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Prospects for a Critical Regionalism

Author(s): Kenneth Frampton

Source: Perspecta , 1983, Vol. 20 (1983), pp. 147-162

Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.

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Kenneth Frampton 147

Prospects for a Critical Regionalism

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Luis Barragan, Las Arboledas, 1961.

Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, Volume 20 0079-0958/83/20147-016$3.00/0 tc; 1983 by Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, Inc., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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1

Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National Cultures", History and Truth (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1961) pp. 276, 283.

The phenomenon of universalization, while being an advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort of sub-

tle destruction, not only of traditional cul- tures, which might not be an irreparable wrong, but also of what I shall call for the time being the creative nucleus of great civilizations and great cultures, that nu- cleus on the basis of which we interpret life, what I shall call in advance the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind. The conflict springs up from there. We have the feeling that this single world civiliza- tion at the same time exerts a sort of attri-

tion or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have made

the great civilizations of the past. This threat is expressed, among other disturb- ing effects, by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propa- ganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by ap- proaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level. Thus we come to the

crucial problem confronting nations just rising from underdevelopment. In order to get on to the road toward moderniza- tion, is it necessary to jettison the old cul-

tural past which has been the raison d'etre of a nation? . . . Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindica- tion before the colonialist's personality. But in order to take part in modern civi- lization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and po- litical rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple aban- don of a whole cultural past. It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is

the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in uni- versal civilization....

No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met dif- ferent civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter

has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue. That is why we are in a kind of lull or interregnum in which we can no longer practice the dogmatism of a single truth and in which we are not yet capable of conquering the skepticism into which we have stepped. We are in a tun- nel, at the twilight of dogmatism and the dawn of real dialogues. Paul Ricoeur

The term critical regionalism is not in- tended to denote the vernacular, as this was once spontaneously produced by the combined interaction of climate, culture, myth and craft, but rather to identify those recent regional "schools" whose aim has been to represent and serve, in a critical sense, the limited constituencies in which they are grounded. Such a region- alism depends, by definition, on a con- nection between the political conscious- ness of a society and the profession. Among the pre-conditions for the emer- gence of critical regional expression is not only sufficient prosperity but also a strong desire for realising an identity. One of the mainsprings of regionalist culture is an anti-centrist sentiment-an aspira- tion for some kind of cultural, economic and political independence.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has ad- vanced the thesis that a hybrid "world culture" will only come into being through a cross-fertilization between rooted culture on the one hand and uni-

versal civilization on the other. This para- doxical proposition, that regional culture must also be a form of world culture, is predicated on the notion that develop- ment in se will, of necessity, transform the basis of rooted culture. In his essay "Uni- versal Civilization and National Cultures"

of 1961, Ricoeur implied that everything will depend in the last analysis on the ca- pacity of regional culture to recreate a rooted tradition while appropriating for- eign influences at the level of both culture and civilization. Such a process of cross- fertilization and reinterpretation is impure by definition. This much is at once evi-

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dent, say, in the work of the Portugese architect Alvaro Siza y Viera. In Siza's ar- chitecture Aalto's collage approach to building form finds itself mediated by nor- mative typologies drawn from the work of the Italian Neo-rationalists.

3

Abraham Moles, "The Three Cities", Directions in Art, Theory and Aesthetics, ed. Anthony Hill (London: Faber and Faber, Limited, 1968), p. 191.

2

Jan Mukarovsky, Structure, Sign and Function (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 228. Perhaps I am overstating the case. However, Mukarovsky writes: "The artistic sign, unlike the communicative sign, is not serving, that is, not an instrument."

4

O. Bohigas, "Posibilidades de una arquitectura Barcelona", Destino (Barcelona, 1951). See also

O. Bohigas, "Disenar para un publico o contra un publico", in Seix Barral, Contra una arquitectura adjetivida (Barcelona, 1969).

5

See Ignazio Gardella's Casa Borsalino Apartments built in Alexandria in 1951.

I - _

1 2

J. A. Coderch and Jesus Sanz, Casa Catasus, exterior. Casa Catasus, Sitges, Barcelona, 1958, plan.

It is necessary to distinguish at the outset between critical regionalism and the sim- plistic evocation of a sentimental or ironic vernacular. I am referring, of course, to that nostalgia for the vernacular which is currently being conceived as an overdue return to the ethos of a popular culture; for unless such a distinction is made one

will end by confusing the resistant capac- ity of Regionalism with the demagogic tendencies of PopuJism. In contradistinc- tion to Regionalism, the primary goal of Populism is to function as a communica- tive or instrumental sign.2 Such a sign seeks to evoke not a critical perception of reality, but rather the sublimation of a de- sire for direct experience through the pro- vision of information. Its tactical aim is to

attain, as economically as possible, a pre- conceived level of gratification in behav- ioristic terms. In this regard, the strong affinities of Populism for the rhetorical techniques and imagery of advertising is hardly accidental.

