Kenneth Frampton

AGENEALOGY
OFMODERN
ARCHI"fECTURE
Comparative Critical
Analysis of Built Form

Edited by Ashtey Sirnone

Lars Mller Pubtishers

For Dalibor Vesely
Architect '
Teacher
Philosopher J
1934-2015

'
 6 INTROOUCTION

HOUSES AND PAVILlONS

40 SCHRDER HOUSE/ MAISON COOK
58 FINNISH PAVILION / LE PAVILLON DESTEMPS NOUVEAUX
74 TUGENDHAT HOUSEIVILLA MAIREA
90 KAUFMANN HOUSE / VILLA SARABHAI
104 Y- HOUSE/ BARNES HOUSE
118 TUBAC HOUSE/ AGOSTA HOUSE

HOUSING
132 SIEDLUNG HALEN I FREDENSBORG HOUSING
148 HIGHPOINT 1 APARTMENTS/HANSAVIERTELAPARTMENTS

OFFICE BUILDINGS
166 CENTRAAL BEHEER / WILLIS FABER-DUMAS HEADQUARTERS

CIVIC BUILDINGS
186 CASA DEL FASCIO / GOTHENBURG LAW COURTS

CONCERT HALLS
206 KURSAALCONGRESSCENTER/ KONGRESSZENTRUM

MUSEUMS
224 KIMBELL ART MUSEUM I NORDJYLLANDS MUSEUM
244 CENTRE POMPIDOU / MEDIATHEQUE CARRE D'ART

STAD lA
266 OLYMPIC SPORTS PAVILlON / SAN NICOLA STADIUM

285 APPENDIX
 6

A GENEALOGY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE:

1923-1980

"Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. lt operates on a field

of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched
J
over and recopied many times ...From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves
J an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any
monotonaus finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what
we tend to feel is without history-in sentiments, Iove, conscience, instincts; it must
be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their
evolution, but to isolote the different scenes where they engage in different rotes."
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

This book grew out of a pedagogical initiative intended to cultivate an awareness

of the organization and articulation of built-form, while at the sametime
imparting an understanding of the layered cultural traditions from which such
forms derive. lt is a record of an approach developed in the early 1970s, in a
seminar entitled "Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form." The intention of
this coursewas to bridge the gap in architectural education between studio
instruction and academic courses in history and theory. Tothis end, students
were required to analyze pairs of buildings in accordance with a particular
comparative method. Within the pairs, each building was a specific response
to a similar institutional program-thus houses were compared to houses, offices
to offices, and so on. For parity, the buildings were also of similar size, relatively
close in date, and yet conceived from categorically different cultural standpoints.

Th is exercise arose out ofthe conviction that culture cannot be meaningfully

developed without some understanding of the tradition from which it stems.
As such, this study is an exploration of the 'tradition of the new' as this
 7
was embodied in the evolution ofthe Modern Movement in architecture from
the mid-1920s to the early 1980s, an eventual move from modernity to post-
modernity; which, in ideological terms, passes from a tacit belief in the feas ibility
of realizing the liberative project of the Enlightenment, to profound doubts as
to the long term benefits of modernization and modern techn ique.

Such doubt, in fact, arises earlier than the period of architectural postmodern ity
beginning in the late 1970s. The post-1945 denouement of the myth of progress
first permeates our late modern consciousness through the successive traumas
J
of Stalinism, Au schwitz, and Hiroshima. Thus despite the momentary triumph

'
of the International Style in 1932, modern architecture, as an embodiment of
modernization, was never able to sustain itself as a normative mode to the same
degree asthat achieved by the Ecole des Beaux Arts du ring the 19th century.

This book is a genealogy structured about a sequence of building analyses rather

than a linear history. The introductory matter that precedes these analyses is
divided into three sections. The first of these, referential to the ana lytical material
that follows, is a synoptic account of the Modern Movement in arch itecture from
1923 to 1980. The second section is a philosophical excursus, grounded in part
in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition of 1958, which had a direct influence
over the spatial categories employed in the analytical method. The third section
is an account of the method itself asthiswas used to arrive at the analyses
that comprise the main substance of this volume.

