Architectural Regionalism : Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition [1 ed.] 9781616890803, 9781568986166

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Architectural Regionalism

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Architectural Regionalism Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition Vincent B. Canizaro, editor

Princeton Architectural Press New York

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Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657. Visit our website at www.papress.com. © 2007 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in Canada 10 09 08 07 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. All reasonable efforts have been made to include original illustrations. In some cases, substitutes were used where originals were unavailable. Efforts have been made to correct factual and grammatical errors, to Americanize spellings, and to standardize typographical elements. Eccentricities of language and phrasing have been retained. Editor: Dorothy Ball Designer: Yoon Seok Yoo Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Sara Hart, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, John King, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Scott Tennent, Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press — Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Architectural regionalism : collected writings on place, identity, modernity, and tradition / Vincent B. Canizaro, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-616-6 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-56898-616-5 1. Regionalism in architecture. 2. Architecture, Modern—20th century. I. Canizaro, Vincent B., 1964– NA682.R44A73 2006 724’.6–dc22 2006018102

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Contents

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Preface: The Promise of Regionalism

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction



CHAPTER 1: IDEAS IN REGIONALISM 

36

The Regional Motive

42





Positions in Architectural Regionalism

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Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture

66 70

Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism



Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism and Invention



Lawrence W. Speck



Critical-Historical Studies in Architectural Regionalism

80

Regionalism in American Architecture

96

Rexford Newcomb

Excerpts from The South in Architecture



Lewis Mumford



Regionalism under Rapid Modernization

102

Regionalism within Modernism

110 120

Suha Ozkan

Cultural Continuum and Regional Identity in Architecture



Balkrishna V. Doshi

Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East



Kenza Boussora



Postmodern Regionalism: Alienation, Historicism, and Analysis

128

Tradition and Modernity: The Feasibility of Regional Architecture



in Post-Modern Society

140 146

Alan Colquhoun

The Concept of Regionalism

156

Juhani Pallasmaa

Critique of Regionalism



Alan Colquhoun

Four Approaches to Regionalism in Architecture



Eleftherios Pavlides



CHAPTER 3: MODERN REGIONALISM: REFERENTIAL REGIONALISM

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Toward a Southwestern Architecture



5

Paul Ricoeur

CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL POSITIONS IN ARCHITECTURAL REGIONALISM



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Wendell Berry

Universal Civilization and National Cultures

David R. Williams

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Contents

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Excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the



Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation,



Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest

188

Mary Colter

Old Forms for New Buildings



John Gaw Meem

194

The Myth and Power of Place: Hispanic Revivalism in the



American Southwest

204

David Gebhard

Regionalism and Texas Architecture

214

Stephen Fox

Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism



James F. O’Gorman



CHAPTER 4: REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL PLANNING

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An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning

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Benton MacKaye

Regional Planning

244

Lewis Mumford

Excerpts from A Pattern Language

252

Christopher Alexander

Regional Development: The Architect’s Role

258

Albert Mayer

Perspectives on Regional Design



Paul D. Spreiregen



CHAPTER 5: REGIONAL MODERNISM: CONFLICT AND MATURATION

270

Excerpts from Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture



and City Planning

276

280

Richard J. Neutra

After the International Style—What?

288

Hugh S. Morrison

The Sky Line: Status Quo

292

Lewis Mumford

What is Happening to Modern Architecture?

310

Museum of Modern Art

The New Regionalism

320

Sigfried Giedion

The Meaning of Regionalism in Architecture

326

Pietro Belluschi

Regionalism and Modern Architecture



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Le Corbusier

Regionalism in Architecture

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James Stirling

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Contents



CHAPTER 6: BIOREGIONALISM

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Reinhabiting California

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350

Michael Haslam



CHAPTER 7: CRITICAL REGIONALISM

368

Constructive Regionalism



Anthony Alofsin

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Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism:



A Provisional Polemic

386 394

Kenneth Frampton

Critical Regionalism in Houston: A Case for the Menil Collection



Richard Ingersoll

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism



Keith L. Eggener



CHAPTER 8: REGIONALISMS FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

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Becoming Regional over Time: Toward a Reflexive Regionalism

420 428

Barbara L. Allen

Strong Margins

432

Timothy Cassidy

On Performative Regionalism



Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till

Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism



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Gary J. Coates

Desert Bloom



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Jim Dodge

Biotechnology and Regional Integration

362

Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann

Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice

Steven A. Moore

446

Notes

456

Selected Bibliography

460

Illustration Credits

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Index

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Preface / Acknowledgments Introduction

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nts /

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Preface

The Promise of Regionalism In 1952, Lewis Mumford edited and published his Roots of Contemporary American Architecture. Mumford was concerned about the inaccessibility of many important writings in American architectural history, calling it “a gap that was a disgrace to American scholarship.” 1 He remedied this by editing a collection of essays by seminal figures in American architecture including Louis Sullivan, Calvert Vaux, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, Sigfried Giedion, and Matthew Nowicki. It became a popular textbook. His aim was to establish the deep roots of an American modern architecture as a continuous history in an attempt to make clear that it was more than a reaction to European ideas. Fifty-three years later, with a more specialized but analogous concern, I seek to remedy the inaccessibility of texts in the discourse of architectural regionalism. Like Mumford’s American modernism, regionalism has deep roots that demonstrate its perennial importance to architectural practice. These roots defy the standard assumption that “critical regionalism” is the only regional theory worth consideration. While it is the most recent, it is by no means alone. There exists a healthy literature that documents the changing, but consistent, dissatisfaction with design theories or other wider social forces that do not respect the immediacy and situatedness of everyday life. These forces, be they the siren song of the International Style, the emancipatory technological possibilities of machines, the enhanced availability of everything for purchase, the demands to remain on the cutting edge, or the invisible forces of laissez-faire capital development have been resisted or redirected by regionally inspired architects since the early twentieth century. But this is only the recent history, as the roots of a self-concious regionalist theory lie in ancient Greece and later in the Italian Renaissance. This collection focuses on these more recent regionalisms, beginning with David Williams and John Gaw Meem’s optimistic and defensive response to the eclectic historicism of the late nineteenth century and the increasing importation of European modernist architectures. It ends with the identification of present and future possibilities by scholars knowledgeable about the history of regionalist theory and practice. In between it documents the importance of regional planning, bioregionalism, and the lost legacy of regional modernism pioneered by a number of mid-century architects. And if this collection has done nothing more than present the thinking of Lewis Mumford to a postpostmodern architectural audience, it will have justified its existence. No one

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can surpass his prescience or the comprehensiveness of his concern for the liberative possibilities of modern architecture and technology. Within the feeble efforts of New Urbanism, the delicate and articulate site-specificity of Glenn Murcutt, the burgeoning possibilities of Landscape Urbanism and Civic Environmentalism, and the still-pregnant possibilities of sustainability are the reverberations of Mumford’s democratic and regionalist vision. But he is not alone. The words of H. H. Harris, Mary Colter, Benton MacKaye, Jim Dodge, and Wendell Berry, among others, echo his concerns and provide inspiration on their own terms. This is not to say that this discourse has been consistent or organized. Putting together this anthology has been much like organizing a convention. It helps to imagine the authors (theorists, architects, historians, polemicists, and social critics) assembled as if they were attending a conference on the means toward achieving a balanced and good life. Their concerns touch upon the issues of quality of place, personal and cultural identity, and the effects and possibilities of modernity and technology. What becomes apparent in the diversity of discussions is a common concern for life balanced between possibility and particularity—the regional life. Yet, upon closer inspection, the differences can overwhelm the similarities, as if each regionalist theory, like each region, is distinct and irreconcilable with any other. So setting this rough discourse into a set of coherent panel discussions is only an approximation; its more important role is to enliven discussions and debates about sitespecificity, context, globalization, cultural identity, exurbia, blob architecture, and suburban sprawl. My pursuit of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis’s seminal text, “The Grid and the Pathway,” which established the phrase and concept of a “critical regionalism,” set this project in motion. That oft-cited work was hiding away in an obscure journal entitled Architecture in Greece. After reading Kenneth Frampton’s many variations on critical regionalism, I was seeking its roots. I hoped to find a deeper basis for architectural design that took into consideration the people for whom we build, the places in which we do so, and the reasons we employ to guide us. For this, critical theory, which is so powerful as a tool of literary and social critique, was helpful, but only partly so. It seemed to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In critical theory, one’s personal or local history was available only through the technique of defamiliarization, lest one fall prey to nostalgia. Comfort of this kind is suspect as it makes society easy prey to commercial and exploitative interests. And yet we all crave comfort, even postmodernists. My disaffection for critical regionalism forced me, as well as a few of my colleagues, to search through the longer-term discourse of regionalism for lessons from those who sought similar goals. I realize, with this volume, I have entered into the intellectual domain of many thinkers and practitioners whose work I have read, been influenced by, and included or not. I hope this volume represents the variety of those discourses well and exposes the affinity between them regarding a concern for

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the good life lived in relation to the specificity of places. My most unreasonable goal is to foster renewed debate and productive architectural work based on the recognition that here and there are important but not equally so—a debate that reconsiders the tired notion that the local is a place of lesser achievement and the source of backwardness, provincialism, and chauvinism. My thesis is that regionalism, as a set of practices and theories, is a misunderstood and neglected discourse that, in practice, is central to architecture. In the same way that “all politics are local,” so it is with architecture, whether by accident or design. 2 Regionalism is the preeminent discourse in architecture that focuses on design in terms of particularity and locale. It suggests that local experiences, the kind most of us have most of the time, should serve as the basis for architectural design. This does not preclude the myriad and powerful issues any field allied with art may entertain, including experimentation, expressiveness, and the necessity of challenging ourselves to think; it simply reprioritizes those concerns so that local quality of life is always at the forefront. For all this, regionalism must be more than design by appliqué or reference alone. It must foster connectedness to that place and be a response to the needs of local life, not in spite of global concerns and possibilities, but in order to better take advantage of them. And as such, the promise of regionalism in architecture is to re-embed us in the reality and diversity of our local places— critically and comfortably. Regionalism has the potential, through thoughtful reference, to situate us in the continuity of our individual and shared human history. This is why style matters, and it must be taken seriously. Further, there is no reason why regionalism should not be understood as a progressive and high-performance architecture, one that is highly attuned to the constancy and change of the local environment. It should open up possibilities for understanding where and with whom one lives. It should encourage awareness of local climate and the changing of seasons. Lastly it should open up the possibility of shared purpose, in which the concerns of here are understood as linked to there: ecologically, economically, and socially.