On the other hand, Critical Regionalism is a dialectical expression. It self- consciously seeks to deconstruct univer- sal modernism in terms of values and

images which are locally cultivated, while at the same time adulterating these au- tochthonous elements with paradigms drawn from alien sources. After the dis-

junctive cultural approach practised by Adolf Loos, Critical Regionalism recog- nizes that no living tradition remains available to modern man other than the

subtle procedures of synthetic contradic- tion. Any attempt to circumvent the dia- lectics of this creative process through the eclectic procedures of historicism can

only result in consumerist iconography masquerading as culture.

It is my contention that Critical Regional- ism continues to flourish sporadically within the cultural fissures that articulate

in unexpected ways the continents of Eu- rope and America. These borderline manifestations may be characterized, after Abraham Moles, as the "interstices of freedom."3 Their existence is proof that the model of the hegemonic center sur- rounded by dependent satellites is an in- adequate and demagogic description of our cultural potential.

Exemplary of an explicitly anti-centrist re- gionalism was the Catalonian nationalist revival which first emerged with the foun- dation of the Group R in the early Fifties. This group, led by J. M. Sostres and Oriol Bohigas, found itself caught from the be- ginning in a complex cultural situation. On the one hand, it was obliged to revive the Rationalist, anti-Fascist values and procedures of GATEPAC (the pre-war Spanish wing of C.I.A.M.); on the other, it remained aware of the political responsi- bility to evoke a realistic regionalism; a regionalism which would be accessible to the general populace. This double-headed program was first publicly announced by Bohigas in his essay, "Possibilities for a Barcelona Architecture,"4 published in 1951. The various impulses that went to make up the heterogeneous form of Cata- lonian Regionalism exemplify, in retro- spect, the essentially hybrid nature of an authentic modern culture. First, there was the Catalonian brick tradition which evi-

dently dates back to the heroic period of the Modernismo; then there was the influ-

ence of Neoplasticism, an impulse which was directly inspired by Bruno Zevi's La poetica della architettura neoplastica of 1953 and, finally, there was the revisionist style of Italian Neo-Realism-as exempli- fied above all in the work of Ignazio Gardella.5

The career of the Barcelona architect J. A.

Coderch has been typically Regionalist in- asmuch as it has oscillated, until recent date, between a mediterraneanized, mod- ern brick vernacular-Venetian in evoca-

tion-apparent, say, in his eight-storey brick apartment block built in Barcelona in the Paseo Nacional in 1952- 54 (a mass ar- ticulated by full-height shutters and over- hanging cornices), and the avant-gardist, Neoplastic composition of his Casa Cata- sus completed at Sitges in 1957. The work of Martorell, Bohigas and Mackay has

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tended to oscillate between comparable poles; between, on the one hand, an as- sumed brick vernacular close to the work of Coderch and Gardella6 and, on the other, their Neo-Brutalist public manner; this last being best exemplified in the technical rationalism of their Thau School built in the suburbs of Barcelona in 1975.

3

Ricardo Bofill, Walden 7, Saint- Just Desvern (near Barcelona), 1975.

6

A. Siza, "To Catch a Precise Moment of Flittering Images in All its Shades", Architecture and Urbanism, Tokyo, no. 123, December 1980, p. 9.

The recent deliquescence of Catalonian Regionalism finds its most extreme mani- festation in the work of Ricardo Bofill and

the Taller de Arquitectura. For where the early work of Bofill (for example, the Calle Nicaragua apartments of 1964) displayed evident affinity for the re-interpreted brick vernacular of Coderch, the Taller was to adopt a more exaggerated rhetoric in the Seventies. With their Xanadu complex built in Calpe (1967), they entered into a flamboyant romanticism. This castellated syntax reached its apotheosis in their he- roic, but ostentatious, tile-faced Walden 7 complex at Saint-Just Desvern (1975). With its twelve-storey voids, underlit liv- ing rooms, miniscule balconies and its now disintegrating tile cladding, Walden 7 denotes that delicate boundary where an initially sound impulse degenerates into an ineffective Populism-a Populism whose ultimate aim is not to provide a liveable and significant environment but rather to achieve a highly photogenic form of scenography. In the last analysis, despite its passing homage to Gaudi, Wal- den 7 is devoted to a form of admass se- duction. It is architecture of narcissism

par excellence, for the formal rhetoric ad- dresses itself mainly to high fashion, and to the marketing of Bofill's flamboyant personality. The Mediterranean hedonistic utopia to which it pretends collapses on closer inspection, above all at the level of the roofscape where a potentially sen- suous environment has not been borne

out by the reality of its occupation.

