Kenneth Frampton

Few architecture critics have had the impact of Kenneth Frampton. His Modern Architecture: a Critical History is a masterpiece; his essay on Critical Regionalism, one of the most influential pieces of writing on architecture of the twentieth century. He talks to Tim about his latest collection of essays Architecture and the Public World, published by Bloomsbury.

 

Podcast transcript

Kenneth Frampton: Peter Cook long since gave up in trying to talk to me and maybe vice versa.

Tim Abrahams: Superurbanists. Hello. This week we were in Bedford Square in London to talk to Kenneth Frampton, who for over half a century has taught, lectured and written about architecture – top of his profession. His book, Modern Architecture, a Critical History will no doubt be the book for which he is most remembered. The way it explores the tension between culture and civilization, tradition and progress, specificity of place and universal technologies. His essay Critical Regionalism still hugely widely influential in areas where architecture is still challenging. South America, China. 

There was something very pertinent though about his latest collection of essays which have been compiled from over his career. It explored the impact on his thinking about architecture, about cities, about planning made by the writing of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, particularly her masterpiece, the Human Condition. Ladies and gentlemen, Kenneth Frampton is 93 and yet when you listen, you’ll hear a man with a clear narrative about modernism and modernity with strong philosophical underpinnings. His work applies globally, speaks to deep rhythms of his history and touches the way we live. You may not agree with all of it, but any ideas you have or I have should be as coherently argued and lived as Kenneth’s.

Kenneth Frampton: My name is Kenneth Frampton and part of my life story is to actually study architecture in the AA School of Architecture in Bedford Square from 1950 to 55, and then spent let’s say the best part of my life, 50 years at least in America, first in Princeton and then in Columbia University.

Tim Abrahams: Why we are speaking at the moment is your book Architecture and the Public World published by Bloomsbury very kindly provided us with the place to meet. The publication is a collection of your writing over the last 30 to 40 years or is it even further back than that? What’s the earliest?

Kenneth Frampton: It’s not the first book of essays that have been collected, essays of mine that has been published because prior to this, Phaidon published a collection of essays and I can’t remember when exactly that was probably 20 years ago, called Labour, Work and Architecture influenced” by Hannah Arendt The Human Condition, someone who had an enormous influence on me, which I first read in the mid-sixties. It’s a book of 1958, the Human Condition, it’s her magnum opus, I think, without a question, German immigré philosopher, pupil at some point fundamental pupil of Martin Heidegger

Tim Abrahams: What was it that grabbed you? Why was it so important to you?

Kenneth Frampton: Yes. I don’t know whether I fully appreciate the full dimensions of this book. Maybe also not now even, but it’s a kind of a political philosophical work. Basically, the human condition and beautifully written, unbelievable piece. Incredible language she wrote it in English, which is just even more extraordinary, and she migrated to the states from Paris already an émigré in the late forties. She ended up in New York and taught at the New School by the way. So that’s also an interesting conjunction in that the editors of this collection of essays also as of now teach in the New School and not in philosophy but in architecture have to focus on answering a question, which is that for me, fundamental distinction she makes in the human condition, she distinguishes between labour, work and action. And I elected not to dwell on the action part, but I was terribly struck by her definition of the difference between labour and work.

She maintains the thesis that these two terms, which are generally thought of as synonyms, are in fact quite distinct. And she defines exactly what do we mean by them. She gives rather primitive examples. For example, we speak about a woman in labour and we speak about a piece of art as a work of art that is relatively crude, that distinction, and she defines it much more precisely, much more elabourately and much more elegantly because she says basically labour is that state of affairs in which that which is produced is meant for consumption and labour is associated with process and with constant fungibility. And work is a state of affairs in which that which is produced is not intended for consumption. It’s intended to create a world a microcosm.

Tim Abrahams: So if I can just clarify, labour is effectively that which enables life to go on and work is that which makes life legible, meaningful.

Kenneth Frampton: She says exactly that. The human condition of labour is life itself. She says something like we consume our houses, our furniture, and our cars as though like the good fruits of the earth they would perish if they’re not consumed and brought into man’s endless metabolism with nature, something like that. That’s how she defines labour.  And the work is of course, it’s complete opposite that she has the term space of appearance. I added to it space of human appearance, space of public appearance, actually the terminology that Aaron uses his space of appearance.

