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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).

Interview with Shirin Neshat: Thoughts about Identity, Culture, and Media

by Nader Vossoughian

Over the summer, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing the filmmaker and multimedia artist Shirin Neshat. Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, but has been living in the United States for the last twenty years. As the following interview reveals, she characterizes her work as “transcultural,” stemming as it does from her interest in themes of identity, representation, and politics. Empirically speaking, the subject matter of her work is her native Iran: its dreams, its tragedies, its dilemmas. As she reveals, however, on a deeper level she prefers to think of her work in a more universal context. “There is the subject matter that generates the idea, which is often political or existential,” she states, “but then there is the personal level of the work, the intuitive dimension.”

Q. How would you characterize your identity as an artist? Do you feel any affinity with Iranian artists or filmmakers living in Iran?

A. My work starts from a bi-cultural perspective. Even though the subject matter is an Iranian one, I really speak from the perspective of someone who is transcultural. My background is conceptual art, and my university studies were carried out in the United States at Berkeley. At the same time, I do share a few things in common with the Iranian cinema specifically – its poetic impulse and its minimal language. I think that particularly in the works of the director Abbas Kiarostami, we see someone working within boundaries, with a restricted palette. This is in part a reaction to Iran’s political situation, to its tight censorship laws, which ironically have made artists still more subversive, minimal, and poetic.

Q. Tell us something about your working methods.

A. A lot of planning goes into everything [I do], but initially when the idea is born, it is purely intuitive. I think a lot of times my projects emerge out of my subconscious. My subconscious has its own particular logic, which is not a normal logic. There is the subject matter that generates the idea, which is often political or existential, but then there is the personal level of the work, the intuitive dimension. This is very much in keeping with how I operate as a person. Part of me is analytical, and part of me is wild and just wants to resist every form of order.

Q. In an interview with Artkrush, you characterize the experience of seeing a film in the cinema as being more “passive” than in an art gallery. Could you elaborate on this?

A. I do find the experience of looking a film in a theater setting radically different from in a gallery space. In my own work, so many of the films are designed as installations of two opposite projections where the viewer must sit between the two screens. Here the viewer finds it impossible to look and follow the story simultaneously on both sides; therefore he or she must constantly shift his or her attention back and forth. In a way, the viewer becomes the editor of the film. The relationship of audience to film is heightened and the experience becomes unusually physical and emotional because of the scale of the projection in part, where the spectator literally feels like he or she is inside the picture; the music that surrounds the spectator and once again the actual design of the installation make the viewer a participant in the piece.

Q. Do you have any input in how your films are presented in an actual galley space? Do you have any preferences vis-à-vis the size of the space in which they are displayed or the kind of lighting that gets used?

A. The design of the installation comes very early on as I am editing the film. The actual size of the room comes later when I finally get to project the film. I usually prefer larger rooms so there is sufficient distance between the viewer and the projection; otherwise, the audience might feel too claustrophobic. It varies from piece to piece, though. There is no lighting involved here; we essentially have a very dark room, the walls are painted black. What of course becomes most critical is the quality of the equipment, meaning the video projector, DVD player, and speakers.

Q. Most of your films are set in very spare and desolate locations – deserts, vast oceans, etc. What is your motivation behind this? Can you see yourself shooting a film on a public street?

A. You are right. It looks like it has been a pattern of mine to film mostly in open landscapes or in interior spaces, except, however, in a very few occasions, as in my film Possessed, which we shot in the streets of Morocco in 2001. I cannot really explain exactly why this is the case for me, perhaps because the nature of my films are less concretely sociological and more metaphoric -- not so bounded to a particular time and place. Perhaps part of me thinks that once you enter the city landscape, you cannot escape the specificity of time and place, and the meaning of the work then risks becoming too literal.

Q. Have you observed differences in how your work has been received before and after September 11th?

A. Yes and no. It just so happened that around September 11th two important art magazines had my work on their cover, which was good or bad timing, depending on how you looked at it.



I received a lot of phone calls. Quite understandably, people felt violated by September 11th and wanted to blame Moslems for it. The media in particular was looking for simplistic answers to very difficult questions. The issues surrounding 9/11 were simply too complex to be captured in television sound-bites or newspaper bi-lines.