Nothing could be further from Bofill's in- tentions than the architecture of the Por-

tugese master Alvaro Siza y Viera, whose career, beginning with his swimming pool at Quinta de Conceicad, completed in 1965, has been anything but photogenic. This much can be discerned not only from the fragmentary evasive nature of the published images but also from a text written in 1979:

Most of my works were never pub- lished; some of the things I did were only carried out in part, others were profoundly changed or destroyed. That's only to be expected. An archi- tectonic proposition whose aim is to go deep ... a proposition that in- tends to be more than a passive ma- terialisation, refuses to reduce that same reality, analysing each of its aspects, one by one; that proposi- tion can't find support in a fixed im- age, can't follow a linear evolu- tion .... Each design must catch, with the utmost rigour, a precise moment of the flittering image, in all its shades, and the better you can recognize that flittering quality of reality, the clearer your design will be.... That may be the reason why only marginal works (a quiet dwell- ing, a holiday house miles away) have been kept as they were origi- nally designed. But something re- mains. Pieces are kept here and there, inside ourselves, perhaps fa- thered by someone, leaving marks on space and people, melting into a process of total transformation.6

It could be argued that this hyper- sensitivity toward the fluid and yet spe- cific nature of reality renders Siza's work more layered and rooted than the eclectic tendencies of the Barcelona School for, by

4

Alvaro Siza y Viera, Quinta de Conceicad, Matosinhos, Portugal, 1958-65, plan.

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5

Siza y Viera, Bires House, Povoa do Varzim, 1976, elevation.

6

Bires House, plan.

. i4.14 .

taking Aalto as his point of departure, he seems to have been able to ground his building in the configuration of a given topography and in the fine-grained specif- icity of the local context. To this end his pieces are tight responses to the urban fabric and marinescape of the Porto re- gion. Other important factors are his ex- traordinary sensitivity towards local materials, craft work, and, above all, to the subtleties of local light-his sense for

a particular kind of filtration and penetra- tion. Like Aalto's Jyvaskyla University (1957), or his Saynatsalo City Hall (1949), all of Siza's buildings are delicately lay- ered and inlaid into their sites. His ap- proach is patently tactile and materialist, rather than visual and graphic, from his Bires House built at Povoa do Varzim in 1976 to his Bouca Resident's Association Housing of 1977. Even his small bank buildings, of which the best is probably

7

Siza y Viera, Bouca Residents Association Housing, Porto, 1977, sketches.

Kenneth Frampton 151

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9

Raimund Abraham, House with Three Walls, project, 1972-75.

the Pinto branch bank built at Oliveira de

Azemeis in 1974, are topographically con- ceived and structured.

8

Siza y Viera, Pinta Branch Bank, Oliveira de Azemeis, 1974.

7

Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragan (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976) p. 9.

The theoretical work of the New York- based Austrian architect Raimund

Abraham may also be seen as having la- tent regionalist connotations inasmuch as this architect has always stressed place creation and the topographic aspects of the built environment. The House with Three Walls (1972) and the House with Flower Walls (1973) are typical ontological works of the early Seventies, wherein the project evokes the oneiric essence of the site, together with the inescapable materi- ality of building. This feeling for the tec- tonic nature of built form and for its

capacity to transform the surface of the earth has been carried over into Abra-

ham's recent designs made for Interna- tional Bauausstellung in Berlin, above all his recent projects for South Friedrich- stadt, designed in 1981.

An equally tactile but more specifically re- gionalist approach is obtained in the case of the veteran Mexican architect Luis

Barragan, whose finest houses (many of which have been erected in the suburb of

Pedregal) are nothing if not topographic. As much a landscape designer as an ar- chitect, Barragan has always sought a sensual and earthbound architecture; an architecture compounded out of en- closures, stelae, fountains, water courses, color saturation; an architecture laid into volcanic rock and lush vegetation; an ar- chitecture that refers only indirectly to the Mexican colonial estancia. Of Barragan's feeling for mythic and rooted beginnings it is sufficient to cite his memories of the

apocryphal pueblo of his youth:

My earliest childhood memories are related to a ranch my family owned near the village of Mazamitla. It was a pueblo with hills, formed by houses with tile roofs and immense

eaves to shield passersby from the heavy rains which fall in that area. Even the earth's color was interest-

ing because it was red earth. In this village, the water distribution sys- tem consisted of great gutted logs, in the form of troughs, which ran on a support structure of tree forks, 5 meters high, above the roofs. This aqueduct crossed over the town, reaching the patios, where there were great stone fountains to re- ceive the water. The patios housed with stables, with cows and chick- ens, all together. Outside, in the street, there were iron rings to tie the horses. The channeled logs, cov- ered with moss, dripped water all over town, of course. It gave this vil- lage the ambience of a fairy tale.

No, there are no photographs. I have only its memory.7

This remembrance has surely been fil- tered through Barragan's life-long in- volvement with Islamic architecture.