Tim Abrahams: So you further defined it as space of human appearance.

Kenneth Frampton: Or public appearance.

Tim Abrahams: Space of public appearance. Interesting.

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, and to some extent it’s redundant because the space of appearance itself is a political space probably if one is reading her correctly, it is a political space first and then a physical space subsequently. She says somewhere this amazing thing, power will remain with the people as long as they live closely together and her basic political thesis is one of participatory democracy, very close to direct democracy.

Tim Abrahams: It has an urban dimension to it because she’s talking about proximity.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, exactly. And of course the paradigm for which she has been criticized is of course the Greek polis and she says somewhere quite overtly, which is very obvious that our term political comes from the polis and she’s seen as a conservative thinker in a way you could say the influence of Heidegger on her.

Tim Abrahams: There’s a big old story between Heidegger and Arendt isn’t it?

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, it was a personal story because they were lovers at some point, but more importantly there is a line of thought which I think still preoccupies me, which runs from Edmund Husserl this physicist, who develops a kind of critique of science itself. The idea of truth in science, the idea of experimental truth being dominant is famous for all the slogan: “back to the things themselves.” 

Tim Abrahams: There’s a moment which crops up twice in the book, I think and it’s related to Arendt because I’m going to ask you about what were the questions that she was helping you answer, and you described this incredible moment when you first go to Princeton. This says something about the way in which the academic world has changed. You had got a helicopter ride from Newark to JFK. Describe this moment of looking down.

Kenneth Frampton: On the way back?

Tim Abrahams: On the way back. What did you see?

Kenneth Frampton: Simply of course, Manhattan burning energy, so to speak, electric light, of course, but all these cars, it was like a Pirrenesian vision and not at that very instant, but that experience alone had a definite impact on me. I’ll never forget it, I’d never seen anything like that in my life. Of course, I was not in the air here, but London. It wasn’t like that and this consumption of energy and later, a very interesting difference at that time and perhaps still, there was a colleague of mine who I knew, I think through the AA circles, whose name was Mike Glickman, and he once said to me, you have to remember something in Britain, the claws are hidden, but in the States you can see them. That for me was an unbelievable metaphor and so in a sense I was politicized in States, I think partly through reading Hannah Arendt, and partly through experiencing the United States itself at this very moment as we talk, the manifestation of American power in terms of what is happening in Palestine, it’s unbelievable, clearly held in place.

Tim Abrahams: By that sheer amount of energy, that sheer amount of power that you saw manifested in that moment.

Kenneth Frampton: And so then I understood power in a quite different way and never left me that revelation, so to speak. So it is of course industrial power. It relates of course to this question of labour because the other revelation for me is that there is a lovely story, which is Renzo Piano, a famous Italian architect, right? His father was a builder, quite a big builder I think. So when he turned to his father as a young man and said, I want to go to architecture school, the father said to him, what do you want to do that for? We know how to build. Why do you want to go to architecture school? And it brings up an incredible thing, I think, this question of building versus architecture, and it later became clear to me that the Oxford English dictionary makes the same discrimination between building and architecture that Arendt makes between labour and work because the Oxford English dictionary gives two definitions.

One is the action and process of building, which of course is close to labour, but it’s never finished its processive and is also very close to, you can see that the speculation speculative building is on the age of commodification, and that’s very evident right now. For example, if you think of something like Canary Wharf, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank moved out of its building on Canary Wharf and now this empty, this thing, not built so long ago after all, and what’s going to happen to that? Then you quickly realize that all these high-rise buildings, it’s commodification in the end.

Tim Abrahams: So it’s an act of what seems to be providing shelter and necessity is actually not that at all?

Kenneth Frampton: Speculation and commodification. And so going back to this double definition in the Oxford English Dictionary one is the action and process of building and building is a gerund. It already implies unending, noun-verb and the other erection of edifices for human use. The other definition has a certain ambiguity because it involves utility, but edifice is connected to edification, which is cultural and it’s amazing. It has very public quality because the hearth making a hearth is microcosmic. It’s a kind of small world and is a small world of discourse also because around the fire, the discourse between humans with each other, so of course it’s ridiculous in a way to compare this to her space of appearance, the polis, but you can see the link. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s the beginning of it.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes. So edifice itself has built into it etymologically this idea of a space of appearance related to the fire, heat, cooking, food, conversation. You can see these things.

