndiscour se of scenogra phic architecture.

Frampton:Yes. If you want to split the t wo, the concern with place was articula ted

in relation to the reality of the megalopolis, and the emphasis on structureto th e 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 t he earlier period . Ton y Vidler, for example, d eveloped a differ-e n t g e n e a l o g y o f m o d e r n i s m , g o i n g b a c k t o t h e e i g h t e e n t hcenturyhence his interest in Ledoux, and his account of typology as a

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symbolic, primarily representational constructionas opposed to youridea of history, which looks more to the example of Pevsner, or a socialprogram tha t respond s to th e new means of ind ustr ial production. B esidesproviding a co mm on cat alog o f form al sources, Ton ys mo ve could be seen

to underwrite the postmodern operationGraves 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 th ink thats right : I believe his position was more in t he postmod erndirection.

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 oth er hand , you also ident ify, as a pr imal scene of architecture in the West,as a traumatic moment that changes it forever, the institutional separation ofarchitecture from engineeringits almost a foundation myth of modern

architecture for you (in fact you give it a date, 1747, when the cole des Pontset Ch ausses is found ed). Two q uestions. First, d o you stress the tecton ic 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 writingnarratives 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 stat ics, for exa mple, structura l engineer ing could ntbe 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 apprenticethat is, the knowledge was contained in the actualprocedures of m aking th ings. Thus no division existed b etween t he per sonwho drew the scheme and the person who executed it. For lay people the

existence of these two different figures, the builder on the one hand andthe architect on the other, has always been confusing. Even Renzo Pianosfather, an established builder, is supposed to have said to him when hedeclared his aspirations to be an architect, Why go to architecture school?Tha ts ridiculo us. We know ho w to build.

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



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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 po int at which a poet ics of con struct ion is combined with sta tics

to determine the way a joint is bolted or welded. Formal considerationstha t are potent ially poetic come into play. All of th is is an attempt to resistthose forces tha t impinge upon th e realization o f the environment in negat iveways because of the division of laboras with, for example, the new disciplineof the project manager whose function is to prevent the architect fromta lking to th e client.

Allen:Even wor se is the emergen ce of value engineer ing.Frampton:These are sub-professions that have their own narrow goals. And they

tend to prevent a m ore integrated cultural form from coming into existence.Allen:We h ave moved no w from Modern Archi tectu reto Studies in Tectonic Cul tu re.

Your ea rlier statemen t ab out your H eideggerian and Marxist sides being

at war is in terest ing : a s implis t ic way of put t ing i t would be tha t theMarxist is in the forefront in Modern Archi tectu reand the Heideggerian inStudies in Tectonic Cul tu re. But its more complicated. For example, you saythat the division of labor is one of the basic predicaments that underliesmodern life, and in Tectoni c Cul tu reyou look for tho se privileged mom ent sin which certain fi guresarchitects like Jrn Ut zon, Car lo Scarpa, RenzoPiano, or Alvaro Sizaare still able to perform an integration, but underthe now much more difficult conditions of modernity where the divisionof labo r is a fact of life.

Frampton:There are in terest ing issues here . I have a f r iend named Paulo

Martins Bara ta , who wrote a do ctoral th esis on Sizas work from a tectonicstan dpoint. Even th ough I m comm itted to the con sistent and remarkableevolution of Sizas architecture over a long period of t ime, theres not

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Alvaro Siza. Architectu ral School, Porto,Portugal (perspecti ve). 1988.


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much that can be considered overtly tectonic in it. There are small-scaleelementswindow and door frames, perhaps, certain spanning componentshere an d th ere but in the ma in, Sizas work is not tectonic in its chara cter, asopposed to, say, Ut zons. This br ings up the diffi cult question o f the limits of

sculpture 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 Miralless work the tectonic ele-ment is closely integrated with the sculptural. In Gehrys case, apart from hisvery early work, theres no interest whatsoever in the tectonic. Hes onlyin terested in plast ic i ty , and whatever makes i t s tand up wil l dohecould nt ca re less. Tha ts ver y eviden t in B ilbao .

Foster:Isnt there a distinction too between an autonomy that the sculptural

seems to assume and a sitedness that the tectonic aspires to achieve?Frampton: Perhaps, but if you t ake the mod el of Go ttfried Semper an d d iscriminate

in 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 m ore na turally outof the earth and out of th e plastic character of the earth work.

Foster:So th e terms can be reversed.Allen:It h as to d o with the way the structure is realized. The a ssembled ch ara c-

t e r o f l i g h t s t r u c t u r e s i s a l m o s t se l f -e vi d e n t , a n d t h e v ie w e r c a nreconstruct the process of construction. The sculptural unity of Gehryswork 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 Miralless work, on the o ther h an d, it is possible to und erstan d h ow thepieces are put together to create his forms, however elaborate and sculp-tural th ey may be.