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Without their support many excellent projects would be missing from our lives. There is always much personal history caught up in processes such as the production of a book, which results from the cooperation and contribution of many people and organizations. I would like to thank most of all the contributing authors, literary executors, spouses, and the sons and daughters of authors who replied so quickly and vigorously to my requests for publication that the collection became inevitable, in particular, Nancy Meem Wirth, Marjorie Belluschi, Dion Neutra, Andres Giedion, and Pat Gebhard. The collection belongs to all of you. At Princeton Architectural Press, I owe particular thanks to Clare Jacobson and Dorothy Ball who, along with their colleagues, found merit and timeliness in these writings and understood their potential importance as a collection. Thanks also to the various other publishers for reprinting permissions for texts and images, especially Rebecca Zimmerman at the Museum of Modern Art, Scott Marinara at Oxford University Press (for helping me understand the permissions process), Gina Maccoby and Robert Wojtowicz for the Lewis Mumford permissions, Chip Sullivan of Architecture for his graciousness, Sarah Hartwell at the Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth College, Jack Kennedy at the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for his patience, Bruce Turner at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Special Collections, Chuck Pinyan at McGraw-Hill, Jack Shoemaker at Shoemaker & Hoard representing Wendell Berry, Kurt Helfrich of the Architecture and Design Collection at the University of California at Santa Barbara for his unparalled support, Beth J. Dodd at the Alexander Archives at the University of Texas at Austin, Margaret Walsh at The University of Wisconsin Press, and to Suha Ozkan and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture for their generosity toward this project in particular and toward the betterment of world architecture generally. A special thank you to Arnold Berke (author of Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest) who exposed me, not to her work, but to her passionate and incisive words about her architecture at the Grand Canyon. Thanks also to Maiken Umbach, Raj Jadhav, and Anne Nequette for sending me copies of their work to read. Each was insightful and helpful in its own way. I am sincerely grateful to have such intelligent and compassionate colleagues and friends as Tim Cassidy, Robert Warden, Lori Ryker, Ed Burian, and Steven Moore, who have brought these ideas into practice and sustained our own dialogue about these issues for a very long time. Also, thanks to those who participated in my 1998 ACSA Southwest panel discussion on the subject of regionalism, who have not already been mentioned: Charlie Burris, Robert Shemwell, Barbara Allen, Stephen Fox, Robert Mugerauer, and Jonathan

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Smith (the most eloquent speaker I know). In many ways, this collection had its origins at that meeting. I am also indebted to my colleagues at the University of Texas at San Antonio School of Architecture, who have challenged me when I needed it, always expected more out of me than I wished, and lent me their support. In particular, Mark Blizard, Rick Lewis, and Andrew Perez challenged me most of all. My appreciation to those that read and reviewed the outline for this book and gave their encouragement: Kenneth Frampton, Richard Bechhoefer, and Keith Eggener. In the last few years, the students in my many classes, whether they were focused on regionalism or not, have helped hone my own understanding of the issues, especially Michael Rey early on, before he became a colleague in his own right. In particular, the students of my graduate seminar who shared their time and energy contributing to this discourse must be recognized: Eric Ingamells, Joel Nolan, Abigail Grass, Steven Cordero, Matt Martinez, Curtis Fish, Alvaro Garcia, Gabe Martinez, Kevin Thompson, and Luis Vargas. Finally, thank you to Julius Gribou, a supportive dean and friend who wisely advised me not to undertake a project of this scope so soon in my academic career. He was right to challenge me in exactly the right way. Thanks also to James Almazan, the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio for their support of this project. Projects like this are impossible to complete without those who give them their meaning. Everything is impossible without Jenny. And Alexander who at 2 3/4 years old is convinced that his dad is editing a book about either dinosaurs, bicycles, or hiking up a mountain. I hope he will not be disappointed when he finds out the truth. Vincent B. Canizaro San Antonio, Texas 2005

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Introduction

Regionalism is not a fixed concept. No region, whether natural or cultural, is stable. − Felix Frankfurter 1 In other words, the nature of a “region” varies with the needs, purposes, and standards of those using the concept. − Merrill Jensen 2 Regionalism suggests a cure for many current ills. Focused in the region, sharpened for the more definite enhancement of life, every activity, cultural or practical, menial or liberal, becomes necessary and significant; divorced from this context, and dedicated to archaic or abstract schemes of salvation and happiness, even the finest activities seem futile and meaningless; they are lost and swallowed in a vast indefiniteness. − Lewis Mumford 3

01 Situating Architectural Regionalism(s) A survey of architectural regionalism spanning the twentieth century yields a heterogeneous collection of motivations and prescriptions — an ongoing theoretical discourse. This may suggest that the variety of regionalist positions are part of the pluralistic attitude considered endemic to postmodern theory, where no singular view is taken to be dominant. All views are competing versions of reality in the postmodernist “sensibility of inclusion.” 4 It may also suggest that heterogeneity is intrinsic to regionalist theory, in which there is not one but as many regionalisms as regions, each specific to its locale and historical circumstance. As such, it is a kind of meta-theory that has only local application and meaning. I think it is fair to say that both are the case; in part, this has much to do with the lack of clarity with which regionalism is understood and practiced. It also has to do with tensions inherent to its dialectical structure. Regionalism is never a singular theory or practice but is most often a means by which tensions — such as those between globalization and localism, modernity and tradition — are resolved. As a subset of architectural theory it has persisted through many wider historical movements including romanticism, eclecticism, revivalism, modernism, and postmodernism. It has served variously as a counter argument and ally to these movements from the Renaissance to the present. Its most ancient origins lie in the Persian overland road system, the Hellenic oikumene5 model of governance, and later Roman imperial practices of territorial management. In the case of the Romans, regionalization referred to both a network of roads connecting its provinces to the central cities and the practice

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of governance in which locals were allowed to maintain some local expressions, beliefs, and rituals as long as their allegiance and taxes were returned to the capital city. 6 An architecturally specific Roman form of regionalism has been cited by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre — the regionalism of Vitruvius. 7 In his treatise, discussing the proper siting of buildings, he speaks of natural relations between the qualities of a place and the health of its residents. Sensibly he suggests the avoidance of low, hot, and wet places for their potentially unhealthy conditions and recommends those with plenty of sunlight and fresh air. In what can only be understood as an environmental determinist extension, he associates the character and intelligence of people with their place of origin. His linking character to region is not an acceptance of regional cultural variation, which is central to social and cultural identity, so much as a region-based chauvinism, a precursor to nationalist movements that would give regionalism part of its negative association. Much of the theoretical terrain of regionalism is laid bare in these two early examples. Vitruvius demonstrates both prescriptive and proscriptive kinds of theory, the former captured in his intent to establish new norms for practice, and the latter in his clear suggestion of what should be avoided in the siting and design of cities and houses. With the Roman examples, regionalism has ties to political order, including both control and resistance; this is true to the root word, regere, which means “to rule.” Resistance and control are evident in the political savvy demonstrated by the Romans in allowing local expression as a means to achieving overarching rule. Even if this practice is evidence of the practical inability to quash those local cultures — both support the notion of regionalism as a theory of resistance, which is central to much of its contemporary meaning. Like theory in general, regionalist theories speculate on, anticipate, and catalyze architectural practice in a variety of specific ways. Among those ways are suggestions for normative practice, polemical diatribes, defensive argumentation, rational analyses, and calls to radical action. What they share is a rough consensus — the goal of establishing connections, through architectural means, between people and the places in which they live, work, and play. This localization is the “alternative” offered by the theory taken as a whole. As a theory about connectedness to place it is situated among other theories of place such as contextualism, site-specificity in art and design, landscape urbanism, and planning. It is allied with other disciplines concerned with spatial phenomena such as cultural geography, cartography, folklore, and historical studies, but it differs from these in scale and application. At the scale of a region, issues and concerns emerge that are not available at the immediate site or context. Thinking in terms of the region grounds these studies within a larger physical and ecological context, in areas that are sufficiently large enough to support a diversity of human and non-human life, through agriculture, available resources, and provisions for adequate recreation. Watersheds, topographical difference, areas of distinctive land use, climatological difference, and consistencies of architectural, cultural, linguistic, and political organization are criteria available to the regionalist for consideration in the design of

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environments for those places. Further, thinking in terms of regions affords architects the opportunity to derive unique and relevant environments from a specific and local context with a wider perspective. By virtue of its manifold relations to human life, regionalism is also situated among theories of culture and concerned with issues of individual and cultural identity, authenticity, meaning, and the structure and governance of society. The disciplines of cultural studies, cultural criticism, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy (particularly phenomenology and critical theory), which address the effects of modernization and modernity, globalization, and technological development on individuals and society, are all allied disciplines from which architectural regionalists draw and to which they contribute. Architectural regionalism differs from these other disciplines in its relation to practice. As opposed to the process of analysis and description, which attempts to remain somewhat neutral, practice is virtually always polemical and its theorization, prescriptive. Regionalism may borrow the critique established in critical theory, but it does so from the perspective of practice, that is, with the aim of applying critical analysis to a situation to focus what needs to be done. As such, regionalism, whether in planning or architecture, may be thought of, in part, as the practical application of the social sciences—a sort of rough synthesis of allied disciplines.

02 Provisional Definitions Region A region is, first, a large area with boundaries determined by a range of cultural and natural criteria. At the extreme cultural end, visible in the etymology of the term, political control or the establishment of jurisdictions is the criterion. At the opposite end, region is determined by naturally occurring physical features. These can include the tributary area and drainage of watersheds or biotic shift, a discernable and measurable difference in plant and/or animal species that roughly defines boundaries. Between these extremes lie the more common physical determinants, such as climate (“the arid Southwest”), topographic landform (“the hill country”), and cultural determinants such as distinct lifeways, patterns of land use and organization, finance and interchange, language use and inflection (dialect), distinct modes and materials used in construction, and styles of architecture. Together or individually, these criteria can yield the boundary or center by which a region is determined. The centrally defined region is important to consider, as boundaries are often difficult to establish clearly. In environmental studies, the concept of the ecotone is specifically intended to designate the area between ecological regions, where many of the richest transactions occur. Like those of the ecotone, regional boundaries are fuzzy and indeterminate; the edge is most often a gradation rather than a starkly drawn line, the exception being political criteria, where the often arbitrary lines tend to be all too clear.

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Competing interpretations of California’s bioregions. Key: Regions determined by 1. biotic shift; 2. watershed; and 3. landform.

FIG. 1

Accordingly, regions range dramatically in size, again, varying according to the cultural and physical influences. For this there is no consensus. “The Columbia Bioregion” and “the South” both encompass many politically derived states, but they are commonly understood as regions. At this scale, Joel Garreau has proposed dividing the United States into nine regions according to various criteria. Alternatively, maps developed by a wide variety of interest groups—the Forest Service, ecologists, and anarchic bioregionalists— demonstrate a variety of ways groups have determined regional divisions in the state of California alone. [FIG. 1] But perhaps the most important concern with regard to the size of regions is the potential to support a democratic and participatory life for those that will (or already) inhabit them. The criteria and issues associated with size are not, however, to be understood as arbitrary choices—though arbitrary choices are available in the determination of regions. Each kind of regionalism or regionalist ideology addresses the “appropriate” criteria within its theorization, and these specific criteria often define the theory itself. For bioregionalists, the definition of a region is based on ecological parameters, specifically watersheds. Under the Regional Planning Association of America and Lewis Mumford, the region is determined according to a calculus that considers political representation and the likelihood of political participation along with resource availability, preexisting patterns, lines of transit, and the transport of goods, all tempered with a concern for social life and local meaning. In critical regionalism, under Kenneth Frampton, it is defined by a culture’s unique identity, manner of place-making, architectonic strategies, qualities of the environment in dialogue with local means for coping with that environment, and possible tactile experiences that may enrich one’s being there. Outside of theory, which, by definition, proposes alternatives to existing conditions, regional definition is popularly determined by the criterion that addresses an area’s most prominent aspect. “Appalachia” is one such region, based on the presence of the Appalachian mountain range. Once established, however, these popular criteria are useful for the development of

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INTRODUCTION

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regional inventories, or as Patrick Geddes, the influential Scottish geographer, formulated it, regional surveys, which take rigorous account of all features, both cultural and physical, that lie within its roughly defined boundaries. These inventories, and the determinations themselves, require constant revision as regions, and their inhabitants are dynamic, not static or singular entities. Regionalism Regionalism is a habit of thought or a prejudice in favor of persons and practices found in one’s general vicinity. Its meaning is similar to that of provincialism, although regionalism lacks this word’s connotation of small-mindedness and lack of sophistication. — Jonathan Smith 8

Regionalism is variously a concept, strategy, tool, technique, attitude, ideology, or habit of thought. Despite its many manifestations, collectively it is a theory that supports resistance to various forms of hegemonic, universal, or otherwise standardizing structures that would diminish local differentiation. These theories propose alternatives in the form of methods and criteria for the respect, revitalization, and, if necessary, reconstruction of life along regionally determined lines. It is a self-conscious set of theories, which distinguishes it from the vernacular—the response to local conditions by necessity, not by choice. [FIG. 2] The vernacular is often characterized dubiously as “unconscious,” which is meant to suggest that it is not purposely regional, but only accidental; in fact, settlers and other pioneers very scrupulously and consciously adapted the architecture they knew to the places they chose to settle. Regionalism is voluntary; alongside being self-conscious, it is a choice made by a practitioner (planner, architect, or politician) among alternatives, including competing theories of regionalism.

FIG. 2

A case of adaptation to place (climate) by necessity. Butler Dogtrot, Old Natchez Trace, Mississippi.