Over the span of some forty years, these analyses were carried out by various
groups of students in courses that I taught f irst at the School of Architecture,
Princeton University, and subsequently at the Royal College of Art, London
and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia
University, New York. They are presented here as a way of analyz ing architecture
so as to integrate a comparison at the Ievel of spat ial hierarchy with an arti-
culation of built form in terms oftypology, tectonic expressivity, and referential
detailing.
 8
PART 1 A SYNOPTIC NOTE ON THE MODERN MOVEMENT 1923-1980

"All modern creations must correspond to new materials and demands of the
present ifthey are to suit modern man; they must illustrate our better, democratic,
self-confident, ideal nature and take into account man's co/ossal technical and
scientific achievements... today the cleft between the Modern Movement and the
Renaissance is already /arger than that between the Renaissance and Antiquity."1
Otto Wa gner, Moderne Architektur, 1898

' Within a genealogy of the Modern Movement three conflicting cultural paradigms

'
appear to have shaped the essential substance of modern architectu ral
culture-the technological, the classical, and the vernacular. As Otto Wagne r
indicated at the turn of the century, the first of thesewas the im pu lse to make
optimum use of advanced techno-scientific methods, both as a means and
as ends in themselves. The second, which continued to maintain its influence
over Wagner, was the long-standing legacy of class icism, which at the inception
of the Enlightenment was both a normative standard and the embod iment of
an ernerging liberative culture. One of the long-term consequences of classicism
remains our modern propensity for formal abstraction, which has left its mark
on architectural practice up to the present. Ove rall, the tension between technol-
ogy, which does not address itself to form and classicism wh ich does continues
to play itself out today in the heterogeneity of contemporary architectural
practice. ln addition to this perennial opposition, there remains a third term,
the vernacular, which derives its vary ing comp lexity as much f rom organic
morphology in nature as from regional bui lding culture. ln th is regard , a hybrid
species of vernacular modernism may be identified in modern architecture
from 1923 onwards, in which the adjective vernacular implies a partial return
to a rustic manner of building using trad itional types and mate rials. Vernacular
modernism thus emerges as an amorphous, counter-p rinciple equally antithetical
to both the optimization of technology and the formal proclivities of c/assicism .
An interaction between these modes, the technological, the c/assical and the
vernacular, seems to have been constantly at play throughout the evolution of the
Modern Movement. While attempting to construct a genealogy of this interplay
 9

across the century, the following narrative also acknowledges the existence of a
latent drive towards a normative code of building culture that would be accessible
to the society as a whole.

This account of the waxing and waning of the Modern Movement is structured
about two trajectories. The first of these covers the two decades of the 20th
century, in which an architectural avant-garde comes into its own in the space
between the two world wars, 1918-1939, while the second trajectory deals
with the forty years following the end of the Second World War in 1945. ln retro-
spect, this last engenders a modern arch itecture that is mediated in terms
of both economic constraints and societal transformations. This period comes
to an end in the early 1980s with the de facto acknowledgment of the postmodern
condition, both aesthetically and po litically.

1918-1926 are the formative years of the European avant garde, as evidenced
here in the analysis eomparing Gerrit Rietveld's Sehrder House, realized in
Utrecht in 1924, to Le Corbusier's Maisan Cook, erected in Boulogne-sur-Seine
near Paris, in 1926. Eaeh of these houses effeetively demonstrated two decidedly
different formulations of an unprecedented modern architecture. The former
was predicated on Theo van Doesburg's "16 Pointsofa Plastie Architecture" of
1924, while the latter was exemplified by Le Corbusier's "Five Pointsofa New
2 Arehitecture" of 1926. These hypotheses also relate to two antithetieal schools of
abstract art, transeendental Neoplasticism in the first instanee 1 and Purism in
the seeond 2; this last being, at one and the same time, both a critique of Cubism
and the idealization of a maehine age civilization as represented through the
industrial produetion of standard glass and ceramic type-objects.