What I tried to do is to strike a balance between what I thought was wrong, the violence and the oppression, but note at the same time that 9/11 involved a very limited group of people, that it does not (and should not) reflect upon an entire nation. I am simply not accustomed to speaking about Islam in sweeping generalities, and I thought we as a society were doing ourselves a disservice by looking for shorthand answers.

Q. Have you tried to deal with September 11th and its political aftermath in your work?

A. Not really. Again, my work is never really made with the intention of being directly political. I don’t feel qualified to do so. It’s not my nature to make grand gestures, whether political or otherwise, as I often err on the side of being timid or unconfident. I often feel skeptical of my own assumptions.

Although much has been made of the political intentions behind projects like The Women of Allah, I must say that it was not originally conceived as such. It was an exercise that I did not plan to make for an audience. I saw it more as a means of initiating a conversation with myself about martyrdom. What are the philosophical ideas behind it? How can I communicate its essence, visually speaking? On the one hand, martyrdom has a religious and spiritual dimension; on the other hand, there are aspects of violence, hate, and obsessiveness to it. To me the most important thing is to explore the conflicting values embodied in a single person – or an entire society, for that matter.

I often will investigate issues through the medium of images; images never want to give answers; often, they only raise further questions.

Q. So it would probably be fair to say that your most recent project, The Last Word, was not necessarily about the woman’s role in Persian society.

A. You’re right indeed. In The Last Word, I felt that the interrogation was something universal, that it could take place anywhere to anyone. For me it was not so much a political trial; the interrogator in the film could have represented a judge or God or whomever.

Q. What are you working on at the moment?

A. I am making my first feature film, readapting a book by Shahrnoush Parsipour, called Women Without Men. She is of course a highly respected Iranian writer who is now living in exile in the United States. The film will be shot in Morocco, starting in Jan. 2004. I have been writing the script which is totally different from the way I normally work but I am very excited and looking forward to the experience. This film is being produced by a film producer and is being planned as a regular feature films for theater screening.

Shirin Neshat's most recent installation piece, Tooba, is on view through February 15, 2004 at the Asia Society in New York.

Theorizing the 'Facts' of the Contemporary City: Interview with Mark Gilbert

By Nader Vossoughian

Recently, I found myself in Vienna’s Museum Quarter, in the library of the Architectural Center. It a place where I love to read, write, and (sometimes) sleep, if only because it seems like the only library in Europe open on weekends. While there, I was paging through a recent issue of Umbau, a journal of architectural theory and urbanism published by Vienna’s Technical University, and I came across a very impassioned text on the subject of Rem Koolhaas and urbanism.

The author of the piece, Mark Gilbert, was blunt in his assessment of Koolhaas. As he writes in the opening paragraph, “[a]moral and pragmatic, [Rem Koolhaas] dismisses leftist concerns for collective good and derides nostalgia.” I was immediately taken by Gilbert’s candor, so I read further. Koolhaas, he observes, “busies himself with the issue of reception, preferring to address the constructed identities… that abound in the city today.” Gilbert continues: “Koolhaas proposes that decentralization will be the urban process that will free the city from historically defined spatial interrelations.”

In the concluding pages to the text, Gilbert proposes an alternative of urbanism rooted in a notion of “social facts.” "What exactly does he mean by a “social fact”?" I asked myself. I wrote him just this question, and, as you will find below, he responded in kind with a series of very illuminating statements.

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Q. In your essay "On Beyond Koolhaas: Identity, Sameness and the Crisis of City Planning," you make the provocative claim that thinking about cities in terms of their "social facts" might prove a more fruitful model for urban planning than the "post-city" philosophy espoused by Rem Koolhaas. Do you think you could elaborate on what you mean by "social facts"?

A. Maybe the best approach to the notion of facts would be to reflect upon its conceptual genesis. The ideas arose in response to Koolhaas’ contention that the generic city is – or would be – everywhere the same, and that the ahistoric “post-city” represents a radical rupture in the production of urban space. I believe instead that a city can transform radically without losing its essential identity. For me, understanding and defining this identity gives us a way of comprehending the city. I try to move away from semiotically-conditioned conceptions of identity – such as Barthesian signification, which is about constructing meanings through the projection and reception of symbols, images, and signs – in favor of notions that are rooted in the performance of the city; that is to say, in how the city constructs itself.