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Regionalism is distinct from provincialism, although the two share status as specifically geographic terms. Marc Treib locates the heritage of provincialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discussions of political realignment in the United States, where it is used primarily as an administrative term. 9 In cultural affairs, provincialism has a predominantly negative association, shared by regionalism in some critiques, referring to work that is limited or unsophisticated. Provincial works, Treib asserts, are distinct from regional ones in that provincial works are limited by their distance from a cultural center, such as New York or Los Angeles, in which the standards for excellence are set. Regionalism is the opposite, in that it resists the values of the centers of standardization and taste, actively promoting the local —  “the regional is fertilized by its locale.” 10 Outside of architecture, regionalism is often used in more strict accord with its Latin roots, in terms of a political strategy or schema for land division by such criteria as historical situation, geographic specificity, etc. 11 In design, this way of thinking is most closely met in the theories of Lewis Mumford and the bioregionalists, the latter of whom seek ecological adaptation and the restructuring of political jurisdictions along ecological boundaries. In architecture regionalism commonly refers to the establishment of connections between new works and pre-existing local and regional characteristics. For some, this process of response is quite prosaic, and sometimes regionalism is minimally interpreted as a response to the local climatic conditions or specific topography. It is minimally adaptive and acclimatizing. For the majority of others, collected here, it is an architectural theory, informed by particularist values, that borders on ideology. These values range from the desire to preserve a region’s cultural heritage to the desire to manifest a new social and political order drawn along regional distinctions. The latter aims to facilitate a restructured and more vibrant social life; the former, an ideology of resistance to both the homogenization of building culture and/ or centralized, absolutist controls. It is a living concept, the specific definition of which must grow and change just as regions must be continually redescribed. Between these polarities lie the many variations included in this collection. The consistent themes are resistance to standard forms (preferring a balance between universal and local), a concern for authenticity (the key to cultural and personal identity), and the fostering of connectedness among people of the specific culture, history, identity, and ecology of their region.

03 Dialectical Oppositions in Architectural Regionalism Despite the fact that the essays collected here have been arranged in chronological and ideological categories, regionalist theories in architecture do not present themselves in this neatly ordered way. The discourse of regionalism is suffused with inherent tensions—a set of dialectical structures that underlie and unite the diversity of regionalist theorizations.

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INTRODUCTION

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Resistance & Response In the twentieth century, from Lewis Mumford to Kenneth Frampton, resistance has occupied the center of regionalist discourse. Regionalist resistance can be political and representational, concerned with the maintenance of personal or local identity through form, as that demonstrated by Crecenzi in Rome or the English Picturesque landscape design. 12 Modern resistance continues this tradition, but instead of a pope or a king, the dominant force has become the changing structure of society and the built environment under disinterested central organizations, industrialization, modern technology, and globalization. Each has enabled the erosion of valued practices and places against which engagement—relating to one’s place through participatory design—or designs that foster local material and social connections serve as the resistant means. Such resistance is often achieved through response. Responding to local concerns and to local needs can halt these centralizing, generalizing forces. Contrarily, response to these same local needs can occur without such social or political motivation. This is the central goal in normative regional practices. Like the vernacular builder, normative regionalist architects often characterize their work as a response to the local conditions of climate, topography, local needs, and the availability of materials. It is a regionalism based in successful performance relative to local conditions. In such cases, social and economic relations are perceived as more stable and the concerns of political or social disenfranchisement or inequity are ignored or muted. Imitation & Invention At the heart of the regionalist dialectic between imitation and invention is a need to establish a relationship between people and place—between the requirements associated with imitation and the desire for invention. Imitation is the direct taking of form, motif, detail, or the like, and repeating it as faithfully as possible. Invention seeks precedents as inspiration for the creation of something new (see Speck, Chapter 2, and Harris, Chapter 2). Imagine two architects using a set of industrial sheds of particular formal appeal as a precedent. The imitative architect will redeploy the form, material, and detail of the original in new materials, trying to match the original closely in the hopes of deriving respect and connection through recognition. The practice of imitation is thought to provide cultural continuity. The inventive architect’s redeployment may only concern the essence or aspect, spatial or formal, of the original, and the resulting regional evocation is more subtle and often more profound. In such instances the vernacular supplies insight into local experiences, rather than a stock of overtly recognizable forms and materials. Tradition & Modernity The dialectic of tradition and modernity is inextricably linked to the struggle between necessary cultural continuity and the desire for progress and innovation. For sociologist Anthony Giddens, tradition is “a means of handling time and space, which inserts any particular activity or experience within the

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continuity of past, present, and future.” 13 Traditions are the carriers of cultural knowledge and the embodiment of a culture’s continual transformation. At its best, tradition is dynamic, a context in which growth and change are measured; at its worst, it is static, permanent, a means to hamper growth, or a declaration of cultural difference. 14 For our purposes, modernity is a mode of social life in which the establishment of the “new” is a driving force. “Being modern” often requires the attenuation of tradition and continuity to attain the fruits of progress and innovation. But jettisoning these cultural structures has negative consequences. The modern world is rife with what Giddens calls “disembedding mechanisms” that, while aimed at achieving a better quality of life, also lift social relations from their local contexts through ease of travel, communications, and trade. Lying at the center of this dialectic, regionalism has been allied with both tendencies: historicist regionalism can exhibit the conservative tendencies of tradition, while regional modernism and critical regionalism build the new upon a measured respect for traditional and regional culture. 15

04 Questions Concerning Architectural Regionalism The Question of Historicism The historicist critique of regionalism is twofold. Proponents of modernism and the International Style during the mid-century contended that historical reference is antithetical to functionalist and progressive concerns. In what turns out to be primarily an argument over taste, referential regionalism was considered a regression into either nineteenth-century eclecticism or revivalism because it failed to pay homage to modernist style. 16 [FIG. 3] Early-twentiethcentury regional practices can be understood as a continuation of cultural history and as a referential homage to local architectural traditions. In the best

FIG. 3 An example of referential regionalism, the Spanish Revivalist Chapman Park Market by Morgan, Walls & Clements, 1929.

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INTRODUCTION

24

of this tradition, historical styles were treated with respect and consistency, well constructed, and included modern technological conveniences. In the worst, during the 1980s under postmodernism, references were often vacuous, poorly built, sometimes insulting, and rarely tied in any meaningful way to its place. The critique of historicism hinges upon a tacit agreement that the normative practice of architecture is primarily an aesthetic enterprise. When regionalism is considered to be little more than an ideology of style, its “central emphasis on place, on the lived environment as a unique historical, cultural and physical entity, and as a key to a fully human life” is lost. 17 Compared to buildings and projects of the architectural avant-garde, the referential tendency of some regionalist practices has given regionalism something of a conservative reputation. Such is the power of the new and modern culture’s drive toward it at any cost, including the need for continuity. This often makes architects reluctant to promote themselves as regionalists.18 But how is the need to respond and be adaptive to local conditions conservative? Historian Robert Dorman defends the historicist tendency of regionalists this way: Most regionalists were realist enough, historicist-minded enough (distinguishing past and present), to know that certain values, behaviors, and practices appropriate to a small-scale, rural, insular, homogeneous, low-technology political economy could not...find applicability in the qualitatively different and exponentially more complex world of contemporary life. Conversely, regionalists were realistic enough...to acknowledge that modernity could have its advantages in the realm of living standards and quality of life...which depended largely on technological advances (electrification, sanitation, medicine). 19

So while regional practice did and will continue to involve some degree of referentiality, the historicist critique is often erroneously aimed at both the respectful and irresponsible attitudes equally. Clearly, regionalism can be more than an ideology of style. Can the same be said of the International Style? The Question of National Romanticism National Romanticism, as an artistic movement, should be understood as primarily a nationalist movement. Its origins lie in the older cultural tradition of Romanticism, developed by nationalist intellectuals who sought to define their nations in terms of their artistic production, language, and literature in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, nationalists sought to invent a vision of themselves that harkened back to eras of perceived past greatness. Domestic architecture and ties to the land became increasingly important as the land was thought to be the most dependable locus of common culture and therefore, symbolically, national identity rooted to place. In many cases, an emphasis on the rural life and the nation was matched by a commitment to social and democratic reform not unlike that called for by the RPAA in the United States (see Mumford, Chapter 4). But under the Nazis,

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what could have been a variant of a progressive regionalism was quickly “de-regionalized.” 20 Rather than having a firm basis in any actual region within Germany, its national romanticism relied on misinterpretations or distortions of Nordic legend. Its so-called “homeland” architecture was nothing more than “invented traditions” 21 and “imagined communities” 22 based on the fantasy of superior culture derived from a non-existent “northland.” 23 So while national romanticism under the Nazis shares the tendency to romanticize the past and engage in sentimental nostalgia, the dimension of the Nazis’ error and intentions are beyond any reasonable comparison to stylistic debates about the use of the Spanish Mission style or even such unfortunate legislative actions as the Santa Fe Ordinance, which mandated the use of the so-called Santa Fe Style in all new construction in the central city in 1957. Scandinavian architects, by contrast, managed a rather unique and inspiring synthesis of national traditions with social democracy. With an attention to site, the use of local and industrial materials, and a conscious effort to unify local craft with modern design, a tradition that persists to the present day, their legacy of National Romanticism saw its highest expression in the work of Alvar Aalto. Nonetheless, the specter of the Nazis continues to hover over regionalism. As Barbara Lane puts it, “the imitation in architecture and the applied arts of an original ‘Germanic’ way of life encouraged by the Nazi regime was generally understood for what it was: an empty pretense. The Nazis’ indiscriminate application of half-timbering and thatch to buildings of all types and locations dealt a dramatic blow to regionalism and a sense of history.” 24 With National or any other kind of Romanticism, the tipping point is twofold: first, when the myths begin to separate from factual history and/or place — when the reference is a mythical place; and second, when that vision is codified and legislated as the representative mode. The Endemic Outsideness of Theory and Professionalization Regionalist practice strives to establish connectedness between people and place. Any practice that acts within a system of social relationships does so in relation to a specific body of knowledge. This knowledge is often defined relative to the political and social interests of the profession that it serves. Though to some extent the training and expertise are placeless and universal, some thought must be given to the means of their localization and applicability “of achieving the fit,” as Rob Quigley has put it.25 In architecture, much knowledge required for professional licensure is placeless and highly standardized. As such, professionalization can be seen, in part, as the development of a special class for which such standardized and outside knowledge or “outsideness” are key attributes. 26 Architects are always on the outside of the places they establish for others. In the rare case of the design of their own home or office, they become patrons and residents themselves. In all other cases, they act as representatives for their patrons and the public. The standardization of knowledge and practice, like modernization generally, has yielded untold benefits to clients and the general public via

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INTRODUCTION

26

safety and quality. But, “in accepting the universal order of the machine,” said Lewis Mumford, we still “have the duty to make it human and see that it incorporates more, not less, of those social and esthetic elements that bind people sentimentally to their homes and their regions.” 27 As professionals we must seek to balance the universal with the regional and be aware of our unique culpability in creating a gap between our clients and their places. At a minimum this realization should serve as a note of caution about whose view of the region should be dominant, if any. Sarah Harding’s notion of the “valuable stranger” provides another model. 28 From feminist theory, she builds on the accepted notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed. Her claim is that the construction of science would benefit from the inclusion of multiple perspectives, specifically those of women, yielding a broader and more accurate picture of reality. The perspective of this valuable stranger “brings to her research just the right combination of nearness and remoteness, concern and indifference, that are central to maximizing objectivity.” 29 Her critique points to the blindness that often accompanies disciplinary boundaries, which is known in media theory and technology studies as the structure of affordance and constraint; 30 there, each medium, whether it is a microscope, a TV, a map, or an intellectual construct such as regionalism, fosters insight into features of the world in inverse proportion to that which they reveal. Think of how in order to look through a magnifying glass you must give up the broader view. Architects must inhabit and continuously question their own knowledge of the places in which they build and establish connectedness. Further, they must learn, as environmentalists have, that awareness of regional issues must be cultivated in the public and professional realms; environmentalism garnered public participation only when its issues were made personal through the linking of health problems to pollution. Regionalism in America has suffered from the same paradox. Any future regionalist movement must work toward the construction of a cultural and political “foundation in the public mind.” 31 To do so they must engage the citizens of that region in an ongoing dialogue of discovery and awareness of regional issues, a practice that requires constant vigilance since regions are dynamic, ever-changing entities. The Question of Authenticity A concept central to regionalism is authenticity. As a practice of theory that is based in establishing architectural and experiential relations to places, authenticity guards against the production of inauthentic replications of regional or local architectures. The potential for inauthenticity is an oft-cited rationale for the inclusion of “critique” in critical regionalism; as a qualifier, it serves as a caution and a guide for those who wish to successfully build regionalist works. But what is it? I contend that authenticity is a quality of engagement between people and things or people and places. It is not a property inherent to things or places but a measure of our connection to them. Architectural theorist Kim Dovey