Tim Abrahams: And when you say the place of appearance, it’s not so much what it looks like, it’s the pace of manifestation.

Kenneth Frampton: What I think is interesting about The Human Condition. It is one in the same time both political and cultural. The cultural implications of what she’s talking about are inextricable from the political. I think our whole discourse is bringing together the cultural and the political.

Tim Abrahams: The political cannot exist without a culture which sustains it and vice versa. One of the things is really interesting is that moment that you described when you’re looking at this kind of, you are going over to the US a bit earlier than the Archigram Boys, but your response is much more questioning, whereas there’s a slightly crazed celebration of it that they go under. Did you ever have any kind of dealings with him?

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, I did Peter Cook long since gave up in trying to talk to me and maybe vice versa and something of an anathema to Peter Cook if he cares about me at all for that matter. So there’s no conversation there,

Tim Abrahams: But in that historical moment it’s very interesting, the different approaches.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, right. The big figure in all of this is Reyner Banham because his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age ends with Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller is ban the ultimate progressive point, which is completely technological, the geodesic dome and all that stuff, and the project of putting a dome over Manhattan in order to shield it from totally fictive, from atomic warfare to shield it from radioactive fallout.

Tim Abrahams: There’s some pointing at the head here.

Kenneth Frampton: A very strange person really, and an enormous influence here in Britain, not only on Archigram, but certainly Archigram was influenced by Fuller, but so was Cedric Price

Tim Abrahams: Foster. He is a big influence on Foster.

Kenneth Frampton: A big influence. Every time Fuller arrived in Britain, Foster would arrange for him to go and see his latest building. In the beginning of Foster’s career, Foster was totally sold on Fuller and more gifted as an architect than Fuller, much more gifted. Fuller wasn’t really an architect at all. He was this sort of dropout figure who went into the Navy and not strictly a mathematician, a Yankee tinker, I think we can say in a way, he is a creature of the New deal in a way, but he’s not an architect. There’s this magazine Shelter which he was editor of with other people. It’s very fascinating. The magazine Shelter itself, which you can feel it from, the title is that somehow the whole New Deal is an attempt to overcome the stock market crash of 29 wouldn’t have existed without the stock market crash. And it is a great moment in the United States.

Tim Abrahams: And Fuller as a kind of child of that, Banham is a figure that promotes this.

Kenneth Frampton: Therefore Foster and so on. British High Tech, in fact.

Tim Abrahams: What’s your view on their attitude to the issues that Arendt was raising? Is it something that crosses their mind? Is it something that informs your critique of them?

Kenneth Frampton: It’s something that informs my critique of them. I think it doesn’t cross their mind at all. They’re not interested. They’re so removed from her discourse, but it definitely informs my critique of them. Before I go to the States, I’m very much connected to this circle around James Stirling, Alan Colquhoun. These were important figures, and in fact, the figure who suggests to me, I read the Human Condition, he was an important figure in the late fifties and early sixties whose name was Thomas Stevens. In a way, I belong to a somewhat conservative circle. Colquhoun writes a very stringent critique of Banham’s Syrian design in the first machine age, and in 1960 when the book comes out, and Banham would have a big influence on me, by the way, because I’m commissioned to write the history in 1970, but the modern architecture of critical history took me a decade to write it. It comes out in 1980, 20 years after Banham.

Tim Abrahams: In many ways it’s responding to Banham’s.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, it is. But as I suggested that there was an article in the British Journal of Aesthetics by Alan Colquhoun in 1960, which is a critique of that book, and one of the primary points that Colquhoun makes is how can buildings which Banham appreciates and thinks of having very high value such as the Mies Van der Rohe house or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye be of consequence, and also at the same time a failure because the contradiction that Colquhoun points out that in ending with Fuller, it’s totally reductive in the sense that Fuller’s idea of shelter is simply technological and very simplistic technologically speaking also. So there’s no real cultural dimension in Fuller.