In this sense, facts are the constitutive building blocks of the city. Wittgenstein’s famous assertion that the world is the totality of its facts precedes and parallels the idea that the city is the totality of its facts. Of course, Wittgenstein sought to delineate the structure and limits of philosophical language, and urbanism is something different; more material, more dynamic, and certainly “dirtier”. But it seems fair to ask the discourse of urbanism to analyze pragmatically its constitutive structure.

How then would I define these facts? Facts are the social constructs that codify and spatialize social practice; they take on many forms, most of which are rooted in the banal actualities of everyday life. Property laws and real estate are facts. Zoning laws are facts; so are building codes. Financial practice and tax law are facts. Building technology, material availability, and the organization of the construction industry are facts. Financial practice and tax law are facts. Political empowerment and economic corruption are facts. Local rituals, taboos and hygienic standards are facts. Social distribution and neighborhood development are facts. The built environment is a fact. The list is long, the point being: the urban facts of a city are its set of collective rules, agreements and habits that specifically mediate between spaces and social practices.

How can the notion of the city as fact help to facilitate the making of urban form? Ultimately, a factual urbanism does not offer recipes and methods for creating form. Instead, it offers a model for seeing the city as a systemic process. Different players have different agendas for the development of the city, and fact-based urbanism helps foreground these discursive conflicts of interest.

One potential embedded in a successful, fact-based urbanism would be that of resistance; resistance to global capital. Now, this is not a call for bans on development or a nostalgia for community. Rather, the challenge is to find processes which allow for the comprehension and counter-balancing of different facts and interests – and not just those embodied in the capitalist market.

Q. So the approach to urbanism you seem to be calling resembles the position espoused by the Dutch office MVRDV. As Bart Lootsma has observed, MVRDV’s “datascape” methodologies attempt to spatialize those invisible rules and codes that give our civil society its order and coherence. Am I right in drawing this comparison?

Second, when you call for an urbanism based upon the idea of “resistance,” are you deliberately invoking Kenneth Frampton’s writings on critical regionalism? How would you assess Frampton’s position, his view that vital forms of regional architecture can help offset the effects of globalization?



A. On the basis of his essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, it would seem that Frampton is more interested in the question of representation than he is in problem of systems. His idea of the arriere-garde proposes the use of local characteristics as a “middle way” alternative to the sort of architectural composition based upon the glorification of technology or the scenographic use of historical forms. When he touts the ability of „critical regionalist“ architecture to resist capitalist hegemony, he refers explicitly to its formal traits -- how it offers aesthetic strategies for making alternative forms. In my opinion, Frampton’s idea of the local simply never offers a decisive definition of what context really is. Devoid of any specific and identifiable criteria for defining context, we can only rely on aesthetic judgment to determine what is authentically local; even issues of materiality and construction are understood as problems of representation, not as problems of systematic production.

What interests me, however, is the idea of the city as systemic and historical process. The site consists of its facts, and there is no authentic or inauthentic choice in its development (contra Frampton), only possible and non-possible strategies as defined within the discursive conflict of interests that accompany any project. This is not to say that there are no good and bad results, or even desirable and less desirable results. It is to say, rather, that the issue of formal authenticity is not the avenue of resistance within a fact-based notion of urbanism. The resistance arises first and foremost at the level of the discursive conflict of interest (an idea I talked about a moment ago), not at the level of representation; resistance is the question of the interested interpretation and the weighing of the site’s facts. A fact-based urbanism does not guarantee a better or more equitable city, it simply means that a system for the perception and weighing of all interests – local and global - is conceivable (although not necessarily present).