Similar feelings and concerns are evident in his opposition to the invasion of pri- vacy in the modern world and in his criticism of the subtle erosion of na-

ture which has accompanied postwar civilization:

Everyday life is becoming much too public. Radio, TV., telephone all in- vade privacy. Gardens should there- fore be enclosed, not open to public

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10

Raimund Abraham, Universal

Corner Building for a City Block, International Building Exhibition, Berlin, 1984, competition project, 1980-81, model.

11

8

C. Banford-Smith, Builders in the Sun: Five Mexican Architects (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1967) p. 74.

11

Luis Barragan with Mathias Goertiz, Satellite City Towers, 1967.

gaze.... Architects, are forgetting the need of human beings for half- light, the sort of light that imposes a tranquility, in their living rooms as well as in their bedrooms. About

half the glass that is used in so many buildings-homes as well as offices-would have to be removed

in order to obtain the quality of light that enables one to live and work in

a more concentrated manner . .

Before the machine age, even in the middle of cities, Nature was every- body's trusted companion. . . . Now- adays, the situation is reversed. Man does not meet with Nature, even when he leaves the city to commune with her. Enclosed in his

shiny automobile, his spirit stamped with the mark of the world whence

the automobile emerged, he is, within Nature, a foreign body. A bill- board is sufficient to stifle the voice

of Nature. Nature becomes a scrap of Nature and man a scrap of man.8

By the time of his first house and studio built in Tacubaya, Mexico D.F. in 1947, Barragan had already made a subtle move away from the universal syntax of the so-called International Style. And yet his work has always remained committed to that abstract form which has so charac-

terized the art of our era. Barragan's pen- chant for large, almost inscrutable abstract planes set in the landscape is perhaps at its most intense in his garden for Las Arboledas of 1961 and his freeway monument, Satellite City Towers, de- signed with Mathias Goertiz in 1967.

Regionalism has, of course, manifested it- self in other parts of the Americas; in Brazil

in the 1940s, in the early work of Oscar Niemeyer and Alfonso Reidy; in Argen- tina in the work of Amancio Williams-

above all in Williams' bridge house in Mar del Plata of 1945 and more recently perhaps in Clorindo Testa's Bank of Lon- don and South America, built in Buenos Aires in 1959; in Venezuela, in the Ciudad Universitaria built to the designs of Carlos Raoul Villanueva between 1945 and 1960; in the West Coast of the United States, first in Los Angeles in the late 1920s in the work of Neutra, Schindler, Weber and Gill, and then in the so-called Bay Area and Southern California schools founded

by William Wurster and Hamilton Harwell Harris respectively. No-one has perhaps expressed the idea of a Critical Regional- ism more discretely than Harwell Harris in his address, "Regionalism and National- ism" which he gave to the North West Regional Council of the AIA, in Eugene, Oregon, in 1954:

Opposed to the Regionalism of Re- striction is another type of regional- ism; the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation "regional" only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere. It is the genius of this re- gion to be more than ordinarily aware and more than ordinarily free. Its virtue is that its manifesta-

tion has significance for the world outside itself. To express this region- alism architecturally it is necessary that there be building,-preferably a lot of building-at one time. Only so can the expression be sufficiently general, sufficiently varied, suffi-

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ciently forceful to capture people's imaginations and provide a friendly climate long enough for a new school of design to develop.

San Francisco was made for

Maybeck. Pasadena was made for Greene and Greene. Neither could

have accomplished what he did in any other place or time. Each used the materials of the place; but it is not the materials that distinguish the work...

9

Harwell H. Harris, "Regionalism and Nationalism", Student Publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State of the University of North Carolina at Raleigh, Volume 14, No. 5.

10

Description submitted by Harry Wolf Associates on September 3, 1982 for the Fort Lauderdale Riverfront Plaza Competition.

A region may develop ideas. A re- gion may accept ideas. Imaginations and intelligence are necessary for both. In California in the late Twen-

ties and Thirties modern European ideas met a still developing region- alism. In New England, on the other hand, European Modernism met a rigid and restrictive regionalism that at first resisted and then surren-

dered. New England accepted Euro- pean Modernism whole because its own regionalism had been reduced to a collection of restrictions.9

Despite an apparent freedom of expres- sion, such a level of liberative regionalism is difficult to sustain in North America to-

day. Within the current proliferation of highly individualistic forms of narciss- ism-a body of work which is ultimately cynical, patronising and self-indulgent rather than rooted-only two firms today display any consistent sensitivity towards the evolution of a regional culture which is both specific and critical.

The first example would be the simple, site-responsive houses designed by An- drew Batey and Mark Mack for the Napa Valley area in California; the second would be the work of the architect Harry Wolf, whose work, which has so far been largely restricted to North Carolina, is de- signed out of Charlotte. Wolf's sensitivity to the specificity of place has perhaps been most intensely demonstrated in his recent competition entry for the Fort Lauderdale Riverfront Plaza. The descrip- tion of this work at once displays both a feeling for the specificity of the place and a self-conscious reflection on the locus of

Fort Lauderdale in history.