Tim Abrahams: So to use an Arendtian term, it’s all labour and no work.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, and in fact the Centre Pompidou in Paris is an Archigram building. It is amazing. The very earliest rendering of that project is pure Archigram

Tim Abrahams: The style of drawing.

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, no sort the fact that visitors are taken up on this escalator system outside the building and fed into the building at different levels. That’s how it was conceived and that’s how it is. And on the other side of the building, there’s a whole series of pipes that are feeding in air conditioning and taking out sewage of course, 

Tim Abrahams: and ducts 

Kenneth Frampton: so that the building is conceived as a machine with the human subject fed in on one side and the necessary kind of services fed in on the other. It’s a building conceived as a machine, and that fits perfectly the Archigram romantic idea of America and of modernization, which has its own poetic so to speak, and is the driving force behind British high tech, which you can say is Anglo Italian because it is Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. 

They realized that at an enormous scale what Archigram imagined but was not able to build. Whereas the very early works of Renzo Piano are very interesting from the point of view of being systems of building. Piano is also of course influenced by Fuller. Piano was always maybe because of his background, because of the father, much more pragmatic in a way oriented towards the realization of buildings.

Tim Abrahams: Building as a technology rather than technology as building.

Kenneth Frampton: Right, and would go so unlike either Richard Rogers or Norman Foster, Renzo would build in the Pacific, he builds on an island.

Tim Abrahams: New Caledonia, is it?

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, correct. Buildings made entirely out of wood. Norman never does that, and Richard doesn’t either because this speaks to Renzo’s more pragmatic. Yes, in certain sense, more humanist. He’s Italian after all.

Tim Abrahams: So, what’s to hand, he takes.

Kenneth Frampton: It’s a huge difference. The Italian tradition has a more material and cultural humanist dimension renaissance than the British story. You can see how Archigram and also British Rogers and Norman built on the 19th century British engineering triumph basically. And America of course is seen as a kind of ultimate culmination of this same technology. But the way the British read it, they read it in terms of the Crystal Palace 1851, but of course a hundred years later, but it’s the same, what can one say, confidence the manifest destiny of technology what Banham is about really and also Archigram.

Tim Abrahams: That it has its own logic which will

Kenneth Frampton: Ultimately automatically to the benefit of the species. But of course we now know technology is the triumph and also the problem. 

Tim Abrahams: And rejoinder to, was it Cedric Price who said technology is the answer… what was the problem?

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, it’s probably him. Yes, that would be typical of Cedric’s wit. What the Israelis have demonstrated is that they’re masters of technology absolutely on the cutting edge so that they can assassinate whoever they want. They paid that whole network off and with that information they can assassinate whoever they want. And one of the issues of cyber war is that you could cripple a country tomorrow simply by destroying its electrical grid, and they can do it. They probably won’t do it because it’s such a kind of sacrilege of using the technology against itself.

Tim Abrahams: That’s very clear. It just leads into my next point is that you’ve lived in America setting aside the industrialization of China through perhaps the greatest period of material production world’s ever seen, and I get the sense through reading some of the essays, particularly about the megalopolis, your idea of the massively extended, almost continuous connurbation that had a profound impact on your thinking.

Kenneth Frampton: I forget the exact date, but I think it’s 62, that John Guttman French geographer realizes that this is a new manifestation.

Tim Abrahams: This is just as you’re in the United States, he’s coined this term.

Kenneth Frampton: He’s focusing on the Boston Washington corridor and the continuous conation, and that’s how he coins the term megapolis. And the same time Tokyo Okaido is another megalopolis and megalopolis are growing all over the world, and I think it’s around 65, 66, Charles Correa Indian architect says to me, in what 10 years’ time, there’s going to be 15 cities in the world with 15 million people. But in a way, Charles underestimated what was going to happen because now we have 20 million, 30 million all over the place. These connotations are everywhere. When I left the UK, the greater London area was somewhere between 10, 12 million people. I suppose when I went to the States, the greater New York area was the same, 10, 12, depending on where you draw the boundary of course, but surely must be much more. And in 2003, under the direction of Ricky Burdett who became Professor of Architecture and Urbanism in the London School of Economics, start the whole research group there, and they produce in 2003, three big volumes with the title, the Endless City.