Any idea of a fact-based system of negotiation brings us to MVRDV. In my opinion, through his quite masterfully argued essay “What is (really) to be Done?: The Theoretical Concepts of MVRDV,” Bart Lootsma is able to place the work of MVRDV in a much clearer context than the group has yet done for themselves. Lootsma firmly elucidates the benefits of a world that can be parameterized by statistical data, as well as pointing out some of the difficulties of this approach. He argues that the benefit of data is its property of (apparently) objective description of a site, which can be used both as a basis for interest group negotiations as well as a starting point for the projection of the future results of negotiated agreements. For Lootsma, the drawbacks of data-driven negotiation in our age of universal urbanism are, first, that the sample area is difficult to define, thus rendering questionable the validity of data at hand, and second, that the society of rational, consensual democracy is far from universal, making fairly negotiated agreements difficult to achieve and well-nigh impossible to carry out. Yet, despite these drawbacks, Lootsma is more than optimistic that such a statistically-based planning strategy offers a progressive and effective ideal for planning the future world.

While there is much of virtue to be gleaned from Lootsma’s text, it contains some very basic problems that need to be addressed. On the one hand, there is the extreme positivism upon which the approach is grounded; on the other, there is the rather simplistic, deterministic role of time and the developmental dynamic that the approach embodies.

In order to function, MVRDV’s approach is dependent (I believe) upon the sort of quantifiable data that statistics describe, and relies upon the assumption that the facts required to project and plan are measurable. Now, although I have drawn from early Wittgenstein’s great logical treatise (The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), I share with Popper and the later Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations) significant doubts that our intercourse with the facts which are the world can be completely, mathematically, and verifiably described. Plainly said, all (meaningful) data – so I would argue -- are facts, but not all facts are data. The belief that emotions can be adequately described through elections or opinion polls is simply misled. Against scientific positivists like Rudolf Carnap, I would argue on the contrary that our built world is not a mathematical-scientific construct.

Of course, many facts, such as population density or yearly sunshine, are quantifiable; many others, such as property laws, are institutionalized. Yet many facts resist positivistic description. Some, such as unplanned or unplannable multi-functionalty, exist more in the realm of ritual than in the realm of data. For example, how many functions does a Japanese tatami room fulfill? Some important urban phenomena are difficult to quantify, as they are contingent upon irrational and unpredictable human factors. Traffic engineers have had insurmountable difficulty modeling traffic jams, as their inception is often caused not just by human accidents, but by other flow interruptions that occur below the threshold of an accident. Numbers are important, but they don’t describe everything. I live and work in Vienna, a city where intrigue and relationships are salient and decisive facts in the planning and realization of the city. How do we quantify intrigue? It is highly unsatisfying to think that the urban world, or even any specific site, could be reduced to quantified data.

The problem with the positivism that is implied in Lootsma’s text is not only one of verification and measurement, but also one of determinism and origin. If I recall correctly, it was P.S. Laplace who claimed that, given the correct location and velocity of all particles in the universe, he could predict the course of the future. This may have been the reason that he escaped beheading in the revolution. This sort of scientific determinism, which datascapes clearly recall, conceives of the world as both knowable and linearly predictable. Yet, thinking since Eisenstein and Heisenberg has not only thrown our knowledge of the world in doubt, but it has also shown us that it is deeply non-linear. Even if we could know the facts, we can’t know where they would ultimately lead us. Our world, our individual and collective behavior, is based upon the workings of the past, but mapping them, even completely, cannot honestly tell us where we would go. We are much too complex for that.

It is important to reiterate what the idea of the city as a totality of facts is – and isn’t. It isn’t about architecture, it is about urbanism and site. As Jean Attali cogently states, architecture and urbanism “belong to different orders”; this notion of facts attempts to describe the constituent basis of urbanism. It deals first and foremost with conditions, evolutions and potentials, not with the methods of their embodiment which would be architecture. The notion of a fact-based urbanism is not prescriptive; it cannot offer recipes for producing city form or even individual buildings. It offers a conceptual framework for understanding the city as a complex, historic, yet unpredictable spatial system whose facts are real but not always measurable. When we engage only those facts of a site that are quantifiable, we are potentially missing out on extremely important aspects of the urban world that might be the cause of trajectories wholly different than what numbers would predict. The city is an historic, ongoing and often irrational process. What MVRDV is doing is useful, but it is important that we do not mistake data for the city. It they are not: what datascapes produce is a significant and interesting approximation, but not the real thing.

Mark Gilbert is Assistant Professor for Design and Theory at the Vienna Technical University. He is a practicing architect and the founding principal of m.gilbert architektur in Vienna, Austria.