Frampton:Its also clear ho w they relate to t he ground . In my view a mo re elabora tetheorization of all these relationships still remains to be done. I was recentlyreadin g Merleau-Po nt y, an d th ere are very interest ing pa ssages in ThePhenomenology of Percept ion that point to the potential of the body to experi-

ence at a m icrolevel the space made a vailable in architectural form . From th ispoint of view the elaboration of the program should avoid any formalisticshort-circuiting of what on e might call the on tological potent ial.

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-



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Above: Enric Mi ral les andCarme Pins. Olympic archery

ranges, Barcelona. 1992. Ri ght:Jrn Utzon. Bagsvaerd Church,

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

Church (section) . 1976.

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gra ph ic. But even in th e early 1960s, th ese effects were present n ot o nly inPop a rt but in image culture at large, to the degree that t hey encourageda k i n d o f d i se m b o d i m e n t o f t h e v i ew e r a n d a d i sso l u t i o n o f p l a c e .Ironically, there are also some convergences between these Minimalist and

Pop tra jectories.Allen:In this regard I was interested to read your critique, in Labour, Work andArchitecture, of Swiss G erman Minimalism ( Peter Zumtor, H erzog an d deMeuron, and others). It speaks to Hals point, and theres 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 on to a n un anch ored kind of subject-effect. The same Minimalismtha t can support th e kind o f place-making an d recovery of perception t hatyou 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 g enerate, o ut of very few element s, a very stron g symbo licpresence, however esoterican arresting physical presence and not animagistic one. That kind of position is difficult for architects due to thevery complexity of buildingthe way it has to respond to the life-worldand also be integrated within i t 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. Theres a primordialism in your thought, a

commitment to Semperian materialism, even anthropology, and for somepeople th is insistence o n o rigins and earth m akes your work . . .Frampton:Co nser vat ive. . . .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 for ms. This marking is no t just a heur istic or histor ical fi ction for you;it is an essent ial part o f arch itecture that subsists, or th at should, fo r 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 the

case of Tad o And o. And here we com e full circle: in t he a rt world theMinimalists were trying to build on the unframed experience of architec-ture as opposed to the fra med experience of th e trad itional art work . . .

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



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architecture of Ando and other s. Can it maintain t hat sense of un framedexperience, or is it recontextualized in a new institut ional fra me?

Frampton:This raises many questions. Theres a peculiar confrontation, or perhapsconvergence, between ph enomen ological and onto logical proclivities in

architecture 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 dynamicwith 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 con fron ted h ead-on with th ese value crises or apor ia ina way tha t oth er cultural fi elds are not .

Allen:So what is specific to architecture as a disciplineits relative slowness,

durability, and being wedded to placecan be seen as progressive ratherthan nostalgic, at least to t he degree tha t the d ominant forces today tendin th e opposite directiontoward speed, replaceability, and movement.

Frampton:Right, as long as architecture doesnt exclude appropriate technology,because such technology can be progressive toofor example, servomech-anisms tha t control the tempera ture of a room more precise ly . 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 oppo sition.

Foster:It seems, though, as if you treat architecture here in part as a stand-in for

other 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 Magazinehas 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 th is intract able problemth at no neof this architectural resistance can be truly effective without real transforma-tion s in building codes, urban zonings, environment al laws . . .

Frampton:I can hardly deny it. But theres a counterthesis to be made here, which Imention at the beginning of Labour, Work and Architecture. When you lookthrough the best professional magazineswhich are primarily Spanish and

Italian, above all Architecturra Vivaedited out of Madrid by Luis FernandezGa liano and you look at architecture worldwide, the q uality of current a rchi-tecture at its best is quite remarkable in terms of how its conceived, built, andequipped a t th e technical level. What is cur ious about publication s like th e NewYork Timesis how narrow-minded t hey are. It represents some kind of n egat ivelyprovincial idea of what is chic on the local landscape. It has no comprehensiveoptic, no apparent understand ing of what is happening elsewhere.

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Foster:This is a dialectical moment in your thoughtas opposed to your tendency tolapsarian narratives. For the most part the image and the media are onthe side of th e forces of evil for you, but h ere there is an instan ce in whichimages of progressive architecture are mediated around the world to positive

effects. Do you also have a similarly dialectical account of the effects ofthe computer on architectural practice and pedagog y?Frampton: In Labour, Work and Archi tectu reI cite the engineer Peter Rice to the

e f fec t tha t the computer can res tore the t ac t i le qua l i t y o f bu i ld ing .Perhaps its 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. Its a populist idea, having to do with accessibility again, thenotion that there shouldnt be a gulf between ordinary people and the builtenvironment. Rice evokes the computer as a tool that would permit this

kind of contact (I assume hes referring to his experience working withPian o on th e Cent re Pom pidou). Yes, I do see a dialectical dynamic th ere.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 th e sta r system an d o f th e way certain fi gures are overvalued as a result.

Allen:The computer can be subsumed by the media, in which case its capacityto prod uce and reproduce images endlessly is foregrounded. But the comp uter

also allows for rapid prototyping, milling, and computer-aided manufac-turing in a way that permits a partial recovery of the means of productionfor arch itects. It puts them in closer cont act with th e mater ial, as opposedto the building industrys tendency to hold them at arms length from theprocess of con struct ion. You t alked earlier of th e separat ion o f th e archi-tec t f rom the c l ient and from the bui lder ; there s now the hope tha tcomputer design and fabr ica t ion might a l low the archi tec t a grea terdegree of cont rol.