The worship of the sun and the measurement of time from its light reach back to the earliest recorded

history of man. It is interesting to note in the case of Fort Lauderdale

that if one were to follow a 26 degree latitudinal line around the globe, one would find Fort Lauderdale in

the company of Ancient Thebes-the throne of the Egyptian sun god, Ra. Further to the East, one would find Jaipur, India, where heretofore, the largest equinoctal sundial in the world was built 110 years prior to the founding of Fort Lauderdale.

Mindful of these magnificent histor- ical precedents, we sought a symbol that would speak of the past, pres- ent and future of Fort Lauderdale.

... To capture the sun in symbol a great sundial is incised on the Plaza site and the gnomon of the sundial bisects the site on its north-south

axis. The gnomon of the double blade rises from the south at 26 de-

grees 5 minutes parallel to Fort Lauderdale's latitude....

Each of (the) significant dates in Fort Lauderdale's history is recorded in the great blade of the sundial. With careful calculation the sun angles are perfectly aligned with penetra- tions through the two blades to cast brilliant circles of light, landing on the otherwise shadowy side of the sundial. These shafts of light illu- minate an appropriate historical marker serving as annual historical reminders.

Etched into the eastern side of the

plaza, an enlarged map of the City shows the New River as it meets the

harbor. The eastern edge of the building is eroded in the shape of the river and introduces light into the offices beneath the Plaza along its path.

The River continues until it meets

the semicircle of the water court

where the river path creates a wall of water even with the level of the

Plaza, providing a sixteen foot cas- cade into the pool below. The map follows the river upstream until it reaches the gnomon where, at map scale, the juncture of the blade and the river coincide exactly with the site on which the blade stands.'1

In Europe the work of the Italian architect Gino Valle may also be classified as criti- cal and regionalist inasmuch as his entire career has been centered around the city of Udine, in Italy. From here Valle was to

12

Wolf Associates, Fort Lauderdale Riverfront Plaza,

competition entry, 1982, site plan and elevation.

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Kenneth Frampton 156

make one of the earliest post-war rein- terpretations of the Italian Lombardy ver- nacular in the Casa Quaglia built at Sutrio in 1956. Throughout the Fifties, Valle dedi- cated himself to the evolution of an indus-

trial format for the Lombardy region. This development reached its zenith in his Zanussi Rex factory built at Pordenone in 1961. Aside from this, he was to extend his capacity for a more richly-textured and inflected regional expression in his thermal baths, built at Arta in 1964 and in his project for the Udine Civic Theatre submitted one year before. Regionalism, as we have seen, is often not so much a collective effort as it is the output of a talented individual working with com- mitment towards some sort of rooted

expression.

Apart from the Western United States, Re- gionalism first became manifest in the post-war world in the vestigial city-states of the European continent. A number of regional architects seem to have had their origins in this middle ground in the first decade after the war. Among those of the pre-war generation who have somehow remained committed to this regional in- flection one may count such architects as Ernst Gisel in Zurich, J0rn Utzon in Copenhagen, Vittorio Gregotti in Milan, Gino Valle in Udine, Peter Celsing in Stockholm, Mathias Ungers in Cologne, Sverre Fehn in Oslo, Aris Konstantinides in Athens, Ludwig Leo in Berlin, and the late Carlo Scarpa in Venice. Louis Kahn may also be considered to be a region- ally-oriented architect inasmuch as he was to remain committed to Philadelphia, both as myth and reality, throughout his life. It is symptomatic of his concern for preserving the urban qualities of down- town Philadelphia that he should show the central city area as a citadel; as a sec- tor walled in like Carcassonne by an auto- route instead of a bastion and studded on

its perimeter with cylindrical parking silos instead of castellated towers.

Switzerland, with its intricate linguistic and cultural boundaries and its tradition

of cosmopolitanism, has always dis- played strong regionalistic tendencies; ones which have often assumed a critical nature. The subtle cantonal combination

of admission and exclusion has always fa- vored the cultivation of extremely dense forms of expression in quite limited areas, and yet, while the cantonal system serves to sustain local culture, the Helvetic Feder- ation facilitates the penetration and as- similation of foreign ideas. Dolf Schnebli's

Corbusian, vaulted villa at Campione d'ltalia on the Italo-Swiss frontier (1960) may be seen as initiating the resistance of Swiss regional culture to the rule of inter- national Miesianism. This resistance

found its echo almost immediately in other parts of Switzerland, in Aurelio Galfetti's equally Corbusian Rotalini House, in Bellinzona and in the Atelier 5 version of the Corbusian beton brut man-

ner, as this appeared in private houses at Motier and Flamatt and in Siedlung Halen, built outside Bern in 1960. Today's Ticinese Regionalism has its ultimate origins not only in this pioneering work of Schnebli, Galfetti and Atelier 5, but also in the Neo-Wrightian work of Tita Carloni.

