Assignment Two:
Read Kenneth Frampton’s article ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’. Provide a short written commentary, explanation or question as a response to each of the following five quotes from the article. Responses should be no more than three (3) sentences.
- Today the practice of architecture seems to be increasingly polarized between, on the one hand, a so-called high-tech approach predicated exclusively upon production and, on the other, the provision of a “compensatory facade” to cover up the harsh realities of this universal system. (Frampton- pp. 18)
- The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its I own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.’ (Frampton quoting Clement Greenberg- pp. 21)
- Architecture can only be sustained today as a critical practice if it assumes I an arriere-garde position, that is to say, one which distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress return and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past. (Frampton- pp. 22)
- “Western civilization habitually identifies itself with civilization as I such on the pontifical assumption that what is not like it is a deviation, less advanced, primitive, or, at best, exotically interesting at a safe distance. ” (Frampton quoting Aldo van Eyck- pp. 24)
- The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (Frampton- pp. 29)
