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Slow Architecture? 141 SLOW ARCHITECTURE? 141 Slow Architecture? - The Myth of Local Resistance to Globalization in Architecture: A Critique. DR. OLE W. FISCHER University of Utah (POST)CRITICAL ARCHITECTURE signs whose differentiation commences an internal process between figuration and abstraction.2 The Over the last decade the definition of architecture “criticism” consists in a methodical-critical analysis (and especially theory of architecture) as a “critical of architectural structure of meaning. practice” has been challenged by a “post-critical” or “projective” stance, expressing pragmatist A second version of “critical architecture” rests in concerns against the futility of “critical” architecture the opposition to monopolization, objectification respectively theory. These have played a major role and fetishization of architectural objects as a in architectural debates in the past three decades: commodity, and in the search for strategies designed under the banner of “Criticality”, the theory of to evade the pressure of visual commodification of architecture was recognized and professionalized as the “late capitalist” culture industry.3 The strategies a regular academic discipline, with its own programs of this cultural and social criticism by architecture and chairs, with distinct “critical” magazines and comprise a deceleration of perception, a “silence publications, exhibitions and symposia, what lead of architecture”, a refusal of pictoriality, staging to the effect that “Criticality” became synonymous and branding, or the uncovering of architecture’s with the theory of architecture. staging devices, respectively, the demonstrative exhibition of negative social effects such as The “critical” aspect stems from the original objectification, alienation or cliché. The “critical” linguistic, psychoanalytical and neo-Marxist content unfolds as self-reflective questioning of contexts of these theories, that, in different the architectural devices still available under the ways, follow the traditions of progressive thought dominant forces of privatization, economization since the Enlightenment: as a clash between and globalization. Both these strands of “critical the established, dominant status quo of culture architecture” share the constant indexing of their and society and divergent possibilities, deviant “critical” state, their “critical” intentions, and the latencies, the excluded Other, as a search for generative processuality of form by means of a revelation, alternatives and changes. The question complex system of references from the object to facing “critical architecture”, however, is: “critical – theory and vice versa. of what?”1 Strictly speaking, there are at least three divergent approaches within architecture that call The third approach to “critical architecture” seems as itself “critical”: first, the idea of the autonomy of far from post-structural linguistics as from aesthetic the discipline with regard to external factors such strategies of abstraction and negation. In the early as society, function or historical significance, and a 1980 the theorists Kenneth Frampton, Alexander reduction to the formal manipulation of the internal Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre4 suggested a “critical elements of architecture. This “criticism” is based regionalism” in architecture as means to reject on a linguistically post-structuralist model that dominant consumer culture of post-modernism interprets architectural elements as self-referential and to resist the mobilizing and equalizing forces 142 LOCAL IDENTITIES GLOBAL CHALLENGES of global capitalism. Suspicious against the elitist the nation state. This strong nationalistic undertone theories of the two other “critical” strategies as in regionalism remains dominant during historic much as against the then popular semiotics and eclecticism of 19th Century up to the conservative imagery in architecture, they hoped to halt the preservation movement of the early 20th Century, loss of differentiation, specificity and locality. which criticized the negative impact of industrial With a detour to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the revolution, infrastructure and urban expansion on “aura” of the work of art,5 the authors suggested small towns, villages and the landscape. From here to slow down the process of visual commodification leads a direct line to “völkische” regionalism as by applying local materials, techniques and critique of the international modernist avant-gardes typologies, by referring to context, history, season of the 1920s to 40s. Of course, the protagonists and the landscape, altogether features that have of “critical regionalism” refrain from nationalist to be experienced on site rather than in images. chauvinism, but prefer the emancipatory strand of In contrast to the earlier notion of regionalism the English Picturesque, the Arts & Crafts Movement or (postmodern) vernacular tendencies, here the of Ruskin and Morris, or the American critic Lewis “critical” denotes a reflexive understanding of local Mumford, who questioned the imperial ideologies inspiration and the notion of place, and opens a of both historicism and universal modernism – dialectic between technological “civilization” and so called “International Style” after the MoMA “(world) culture”,6 as for example in the work of exhibition respectively catalogue of 1932 by Henry Alvar Aalto, Jørn Utzon or Alvaro Siza. Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson10 – which he opposed with regional practices that grow out of “REGIONALISM” – A VERY BRIEF HISTORY individual perspectives and a specific social climate, such as Henry Hobson Richardson in New England Whilst Frampton is less concerned with the evolution in the 1870s and 80s or West Coast architects of of the term “regionalism” beyond the modern the 1930s and 40s. And it is Mumford who decidedly movement, it remains to Tzonis and Lefaivre to argues for regionalism as a “humanist” alternative review its evolution: although they go back to the to the constraints of abstraction, mechanism and treatises of Vitruvius and Alberti to find evidence estrangement of modern bureaucratic civilization, for an awareness of site, local conditions and and who envisions the (American) home as a return techniques, they situate the begin of a regionalist to an organic, natural state of community and discourse in the 18th Century English “picturesque” architecture as a point of resistance to advertising, movement. They read the English landscape garden fashion, reification, urban sprawl or automobile as a natural, sensual, and regional alternative to transportation. the rationalism of the French formalist garden; more, they put its specificity of the site – thegenius The spread and differentiation of the modernist loci as it has been reintroduced into architectural canon in the 1950s and 60s, regional “schools” discourse by Christian Norberg-Schulz7 – in such as the Scandinavian, Greek, Italian, British or contrast to universal hegemony of geometry.8 In local adaptations to Post-colonial settings caused a addition they foster an anti-conformist and anti- new debate about “regionalist” tendencies within absolutist political dimension of the English garden the modern movement, whereas the revision of as manifestation of liberal bourgeois ideologies of the 1960s and 70s that re-addressed history, freedom, nature, self-awareness and last, but not style, semiotics, urban fabric, image, media, irony, least, distinct Englishness. Tzonis and Lefaivre take ornament, culture of the everyday and vernacular up a second threat from Goethe9 who described questioned this framework altogether. It is against the Strasbourg Cathedral as expression of national this background of the modern-postmodern debate native genius versus the universal civilization of triggered by Charles Jencks’ publication of The classicism – represented by Marc Antoine Laugier – language of Post-Modern Architecture in 197711 that that lead via gothic revival to the so called “romantic Frampton, Tzonis and Lefaivre position their proposal regionalism” of the 19th Century in search of national for a “critical regionalism” as a differentiation from identity in the (fictive) past. Therefore the concept populist, vernacular or historicist regionalism, but of “regionalism“ is connected to the national uprising also from (rational) universalism of International of the Napoleonic wars as well as to the then new Style or the behaviorist implications of post-war science of history, politics of identity and the idea of social theories in architecture. SLOW ARCHITECTURE? 143 NOTES ON THE CRITICALITY OF “CRITICAL obvious: Frampton defines “critical regionalism” REGIONALISM” as answer to “universalization” and “scenography” of consumerist semiotic postmodernism, and These authors therefore define “regionalism” not as a significantly he introduces his seminal essay of matter of fact, but as a social construct, as a cultural 1983 with a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s History discourse, as a frame to picture an alternative to and Truth,15 who opposes “rooted culture” with theories that claim universal validity. The adjective “universal civilization”. Though already Ricoeur “critical” denotes a reflexive understanding of this uses throw-away goods, consumer media, instable condition and historic evolution of the advertising and propaganda as examples for the term, that asks for comprehensible criteria and destructive effect of (Western) “universalization” contextualization. Hence, Frampton, Tzonis and to (post-colonial) native national cultures, it is Lefaivre
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