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October 27, 2003

Critical Regionalism Revisited: Provisional Thoughts on the Future of Urban Design

by Kenneth Frampton

Irrespective of whether one addresses oneself exclusively to the United States or to the developing world at large, there are two fundamental approaches in the field of environmental design that ought to be emphasized. In the first instance, architectural practice should focus much more urgently on the issue of sustainability, while in the second, it ought to recognize the salient importance of landscape not only in terms of integrating one-off buildings into their surrounding topography, but also with regard to the fact that landscape intervention is possibly the sole remaining agent capable of mediating the chaos of the megalopolis. Not withstanding the occasional bucolic suburb, it is overwhelmingly evident that our suburbanized dystopia is fast becoming a universal late-modern condition. The chances are that little of this will ever be rebuilt or even reformulated in a culturally significant way. Urban sprawl seems to be here to stay, and apart from the possibility of modifying it on a piecemeal basis through earthwork interventions of various kinds, one can only envisage its eventual long-term ruin and abandonment. Given what has happened to the “Brownfield” legacy of the last century -- those lands left derelict by the ravages of industrialization -- one can hardly be sanguine about the future demolition or restoration of sprawl.

As far as sustainability is concerned, it is imperative that we attempt to reduce the amount of energy consumed by built form. If the latest statistics are to be taken at face value, it is somehow shocking to discover that while commutation by automobile, aircraft and public transport are jointly responsible for some forty percent of our annual energy consumption, the built environment currently accounts for an equal amount or even still greater, with the remaining twenty percent being used in various modes of primary and secondary industry. As the environmental building designer Michelle Addington informs us, a large part of this “built consumption” stems from our profligate use of electric light, with air-conditioning coming a close second.

My original essay on “Critical Regionalism,” first published in Hal Foster’s (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic, is now twenty years old, and in the interim much has changed, and hardly for the better, as far as democracy is concerned. If one is looking for a “site” upon which a radically democratic environmental discourse could be based, then surely the issue of sustainability is a focus that is capable of cutting across the differences in scale between architecture and urbanism. This focus could also be said to be “critically regional” with respect to climate, topography, etc. as I attempted to argue in my original essay. Against Mark Gilbert’s criticisms, I hardly think that this position is reducible to aesthetic representation. As for the rest, one thinks of Guy Debord who remarked in 1988 that because late modern power is shielded by the spectacle (i.e. by the media) from having to take responsibility for its delirious decisions, it “believes that it no longer needs to think; and indeed can no longer think.”

As Mark Gilbert observes, it could well be that architecture and urbanism today belong to quite different discourses. If this is indeed the case, it could be said that Critical Regionalism is, at best, only a “holding” operation with regard to architecture.

Gilbert is also right to put into question the issue of democracy. Here, there is a problematic interface, so to speak, between the prescriptions of a technocracy serving global techno-scientific-cum-economic agendas and the desire of a democratic society to stem the forces of development. Apart from the already established institutions of “democratic” governance, how may this desire or will manifest itself more effectively given the transnational forces of globalization and the growing capacity for manipulation in our information age? The U.S. is a fairly negative paradigm in this regard despite the much vaunted myths of freedom and democracy, particularly when one recalls the fact that only 34% of the electorate vote, not to mention the conditions under which Arnold Schwarzenegger was recently elected governor of California.

As to Gilbert’s call for an "urbanism of facts," what can one say, when by and large suburbanization as this takes place in the ever growing conurbation of Atlanta could be said to be an urbanism of facts based on the engineered and indeed subsidized optimization of the automobile and the related forces of speculative land sub-division?

Surely, this is a too pessimistic note on which to conclude my intervention. Perhaps this somber tone derives from the fact that I live in the United States, with all the obvious aporias on a cultural and political level that this situation entails. I am well aware that things are still somewhat different in Europe where some vestige of the welfare state remains alive, or if not, that the politics of the “city-state,” particularly as this is still manifested in the Iberia Peninsula, Scandinavia, or France. Perhaps, to be generous to Gilbert, this is what is implied by “social facts” upon which one could base a future urbanism. I am far from convinced, however, that an urbanism of hard facts per se leads us anywhere beyond some constantly shifting condition between urban production and consumption; hence ,the relative impotence of MVRDV’s Datascape methodologies; impressive as a techno-scientific sales pitch, perhaps, but not very useful otherwise, I feel. Of much greater relevance for me is the concept of “urban acupuncture,” as posited by the Catalan architect Manuel de Sola Morales, which seeks to reign in waste disposal and ecological destruction through measured and strategic urban interventions.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. His books include Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1990), Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (1995), Labor, Work, and Architecture (2002), and Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Century (2002).