The strength of provincial culture surely resides in its capacity to condense the ar- tistic potential of the region while rein- terpreting cultural influences coming from the outside. The work of Mario Botta

is typical in this respect, with its con- centration on issues which relate directly to a specific place and with its adaptation of various Rationalist methods drawn

from the outside. Apprenticed to Carloni and later educated under Carlo Scarpa in Venice, Botta was fortunate enough to work, however briefly, for both Kahn and Le Corbusier during the short time that they each projected monuments for that city. Evidently influenced by these men, Botta has since appropriated the meth- odology of the Italian Neo-Rationalists as his own, while simultaneously retaining, through his apprenticeship with Scarpa, an uncanny capacity for the craft enrich- ment of both form and space. Perhaps the most striking example of this last occurs in his application of intonocare lucido (polished plaster) to the fireplace sur- rounds of a converted farmhouse that

was built to his designs at Ligrignano in 1979.

Two other primary traits in Botta's work may be seen as testifying to his Regional- ism; on the one hand, his constant preoc- cupation with what he terms building the site, and, on the other, his deep conviction that the loss of the historical city can only now be compensated for on a fragmen- tary basis. His largest work to date, namely his school at Morbio Inferiore, as- serts itself as a micro-urban realm; as a cultural compensation for the evident loss of urbanity in Chiasso, the nearest large city. Primary references to the culture of the Ticino landscape are also sometimes evoked by Botta at a typical level. An ex-

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Gino Valle, Casa Quaglia, Sutrio, 1956, section.

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Casa Quaglia, plan.

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15

Mario Botta, Farmhouse at Ligrignano, 1978-79.

16

Mario Botta, Casa Rotunda, Stabio, 1981.

ample of this would be the house at Riva San Vitale, which refers obliquely to the traditional country summer house or rocoli which was once endemic to the

region.

Aside from this specific reference, Botta's houses often appear as markers in the landscape, either as points or as bound- aries. The house in Ligornetto, for exam- ple, establishes the frontier where the village ends and the agrarian system be- gins. The visual acoustics of its plan stem from the gun-sight aperture of the house which turns away from the fields and to- wards the village. Botta's houses are in- variably treated in this way, as bunker- belvederes, where the fenestration opens towards selected views in the landscape, thereby screening out, with stoic pathos, the rapacious suburban development that has taken place in the Ticino region over the past twenty years. Finally, his houses are never layered into the contours of a given site, but rather "build the site"1' by declaring themselves as primary forms, set against the topography and the sky. Their surprising capacity to harmonize with the still partially agricultural nature of the region stems directly from their analogical form and finish; that is to say, from the fair-faced, concrete block of their structure and from the silo or barn-like shell forms in which they are housed, these last alluding to the traditional ag- ricultural structures from which the form derives.

Despite this demonstration of a convinc- ing, modern, domestic sensibility, the most critical aspect of Botta's achieve- ment does not reside in his houses, but rather in his public projects; in particular

in the two large-scale proposals which he designed in collaborative with Luigi Snozzi. Both of these are "viaduct" build-

ings and as such are certainly influenced to some degree by Kahn's Venice Con- gress Hall project of 1968 and by Rossi's first sketches for Galaratese of 1970. The

first of these projects, their Centro Di- rezionale di Perugia of 1971, is projected as a "city within a city" and the wider im- plications of this design clearly stem from its potential applicability to many Mega- lopolitan situations throughout the world. Had it been realized, this regional center, built as an arcaded galleria, would have been capable of signaling its presence to the urban region without compromising the historic city or fusing with the chaos of the surrounding suburban develop- ment. A comparable clarity and appropri- ateness was obtained in their Zurich

Station proposal of 1978. The advantages of the urban strategy adopted in this in- stance are so remarkable as to merit brief enumeration. This multileveled bridge structure would have not only provided four separate concourse levels to accom- modate shops, offices, restaurants, etc., but would have also constituted a new

head building at the end of the covered platforms. At the same time it would have emphasized an indistinct urban boundary without compromising the historic profile of the existing terminus.

In the case of the Ticino, one can lay claim to the actual presence of a Region- alist School in the sense that, after the late 1950s, this area produced a body of remarkable buildings, many of which were collectively achieved. This much is clear, not only from the diversity of Botta's own collaborators but also from

11

Vittorio Gregotti, L'Architettura come territoria. Botta took his notion of building the site from the thesis that Gregotti advanced in this book.

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17

12

Tadao And6, "From Self-Enclosed Modern Architecture Toward Universality", The Japan Architect, no. 301, May 1982, pp. 8-12.

associations which took place without his participation. Once again credit is due to the older generation such as Galfetti, Carloni, and Schnebli, who frequently col- laborated with younger architects. There is no room here to list all the architects

involved, but some idea of the scope of this endeavor may be obtained from the fact that the Ticinese "school" comprised well over twenty architects who were variously to build some forty buildings of note between 1960 and 1975.