They argue that 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, but they argue that by 2050, 75% of the world population will live in Megalopolis, and the phenomenon of megalopolis would not be possible without the automobile by the way. I always maintain that the automobile is by far the more apocalyptic invention than the atomic bomb because the megalopolis wouldn’t have been possible without the automobile. The downside with the automobile is it’s not public transport. We come back to the lack of public in terms of the continuous suburbanization is a kind of placelessness.

Tim Abrahams: It’s interesting that you bring up the subject of the suburban. Why is it important to have to use Arendt’s phrase, representational and physical embodiment of the collective important for politics? Why do we need that physical reality?

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, there is a political philosopher, Chantel Mouffe, and she coins the term agonistics. She distinguishes between antagonistics and agonistics and the Marxist, without a doubt. In agonistic, she cites with approval the discourse of Basimo Cachari was mayor of Venice twice, and Caccari’s critique of the European Union of the power of Brussels takes the form or the phrase if you like, of federation from the top, as opposed from federation from the bottom. Again, we’ll come back to Italians because it’s always been weak in England, but the city state in Italy remains as an idea, as a physical political reality. And this figure, Caccari the philosopher, first of all, no philosopher is ever going to be mayor of any British city. Forget about it in Italy, would a philosopher become? He’s not the only one.

Tim Abrahams: So, his idea is that through urban continuum can create a adoration. The European Union is federation from the top.

Kenneth Frampton: That’s the point of his argument about federation from the bottom. But anyway, Chantal Mouffe is very approving of this Caccari. The argument which you can find in the book Agonistic

Tim Abrahams: And agonistic, is the process by which that federation from the bottom could make.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, I mean agonistics, it is the political realm in which the society determines itself by something close to direct democracy because okay, a city state isn’t exactly direct democracy. It’s quite different from national elections like the one we’ve just had here where the game is to persuade the electorate somehow, or rather to put you in power rather than the other in power with margins of 4%, something like that. Which in the end, it’s populism, it’s a game of populism. It’s not a game that is articulated in a discourse about what we would like to have. It is clear that large chunks of the American population, for example, and it’s also present here are cut out the action. They’re no longer part of the deal. The problems of employment here, this issue of power,

Tim Abrahams: There’s a mass who are just excluded from the public considerations of political parties. 

Kenneth Frampton: The Yes. And Hillary Clinton used unfortunately for her politically, the words deplorable or what in America is called the flyover states. The power is in the east coast and the west coast and the rest are flyover states. It’s already symptomatic. That model even is symptomatic of a kind of reality.

Tim Abrahams: And so in that description you have of the flyover states, you have a physical idea of travel and exclusion.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, and it’s summed up in a Steinberg cartoon where he draws the east coast and then there’s this blank and the west coast on the horizon. That’s a way of perceiving reality, which is also disturbing ultimately and not only disturbing. Trump is all about that. Of course.

Tim Abrahams: Yeah. I just want to bring it back. We don’t want to depress ourselves too much. 

Kenneth Frampton: Okay, fine.

Tim Abrahams: I’m being flippant and I don’t mean to denigrate anything that we’ve been saying because it’s very interesting. But there’s a couple of things in terms of architectural strategies, which you outline in your book, the essays describing such, which I’d like to just touch on, one of which I think is really interesting because it’s a post-rationalization or a corrective to conditions that we’re talking about there, the motopia, the kind of pulling out of space, the lack of representation, and it’s this idea of the mega form in which there is some architectural or urbanistic or landscape project which pulls together a continuum of space which actually ties things together. And I wanted to ask you about that a little bit.

Kenneth Frampton: It has its own pathos, meaning that we were talking earlier about this question of lack of planning this problem, of not planning anything. And it’s very interesting that Le Corbusier who was never considered to be a Marxist really, but was for a planned economy. And he belonged to a certain kind of intellectual circle in the thirties in France who were interested in planned economy. And there is a kind of politics also present in Le Corbusier which is very naive, but definitely perceivable. And so I think after the second World War, he already realized these kind of utopian visions of his were no longer really possible. He comes to terms with the fact that he developed a theory in relation to that. The radial concentric cities of Europe, particularly of Germany, but everywhere are linked by road connections and rail connections, and therefore potentially by linear development.

