Kenneth Frampton


Kenneth Brian Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He is regarded as one of the world's leading historians of modernist architecture and contemporary architecture. He is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the Columbia [Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation|Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation] at Columbia University, New York, where he taught for over 50 years. He is a citizen of Britain and the United States.

Biography

Frampton studied architecture at Guildford School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. Subsequently, he worked in Israel, with Middlesex County Council and Douglas Stephen and Partners in London, during which time he was also a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art, tutor at the Architectural Association and technical editor of the journal Architectural Design . While working for Douglas Stephen and Partners he designed in 1960-62 the Corringham Building, an 8-story block of flats in Bayswater, London, the architecture of which is distinctively modernist; in 1998 it became protected as a listed building.
Frampton has also taught at Princeton University School of Architecture and the Bartlett School of Architecture, London,. He has been a member of Columbia University's faculty since 1972, and that year he became a fellow of the [Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies] in New York and a co-founding editor of its magazine Oppositions.
In 2017 the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which holds Frampton's archive, held an exhibition titled that examined aspects of his teaching at Columbia University, that informed his key publications.
Frampton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to architecture.
In 2015, Frampton's library was acquired by the Department of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong.

Writings on architecture

Frampton is especially well known for his writing on twentieth- and twenty-first century architecture, and for his central role in the development of architectural phenomenology. His books include Modern Architecture: A Critical History and Studies in Tectonic Culture. Frampton achieved great prominence in architectural education with his essay "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" – term, critical regionalism, had been coined by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre. In this paper, he mounts a criticism of globalisation, mass consumer culture and the impact that this has had on architecture. For Frampton, this represents a particularly salient issue within the Modern Movement, as it has pushed architecture toward mediocrity, sameness and urban form that lacks any kind of cultural relevance or specificity. To remedy this, Frampton argues that the adoption of a more critical regionalist approach is required in architecture, one that takes into account specific considerations of place, topography, climate, and culture, as well as the creation of new "vernacular" forms of architecture.
Frampton's essay was included in the book The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, though Frampton is critical of postmodernism in architecture. Frampton's own position attempts to defend a version of modernism that looks to either critical regionalism or a 'momentary' understanding of the autonomy of architectural practice in terms of its own concerns with form and tectonics, which cannot be reduced to economics. He summed up his critical stance towards postmodernist architecture and its advocates' belief in the primacy of architecture as a language as follows:
In 2002 a collection of Frampton's writings over a period of 35 years was collated and published under the title Labour, Work, and Architecture. An English translation of his 2015 book, The Other Modern Movement, is due out in 2021. In addition to his own scholarly research and criticism, Frampton has frequently furthered the intellectual reach of his work through writing introductions, prefaces and forewords for other authors and publications on allied themes.

Select list of Frampton's writings

  • "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance", in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, Port Townsen, 1983.
  • The Twentieth Century American House. Masterworks of Residential Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1995.
  • Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
  • Álvaro Siza. Complete Works, Phaidon, London, 2000
  • Le Corbusier . Thames & Hudson, London, 2001.
  • Labour, Work and Architecture. Phaidon Press, London, 2002.
  • "Ando at the Millennium", in Tadao Ando: Light and Water, Book Design by Massimo Vignelli, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003.
  • The Evolution of 20th-Century Architecture: A Synoptic Account, Springer, New York, 2006.
  • Georges Baines, Ludion, Gent, 2006.
  • Modern Architecture: A Critical History , Thames & Hudson, London, 1985; fifth edition 2020.
  • American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth & Twenty-First Centuries, Rizzoli, New York, 2008.
  • Five North American Architects: An Anthology by Kenneth Frampton, Lars Muller, Zurich, 2012.
  • Genealogy of Modern Architecture: A Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, Lars Muller, Zurich, 2014.
  • L'altro Movimento Moderno, Mendrisio Academy Press/Silvana Editoriale, Mendrisio-Milan, 2015.
Writings on Kenneth Frampton