It is hardly surprising that Tadao Ando, who is one of the most regionally con- scious architects in Japan should be based in Osaka rather than Tokyo and that his theoretical writings should formulate more clearly than any other architect of his generation a set of precepts which come close to the idea of Critical Region- alism. This is most evident in the tension

that he perceives as obtaining between the process of universal modernization and the idiosyncrasy of rooted culture. Thus we find him writing in an essay en- titled, "From Self-Enclosed Modern Archi- tecture toward Universality,"

Born and bred in Japan, I do my ar- chitectural work here. And I suppose it would be possible to say that the method I have selected is to apply the vocabulary and techniques de- veloped by an open, universalist Modernism in an enclosed realm of

17

Mario Botta and Luigi Snozzi, New Administrative Center at

Perugia, competition entry, 1971, sketch.

individual lifestyles and regional dif- ferentiation. But it seems difficult to

me to attempt to express the sen- sibilities, customs, aesthetic aware- ness, distinctive culture, and social traditions of a given race by means of an open, internationalist vocabu- lary of Modernism ...12

As Ando's argument unfolds we realize that for him an Enclosed Modern Architec-

ture has two meanings. On the one hand he means quite literally the creation of en- claves or, to be specific, court-houses by virtue of which man is able to recover

and sustain some vestige of that time- honoured triad,- man, nature, culture- against the obliterating onslaught of Megalopolitan development. Thus Ando writes:

After World War II, when Japan launched on a course of rapid eco- nomic growth, the people's value criteria changed. The old fundamen- tally feudal family system collapsed. Such social alterations as concentra-

tion of information and places of work in cities led to overpopulation of agricultural and fishing villages and towns (as was probably true in other parts of the world as well); overly dense urban and suburban populations made it impossible to preserve a feature that was formerly most characteristic of Japanese resi-

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18

15

Tadao And6, The Japan Architect.

16

Tadao And6, The Japan Architect.

13

Tadao And6, The Japan Architect.

14

Tadao And6, The Japan Architect.

18

Botta and Snozzi, Zurich Railway Station, competition entry, 1978.

dential architecture; intimate con- nection with nature and openness to the natural world. What I refer to as an Enclosed Modern Architecture is a restoration of the Unity between house and nature that Japanese houses have lost in the process of modernization.'3

In his small courtyard block houses, often set within dense urban fabric, Ando em-

ploys concrete in such a way as to stress the taut homogeneity of its surface rather than its weight, since for him it "is the most suitable material for realizing sur- faces created by rays of sunlight . . (where) . . . walls become abstract, are negated, and approach the ultimate limit of space. Their actuality is lost, and only the space they enclose gives a sense of really existing."'4

While the cardinal importance of light is present in theoretical writings of-Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier, Ando sees the paradox of spatial limpidity emerging out of light as being peculiarly pertinent to the Japanese character and with this he makes explicit the second and broader meaning which he attributes to the con- cept of a self-enclosed modernity. He writes:

Spaces of this kind are overlooked in utilitarian affairs of everyday liv- ing and rarely make themselves

known. Still they are capable of stimulating recollection of their own innermost forms and stimulating new discoveries. This is the aim of what I call closed modern architec- ture. Architecture of this kind is likely

to alter with the region in which it sends out roots and to grow in vari- ous distinctive individual ways, still, though closed, I feel convinced that as a methodology it is open in the direction of universality.'5

What Ando has in mind is the develop- ment of a trans-optical architecture where the richness of the work lies beyond the initial perception of its geometric order. The tactile value of the tectonic compo- nents are crucial to this changing spatial revelation, for as he was to write of his Koshino Residence in 1981:

Light changes expressions with time. I believe that the architectural materials do not end with wood and

concrete that have tangible forms but go beyond to include light and wind which appeal to our senses. ... Detail exists as the most impor- tant element in expressing identity. ... Thus to me, the detail is an ele- ment which achieves the physical composition of architecture, but at the same time, it is a generator of an image of architecture.'6

That this opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture

can have strong political connotations has been remarked on by Alex Tzonis in his article on the work of the Greek architects

Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, en- titled, "The Grid and Pathway," in which he demonstrates the ambiguous role played by the universality of the Schinkelschuler in the founding of the Greek state. Thus we find Tzonis writing:

In Greece, historicist regionalism in its neo-classical version had already met with opposition before the ar- rival of the Welfare State and of modern architecture. It is due to a

very peculiar crisis which explodes around the end of the nineteenth

century. Historicist regionalism here had grown not only out of a war of liberation; it had emerged out of in- terests to develop an urban elite set apart from the peasant world and its rural "backwardness" and to create

a dominance of town over country: hence the special appeal of histor-

159 Kenneth Frampton

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22 20

19

Tadao Ando, Koshino Residence, 1981, plan projection.