An accompanying, wide-ranging pereeption of material cu lture is evident in

Le Corbusier's annotated map of his Voyage d'Orient of 1912, as this appeared in
his book L'Art decoratif d'aujourd'hui of 1925 3 . Herein, via a study tour ranging
from Paris to lstanbul and back, European capitals were seen as being variously
compounded of culture, folklore, and industrie. The middle and last terms of this
taxonomy may be seen as referring to the vernacular and technology respectively;
 10

whereas the term culture would appear to refer to some trace of the classical
tradition. These three modes were synthesized in the aesthetics of Purism as
this was apparent to an equal degree in Le Corbusier's painting and architecture.
His Purist architecture integrated the classicism of Platonic geometry with
modern building technology, consisting of a reinforced concrete frame, concrete
block in-fill, steel framed glazing, electric light, and centrat heating, as we find
all of these techniques applied in the Maisan Cook. ln the publicity photos of the
period Le Corbusier's villas are knowingly furnished with a vernacular of kilim
rugs and Peruvian pottery, casually disposed, in normative Purist space as
vestiges of a pre-industrial way of life. Technology also presents itself in the pages
of L'Art decoratif d'aujourd'hui in the form of functional equipment, such as
Thonet bentwood chairs, American pressed steel office equipment, light-weight,
Parisian park furniture, and industrial glassware. ForLe Corbusier all of these
elements constituted the typical found objects of everyday life, that is to say the
objet types of the new industrial world 4 .

Le Corbusier's "Five Pointsofa New Architecture" became the lingua franeo of his
Purist architecture, comprising the pilotis, the free plan, the free fac;:ade, the roof
garden, and the fenetre en longueur, this last being characterized by him as 'the
typical mechanical element of the hause' s. lt is significant that in an early version
of this manifesto these points were tobe complemented by a sixth point, namely,
the elimination ofthe cornice. This pointwas soon dropped, presumably because
it made the classical roots of his Purist architecture too explicit. 2

One year later, the technological optimization of building as a prefabricated

process demonstrated by Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace of 1851 is adopted
to different degrees in the two most didactically modern entries submitted for
the Societe des Nations competition of 1927, first, the project by Le Corbusier and
Pierre Jeanneret 6 , and, second, the entry by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer 7 .
Among the ideological differences embodied in these designs, none is more
striking than the different attitudes adopted towards the basic structure in each
instance, with Le Corbusier inflecting the repetitive modularity of his structure
through typical Palladian ABABA syncopation-the typical classical alternation
 11

between wide A bays and narrow 8 bays-and Meyer repeating the same
structural module throughout, notwithstand ing the atypical egg-shaped form of
his main auditorium. Meyer's insistence on using the same module, irrespective
ofthisnon-orthogonal form led to a totally unresolved juxtaposition between the
inclined supports of the auditoriumshelland the repetit ive orthogonal structure
of the surrounding fabric. By contrast, Le Corbusier's assembly hall was pre-
dicated on a hierarchical structural system with long span trusses covering the
depth of the hall and transverse portal frames carrying the roof and glazed sides
of the aud itorium . Thus , paradoxically, the latent classicism of Le Corbusier's
Purist paradigm proved itself more capab le of ach ieving a rational solution than
the repetitive modular, techno logical rigor of Meyer's utilitarianism.
7

Around this time, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe opposed Meyer's reductive
functionalism with the idea of a transeendental technology. Like the Berlin Jesuit
philosopher Romano Guardini whose Letters from Lake Como of 1927 exercised
such a strong influence on him, Mies van der Rohe strove to use advanced
constructional technology in such a way as to transcend functional and material
contingencies and thereby ach ieve a sublime dematerialization of light, glass
and gleaming metal, a conjunction which Mies characterized as "almost nothing."
Miesfirst articulated the aim behind such a fusion in his essay "The New Era"
of 1930 wherein he wrote: "One thingwill be decisive: the way we assert ourselves
in the face of circumstances. Here the problern of the spirit begins ... we must
set up new values; fix our ultimate goals so that we may establish standards.
For what is right and significant in any era- including the new era-is to give the
opportunity for the spirit to exist." This transeendental approach to technique
was first fully realized by Mies in hisTugendhat House, completed in Brno,
Czechoslovakia, at around the sametime s.