Frampton: Pro vided it doesnt becom e in itself a form o f fetishizat ion. I was th inkingof a rather unexpected example of such a positive use: Ove Arup andPartners recovery of reinforced stone arches, which wouldnt be possible

without computer calculation and the precision cutting of stone because ofthe precise interfaces required in the arch between each voussoir. H ere thedigital is oriented not toward the future but toward a revitalization of thepastits a stone arch, for Gods sake. And yet, I suppose, it might befetishizing to use a stone arch at all. This raises interesting questions aboutfetishization in relation to pro gram, fo r example, or to landscape. Theres arisk that the production of a certain component will be fetishized in a way



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tha t unba lances the work as a whole. We often tend to o vervalue a demonstra-tion of the n ew way for its own sake.

Allen:You re q uite crit ical of som e Br itish high -tech a rchitectu re for preciselythat reason.

Frampton:Yes. One is somet imes caught bet ween admira tion for th e man ifesta t ionof sheer tech nica l skill in a build ingit s lumino sit y as a techn ical objectand 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 tha n Richard Ro dger s or Norma n Foster.

Allen:Before we end, I want to ask about your relation to a younger generationof cr itics. Your essay U t ilitar ian versus H uma nist Idea ls ( 1969) in Labour,Work and Archit ectu re, concerning Hannes Meyers and Le Corbusier sschemes for the League of Nations building, was an important point ofreference for Michael Hays. Hays accepts your identification of Meyer

with t he ut ilita rian and Le Corbusier with th e huma nist ideal, but he givesthose values a different interpretation. He has constructed a defense ofMeyers functionalist position as radically post-humanistthat 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 m ight be in the architectural con text? H ow do you see your workin relation to his? I mention Hays because he is a critic and historian ofmy generat ion with whom you might expect a strong dialogue. . . .

Frampton:Your q uestion makes me th ink again of t he limits of any part icular

historical moment. Is it unfair to suggest that the critical rigor upheld byH ays and possibly by Tafur i, in their d efense of the ant icompositional a ndthe antihumanist, is still a form of waiting, as it were, for the revolution-a r y m o m e n t w h e n a r a d i c a l t r a n s f o r m a t i o n m i g h t o c c u r a n d a n e w condition 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 th e mor e opera tively critical.

Allen:You ve implied tha t Meyers funct iona lism migh t be ada pted to und erwr itethe t echn ocra t ic a rch i tecture o f po stwar Amer ica , a s opposed to LeCorbusiers humanism, which still might hold o ut some possibility of resistan ce.You po int ou t that Meyer, for example, devotes the en tire gro und place ofthe Leag ue of Nat ions scheme to the car, and provides six times the amo untof 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 encoun ter with your AA teacher, the student of H ilberseimer, in themid 1950s and your encounter with Maldonado at Princeton in the late60s. 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 h ave remained engag ed with con tempora ry architecture in a waytha t H ays is not an d Tafur i was not . Even if it mean s accepting some o fthe contradictions of your own position, since, as youve suggested, itsvery hard to reconcile Piano, Ando, and Sizato pick only three figurestha t youve supported.

Foster:H ave tho se contempora ry engagement s chang ed your histor ical thinking atall? H ave they opened up oth er fi gures in th e past for you? That can b e oneeffect of con tinued engagemen t as a criticto stay enlivened a s a h istor ian.

Frampton:Yes. For exam ple , they have made m e wan t to re read G ermanExpressionism; I ve never paid suffi cient attent ion to Erich Mend elsohn inthis regard, and his position is very interesting. But this prompts anotherkind o f refl ection: when we look at a body of work, we often h ave the d elusionthat it should all be of a piece, but humans are not like that in the end,and history isnt either. So there are moments where things are achievedand have a resolut ion, 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 toident ify no t career s as ent ities but specifi c works within a n o verall bod y of

production.Allen:On that score, the two books that weve focused on are very different.Modern Architectu reis a book that, in a sense, had to be written, and it scompreh ensive in its treatment of d ifferent fi gures. For me Studies in Tectoni cCulture is more original and more complex. Its 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 t he present in a way that Modern Architecturedoes not .Put another way, if we pay attention to the subtitles, we have the passagefrom A Cr itical Histor y to The P oetics of Co nstruction.

Frampton:Part of the challenge, whether one is on the side of making work or

of cr iticizing it , is developing a stra tegy of sidesteppingsidestepping a tendencytoward closure that seems to constrain the living present in such a waythat you sometimes feel you cant do anything. The value Im 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



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school exhibitions, a proliferation of forms with nowhere to go. One almostsuffocates from their elaboration. So its 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-complete

closure of the Right over environmental development in the United States andelsewhere as well.

New York City, May 29, 2003

OCTOBER58

allen stan--foster hal--a conversation with kenneth frampton

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