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suggests that the authentic object or environment must be “of undisputed origin,” its form should be connected to its process of creation; it must be genuine, things are what they appear to be or what one expects them to be; and it must be reliable, it should continue to function over time. 32 Satisfaction of these three conditions results in what Dovey refers to as “experiential depth,” which is connectedness without deception — when one’s knowledge of a thing or place is backed up by its reality. Edward Relph similarly sees authenticity as a particular order of relation between people, things, and places—an order measured in degrees of participation. The more we are able to participate, the more authentic the connection or relation. 33 Lack of participation leads to a lack of direct experience, which results in detachment. Places like Colonial Williamsburg remove the real experiential possibilities offered by the place by providing only scripted experiences; much is often lost in translation. Together these forces conspire toward an inauthentic relationship with place, removing one from the reality of a place and thereby lessening one’s ability to engage and participate fully in one’s surroundings. Dean MacCannell’s analysis of tourist experiences demonstrates another facet of authenticity. 34 Seeking “authentic experiences,” tourists participate in a structure of “fronts” and “backs.” The front is the public face of a place, and the back is the space of both privacy and functionality—where “things really happen.” “Behind-the-scenes” adventures are sought after because they promise to show the traveler life as it is lived by locals. Authenticity is determined by the degree of access. On the road less traveled one is bound to get a better view, a better meal — a more authentic experience. While many tourists might settle for a Mexican restaurant with an “authentically” styled interior, the savvy traveler would know the difference between real front regions and back regions. Like those savvy travelers, many regionalist architects seek to provide authentic experiences through design. As such they deal in the notion of authenticity as connectedness, participation, and the possibility of real local experiences. Unfortunately, the “real fakery” of the Mexican restaurant and regionalism are often conflated by critics. 35 So-called “romantic” and “scenographic” regionalism is seen as trading in empty or even dangerous allusions to places. Some referential regionalist architects present fronts as backs or use the imagery or motifs of authentically regional buildings on modern buildings so they will appear regional. [FIG. 4] Like tourist destinations, which stage “authentic” experiences, they trade on the desire for authenticity to engender a false sense of belonging. The inhabitants and travelers are equally fooled. Arguments by Mary Colter, John Gaw Meem, and David Williams make a different point. [FIG. 5] They identify the culturally expressive role played by architecture and argue for a wider consideration of the “back” in architecture, one that expands its role beyond the internal discourse of architects and theorists; one interwoven with the local history, meaning, and expression of a region—with its cultural landscape [FIG. 6]; one that provides for participation, experiential depth, and connectedness to life and how it is lived in that place or region.

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INTRODUCTION

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4

5

6

Mary Colter, the Grand Canyon and the Desert View Watchtower at sunrise. FIG. 5 The construction of the steel framework that underlay the Desert View Watchtower, Mary Colter. (see Colter, Chapter 3) FIG. 6 John Gaw Meem, Christo Rey Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1939. Here Meem demonstrates his own sense of a modern architecture within the southwestern traditions, as this church, while smooth, soft, and planar in form, also provides light to the interior through six large and uncharacteristic windows. FIG. 4

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Map by David R. Williams exhibiting the potential and pre-existing uniqueness in houses across the United States, 1934.

FIG. 7

05 The Volume The following collection of essays is organized with the aim of clarifying the distinctions between regionalist theories from the 1920s to today according to both chronological and ideological categories. 1) The volume opens with Wendell Berry presenting an important touchstone of regionalism as “local life aware of itself.” Excerpted often by Kenneth Frampton, Paul Ricoeur discusses the plight and possibility for traditional culture and meaning under the destructive forces of globalization and change. 2) Documenting critical positions that stand alone within the discourse, chapter two is divided into four sections. The first section presents two articles, separated by thirty years, that argue for regionalism as a source of invention. The second contains critical-historical studies in regionalism, focusing on American subjects. Rexford Newcomb presents the traditional understanding of regionalism as the expression of regional differences or uniqueness via geographically consistent styles. Lewis Mumford looks at the same period but produces a uniquely polemical history and establishes the basis for what would later become critical regionalism. The third section presents a muchneeded account of regionalism in the developing world, where it is a means for the preservation of cultural identity, local traditions, and local skills against the homogenization of built culture due to what William Curtis calls “rapid modernization.” 36 The last section documents the status of regionalism in postmodern society. Juhani Pallasmaa writes of the estrangement and alienation that accompany the hypermodern obsession with technology and economics

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INTRODUCTION

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and suggests that regional architecture can provide places of psychological amelioration. Alan Colquhoun’s two essays are critical of regionalism. The first posits it as a subset of historicism, and the second, as something of a fool’s errand for seeking authenticity in a world where such stability is no longer tenable. The chapter concludes with a sober analysis of regionalism in which four types are identified: folkloric, ideological, experiential, and anthropological. 3) The regionalist architecture of the 1920s and 1930s begins the rough chronological course of the volume. Many are dismissive of the work of this period as a mere continuance of nineteenth-century eclecticism. While it shares the easy visibility of stylistic reference, its relationship to the broader social regionalist movement in America sets it apart. From 1920 to 1945 this larger movement sought the cultural reconstruction of American life through the revitalization of indigenous and regional history, culture, art, and land; it was a progressive and pluralistic movement based on learning enough about a place and its past to provide lessons for the future. On the whole it did not seek a return to mythical regional pasts, nor did it have provincial or chauvinistic intentions. Rather, the veneration of the local served as a source of creativity and uniqueness — a celebration of the potential for a rich and modern life here. [FIG. 7] Despite the strong links, the work described in this chapter has been labeled scenographic, romantic, and commercial. Such terminology more adequately describes our own historical, particularly postmodern, position than the views, attitudes, and intentions of the architects represented here. Their earnestness — a confidence we unfortunately no longer share in the wake of relativism and out of fear of fundamentalism — is not born out of naiveté but out of pragmatism. These are confident statements about architecture, culture, meaning, and history. 4) Regional planning is central to architectural regionalism. It is about revising the logic by which we develop our settings; implicating cities, neighborhoods, streets, and houses. Regional planning expands the architect’s awareness to issues that operate outside of the immediate site but that still heavily influence its life and meaning. Under Lewis Mumford and the Regional Planning Association of America, it was understood as a socially progressive practice that set out to establish a regionally relevant order that prioritized a healthy and balanced quality of life. “The key, they believed, lay in instilling the public, a local public, with a sense of ‘connectedness’ — aesthetic, historical, and personal — to the place where they lived.” 37 For architects it is an issue of scale. The interdisciplinary embrace of planning is about thinking within the larger context and is not unlike the recent embrace of larger geographies by architects concerned with sustainability. Regional planning, and in particular its new manifestation, “New Regionalism,” is invaluable in helping to put the region back into architectural regionalism. 38 5) From the 1930s to the 1960s, architectural regionalism was marked by two trajectories. 39 Conflict arose out of discontentment with the emerging

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8

9

10

11

Hervey Parke Clark, De Bivort House, Berkeley, 1941. An example of regional modernism that exemplifies the aesthetic desires of both “hard” and “soft” modernists. FIG. 9 Walter and Ise Gropius, Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937. Serves as an example of a project that is both modern and regional—“an attempt to redefine ‘International Style’ by its originators.” FIG. 10 William Wurster, Gregory Farmhouse, Scotts Valley, California, 1928. One of Wurster’s earliest and most prominent residential works, which exemplified for many the Bay Region style, as coined by Lewis Mumford. FIG. 11 William Wurster, Schuckl Canning Company, Sunnyvale, California, 1942. An example of Wurster’s regional modernism. FIG. 8

mythology of European modernism and the hegemony of International Style architecture. At odds were regional or “soft” modernists and the “hard” modernists. 40 [FIG. 8] Rudolph Schindler stated: “the classical mode of set forms for columns, architraves, and cornices is replaced by a stereotyped vocabulary of steel columns, horizontal parapets and corner windows, to be used . . . both in jungles and on the glaciers.” 41 Rather than foster local relevance it was intended to serve as basic formula relevant anywhere and specific to nowhere in particular — to which an indigenous American architecture suited to regional differences was an anathema. The second trajectory was the maturation of modernism into a responsive, functional, and locally relevant “regional modernism,” 42 demonstrated most clearly by Le Corbusier’s “Post-purism” and regionalism, Alvar Aalto’s “romantic Rationalism,” 43 and Walter Gropius’s sense that modernism provided a foundation for the creation of regionally distinct work. [FIG. 9] Criticizing the International Style, Gropius stated: “It is not a style, because it is still in flux, nor is it international, because its tendency is the opposite—namely, to find regional, indigenous expression derived from the environment, the climate, the landscape, the habits of the people.” 44 [FIGS. 10/11]

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12

13

The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, The Advanced Green Builder Demonstration House, Austin, Texas. House demonstrates many of the concepts described by Fisk. Shown here is the “green form” framing system (recycled-content post and beam), adobe block infill, and the rainwater-harvesting system FIG. 13 Alvar Aalto, Saynatsalo Town Hall, Saynatsalo, Finland, 1952. Staircase leading into the Council Chambers. FIG. 12

6) The bioregional movement has been eclipsed in architecture by the ecological and sustainable-design movements it fostered. It is a theory and practice concerned with reconnecting human cultures to region-scale ecosystems in a sustainable manner, integrating ecological and cultural affiliations and creating a place-based sensibility informed by in-depth knowledge of the local natural landscape, climate, geography, indigenous cultures, and their environmental history. Bioregionalism is also a political movement aimed at decentralization and realignment according to ecological criteria instead of the present, arbitrary political boundaries that often privilege ecological concerns over societal ones. It redefines regions along physical lines via climatology, geomorphology, plant and animal geography, and natural history. It calls for a reconceptualization of architecture to be part of a functioning ecosystem, as well as a functioning ecosystem in itself. [FIG. 12] 7) Critical regionalism is an approach to architectural production aimed at resisting a number of physical, cultural, and social changes thought to limit the quality of modern life and architecture. It is a theory and practice of resistance that seeks to establish a dialectic between an increasingly globalized civilization and the local traditions found in regions, without resorting to romanticism or nostalgia. Aimed to resist the homogenization of the physical and the social environment, it is for the production of experientially diverse environments. [FIG. 13] It is against the casual and irresponsible use of cultural symbols, and for thoughtful consideration. It is against the use of standardized construction methods and materials, and for local materials and building

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traditions. It is against the sense of relativism in modern culture, and for situated, but not dogmatic, knowledge and experience. The leveling forces of commercialization, by which everything can be devalued to a “price point,” are processes its methods seek to ameliorate. Informed by critical theory, its proponents hope to reverse or redirect these negative changes and continue the enlightenment goal of social liberation and the development of a rational, just, and humane society. Its methods are varied but share the concept of “defamiliarization” or “making strange” taken from Russian literary theory. 45 Critical regionalism’s origins lie in the work of Lewis Mumford and a 1981 essay by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre. 46 Kenneth Frampton’s adaptation of the concept produced its most influential and complex development. 8) Concluding the volume are recent contributions that provide four distinct routes out of the discourses documented above. Tim Cassidy’s critique of critical regionalism reasserts the possibility of living in concert with one’s region, echoing Wendell Berry. Barbara Allen builds on cultural studies to assert the impoverished sense of culture and meaning in regional theory. Leaning on performativity and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, she challenges architects to adopt greater awareness of local and regional life, rather than architectural form. A socially conscious “critical” regionalism is sketched in reference to the work of the Rural Studio, a provocative model for regional practice. Finally, Steven Moore closes the volume pointing toward sustainability as a regionalist practice that seeks, as Lewis Mumford did many years before, to balance universal means with the needs of local places and ecologies — a balance that depends on an informed and engaged participatory and democratic society.

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Chapter 1

Ideas in Regionalism

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The Regional Motive Wendell Berry Universal Civilization and National Cultures Paul Ricoeur

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INTRODUCTION TO “THE REGIONAL MOTIVE”

In this short piece Wendell Berry, a

Berry’s critique is primarily a note

Kentucky farmer and writer, seeks to

of caution to the reader, theorist,

define “regionalism,” a term he finds

architect, or planner, that regionalism

in need of clarification: “For I do not

should remain based in one’s

know any word that is more sloppily

participation, stake, and knowledge

defined in its usage, or more

of a place. It is an agrarian argument

casually understood.” His attempts

for architecture that unites cultural

at illumination are integral to the

work with direct experience; Berry

purposes of this volume, which seeks

himself works the land as a farmer

to explore the terms, ideas, and

and a writer. But it is not regressive.

discourses of regionalism.