Equally anti-reductive but quite distinct from Mies' drive to sp iritualize modern
technology was the organicism of his colleague Hugo Hring, whose proto:-Brutal-
ist, Gut Garkaufarm of 1924 9 was one of the earliest attempts at formulating
a vernacular modernism, predicated, according to Hring's theory on ach ieving a
9 close fit between the Organwerk of the functiona l requ irements and the Bauwerk
 12

of the resulting form. Le Corbusier formulated his own version of vernacular

modernism in his mono-pitched, tile-roofed proposal for the Errazuris House,
which he projected for a precipitous coastal site in Chile in 1930. Here,
he seems to have abandoned overnight the Five Points of his Purist architecture
10 as this had been mademanifest in the Maison Cook. Although the Errazuris
House was never realized, it nonetheless introduced a new craft-based materiality
~
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into Le Cor:busier's architecture, which in this instance included rubble stone~
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[f(~'
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li! - Ii work, roughly dressed tree trunks and a mono-pitched, tiled roof 10. Despite the
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. various technological works that his studio realized du ring the firsthalf of
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:J 0 t' j the 1930s, above all the curtain-walled Armee du Salut, Paris (1933) 11 and the
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m
, ~

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equally machinist Maisan Glarte, Geneva (1932), Le Corbusier began to distance
' /"""' I hirnself from optimized techn ique in favor of a hybrid approach combining
'11! vernacular modes of construction with industria lly produced bui lding elements
as we find this in his remarkable Maisan Week-End, Saint Cloud, Paris of 1935 12,
wherein rubble stone walling and reinforced concrete shell vau lts are fleshed out
with steel-framed plate glass, glass blocks, and plywood; culminating in a
vaulted assembly, half-buried und er a grass berm covering the roof.

The 1930s produced an equally mediated modernity in Scandinavia, as evidenced

by the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, staged in the name of an emergent social-
democracy 13. The political-cultural ethos of this exhibition would come to
be reiterated in different ways in the other Nordic countries throughout the 30s.
The St ockholm Exhibition-organized under the leadership of Gunnar Asplund,
in collaboration with the critic Gregor Paulson-was able to envisage a psycho-
socially accessible version of functionalism known by the Swedish term funkis.
This was a functionalist aesthetic, organically inflected through the use of soft
biomorphic profilesandwarm interiors, the latter invariably lined with plywood.
This popular norm seems to have emerged out of a fusion between the elegant
severity of Nordic Classicism, as exemplified in Asplund's Stockholm Public
Library of 1926 14, and a ludic version of Soviet Constructivism. This synthesis
was complemented throughout the Exhibition by a craft-based approach to the
design of everyday objects, furniture, utensils, etc.
13
 13
The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who was one of the first to recognize the popular
appeal of the Stockholm Exhibition, demonstrated his own mastery of the
funkis manner in his Viipuri Library of 1935 15, equ ipped with his bent, laminated
birchwood furniture, which was put into production by the Artek Company
at around the sametime 16. One year earlier, in his house, built in Munkieniemi ,
Helsinki in 1934, Aalto posited yet another version of vernacular modernism in
14 which rubble stone walls were combined with painted brickwork, vertical t imber
battens, rough timber balustrading and plate glass picture windows. This house
already articulated the tectonic syntax of the successive masterworks of
his mid-career, namely, the Finn ish Pavilion built for the Paris World Exhibition
of 1937 17 and the Villa Mairea, completed in Noormarku, Finland in 1939 1a.
These works were equally removed from both the spiritualized technology of Mies
and the reductive functionalism of Meyer.ln this regard both the Finnish Pavilion
15 and the Villa Mairea may be seen as examples of a techno-vernacular montage,
similar to Le Corbusier's Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, which was his re-working
'
/ .-! ,, ' ',
of the Hebrew temple in the wilderness as realized for the Paris World Exhibition