There’s a model of Le Corbusier’s vision, if you like, that he has of a more realistic potential for development in which the whole thing is a triangular network linking points, preexisting points of preexisting cities, and that interstitially inside the triangular network would be agriculture. He develops much too theoretical one can say, but the radio concentric city of exchange, the linear industrial city, and in the interstices of the grid agriculture, and I make the argument somewhere, I think actually I recently second edition of a book I wrote much earlier on Le Corbusier which has been published by Thames and Hudson, and there’s a postscript at the end by me, which I point this out, that this was the model after the Second World War, an attempt on his part to come to a more realistic model rather than the utopian projects of the thirties. And that didn’t happen either, but partly because of the mass ownership of the automobile.

I suppose when I started to study architecture of the mass ownership of the automobile had not yet become a full reality in Britain, but it was already, of course, the reality of the United States had been since the middle. It emerged of course as a possibility with the Model T Ford and it would just go on the ever-expanding automobile industry. We come back to the mega formula because it’s full of pathos, because what is it exactly? It’s an argument I try to make that certain kind of building programmes could be used to establish places in the placelessness of the megalopolis so that universities or airports or there’s a particular building I have in mind in Singapore, which is really just simply a glorified shopping mall really, but it’s underneath a theatre so that the combination of the theatre and the shopping facility is potentially in my mind a megaform and is a fact, a unified form which is identifiable as a place can be seen in the landscape as a place amidst, the placelessness that’s the rather pathetic idea involved in this notion of mega form as open landscape.

Tim Abrahams: And in the book you talk about Jacob’s Bocham University proposal of 1962. It’s planned for Tel Aviv, it’s 1963 and the Pampers plan for Rotterdam in 1960, Hans Sharouon as well, Maki in Japan. You talk about a kinetic horizontality to the big problem, but you have to scale up the solution.

Kenneth Frampton: This whole story, of course, public transport is a critical issue and light rail, which of course takes us back to the 19th century. What is fascinating for me, the idea in my head is that someone should write a history of the Zurich tram system because it goes back to the 19th century and it will never disappear. They never abandoned the tram system like other parts of the world. 

Tim Abrahams: Britain.

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, totally. But not only, and the United States for that matter, the American term was streetcar, but tram, in any case, what is fascinating is that in Zurich right up till now, the tram has right of way over the automobile. It’s all about public transport. I was thinking quite recently, in fact, there is a very powerful Chinese landscape architect called Kongjian Yu, and he has made incredible large scale parks, often having a kind of very big ecological aspect in terms of rivers and wetlands and all this stuff. It’s very much part of the kind of ecological view of the world, but I have this uneasy feeling that in fact, public transport is somehow missing from this vision. The vision is being realized on a really huge scale in China, but the public transport is not so evident. And so how people go from these mega cities in the Chinese case to these parks, you have this feeling that public transport is absent.

And this question of public transport I think is critical. And the incredible achievement of London going back to the middle of the 19th century, they were the first underground, but also the bus network, the whole thing, the London public transit system is incredible. And the Elizabeth Line is absolutely extraordinary. And there’s a certain kind of reciprocity between Paris and London in that, of course, London starts. That’s incredible. It’s very British to actually think and actually make underground systems with steam trains, 1863, British masochistic, basically. How could they possibly think that’s a reasonable idea that anyone would use, but they did. And it is so British, and the French of course waited until electric power, the metro is 1900. They know they can finally do it in a way which is not totally insane.

Tim Abrahams: Another thing that I loved that you explore was the idea of the way you’ve articulated, as I just alluded to, just there, critical regionalism, and there’s the quotation that you pull. You always find these… pull out the quotations from other writers, which just always, Arendt’s always been a writer I’ve admired, but it’s only through your writing that I really see and really feel the pull of it and make it legible. There’s also a quote when you talk about Critical Regionalism. It’s Alexander Soni and Lillian Re, no new architecture can emerge without a new kind of relationships between designer and user without new kinds of programs, despite these limitations. Critical regionalism is a bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass. And then this is articulation between how to, and you talk about it from the position of a developing nation, how to take on the riches of modernity, but also not be confounded by its deilitirious consequences.

