Tzonis and LeFaivre 1990

From UANotebook

"Why Critical Regionalism Today?"

by Alexander Tzonis and Liane LeFaivre

Contents 1 citation 2 notes 3 discussion 3.1 vernacular 3.2 regionalism 3.3 critical regionalism

citation

Alexander Tzonis and Liane LeFaivre, "Why Critical Regionalism Today?" [1990] reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecure: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995 (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press) 483-492.

AUP stacks: NA 680.T45 1996 OCLC 33668084

notes

Critical Regionalism

"Given this loss of region, how is it possible for regionalist architecture to be anything more than, at best, a sentimental cosy indulgence in nostalgia for a bygone era, having nothing to do with Proust's art and everything to do with what we have called Proust's syndrome, citing highly typified regional fragements and gluing them together in a fake, a pastiche, kitsch, good only for commercial facilities, restaurants, hotels, and other emporia; or at worst, a form of atavism, a setting for a xenophobic, neo-tribal racist hallucination. How is it possible for such a regionalist architecture, whether libertarian or totalitarian, commercial or propagandistic, in its "as-if" overfamiliarity to be anything but a kind of architectural pornography?" --pp. 485

pp. 488:

"'Critical' here does not connote a 'confrontational' attidue only."

first sense, "of the romantic nineteenth century regionalists, was in open rebellion against the 'imperialist' spread of the classical canon."

secondly:

"a regionalism that is self-examining, self-questioning, self-evaluating, that not only is confrontational with regard to the world but to itself.

The idea of 'critical' in this second sense, originates in the serene essays of Kant [The Critique of Pure Reason, 1791] and is developed in the agitated writings of the Frankfurt School."

Thus: "this occurs when a building is self-reflective, self-referential, when it contains, in addition to explicit statements, implicit metastatements that make the beholder aware of the artificiality of her or his way of looking at the world."

Heimatarchitektur --what is it, exactly?

pp. 486:

Lewis Mumford's South in Architecure discusses H.H. Richardson as an example of regionalism. It did not succumb to the Beaux Arts architecture that Mumford indicts as imperial, colonial, and exploitative, the conquest of Asia, Africa, and Americas. He also indicts the east coast banking establishment as "placing a premium upon the facade".

Mumford later criticized the International Style as having lost the reform-mind of the early Modern Movement and "succumbing to the very forces it was created to reform."

see 1947 Mumford column "Skyline" in The New Yorker (11 October 1947).

pp. 489:

Defamiliarization -- originally coined by Russian literary theoretician Victor Shklovsky, a Russian Formalist.

"Romantic regionalism, despite its confrontational stance, employed familiarization. It selected regional elements linked in memory with forlorn eras and inserted them into new buildings, constructing scenographic setting for arousing affinity and 'sympathy' in the viewer, forming familiarized scenes which, although contrasting, mostly emotionally, with the actual despotic architecture, rendered consciousness insensible. The mawkish, gushing, sentimental regionalism with its overfamiliarization , immediate easy, titillating, 'as if' narcissistic Heimat settings, has had an even more narcotic --if not hallucinatory-- effect on consciousness."

So... while it satisfied the first part in its reaction to the colonial canon, it was not self-examining and critical. It was architectural pornography, inadvertently caricaturizing itself and the region from which it drew reference.

"Critical regionalism... selects these regional elements for their potential to act as support, physical or coceptual, of humna contact and community, what we may call 'place-defining' elements, and incorporates them 'strangely' rather that 'familiarly.' In other words it makes them appear distant, hard to grasp, difficult, even disturbing. . It frames as if it were the sense of place in a strange sense of displacement. It disrupts the sentimental 'embrace' between buildings and their consumers, 'de-automatizing' perception and the 'pricking the consciou,' to use another Shklovsky's expressions. Hence, through appropriately chosen poetic devices of defamiliarization critical regionalism makes the building appear to enter into an imagined dialogue with the viewer. It sets up a process of hard cognitive negotiation in place of the fantasized surrender that follows from familiarization and the seduction that follows from overfamiliarization. It leads the viewer into a metacognitive state, a democracy of experience as Jerome Bruner might have called it, it conjures up a 'forum of possible worlds.'"

(((Is U-Village critical regionalism in that it causes the viewer to re-examine the artificiality of her or his way of looking at the world?? Does its drawing on the trope of the small-town main street, set in the West... but with contemporary elements cause an examination of the idea of Main Street?

What about the re-appropriation of the nomenclature? Is it conscious and critical that it has subverted the real Main Street and Town Center?

Perhaps suggest this as an approach for further study: methodologically, one can interview shoppers at U Village as to their perceptions of the visual elements of the place and what those evoke in the viewer.)))

"Critical regionalism does not imply professional parochialism."

pp. 490:

"The poetics of critical regionalism does not include a set of design rules of partitioning, motifs, and genera as does the definition of classicism, the picturesque, or de Stijl. Rather, as with Neue Sachlichkeit architecture, it draws its forms from the context. In other words its general poetics become specific drawing from the regional, curcumscribed constraints which have produced places and collective representations in given bound areas."

"There is also another mode in the critical regionalist poetics, found more often in the United States, through which regional characteristics --natural rather than cultural-- enter into the design. This is the case of optimally composing buildings as shelters, respecting regional environmental constraints, and accepting regional resources This is the reverse of the anomy and atopy resulting when nature is violated through brute force to control environmental conditions --not force as such, but as a causeof the hubris of mind spent on nothing..."

"In other words, placeness and the containment of anomie and atopy are supported by the implicit messages of a well tempered, 'economical', 'ecological' design."

Kenneth Frampton (in "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance," in H. Foster, Ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 21.):

"The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly [emphasis mine] from the peculiarities of a particular place. It is clear formt he above that Critical Regionalism depends on maintaining a high level of critical self-consciousness. It may find its governing inspiration in such things as the range and quality of local light, or in a tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site."

Me: It seems to be, finally, an architecture of cooperation with, rather than a domination of, the landscape, be it physical or cultural landscape.

discussion

vernacular vs regionalism vs critical regionalism

vernacular

• not self-conscious
• not self-critical
• influenced by local environmental conditions
• influenced by ways of living
• perpetuates local values BUT doesn't necessarily reject anything

regionalism

• self-conscious
• aware of where it comes from
• may attempt to bring something back which has been lost (nostalgic)
• reclaiming local values
• a reaction to the universalism of Modernism (esp. late Modernism, International Style)

(scan and insert diagram)

Regionalism consists of connections and relationships between

• the cultural (lifestyle, etc.)
• the physical (geographic setting, demographics, etc.)
• the environmental (climate, etc.)

It is the space in between all of these, as well as their connections/relationships, that unique regional identity is formed.

critical regionalism

• cautions against nostalgia and sentimentality
• rejects nationalism and tribalism
• critiqued late Modernism (Int'l Style) as perhaps nostalgic and sentimental on its own part
• feels that Modernism had sold out the reformist cred that it had in the original, Bauhaus days
• is open to a "style" but doesn't dogmatically adhere to it. in fact, it seeks not to establish one..

This concept is hard, if nigh on impossible, to apply in reality/practice. It could all be in the eye of the beholder. For example, I can read U-Village as critical regionalist design; however, the architects may not have meant it this way at all. Also, the other visitors may not view it in critical terms at all.