~ I ' t' of 1937: a work which combined the time-honored , nomadic form of a tent with
wire-cable suspended construction 19. Le Corbusier's penchant for aeronautical
I
form emerged herein the latticework steel stays of this pavilion in as much
, J as these could be read as an allusion to the internal framework of a dirigible.
I'
This complex work was influenced, like the Stockholm Exhibition, by the agitprop
( /. /
culture of the Soviet Unionandin this regard , Le Corbusier seems to have posited
..../ / A

16 a kind of provisional modernity appropriate to the political compromise of Leon

Blum's short-lived Popular Front government in France which, via the debacle
of the Spanish Civil War, witnessed the demise of the liberative modern project,
as Europe entered into the Secend World War.

Jointly composed in exilein the United States du ring the early years of the war,
"The Nine Points of Monumentality," written in 1943 by Sigfried Giedion, Jose
Lluis Sert and Fernand Leger, openly acknowledged the reductive aspects.of the
Modern Movement, which despite the popular reception of the social housing
in the Weimar Republic, bu ilt over the years 1923-1933, notably failed to satisfy
11 the wider psycho-symbolic needs of the society at large. As Giedion, Sert, and
 14
Leger argued, in the wake of the popu lar reception of Socialist Realism in the
Soviet Union and the Heimatstil in the Third Reich , " monuments have to satisfy
the demand of ordinary people for a popu larly representative identity."

The initial response of Louis Kahntoth is call fo r a New Monumentality was

to envisage a quasi-monumental build ing culture based on the direct expression
of modern, technology or, more specifically, on tetrahedral space-frame construc-
tion asthiswas embodied in the experimental high-rise office tower that he
designed with Ann Tyng in the early 50s 20. Subsequently, he moved away from
this stance in his Yale Art Gallery, completed in New Haven in 1952, since here
the architect was obliged to enclose his space-frame structure in an orthogonal
prism in order to provide an appropriate space fo r the exhibition of art 21 .

Notwithstanding the reconstruction of Europethat began at the end of the

Second World War, the Modern Movement experienced difficulties in reconciling
its progressive pre-war ethos with the polarized politics of the postwar world
as it struggled to reconcile its pre-war socialist agenda with the realities of the
Pax Americana and the ideological divide of the Co ld War. Despite the Unite
d'habitation, Marseille, of 1952 22 , wh ich realized the Soviet ideal of a comprehen-
19 sively collective dwelling, Le Corbusier's work from 1945 onwards was pre-
occupied with a reinterpretation of the Mediterranean vernacular as found in
the barrel-vaulted terrace housing he projected for Cap Martin in 1949 23 , along
with his proto-Brutalist Maisan Jaoul, erected near Paris 24, and his Sarabhai
Hause in Ahmedabad, both works dating from 1955.

ln terms of an accessible modern ity, the Festival of Britain, staged in London in

1951, was a pale echo of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, by which it was
obviously influenced. However, despite the display of technological prowess in the
Dome of Discovery and the symbolic cable-suspended Skylon, the middle-brow
populist taste of the Festival had the effect of sponsoring the populist vernacular
of the so-called 'people's detailing' prevalent in the British New Towns. This
was an Anglicized version of Swedish funkis manner, consisting of shallow pitched
20 roofs, yellow brick walls, and Scandinavian picture windows. This line, favored
 15
by the left-wing architects of the London County Council, was characterized
by The Architectural Review as the New Empiricism, a style much despised by the
New Brutalistsand their representative critic Reyner Banham, for its patent
retreat from the tectonic and ideological rigors of the pre-war Modern Movement.

Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism of 1948

reintroduced classical values into the British contemporary debate, preoccupied
as the professionwas at the time with recovering the precepts of a socially
.. r '
accessible, but nonetheless rigorous, architecture. However, this implicit rappel
a /'ordre was difficult to reconcile with the populism of the welfare state, along
with the ernerging rationalization of building technique and the rise of techno-
scientific, procedures and algorithmic design methods. This is the cultural context
of John Summerson's RIBA Address of 1957, "The Case for a Theory of Modern
Architecture," which posed the question of whether a build ing program could,
in and of itself, ever become the basis for coherent formal unity. This debate was
intensified on the London scene by the charismat ic presence of the peripatetic
American technoerst Richard Buckminster-Fuller, who became the postmodern
guru of Anglo-American environmental design following the success of his one-
man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1959. Reyner Banham's
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, published in the following year,
22 concluded with an appraisal of Fuller as the techno-scientific deus ex machina
of a potentially popular modern architecture. This prejudice in favor of the
technological as the new unifying ethos led, via Archigram and the influence of
Cedric Price's Fun Palace of 1960, to the rise of the High-Tech movement in
architecture, which aspired to an architecture that would be nothing more than
the direct expression of productively rational, functional form. Th is approach
was first fully manifestedas a new potential in the Centre Pompidou, Paris,
realized to the designs of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in 1977 2s. Despite
the equally sophisticated technological works that were subsequently ach ieved
by Norman Fester, the High-Tech approach proved incapable of envisaging.
and promoting a new form of residentistland settlement as implicitly demanded
by the ever-expanding, suburbanized megalopoli on both sides of the Atlantic.
23 Automotive suburbanization as the inevitable consequence of post-war
 16
consumerism was never moreevident than in the open-ended, gridded plan
of the last British new town, Mitton Keynes , dating from 1972. Testifying to the
postwar dominance of American values in Britain, this prime example of
the so-called "non-place urban realm" was designed by Walter Bor under the
24 influence of the American planner Melvin Webber, whose de-urbanizing thesis,
Explorationsinto Urban Structures of 1963, advocated the Los Angeles paradigm
of "community without propinquity" as the necessary and seemingly beneficial
consequence of motopian dispersal. Two counter proposals for low-rise,
high-density residential development of areund the same date are featured in
the comparative analyses that make up the substance of this book; respectively,
two canonical exurban housing schemes that were realized in Europe at the end
of the 50s-the Kingo Fredensborg Estate of 1958, built near Elsinore, Denmark,
to the designs of J0rn Utzon, and Siedlung Haien of 1960, designed by Atelier 5
and erected near Bern , Switzerland.

As Arnulf Lchinger suggested in his 1981 study Structuralism in Architecture

and Urban Planning, this emergence of low-rise, high-density housing as a model
2s for exurban development may have ultimately owed much of its momentary
popularity to the rise of structural anthropology as a progressive cultural paradigm
in Europein the secend half of the 50s. While neither Atelier 5 nor Utzon parti-
cipated in the seminal Otterlo CIAM Congress of 1959, in which anthropological
structuralism was first introduced to the world of architecture by Dutch architect
Aldo van Eyck, it may be argued that they were partially influenced by this
discourse, and by the structuralist post-human ist tenor of the times. Either way,
structuralism seems to have presaged the advent of late modern architectural
culture, favoring low-rise, high density housing rather than medium-rise,
slab blocks set a standard distance apart. ln an attempt to formulate a more
direct correspondence between life-form and built-form, van Eyck proposed
his casbah organisee as an anarchic model of land settlement as antithetical to
the collective grands ensembles of Europe as to the suburbanized megalopoli ,
of the United States. As Lchinger suggests, there is an implicit critique of both
paradigms in van Eyck's essay of 1968, "The lnterior of Time" :