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, right. It also implies, again, this kind of political decentralized power again, and I was very inspired by this 1981 essay, the Grid and the Pathway by Alex Onus and Leon, 1981. It’s fascinating really, because modern A of critical history comes out in 1988, which coincides in a very paradoxical way with the advent of postmodernity and Biennale of that year is very much postmodern manifestation. And you could say that built into my writing this book, which I’m commissioned with in the 1970s, it’s still a kind of conviction about the modern project, but with the 1980 Venice Biennale, of course there’s a whole issue of me resigning from the planning committee of that.

Tim Abrahams: Wait, what? I didn’t know this story.

Kenneth Frampton: What happens is that Robert Stern US of course, and Charles Jencks UK, but an American living in the UK together, but there are others like Vincent Scully and so on from Yale. Somehow there is this connection established between Paolo Portoghesi who is close to Italian socialist party as a matter of fact, but they together have this idea, Portoghesi Stern Jenks to consolidate, to conceive and legitimize the kind of break with the modern project postmodern. It involves all sorts of other figures, Robert Venturi, et cetera. And Stern asked me to be a member of the committee, and I go once the Venice and then I write a letter to Portoghesi to say I’m resigning. So that’s a breakpoint for me and I had this connection to Greece and to a magazine called Architecture in Greece, and the grid and the pathway will appear in 1981. So these things are very close together. And when Hal Foster edits this collection of essays on postmodern culture.

Tim Abrahams: He invites you.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes. And he will produce this essay called Towards the Critical Regionalism, six Points for an Architectural Resistance. So I formulate this idea of a decentralized body politic, however modest, a village or city, a town, whatever. Again, this very influenced by Arendt of course, not at that moment directly, but clear that that’s the idea. Same idea of a direct democracy

Tim Abrahams: And architecture as representational and physical.

Kenneth Frampton: Yes, exactly. And it has been very influential. This essay outside of the transatlantic Eurocentric world. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s exactly what my point was going to be. My point was going to be slightly provocative on where do you think it’s been most influential and where, I mean, is it somewhere I would say Chile perhaps, or Mexico, even Latin America?

Kenneth Frampton: Yeah, I would say so. I mean it’s been sporadic, but probably also China, maybe.

Tim Abrahams: Time is running out. But I just wanted to say the book is fantastic and I recommend, it’s going to be out on October 16th, it’s Architecture and the Public World by Kenneth Frampton, heavily influenced by Hannah Arendt. But it’s a history of how to think about planning, urbanism, architecture and politics altogether. It’s the most coherent vision I’ve read of someone in my lifetime bringing all those things together, and I’m very grateful to you for discussing it. Thank you very much. 

Kenneth Frampton: Thank you. 

Tim Abrahams: Thank you to Susie Nash and Carly Bull at Bloomsbury for making this happen. Thank you to all the people at the Architectural Association who helped as well. Did you know that Frampton resigned from the organizing committee of Portoghesi’s 1980 Venice Biennale? I didn’t know that. This is the foundational Venice architecture of Biennale. And from that, he went on to propose Critical Regionalism with some Greek dudes. Amazing, absolutely amazing. I shall be thinking about this podcast a lot. What I’m most taken with is the way he extrapolates from the quotation from Hannah Arendt: “only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present, will power remain with them? That’s something that’s political justification of urban density.” 

And I’m not convinced, I think Frampton argues the logic very well, his advocacy of an architecture that is representational and a physical embodiment of the collectivist convincing, and it speaks very much to our love of the city. But the city state is not our primary political expression. It is the nation. Still, there’s much to commend this in the digital age that we need to be with each other to experience and produce political power, but also this fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of places we live in today. But that’s a feeling. What remains is admiration for Frampton’s work. Thank you so much for listening. We have more stuff to consider. We have more architects to speak to, like, and subscribe. Keep sharing this stuff. It’s great. These people are talking straight to you as much as they’re talking to me. Talk to you soon. Bye.

 

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