Like Harwell Hamilton Harris and Larry Speck, among others, he sees

“The Regional Motive” serves as

intimate physical knowledge of a

a microcosm of the discourse of

place or region as both liberating and

regionalism. From its title to its oft-

a source for invention. (see Harris,

quoted definition of regionalism as

Chapter 2, and Speck, Chapter 2).

“local life aware of itself,” the text is

For Berry, the regional motive is to

both intellectual and experiential. The

live life at its best, which is a life

anthology that this essay originally

lived in harmony with nature and

appeared in was entitled A Continuous

community.

Harmony, a phrase taken from Thomas H. Hornbein’s account of his travels in the Himalayas: “It seems to

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a farmer, poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and teacher who has written more than thirty-two books.

me that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much and as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants.” i Berry is critical of recent scholarship that generalizes the South as a region because he sees within that characterization the process of abstraction. And what is abstraction but the achievement of distance, of detachment from real relationships with places. He suggests this leads to the worst kinds of regionalism: regionalisms of pride, based on invented traditions and selective readings of history, and regionalisms of condescension or exploitation, which use distance and detachment to edit out features of places that are not attractive to tourism or the economic forces of globalization.

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Wendell Berry

The Regional Motive Originally published in A Continuous Harmony; Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 63–70. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

In thinking about myself as a writer whose work and whose life have been largely formed in relation to one place, I am often in the neighborhood of the word “regional.” And almost as often as I get into its neighborhood I find that the term very quickly becomes either an embarrassment or an obstruction. For I do not know any word that is more sloppily defined in its usage, or more casually understood. There is, for instance, a “regionalism” based upon pride, which behaves like nationalism. And there is a “regionalism” based upon condescension, which specializes in the quaint and the eccentric and the picturesque, and which behaves in general like an exploitive industry. These varieties, and their kindred, have in common a dependence on false mythology that tends to generalize and stereotype the life of a region. That is to say it tends to impose false literary or cultural generalizations upon false geographical generalizations. The evils of such generalizations are abundantly exemplified by the cult of “the South.” I take for instance the following sentences from John W. Corrington and Miller Williams’ Introduction to their anthology, Southern Writing in the Sixties: The landscape of the South that is most haunted is within the Southern man. And there, too, the ghosts have names. They have been named before, and the names are not ours, but they are good and honest names. They are Religion and History, Place, and Responsibility.

The tone of spurious piety here, the accrediting to one place of virtues it can only have in common with many other places and other people, the melodrama of referring to concepts as “ghosts,” all strike me as typical of what is false and destructive in the conventions of Southern regionalism. Are the editors, one would like to know, talking about George Wallace or Martin Luther King? Do the concepts propounded here as literary virtues apply to Homer and Dante and Thoreau less than to Allen Tate? With that sentence about “Religion and History, Place, and Responsibility” we are supposedly ascending into the highest reaches of human experience; in reality, however, the direction is toward the obscuring chauvinisms of Southern Hospitality and Southern Fried Chicken. In writing and criticism the effect of such talk and such thinking is to transform myth into fantasy. Morally, it functions as a distraction from the particular realities and needs of particular places. A believer in Southern

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Responsibility, as somehow a unique regional inheritance, will be slow to see that in the South responsibility, like hospitality, has often been too exclusive to deserve the name. Thus generalized, regional pieties blind a man to his whereabouts and his condition. Like the abstractions of Economics and Heaven and Progress, they come between him and his place and cause him to be, not its steward and preserver, but its destroyer. Or they facilitate his utter detachment from his native place and condition. “The mind of the South,” for instance, can be transported to comfortable chairs of literature in Northern universities, whereas the land of the South, as Faulkner well knew, can be dealt with only at home and in the particularity of personal dedication and personal behavior. Further on in their Introduction, Corrington and Williams provide a most revealing example of the moral distortion of exploitive or sentimental regionalism. “The land,” they write, “is scarred by [history] and the grass is greener for what the land holds.” Here the chauvinism of the earlier quote has reached the ground, and is revealed as nonsense. For it is obvious that on land scarred by history the grass cannot be greener, not even figuratively greener. The first part of the sentence is perfectly correct: the land of the South, like that of the North and the West, has been scarred by history; indeed the history of the white man’s life on this continent has been to an alarming extent the history of the waste and exhaustion and degradation of the land. But the second half of the sentence reveals a disastrous moral confusion: Shall we heal those scars by the establishment of a decent and preserving community, aware of its complex dependence on and obligation to the land, or shall we enshrine the scars and preserve them as monuments to the so-called glories of our history? The health and even the continuance of our life in America, in all regions, require that we enact in the most particular terms a responsible relationship to the land. For that reason the agrarianism of the Southern Agrarians was, in my opinion, a beginning that promised something in the way of a cure. But the withdrawal of the most gifted of those people into the Northern colleges and universities invalidated their thinking, and reduced their effort to the level of an academic exercise. And I suspect that their withdrawal was facilitated by a tendency to love the land, not for its life, but for its historical associations — that is, their agrarianism was doomed to remain theoretical by a sentimental faith that history makes the grass green whether the land is well farmed or not. 1 The regional motive is false when the myths and abstractions of a place are valued apart from the place itself; that is regionalism as nationalism. It is also false when the region is made the standard of its own experience — when, that is, perspective is narrowed by condescension or pride so that a man is unable to bring to bear on the life of his place as much as he is able to know. That is exploitive regionalism. If they had written under its standard Faulkner would have had to disavow that part of his mind that knew the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Thoreau’s knowledge of the Orient would have been a mere flourish, not useful; William Carlos Williams would have had to shrug off the influence of Villon and Chaucer and Fabre.

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The regionalism that I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge. Some useful insights into the nature and the value of the sort of regionalism I am talking about can be found in the work of Thomas Hardy. In The Woodlanders, comparing Dr. Fitzpiers’ relation to Little Hintock with that of the natives, Hardy writes: Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given...old association — an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object...within the observer’s horizon.

And he goes on to say that even though a place “may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience,” it still cannot be comfortably inhabited by people “if it lack memories.” And in a letter to H. Rider Haggard about the effects of the migration of the English working people, Hardy wrote that, “there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next.” From the perspective of the environmental crisis of our own time, I think we have to add to Hardy’s remarks a further realization: if the land is made fit for human habitation by memory and “old association,” it is also true that by memory and association men are made fit to inhabit the land. At present our society is almost entirely nomadic, without the comfort or the discipline of such memories, and it is moving about on the face of this continent with a mindless destructiveness, of substance and of meaning and of value, that makes Sherman’s march to the sea look like a prank. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or “in” group. And so I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity of civilization and of survival. I notice a prevalent tendency among my contemporaries to think of existing conditions as if they were not only undeniable, but unassailable as well, as if the highest use of intelligence were not the implementation of vision but merely the arrangement of a cheap settlement. It would appear that any fact, by virtue of being a fact, must somehow be elevated to the status of Eternal Truth. Thus, if we have become a nation of urban nomads, at the expense of human society

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and at the world’s expense, the common anticipation seems to be that, knocking around in this way, we will sooner or later evolve an urban nomadic civilization that will correct the present destructiveness of urban nomadism. I do not believe it. I do not believe it even though I am sure that my disbelief will be thought by many people to be impractical and unrealistic. I certainly am aware that there have been great nomadic civilizations. But it seems to me that those were evolved in response to natural conditions of climate and soil, whereas our nomadic civilization has evolved in response to an economy that is based upon a deliberate wastefulness. That a desert should produce a nomadic life is perfectly understandable. That my own section of Kentucky — well wooded, well watered, having had originally the best of soils, and still abundantly fertile — should have produced a race of nomads is simply preposterous. It could have happened only by a series of monumental errors — in land use, in economics, in intellectual fashion. With the urbanization of the country so nearly complete, it may seem futile to the point of madness to pursue an ethic and a way of life based upon devotion to a place and devotion to the land. And yet I do pursue such an ethic and such a way of life, for I believe they hold the only possibility, not just for a decent life, but for survival. And the two concerns — decency and survival — are not separate, but are intimately related. For, as the history of agriculture in the Orient very strongly suggests, it is not the life that is fittest (by which we have meant the most violent) that survives, but rather the life that is most decent — the life that is most generous and wise in its relation to the earth.

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INTRODUCTION TO “UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATION AND NATIONAL CULTURES”

42

For many years, readers of Kenneth

Throughout much of his work,

Frampton’s writings on critical

Ricoeur was concerned with cultural

regionalism have been presented

and individual identity in terms of

excerpts of this essay by Paul Ricouer

its formation and relation to history

on identity, culture, and meaning. In

and tradition. For him the self is

these excerpts, Frampton utilized

constituted by its relation to specific

what is effectively Ricoeur’s problem

places, experiences, and situatedness

statement: that regional and national

within a social situation.

cultures cannot sustain themselves

The encroachment of universal

or adequately “absorb the shock of

civilization, while improving some

modern civilization” and must instead

qualities of life, erodes those that

be constituted as manifestations of

are most vital and creative—one’s

world culture—a hybrid Frampton

attachment to and knowledge of self

interprets as “vital forms of regional

in relation to place. Such knowledge,

culture” that also appropriate alien

while locally derived, is key to one’s

influences. i Here, Ricoeur’s essay

ability to understand other places

“Universal Civilization and National

and peoples, where sympathy and

Cultures” is reprinted in its entirety

imagination are invaluable. Just as for

to allow the author’s full argument to

Wendell Berry, for Ricoeur the local

be made.

and regional are that into which local cultures must “take root . . . in order to

This essay helps to establish the

ceaselessly invent.”

threads of conflict that lie between the processes of modernization—be they industrialization, globalization, free-market capitalism, or the

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) taught at the University of Strasbourg, the Sorbonne, University of Paris at Nanterre, the University of Louvain, and the University of Chicago. He was among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.

effects of new technologies—as they act upon local life. According to Frampton’s interpretation of Ricoeur, the conflict constitutes an assault of universalizing forces on local and regional lifeways that must be resisted. Assimilation of universal civilization is seen as tantamount to the destruction of those regional cultures. What Frampton fails to stress, however, is Ricoeur’s optimism about universal civilization. Particularly, the fact that it brings real benefit and progress to humanity in the form of better health and the availability of resources such as food and water.

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Paul Ricoeur

Universal Civilization and National Cultures Originally published in History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 271–84. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Reprinted courtesy of Northwestern University Press.

