Critical Regionalism: A Not So Critical Theory

Author: Carmen Popescu
Year: 2020 (in The Figure of Knowledge, Leuven UP)
Source type: chapter
Raw file: raw/chapters/popescu-critical-regionalism.md

Summary

Popescu interrogates the construction of "critical regionalism" as a "travelling concept" — from its prehistory (the 1948 MoMA symposium, Giedion's "new regionalism," Mumford's Bay Region, Moholy-Nagy's "anonymous architecture," Heidegger's 1951 Darmstadt lecture) to its launch by Tzonis and Lefaivre, its consecration by Frampton, and the 1989 Pomona meeting. Against its self-image as an "architecture of resistance," she argues critical regionalism "seemed to have failed its role of providential solution," becoming "less an architecture of resistance than an architecture meant to provide resistance — a disguised manner of keeping a certain hegemonic discourse alive."

Key Claims

• Critical regionalism as a travelling/constructed concept: launched in 1980–81 by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre ("The Grid and the Pathway"), replacing Alofsin's "constructive" with "critical," consecrated by Kenneth Frampton (Perspecta 1983, "Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance"). Its historicity was a constructed narrative drawing on Vitruvius and the primitive hut.
• Prehistory: the 1948 MoMA symposium considered "how regionalism could rescue modernism," with Mumford's Bay Region style as a "native and human form of modernism"; Giedion's "new regionalism" (space-time) and Moholy-Nagy's "anonymous architecture" (vernacular from a Heideggerian perspective of man-site); Heidegger's 1951 lecture on space-as-place.
• Frampton's theory: built on Heidegger (space vs place), Arendt ("space of public appearance"), and Ricœur (rooted culture vs universal civilisation); a "culture of resistance" that "seek[s] to deconstruct universal modernism in terms of values and images which are locally cultivated"; later shifting to the "poetics of construction"/tectonics.
• The critique of its criticality: the discourse "laid on a problematic intellectual construct" (Eggener); it was "not a historiographic category but rather a label forged on the scene of architectural criticism," misused and diluted. Defending peripheries "reinforced their geopolitical belonging," stressed "their marginality" — their differences perceived as "cultural marketing in the context of late capitalism" (Colquhoun: what was celebrated "would seem to be more the loss of authenticity than its recovery"). "The very theorization of critical regionalism came from a central position, which ironically resumed a certain intellectual colonisation."
• Conclusion — a "refolution": critical regionalism was "a version of ... critical modernism," a way of "evacuating history through geography," of saving the modernist doctrine; "perhaps critical regionalism was less an architecture of resistance than an architecture meant to provide resistance — a disguised manner of keeping a certain hegemonic discourse alive."

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Everyday Architecture · Atmosphere · Dwelling
Authors: Carmen Popescu · Christian Norberg-Schulz
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Genius Loci (Norberg-Schulz) · Recodings (Foster)

Direct Quotes

"[C]ritical regionalism was less an architecture of resistance than an architecture meant to provide resistance – a disguised manner of keeping a certain hegemonic discourse alive."

"The very theorization of critical regionalism came from a central position, which ironically resumed a certain intellectual colonisation."

"[W]hat was celebrated through critical regionalism 'would seem to be more the loss of authenticity than its recovery.'" (Colquhoun, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does Popescu's critique apply to all "critical" regionalisms (cf. Frampton's later tectonics, Pallasmaa's "regionalism of the mind"), or only to the commodified/labelled form — and can an architecture of place resist under late capitalism at all?