1 Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture: o Guidebook
for His Students to This Field of Art, trans. by Harry
Francis Mallgrave. Santa Monica, California: Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities;
Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1988,
p. 78,80.
2 Le Corbusier, "Ou en est l'architecture?,"
L'Archttecture Vivente (Autumn/Wonter 1927), p. 11.
3 Aldo van Eyck, "The Interaar ofTtme," tn Meoning
in Archttecture, Charles Jencks and George Baird,
eds., New York: George Braziller, 1970.
J notion of time (whot ontiquorians ond technocrots hove in common). So let's
' the light of chonge-i.e. in the light of the changing conditions he hirnself brings
17
"Western civilization habituolly identifies itself with civilizotion os such (with whot
it stands for) on the pontificol ossumption that what is not like it-is o deviotion,
less 'odvonced,' 'primitive' or, ot best, exotically interesting ot a sofe distonce...
Architects nowadays are pothologically addicted to change, regording it os
something one either hinders, runs ofter, or, at best, keeps up with. This, I suggest,
is why they tend tosever the post from the future, with the result thot the present
is rendered emotionolly inoccessible-without temporal dimension. I dislike
o sentimental ontiquarian attitude towords the post as much os I dislike o senti-
mental technocrotic one towords the future. 8oth are founded on o stotic clockwork
start with the post for o chonge ond discover the unchonging condition of man in
about."3
Twelve years later, in 1980, postmodern architecture would come into its own as
the inescapable ethos of the moment, asserting itself as the culture of the
post-ideological condition prevailing at the time, while the socio-cultural eman-
cipatory project of the Modern Movement remained, forthe most part, in abeyance.
This post-structuralist end to the viability of the modernmasternarrative was
first advanced by Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition
of 1979. This thesiswas echoed by Paolo Portoghesi when directing the first
Venice architectural Biennale of 1980 under the title, "The End of Prohibition:
the Presence of the Past." Portoghesi's cynical demonstration of the potential
for mixing stylistic tropes drawn from almost any epoch in a disenchanted,
trans- historical free-for-all, ushered in several decades of a quasi-historieist
architectural language. Today, however, we may still assume an ideologically
progressive approach topostmodern architectonic form via a sensitive response
to context, climate, topography, and material, combined with the self-conscious
generation of a place-form as a political-cum-cultural space of appearance.
 300
Kenneth Frampton Ashley Simone

is a renowned architectural critic, historian, and educator. Born in the is a designer, educator, writer, and photographer based in New York City.
United Kingdom in 1930, he was trained as an architect at the Architectural She was trained as an architect at the Graduate Scheel of Architecture,
Association Scheel of Architecture in Lenden and subsequently worked Planning and Preservation, Cotumbia University. Currently she teaches
as an architect in England, Israel, and the United States. His ongoing rote architectural drawing and writ ing courses at Pratt Institute, New York, and
as a critic and theorist has been inseparable from hiseditorship of a architecturat history and visuat culture courses at the University of Arizona,
number of key publications, inctuding the British magazine Architectural Tucson.
Design and the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies' journal
Oppositions. He is the author of numerous seminal studies of contemporary
architecture, including Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980),
Studies in Teetonic Culture (1995), Le Corbusier (2001 ), and Labour, Work &
Architecture (2005). Over the years, he has taugtl't, in various capacities,
at the Royal College of Art, Lenden; Princeton Un,versity; the Accademia
di architettura in Mendrisio; the ETH, Zurich; the .EPFL, Lausanne; and the
Bartage Institute, Rotterdam. He is cu rrently the Ware Professor of
Architecture at the Graduate Scheel of Architecture, Ptanning and Preser-
vation, Cotumbia University.
 Kenneth Frampton
A GENEALOGY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Ashley Simone

Design: Integral Lars Mtter/Lars Mtter and Nadine Unterharrer

Typesetting: Integral lars MtterlEsther Butterworth
Copyediting: Ashley Simone
Proofreading: Sarah Quigley
Assistance: Lily Wong
Lithography: Ast & Fischer, Wabern, Switzerland
Printing and binding: Ksel, Altusried-Krugzett, Germany
Paper: luxoArt Samt 1.05,135 g/m'
J
I
2015 lars Mller Publishers, Zurich, and Kenn8th Frampton

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or manner

whatsoever without prior written permission, except in the case
of briet quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Lars Mtter Publishers

Zurich, Switzerland
www.lars-mueller-publishers.com

ISBN 978-3-03778-369-6

Printed in Germany

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