The problem evoked here is equally pertinent to highly industrialized countries ruled by well-established governments, and to underdeveloped countries which have just attained their independence. The problem is this: mankind as a whole is on the brink of a single world civilization representing at once a gigantic progress for everyone and an overwhelming task of survival and adapting our cultural heritage to this new setting. To some extent, and in varying ways, everyone experiences the tension between the necessity for the free access to progress and, on the other hand, the exigency of safeguarding our heritage. Let it be said at the outset that my thought does not result from any contempt for universal modern civilization; there is a problem precisely because we are under the strain of two different necessities which are both pressing. 1

How can we characterize this universal world civilization? Some have hastily characterized it as a technical civilization. Yet technics is not the decisive and fundamental factor; for the source of the spread of technics is the scientific spirit itself. Primarily, this is what unifies mankind at a very abstract and purely rational level, and which, on that basis, endows civilization with its universal character. We have to keep in mind that if science is Greek in its origins and European through Galileo, Descartes, Newton, etc., science does not foster this power of unifying mankind because it is Greek or European but because it is a human dimension. It manifests a sort of de jure unity which controls all the other features of civilization. When Pascal writes that “the whole of mankind may be looked upon as one single man who constantly learns and remembers,” his statement simply means that every man, if confronted with a test of a geometrical or experimental character, is capable of arriving at the same conclusion providing he has had the required background. Hence, it is a purely abstract and rational unity of mankind which leads to all the other manifestations of modern civilization. In second place we shall, of course, rank the development of technics. This development may be understood as a revival of traditional tools on the basis of

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the consequences and applications of this single science. These tools, which belong to the primitive cultural resources of mankind, have in themselves a very great inertia. Left to themselves they tend to coagulate in solid traditions. They are not transformed by something intrinsic to them, but by the repercussions of scientific knowledge; tools are revolutionized and become machines by means of thought. Here we encounter a second source of universality; mankind develops in nature like an artificial being, that is to say, like a being that creates all its relations with nature by means of tools which are constantly being revolutionized by scientific knowledge; man is a kind of universal contrivance. In this sense we can say that technics, considered as a revival of traditional tools in an applied science, has no fixed domain either. Even if it is possible to ascribe to such or such a country or culture the invention of writing, printing, the steam engine, etc., an invention rightfully belongs to mankind as a whole. Sooner or later it creates an irreversible situation for everyone; its spread may be delayed but not totally prevented. Thus we are confronted with a de facto universality of mankind: as soon as an invention appears in some part of the world we can be sure it will spread everywhere. Technical revolutions mount up and because they do, they escape cultural isolation. We can say that in spite of delays in certain parts of the world there is a single, world-wide technics. That is why national or nationalistic revolutions, in making a nation approach modernization, at the same time make it approach a certain cosmopolitanism. Even if—and we shall come back to this presently—the scope is national or nationalistic it is still a factor of communication to the extent that it is a factor of industrialization, for this makes it share in the universal technical civilization. It is thanks to this phenomenon of diffusion that we are able today to have a world-wide awareness and, so to speak, a lively sense of the earth’s roundness. At the third stage of this universal civilization I would put what I call with caution, the existence of a rational politics. Naturally, I am not underrating the importance of political regimes, but one may say that amid the diversity of familiar political regimes there is the unfolding of a single experience of mankind and even a unique political technics. The modern State, qua State, has a recognizable universal structure. The first philosopher to have reflected on this form of universality is Hegel in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel is the first to have shown that one of the aspects of man’s rationality and, at the same time, of his universality, is the growth of a State which institutes laws and develops the means for their enforcement in the form of an administration. Even if we should sharply criticize bureaucracy and technocracy, we only achieve the pathological form peculiar to the rational phenomenon which we are elucidating. Perhaps we must even go farther: not only is there the single political experience of mankind, but all regimes also have a certain path in common; as soon as certain levels of comfort, instruction, and culture are attained, we see them all inescapably evolve from a dictatorial form to a democratic form. We see them all in search of a balance between the necessity of concentrating power, or even of personalizing it, in order to make a decision possible, and on the other hand, the necessity of organizing discussion in order

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that the largest possible number of men can take part in this decision. But I want to come back to the concept of the rationalization of power represented by an administration, because it is a phenomenon seldom treated by political philosophy, even though it is a factor in the rationalization of history which could not be underestimated. It may be said that we are confronted with a State, a modern State, when we witness the power capable of effecting a public function, a body of civil servants who prepare decisions and enforce them without being themselves responsible for the political decision. This constitutes a rational aspect of politics which concerns absolutely all the nations of the world to the point that it constitutes one of the most decisive criteria of the accession of a State onto the world scene. It may be dangerous to speak of the existence of a rational, universal economy as a fourth factor. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to speak of it with even more caution than of the previous phenomenon, owing to the decisive importance of individual economic regimes as such. Nevertheless, a good deal takes place behind the scenes. Over and above the known massive oppositions, economic techniques of a truly universal character unfold. Calculations concerning contingencies, techniques of market-control, plans of forecasting and decisions, all of these have something in common despite the oppositions of capitalism and authoritarian socialism. We can speak of an economic science and an economic technics of international proportions; they are integrated in their different economic goals, but at the same time they create, whether we like it or not, converging phenomena whose effects seem to be inescapable. This convergence results from the fact that economics as well as politics is cultivated by the human sciences, which in their essence are supra-national, without a country. The original universality, with its scientific character, permeates all human technics with rationality. Lastly, it can be said that throughout the world an equally universal way of living unfolds. This way of living is manifested by the unavoidable standardization of housing and clothing. These phenomena derive from the fact that ways of living are themselves rationalized by techniques which concern not only production but also transportation, human relationships, comfort, leisure, and news programming as well. Let us also mention the various techniques of elementary culture or, more exactly, the culture of consumption; there is a culture of consumption of world-wide dimensions, displaying a way of living which has a universal character. 2

Now what is the significance of this world civilization? Its significance is very ambiguous and it is this double meaning which creates the problem that we are treating here. On the one hand, it seems to constitute a real progress; still it is necessary for this term to be clearly defined. There is progress when two conditions are fulfilled: there is a phenomenon of accumulation and a phenomenon of improvement. The first is the easiest to distinguish, although its boundaries are unclear. I would readily say that there is progress wherever

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one can distinguish the phenomenon of the deposit of tools which we were just speaking about. But in that case, we have to take the expression “tools” in a very broad sense, covering both the properly technical realm of instruments and of machines. The whole network of organized mediations which are put into the service of science, politics, economics, and even of ways of living and means of leisure are dependent, in this sense, on the realm of tools. The transformation of means into new means constitutes the phenomenon of accumulation, which is the reason why, moreover, there is human history. To be sure, there are many other reasons which account for human history; but the irreversible character of this history depends in large measure upon the fact that we work as fragments of tools; here nothing is lost and everything accumulates. This is the basic phenomenon, and it can be seen in fields which are on the surface quite removed from pure technics. Thus, unfortunate experiences and political failures constitute an experience which becomes, for the whole of mankind, something similar to a set of tools. It is possible that certain ways of careless planning, for example, those pertaining to rural populations, will spare other planners from making the same mistakes, at least if they follow the course of reason. Hence, there arises a phenomenon of rectification, an economy of means, which is one of the most striking aspects of progress. But one could not attribute progress to any accumulation whatever. This development has to represent an improvement in various respects. Now it seems to me that this universalization is a good in itself. By itself, the awareness of a single humanity represents something positive; one might say that a sort of mutual recognition of men arises in the midst of all these phenomena. The multiplication of human relationships makes mankind a more and more compact network, more and more interdependent; and it makes all nations and all social groups a single humanity which develops its experience. It can even be said that the thought of nuclear destruction makes us a little more aware of the unity of mankind, since for the first time, we can feel ourselves totally threatened en masse. On the other hand, universal civilization is a good because it represents the availability of elementary possessions to the masses of humanity. No kind of criticism of technics will be able to counterbalance the absolutely positive benefit of the freedom from want and of the massive access to comfort. Up to the present, mankind has lived, so to speak, by proxy, either through certain privileged civilizations or through some select groups. For the first time in two centuries in Europe, and since the second half of the twentieth century for the immense populations of Asia, Africa, and South America, we can now detect the possibility of a massive access to at least a minimum degree of comfort. Furthermore, this world civilization represents a good, owing to a sort of shift in the attitude of mankind taken as a whole with regard to its own history. Mankind as a whole has experienced its lot as a dreadful fate; this is probably still true for more than half of mankind. But the massive access of men to certain values of dignity and autonomy is an absolutely irreversible phenomenon, a good in itself. We are witnessing the advance onto the world scene of great human masses who were heretofore silent and downtrodden. It can be said that

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a growing number of men have the awareness of making their history, of making history; in this sense, one can say that these men are really joining the majority. Lastly, I shall not scoff at what I earlier called the culture of consumption, from which we all benefit to some degree. It is certain that a growing number of men are today approaching that elementary level of culture of which the most noteworthy aspect is the fight against illiteracy and the development of means of consuming and a basic culture. Until these last few decades, only a small fraction of mankind knew how to read. Now, however, we may expect that in a few more decades, mankind will have surpassed the threshold of a first rudimentary culture by far, and this is unquestionably a good. On the other hand, we have to admit that this same development presents a contrary character. The phenomenon of universalization, while being an advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures, which might not be an irreparable wrong, but also of what I shall call for the time being the creative nucleus of great civilizations and great cultures, that nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life, what I shall call in advance the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind. The conflict springs up from there. We have the feeling that this single world civilization at the same time exerts a sort of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have made the great civilizations of the past. This threat is expressed, among other disturbing effects, by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level. Thus we come to the crucial problem confronting nations just rising from underdevelopment. In order to get onto the road toward modernization, is it necessary to jettison the old cultural past which has been the raison d’être of a nation? The problem often comes up in the form of a dilemma or a vicious circle. The fight against colonial powers and the struggles for liberation were, to be sure, only carried through by laying claim to a separate personality; for these struggles were not only incited by economic exploitation but more fundamentally by the substitution of personality that the colonial era had given rise to. Hence, it was first necessary to unearth a country’s profound personality and to replant it in its past in order to nurture national revindication. Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandon of a whole cultural past. It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.

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However, as I indicated at the outset, this same paradox is met by industrial nations who long ago worked out their political independence around longstanding political institutions. Indeed, meeting other traditional cultures is a serious test and, in a way, totally novel for European culture. The fact that universal civilization has for a long time originated from the European center has maintained the illusion that European culture was, in fact and by right, a universal culture. Its superiority over other civilizations seemed to provide the experimental verification of this postulate. Moreover, the encounter with other cultural traditions was itself the fruit of that advance and more generally the fruit of Occidental science itself. Did not Europe invent history, geography, ethnography, and sociology in their explicit scientific forms? But this encounter with other cultural traditions has been just as great a test for our culture and one from which we have not yet drawn all the consequences. It is not easy to remain yourself and to practice tolerance toward other civilizations. However much we may be inclined toward foreign cultures— whether it is through a kind of scientific neutrality or through a curiosity and enthusiasm for the most remote civilizations, or whether it is caused by a nostalgia for the abolished past or even through a dream of innocence or youth—the discovery of the plurality of cultures is never a harmless experience. The disillusioning detachment with respect to our own past, or even selfcriticism, both of which may nourish this exotic feeling, reveals rather well the kind of subtle danger which threatens us. When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an “other” among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes a kind of imaginary museum: where shall we go this weekend—visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in the Tivoli of Copenhagen? We can very easily imagine a time close at hand when any fairly well-to-do person will be able to leave his country indefinitely in order to taste his own national death in an interminable, aimless voyage. At this extreme point, the triumph of the consumer culture, universally identical and wholly anonymous, would represent the lowest degree of creative culture. It would be skepticism on a world-wide scale, absolute nihilism in the triumph of comfort. We have to admit that this danger is at least equal and perhaps more likely than that of atomic destruction. 3

This contrasting reflection leads me to ask the following questions: 1. What constitutes the creative nucleus of a civilization? 2. Under what conditions may this creativity be pursued? 3. How is an encounter with different cultures possible?

