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A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton

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A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton STAN ALLEN AND HAL FOSTER Hal Foster: Our occasion is the recent publication of Labour, Work and Architecture (2002), but we should also look back to Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995) and further back, given its wide readership, to Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980). Let’s begin with your formation as an architect. Kenneth Frampton: I was trained at the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1950 to 1956. After that I went into the British Army for two years, which was a ridiculous experience except for basic training. I then went to Israel for a year, which was a positive experience, architecturally speaking, in that it was a simpler country with a basic building technology. Within this limited scope, one was free to do what one wanted. I returned to London and started to work for Douglas Stephen and Partners, a relatively small practice in the City Center. I was an associate of this office until I left for the States in 1965. Foster: Whom did you confront at the AA, in terms of teachers and fellow students? Frampton: My group at the AA is a lost generation in many ways. There were and still are peers of considerable talent, but they’ve had mixed careers. Neave Brown is surely one of them. He has had the long career as a housing architect, but it hasn’t been easy for him. Perhaps the most talented of my generation was Patrick Hodgkinson, who worked briefly with Alvar Aalto as a student, and then for Leslie Martin in Cambridge. He had a spectacular career at the beginning, but then it faltered, and he spent the greater part of his life teaching at the University of Bath. He was a brilliant teacher, but the architectural talent he displayed as a student wasn’t fulfilled. Arthur Korn was important to the AA climate at the time; he was a Jewish émigré from Berlin who had worked for Erich Mendelsohn (he was also a close friend of Ludwig Hilberseimer). Korn indulged in a radical leftist discourse during this period. One of the things that now seems quaint is that in the 1950s, inside a relatively small school like the AA, there were student associations aligned with three political parties: communist, socialist, and conservative. This was also the prime era of the British welfare state, which in architec- ture affected school building in particular. After the Beveridge Report and Education Act of 1944, there was a spate of rather brilliant school buildings, OCTOBER 106, Fall 2003, pp. 35–58. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791016 by guest on 27 September 2021 36 OCTOBER especially in Hertfordshire. As students, we also visited Hunstanton when it was under construction in the early fifties. Foster: That’s the school by Peter and Alison Smithson, a landmark New Brutalist building . Frampton: Right. As it happens, Peter Smithson was our design tutor toward the end of my time at the AA, perhaps the most distinguished teacher of that moment. Foster: But they were a part of the generation ahead of you, as was James Stirling. Frampton: The Smithsons had a rivalrous relationship with Stirling. In a CIAM IX meeting at Aix-en-Provence in 1953, Peter Smithson seems to have shown Stirling’s work without making it quite clear that it wasn’t by the Smithsons. At that date the neovernacular forms being used by all of them, especially for small-scale cellular housing, were similar. Interestingly, they were influenced by a book called The English Village by Thomas Sharp, an English planner who analyzed British agricultural villages and their characteristic cluster and linear formation. Already nostalgic, I would say, but also a great modification of the tabula rasa approach of the modern movement in the interwar period. Foster: When you say your generation was semilost, do you also mean it was in the shadow of the generation of the Smithsons and Stirling? Frampton: I’m talking about my specific class at the AA, and some classes just don’t find their way. In fact a class or two after mine, in which Edward Jones was a leading figure, has effectively prevailed. I have in mind the current practice of Dixon Jones (Jeremy Dixon is his partner). It is a successful modern British practice, having passed through the postmodern moment. That genera- tion was able to distinguish itself and to sustain its creativity. My closest colleague in London, John Miller, also did very remarkable buildings at the beginning of his career in partnership with Alan Colquhoun, but they too were affected by postmodernism and by the change in the British cultural and political climate. After a while Alan withdrew to devote his time to writing and teaching at Princeton. He was always a very powerful intellectual, and it was a kind of fulfillment for him to move into scholarly work. Stan Allen: To go back to the Smithsons and Stirling, they had an ambivalent rela- tionship to the high modes of modern architecture. In the Smithsons’ Above: Alison and Peter Smithson. Hunstanton school, Norfolk, England. 1949–54. Facing page: Nigel Henderson. Farm machinery, Colchester, England. 1960. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791016 by guest on 27 September 2021 A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton 37 writings there is a strong sense of having come to modernism late and inheriting an already formed tradition. Being taught by that generation, was there a further distancing from those precepts for you and your peers? Frampton: My first-year master at the AA was Leonard Manasseh, who was a hot architect at the time of the Festival of Britain (1951). The Festival already displayed a reformist position with regard to the modern movement. There were exceptions, such as the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon, both of which were rather Neo-Constructivist works. But the basic atmosphere, the primary ethos, of the festival was very close to the populism of Stockholm 1930: the famous Gunnar Asplund exhibition. According to this position architecture should be socially accessible and not too assertive. The two most aggressive structures in the festival were the Dome and the Skylon. Foster: In terms of other forces in play at the time, what about Reyner Banham and the Independent Group (IG) in general? Allen: Yes: when was New Brutalism articulated—by Banham and others—as a counterpoint to that kind of populist architecture promoted by the Festival of Britain? Frampton: A key moment was the exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956), which involved some members of the IG. It was categorically opposed to the Swedish modern line of the Festival of Britain as well as to the more populist line of the London and Hertfordshire County Councils. At the same time Colquhoun worked for the London County Council, designing neo-Corbusierian slab blocks in exposed concrete, loosely modeled after the Unité at Marseille. All of this was an attempt to recover the rigor of the modern movement in some way. To an extent, the Golden Lane project proposed by the Smithsons for the rebuilding of Coventry also tried to recover this spirit. Although it wasn’t Le Corbusier’s tabula rasa urbanism, it was meant to be more assertive, more rigorous. At the same time it also aspired to be rooted in a kind of nineteenth- century sense of community rather than in the postwar welfare state. It wasn’t opposed to social welfare, but it hankered after the spontaneous social identity of nineteenth-century urban cul- ture—hence the reference by the Smithsons to Bethnal Green in the East End of London. There was a connection here to the photographs of Nigel Henderson, who was also an IG member. Henderson’s wife, Judith Stephen, was an anthro- pologist and social worker in the Bethnal Green . Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791016 by guest on 27 September 2021 38 OCTOBER Allen: Was there the sense, through the IG, that the boundaries between architecture and art worlds were porous? Frampton: It was particularly so for the Smithsons. They were close to Eduardo Paolozzi and Henderson, and together they staged the Parallel of Art and Life exhibition (1953). The Smithsons were also open to Art Brut, Dubuffet, and Existentialism. The Situationists were too much for them, I think, but they were interested in CoBrA, and that already brought them toward Situationism. All of this was part of the Smithsons’ sensibility, but not of Stirling’s. Foster: And you felt more sympathetic to whom? Frampton: Well, I was closer to Stirling personally. I don’t think I understood the Situationist position then; I didn’t begin to appreciate it until the 1960s. However, in 1963, when I was technical editor of Architectural Design, we were the first to publish an English translation of Constant’s New Babylon. I thought it was an astonishing text. Also, at that time in Architectural Design I supported the work of Yona Friedman, who often came to our editorial offices in London. He was famous for his space-frame, megastructural proposal Paris Spatiale. He was and still is a died-in-the-wool anarchist, fond of saying things like, “I think there is one art and it is cooking!” Foster: There’s no easy fit between the Situationists and the IG and its followers. (Legend has it that when the Situationists came to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1960, mutual incomprehension prevailed.) In the simplest terms, the IG embraced certain aspects of emergent consumer culture, and the Situationists did precisely the opposite.
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