20

Koshino Residence, courtyard.

21

Koshino Residence, interior.

22

Koshino Residence, living room.

19

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17

Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "The Grid and

the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, with Prolegomena to a History of the Culture of Modern Greek Architecture", Architecture in Greece, no. 15, 1981, pp. 164-78.

18

Tzonis and Lefaivre, Architecture in Greece.

icist regionalism, based on the book rather than experience, with its monumentality recalling another distant and forlorn elite. Historical

regionalism had united people but it had also divided them.'7

While the various reactions which fol-

lowed the nineteenth-century triumph of the Greek Nationalist, Neo-classical style varied from vernacular historicism in the

Twenties to a more thorough-going mod- ernist approach which, immediately be- fore and after the Second World War, first proclaimed modernity as an ideal and then directly attempted to participate in the modernization of Greek society.

As Tzonis points out, critical regionalism only began in Greece with the thirties projects of Dimitri Pikionis and Aris Kon- stantinidis, above all in the latter's Eleusis house of 1938 and his garden exhibition built in Kifissia in 1940. It then manifested

itself with great force in the pedestrian zone that Dimitri Pikionis designed for the Philopappus Hill, in 1957, on a site imme- diately adjacent to the Acropolis in Athens. In this work, as Tzonis points out:

Pikionis proceeds to make a work of architecture free from technological exhibitionism and compositional conceit (so typical of the main- stream of architecture of the 1950s) a stark naked object almost de-

materialized, an ordering of "places made for the occasion," unfolding around the hill for solitary contem- plation, for intimate discussion, for a small gathering, for a vast assembly.

To weave this extraordinary braid of niches and passages and situations, Pikionis identifies appropriate com- ponents from the lived-in spaces of folk architecture, but in this project the link with the regional is not made out of tender emotion. In

a completely different attitude, these envelopes of concrete events are studied with a cold empirical method, as if documented by an ar- chaeologist. Neither is their selec- tion and their positioning carried out to stir easy superficial emotion. They are platforms to be used in an everyday sense but to supply that which, in the context of contempo- rary architecture, everyday life does not. The investigation of the local is the condition for reaching the concrete and the real, and for re- humanizing architecture.'1

Unlike Pikionis, Konstantinidis, as his ca- reer unfolded, moved closer to the ration- ality of the universal grid and it is this affinity that now leads Tzonis to regard the work of Antonakakis as lying some- where between the autochthonous path- way of Pikionis and universal grid of

23

Dimitri Pikionis and Aris Konstantinides, Garden

Exhibition, Kifissia, 1940, plan and axonometric.

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19

Tzonis and Lefaivre, Architecture in Greece.

Konstantinidis. Are we justified in seeing this dualism as yet a further manifestation of the interaction between culture and

civilization, and if so, what are the gen- eral consequences? Tzonis writes of Antonakakis' work and of critical regional- ism in general that: ". .. (it) is a bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass, even if the path may lead to a completely different direction.""19

Perhaps the one work of Antonakakis which expresses this conjunction of grid and the pathway more succinctly than any other is the Benakis Street apartment building completed to their designs in Athens in 1975; a building wherein a con- cept of labyrinthine path-movement, drawn from the islands of Hydra, is woven into the structural fabric of a ra-

tionalist grid-the ABA concrete frame which sustains the form of the building.

If any central principle of critical regional- ism can be isolated, then it is surely a commitment to place rather than space, or, in Heideggerian terminology, to the nearness of raum, rather than the dis- tance of spatium. This stress on place may also be construed as affording the political space of public appearance as for- mulated by Hannah Arendt. Such a con- junction between the cultural and the political is difficult to achieve in late capi- talist society. Among the occasions in the last decade on which it has appeared on

more general terms, recognition should be given to the development of Bologna in the Seventies. In this instance, an ap- praisal was made of the fundamental morphology and typology of the city fab- ric, and socialist legislation was intro- duced to maintain this fabric in both old

and new development. The conditions un- der which such a plan is feasible must of necessity be restricted to those surviving traditional cities which have remained

subject to responsible forms of political control. Where these cultural and political conditions are absent, the formulation of a creative cultural strategy becomes more difficult. The universal Megalopolis is pa- tently antipathetic to a dense differentia- tion of culture. It intends, in fact, the reduction of the environment to nothing but commodity. As an abacus of develop- ment, it consists of little more than a hal- lucinatory landscape in which nature fuses into instrument and vice versa. Criti-

cal Regionalism would seem to offer the sole possibility of resisting the rapacity of this tendency. Its salient cultural precept is 'place' creation; the general model to be employed in all future development is the enclave-that is to say, the bounded fragment against which the ceaseless inundation of a place-less, alienating con- sumerism will find itself momentarily checked.

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