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The first question will give me the opportunity to analyze what I hurriedly called the ethico-mythical nucleus of a culture. It is not easy to grasp what is meant by the definition of culture as a complex of values or, if you prefer, of evaluations. We are too prone to look for the meaning of culture on an excessively rational or reflective level, for example, by starting with a written literature or an elaborated form of thought, as in the European tradition of philosophy. The values peculiar to a nation and which constitute it as a nation must be looked for on a much lower level. When a philosopher works out an ethic, he gives himself to a work of a very reflective character; strictly speaking, he does not make up an ethic, but he mirrors the one which has a spontaneous existence in the people. Here, the values of which we are speaking reside in the concrete attitudes toward life, insofar as they form a system and are not radically called into question by influential and responsible people. Among the attitudes which interest us here, the most important are those concerning tradition, change, our behavior toward our fellow-citizens and foreigners, and more especially the use of available tools. Indeed, a set of tools, we said, is the sum total of all ways and means; consequently, we may immediately oppose it to value insofar as value represents the sum total of all goals. In fact, in the last analysis, these valorizing attitudes decide upon the meaning of the tools themselves. In Tristes tropiques, LéviStrauss analyzes the behavior of an ethnic group which, when suddenly confronted with a civilized set of tools, is incapable of assimilating it, not out of a lack of ability in the proper sense of the word, but rather because their fundamental conception of time, space, and interhuman relations does not allow them to give any kind of value to profit, comfort, or the capitalization of means. With all the strength of their fundamental preference, they hold out against the introduction of these means into their way of living. One may think that whole civilizations have thus sterilized technical inventions on the basis of a wholly static conception of time and history. Some time ago, Schuhl pointed out that Greek technics had been checked by the same conception of time which did not involve a positive evaluation of progress. The very abundance of slave-trading does not by itself constitute a purely technical explanation, because the brute fact of disposing of slaves must in addition be valorized in some way or another. If they did not bother to substitute machines for manpower, it is because the value had not been formulated: diminishing man’s burden. That value did not belong to the group of preferences which made up Greek culture. Thus, if a set of tools is put into use only by virtue of a process of valorization, then the question arises concerning where this deposit of values is to be found. I think we have to seek it out on several different levels. When I earlier spoke of a creative nucleus, it was with reference to this phenomenon, with reference to this multiplicity of successive layers which must be penetrated in order to reach the creative nucleus. At a quite superficial level, the values of a nation are expressed in its habitual customs and factual morality. But that is not the creative phenomenon; like primitive tools, customs represent a phenomenon of inertia; a nation maintains its initial impetus by means of its traditions. At a less superficial level, these values are manifested by means of traditional

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institutions, but these institutions are themselves only a reflection of the state of thought, will, and feeling of a human group at a certain point in history. The institutions are always abstract signs which need to be deciphered. It seems to me that if one wishes to attain the cultural nucleus, one has to cut through to that layer of images and symbols which make up the basic ideals of a nation. I use these concepts of image and symbol here in the psychoanalytic sense; indeed they are not discovered by immediate description; in this respect, the intuitions of sympathy and of the heart are misleading; what we need is an authentic deciphering, a methodical interpretation. All the phenomena directly accessible to immediate description are like symptoms or a dream to be analyzed. In the same way, we should have to be prepared to conduct our research up to the stable images and the permanent dreams which make up a nation’s cultural resources and which feed its spontaneous judgments and its least elaborated reactions regarding experienced situations. Images and symbols constitute what might be called the awakened dream of a historical group. It is in this sense that I speak of the ethico-mythical nucleus which constitutes the cultural resources of a nation. One may, therefore, think that the riddle of human diversity lies in the structure of this subconscious or unconscious. The strange thing, in fact, is that there are many cultures and not a single humanity. The mere fact that there are different languages is already very disturbing and seems to indicate that as far back as history allows us to go, one finds historical shapes which are coherent and closed, constituted cultural wholes. Right from the start, so it seems, man is different from man; the shattered condition of languages is the most obvious sign of this primitive incohesion. This is the astonishing thing: humanity is not established in a single cultural style but has “congealed” in coherent, closed historical shapes: the cultures. The human condition is such that different contexts of civilization are possible. Yet this layer of images and symbols still does not make up the most radical phenomenon of creativity; it merely constitutes the outermost layer of it. Unlike a set of tools which accumulates, sediments, and becomes deposited, a cultural tradition stays alive only if it constantly creates itself anew. Here we touch on the most unfathomable riddle in which one can merely recognize the style of temporality as is opposed to that of the deposit of tools. Here we have two ways for mankind to pass through time: civilization fosters a certain sense of time which is composed of accumulation and progress, whereas the way in which a nation develops its culture is based upon a law of fidelity and creation; a culture dies as soon as it is no longer renewed and re-created. One needs a writer, a thinker, a sage, or a religious man to rise up in order to start a culture anew and to chance it again with venture and total risk. Creativity eludes all definition, is not amenable to planning and the decisions of a party or State. The artist—to take him as one example of cultural creativity—gives expression to his nation only if he does not intend it and if no one orders him to do it. For if one could direct him to do it beforehand, that would mean that what he is going to produce has already been said in the language of everyday technical and political prose: his creation would be false. We can only know after the fact

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if the artist has really communicated with the stratum of fundamental images which have made the culture of his nation. Each time a new creation is born, we shall also know in what direction the culture of the artist’s country is heading. As all great artistic creations always begin with some scandal, we can all the less forecast them: first of all, the false images which a nation or a regime form of themselves need to be shattered. The law of scandal answers the law of the “false consciousness.” It is necessary to have scandals. A country will always tend to give itself a favorable image or a right-thinking image. The artist, contrary to the tendency to be a conformist in his own milieu, rejoins his people only when that crust of appearances is shattered; chances are that in his solitude, being in contention and misunderstood, he will bring about something which will be shocking and bewildering at first and which will be retained long after as the authentic expression of his people. Such is the tragic law of the creation of a culture, a law diametrically opposed to the steady accumulation of tools which make up the civilization. Then the second question is raised: under what conditions can the cultural creativity of a nation continue?—a quite important question raised by the development of universal, scientific, technical, judicial, economic civilization. For if it is true that all traditional cultures undergo the pressure and erosive influence of this civilization, they all do not have the same capacity for resistance and above all the same capacity of absorption. It is to be feared that every culture is not compatible with the world civilization born of science and technics. It seems to me that we can distinguish certain conditions which are sine qua non. Only a culture capable of assimilating scientific rationality will be able to survive and revive; only a faith which calls upon the understanding of intelligence can “espouse” its time. I would even say that only a faith which integrates a desacralization of nature and brings the sacred back to man can take up the technical exploitation of nature. Likewise, only a faith which values time and change and puts man in the position of a master before the world, history, and his own life seems fit to survive and endure. Otherwise, its fidelity to the past will be nothing more than a simple folkloric ornamentation. The problem is not simply to repeat the past, but rather to take root in it in order to ceaselessly invent. There remains, then, the third question: how is the encounter with different cultures possible, that is to say an encounter which is not fatal for all? It would seem, in fact, that the result of the preceding reflections would be that cultures are incommunicable; and yet the strangeness of man to man is never total. Man is certainly a stranger to man, but always similar. When we land in a totally foreign country, as I did a few years ago in China, we feel that in spite of the greatest change of elements we have never left mankind. But this feeling remains blind; one has to raise it to the rank of a wager and a voluntary affirmation of man’s oneness. Such is the wager which Egyptologists formerly made when, in discovering incomprehensible markings, they postulated in principle that if these markings were made by man they could and should be translated. Certainly everything does not come out in a translation, but

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something always does. There is no reason or probability that a linguistic system is untranslatable. The belief that the translation is feasible up to a certain point is the affirmation that the foreigner is a man, the belief, in short, that communication is possible. What we have just said about language—signs— is also valid for values and the basic images and symbols which make up the cultural resources of a nation. Yes, I believe it is possible to understand those different from me by means of sympathy and imagination, just as I understand a character in a novel or at the theater or a real friend who is different from me. Moreover, I understand without repeating, portray without reliving, make myself different while remaining myself. To be a man is to be capable of this projection into another center of perspective. Then the question of fidelity is raised: what happens to my values when I understand those of other nations? Understanding is a dangerous venture in which all cultural heritages risk being swallowed up in a vague syncretism. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we have given here the elements of a frail and provisional reply: only a living culture, at once faithful to its origins and ready for creativity on the levels of art, literature, philosophy, and spirituality, is capable of sustaining the encounter of other cultures—not merely capable of sustaining but also of giving meaning to that encounter. When the meeting is a confrontation of creative impulses, then it is itself creative. I think that among all creations, there is a kind of harmony in the absence of all agreement. It is in this way that I understand Spinoza’s excellent theorem: “The more we understand individual objects, the more we understand God.” When one has penetrated to the depths of singularity, one feels that it is harmonious with every other in a way that cannot be put into words. I am convinced that a progressive Islamic or Hindu world, in which old ways of thinking would inspire a new history, would have with our European culture and civilization that specific affinity that all creative men share. I think that skepticism ends here. For the European, in particular, the problem is not to share in a sort of vague belief which would be acceptable to everyone; his task is expressed by Heidegger: “We have to go back to our own origins,” that is, we have to go back to our Greek, Hebrew, and Christian origins so as to be worthy participants in the great debate of cultures. In order to confront a self other than one’s own self, one must first have a self. Hence, nothing is further from the solution to our problem than some vague and inconsistent syncretism. At bottom, syncretisms are always residual phenomena; they do not involve anything creative; they are mere historical formations. Syncretisms must be opposed by communication, that is, a dramatic relation in which I affirm myself in my origins and give myself to another’s imagination in accordance with his different civilization. Human truth lies only in this process in which civilizations confront each other more and more with what is most living and creative in them. Man’s history will progressively become a vast explanation in which each civilization will work out its perception of the world by confronting all others. But this process has hardly begun. It is probably the great task of generations to come. No one can say what

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will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue. That is why we are in a kind of lull or interregnum in which we can no longer practice the dogmatism of a single truth and in which we are not yet capable of conquering the skepticism into which we have stepped. We are in a tunnel, at the twilight of dogmatism and the dawn of real dialogues. Every philosophy of history is inside one of these cycles of civilizations. That is why we have not the wherewithal to imagine the coexistence of these manifold styles; we do not possess a philosophy of history which is able to resolve the problems of coexistence. Thus if we do see the problem, we are not in a condition to anticipate the human totality, for this will be the fruit of the very history of the men who will take part in this formidable debate.

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Chapter 2

Critical Positions in Architectural Regionalism

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Positions in Architectural Regionalism

Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture

ns

Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism

Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism and Invention

Lawrence W. Speck

Critical-Historical Studies in Architectural Regionalism

Regionalism in American Architecture

Rexford Newcomb

Excerpts from The South in Architecture

Lewis Mumford

Regionalism Under Rapid Modernization

Regionalism within Modernism

Suha Ozkan

Cultural Continuum and Regional Identity in Architecture

Balkrishna V. Doshi

Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East

Kenza Boussora

Postmodern Regionalism: Alienation, Historicism, and Analysis

Tradition and Modernity: The Feasibility of Regional Architecture in Post-Modern Society

Juhani Pallasmaa

Critique of Regionalism

Alan Colquhoun

The Concept of Regionalism

Alan Colquhoun

Four Approaches to Regionalism in Architecture

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Harwell Hamilton Harris’s essay,

rather than a strict importation of

published by the University of Texas,

European modernism. i He felt that

was originally delivered on August 22,

he and his colleagues were not

1954, as a talk before the Northwest

rejecting the International Style so

Regional Council of the AIA.

much as “just moving beyond it.” ii Like Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra,

In the early ’40s, after Harris had

William Wurster, and Lewis Mumford,

begun a successful career in

he believed in the fertile possibility of

Los Angeles, WWII brought much work

modern technology and an intimate

to a halt. During that time, he visited

relationship with one’s region.

New York and practiced, taught, and encountered Walter Gropius, Marcel

By changing the title to “A Regional

Breuer, Sigfried Giedion, and Josep

Expression,” Harris meant to do away

Sert. His disenchantment with the

with the criticism, often leveled at

European-dominated East Coast

regionalism, that it had an affinity

architectural scene, which he felt

with the nationalistic and chauvinist

was overly infatuated with importing

attitudes that had led to WWII. This

European modernism, increased

essay’s final title is a compromise that

his desire to return to the region he

encapsulates all of these concerns

understood best. In California, he

and firmly places regionalism against

admired the liberative architectural

any form of nationalism.

school that produced a flourishing American modernism so different

Harris’s talk is both a highly personal

from the restrictive results of

statement and a statement of theory.

blindly following the dictates of the

It reveals Harris’s affinity for the

International Style or eclecticism. After

California regional “school” of which

a decade when the built landscape

he had been a part, and it agrees

had been unrecognizably changed

with Kenneth Frampton’s promotion

by a postwar building boom, and

of regional “schools” as fertile

during which Harris felt slighted after

ground for creative and distinctive

builders co-opted his designs, he left

architectural work. iii

for Texas. This talk came late in his tenure as Dean at the University of Texas at Austin.

Harwell Hamilton Harris (1903–1990) was an architect, professor, and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas in Austin.

Changes he made to the title over various drafts indicate significant changes in his thinking on the subject. From “A National Expression,” to “A Regional Expression,” and finally simply “Regionalism,” he betrays his interest in the possibility of a truly American architecture—one rooted in place and modernity, as was the architecture emerging from California,

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Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture Originally published in Texas Quarterly 1 (February 1958): 115–24. Reprinted courtesy of The Alexander Architectural Archive, The University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

The adjective “regional” attached to the word “architecture” implies that there is something special about the architecture of a particular locality, something that occurs no where else. It is obvious, therefore, that to know what is regional one must first know what is general. Often we discover that what at first seems to be regional is after all only the remains of what was once quite general. Some of the New Orleans architecture is an example of this. The small scale of the old French quarter was not confined to New Orleans at the time these buildings were built. The small scale still found there was general in the 1840s—“the hungry forties.” Architectural ironwork was developed in the 1840s, and New Orleans was fortunate in being on the main line of the salesmen of ironwork who went out all over the country. Judging by the 1840 buildings still remaining elsewhere, architectural ironwork was a widespread fad. But since New Orleans is a well-known and much-visited city, and rightfully so, and since the Old Quarter is artificially preserved, the small, crowded buildings with the iron balconies are considered regional architecture. However, in spite of wrong diagnoses of regionalism due to misconceptions or ignorance, there are certain things which do spring up in certain localities and which are truly characteristic of these places. Why? Here again our thinking is colored by certain misconceptions. Climate, geography, the presence or absence of certain materials are thought to be the cause of regional architecture. In the same way, some people believe the trade winds blowing in from the Pacific cause every architect, draftsman, writer, and photographer in the region of San Francisco Bay to believe himself to be a qualified architectural historian. Let me correct this misconception. The trade winds are not to blame for this idiosyncracy of the Bay Region residents. Nor are the trade winds, the sunshine, the fog, and the redwoods fundamentally to blame for the Bay Region architecture. Fundamentally regionalism is a state of mind. This state of mind may be induced by poverty, resulting in meager proportions; by isolation, producing ignorance of developments in more favored localities; by lack of transportation, restricting the choice of building materials to

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those native to the region; by iron-clad traditions, imposing living patterns rooted in a vanished past. Such regionalism prides itself on its exclusiveness. It cares more for preserving an obscure dialect than for expressing an idea. It is anti-cosmopolitan and anti-progressive. Such regionalism becomes a cloak for the misplaced pride of the region and serves to build-in ignorance and inferiority. Happily, such regionalism is being destroyed as we become more nearly one world. Let’s call this type of regionalism the “Regionalism of Restriction.” Opposed to it is another type of regionalism: the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation “regional” only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere. It is the genius of this region to be more than ordinarily aware and more than ordinarily free. Its virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself. To express this regionalism architecturally it is necessary that there be building—preferably a lot of building—at one time. Only so can the expression be sufficiently general, sufficiently varied, sufficiently forceful to capture people’s imaginations and provide a friendly climate long enough for a new school of design to develop. This is the kind of regionalism that developed in Florence during the Renaissance. This is the kind of regionalism that burst into flower in Chicago between 1880 and 1914, and in California between 1895 and 1914 and again in the 1930s. This explains why these regions were pace-setters for the country, while the insular and backward regionalism of some other sections not only did not spread but became a hindrance to the development of these sections. To repeat, regionalism is a state of mind. In California, during both periods mentioned, that state of mind included a special awareness of the underlying thought of the time. To understand this one must know something of the history of the state. I hope you will forgive me for using California to illustrate my point. It is the only region that I know well enough to use for this purpose. In spite of its distance from the Atlantic Coast, California was never a poor or isolated region. It was on the sea when the sea was the highway of the world. It was never merely the end of the trail. It was also a beginning: the gateway to the Orient. Born of the Gold Rush, it was rich from the start. Its development never stopped. In the ’60s, after the gold mines petered out, silver came into production. Though the Nevada mines, located near Virginia City, were outside the legal boundary of the state, they were in effect in the suburbs of San Francisco. After mining came agriculture, lumbering, and industry. So the development of the state continued without a stop. More than rich, the population of the young state was of high quality and cosmopolitan as well. The news of the discovery at Sutter’s Mill spread like wildfire over Europe. Remember not only that the Gold Rush was in 1849 but also that 1848, the year immediately preceding, was the year of revolution in Europe. This meant that the Gold Rush drew to California many people who would never have left home in happier times—some of them destined to be the last real democrats to come out of Europe.

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In the Orient, the Tai Ping Rebellions in Canton in 1846 had left southern China with a legacy of famine and misery. As a result thousands of unhappy Cantonese also came to this land, later to build the railroads as well as to wash the clothes and raise the vegetables and cook the food that went into the formation of the region. Thus events on other sides of the world provided much of the manpower that built up the country. And the potential rewards from the silver mines drew some of the finest business minds of the world to San Francisco. Also part of the early ferment responsible for the special nature of the region were writers, painters, naturalists, philanthropists, conservationists, and reformers. None of them were born there. Few were there by accident. Most were drawn there by the life, the freedom, the beauty, and the opportunity the place afforded. Among the writers were Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, George Sterling, Frank Norris, and Gertrude Atherton. William Randolph Hearst’s entry into the newspaper field in 1894 was an important factor in building up the literary life of the city. The painters included William Keith, whose large canvases of the Sierra scenery brought large sums from the nature-loving San Franciscans, and Guy Rose. The Bohemian Club became an important influence in the life of the city and the state. Among the philanthropists interested in social betterment were Lick, Stanford, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. An observatory, a privately endowed university, and a substantially stimulated and assisted state university are existing records of their interest. People loved the beauty of the country and were desirous of preserving it. John Muir signalized this love and also the early Conservation Movement which included Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin K. Lane among its ardent supporters. Theirs was an important part in the determination to establish the National Forests. Then there was the Sierra Club, founded as much for the preservation of the Sierra as for the enjoyment of mountain climbing. And not to be ignored was the Southern California Automobile Club, founded in 1903, which from the beginning did much to make the scenery accessible to motorists through its work for good roads. People’s interest in nature was not restricted to what they found here. They were fascinated with the possibilities of what could be established here, and greatly enlarged the variety of plant life with importations from the Orient, the South Pacific, and the Mediterranean. They warmly applauded the successes of their fellow Californian Luther Burbank, who developed new species and was known as the Plant Wizard, and held in the same high esteem as his contemporary Thomas A. Edison, the Electrical Wizard. I have gone into detail and recalled half-forgotten names because it is important to recognize the intellectual ferment—the state of mind—that marked the region that was to be distinguished by the architecture of Bernard Maybeck, Greene & Greene, Willis Polk, Myron Hunt, and many other only slightly less gifted designers.

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The state of mind that distinguished the region made their work possible. They contributed to that state of mind, but alone they would have been powerless to create it. Architecture, I have no need to tell you, cannot exist without buildings, and buildings cannot exist without clients, and clients cannot be pushed or led very far in advance of the head of the procession—at least not in sufficient numbers to create a movement broad enough to be called a regional expression. And without some degree of general acceptance it is only rarely possible to win the assistance of the builders, the mills, the craftsmen, and, perhaps most important of all, the bankers. San Francisco was made for Maybeck. And Pasadena was made for Greene & Greene. Neither could have accomplished what he did in any other place or time. Each used the materials of the place, but it is not the materials that distinguish the work. Maybeck used wood, concrete, transite, corrugated iron, all before 1910—and used them with great distinction. But there is no reason to believe that he would not have used marble and bronze equally well and just as cheerfully. He was equally indifferent to where his forms came from. Whether from Imperial Rome, twelfth-century Italy, a log cabin, or a twentiethcentury factory, what he made of them is what matters. He did not reconstruct the past; he made something altogether new under the sun out of those relics and reminiscences of the past. As a result, any previous incarnation of those forms appeared a mere preparation for their present role. Perhaps Maybeck’s clients believed him when he told them that they had twelfth-century souls and so he was giving them a twelfth-century building. But if they did, their leg was being pulled, for the twelfth century was never like this. A region promotes ideas. A region accepts ideas. Imagination and intelligence are necessary for both. Otherwise ideas fall in a vacuum. In California in the late twenties and the thirties, modern European ideas met a live architectural tradition. California’s acceptance was partial but intelligent, largely confined to what it found relevant. Such modern European ideas as were accepted became part of a flexible and living California tradition. In New England, on the other hand, modern European ideas met a rigid and entrenched tradition that at first resisted and then surrendered. New England is now accepting European ideas whole. The European is supplanting the New England rather than becoming incorporated in it because there is nothing behind the New England façade except a vacuum. Once the defense falls, there is nothing but vacancy to be filled. Perhaps one reason the kind of regionalism that distinguishes New England has found friends among many architects is that the architect has had a limit put upon the choices he is called to make. Whether he admits it or not, the unified character of his building is owing partly to his limited choice of materials, forms, methods, and ways of living. He has not had to depend on a central thought powerful enough to permeate the entire design and comprehensive enough to make it a part of the technical, social, and spiritual life around it. What unity there is has been achieved without benefit of thought. The designer has depended upon poverty to produce decorum. Unconsciously at least he recognizes that riches require discrimination. So making a virtue of his lack of

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discrimination, he calls his poverty “restraint.” His restrictions, he realizes, are his best friends. A mind that cannot perceive unity has to have unity forced upon it. The same mind that craves the restrictions of a church or a patron also craves the restrictions of a region. It is the designers of this sort who are the proponents of regionalism-as-restriction. Their personal interest in this restrictive feature must be allowed to limit neither more original designers nor the development of the region itself. To be expressed architecturally, an idea must be built; to be built, it must be particularized, localized, set within a region. And what are important are not the limitations of the region but the resources of the region. Its most important resources are its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future, its energy, and, last of all, its climate, its topography, and the particular kind of sticks and stones it has to build with. It is the free minds, the imagination, the stake in the future that make up the state of mind that is the condition necessary for any kind of regionalism in architecture worth preserving. II

How does a national expression of architecture differ from a regional one? In my opinion a regional expression at its highest is an expression of liberation. It is a picture of an adventure into new territory, new ways of living, new forms of construction, new harmonies of form. It is a picture of individual men discovering the universe in architectural terms and realizing themselves more fully than before. It is a picture of liberation, of expansion, of diversity. A national expression, on the other hand, is, at its highest, the expression of consolidation. This is because a nation is a people consolidated. The purpose of a national architecture is to further unite people as citizens. Since the nation is essentially a symbol, a national architecture must provide an image of the qualities the nation symbolizes. Like a national literature, a national architecture must evoke images of the qualities people desire. The nation needs buildings which hold up a picture of what their citizens would like to believe they are, that call their achievements to the attention of the world, that advertise their power. This is what consolidates citizens. This is why conquerors always build. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were following the pattern of their predecessors. They were no exception to the rule. To the nation, therefore, the spirit of an architecture is its most important, its most valuable, its most practical aspect. A national architecture, expressing symbolically the needs of the people, is therefore much more common than one expressing both spiritual and physical needs. As a result of the need to create spiritual values in their buildings, nations often look for a style derived from the buildings of some former time—a time important in the historical development of the nation and hence useful as a national symbol. As a consequence, the national expression may likely result from the accident of time and place.

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Because columned porticoes adorned the houses of the more fortunate citizens of the South in the period of her greatest prosperity, columned porticoes became a symbol of wealth and power and glory, and half a century later were being used to bolster the pride of citizens for whom wealth, power, and glory had vanished. As a symbol of an idealized past of which Southerners are proud, these porticoed buildings serve a present service in stimulating the spirit of people for whom they have little physical use. In a similar way the early New England farmhouse, conceived in poverty and born during the colonists’ bitter struggle with cold, famine, and adversity, is identified with New England’s pioneer past. For many today it symbolizes America, though the primitive amenities have little to offer of a physical nature that is not surpassed by an untraditional modern house. It is a symbol of America-the-heroic rather than America-the-abundant. While not undervaluing the heroic, I nevertheless find it difficult to understand why today we are not more proud of our present-day achievements and why we do not idealize our abundance, amplitude, fertility, independence, and liberty of action. Both of the examples of symbol-by-association which I cited are symbols of colonial America, not of the United States of America. The colonies were not American in their ideals; they were European. Even at the time of the Revolution the American Ideal was a picture in the imagination of only a few of the rebelling colonists. To the European of today, the architecture of colonial America, as well as the importations of later times, are, in some respects, the symbols of the very ideals which the new nation was dedicated to oppose! Colonial architecture was part of a general colonial architecture. Like that general attitude, colonial architecture had developed under ecclesiastical and monarchical influences. Unlike the political and, to a lesser degree, the social parts of that general attitude, American building failed to cleanse itself of those European elements which are opposed to the American ideal. Hence we have a confusion of symbols in which the same building represents a diametrically opposite spirit to two different peoples. More than this, the entrenched patterns that could not be destroyed have acted as a brake on the development of an architecture directly expressive of the American Spirit and expressive also of modern America’s physical need and means. The braking action is only now being overcome. Both the Middle West and California benefited by the lateness of their development, and I expect the Northwest will later benefit in a similar manner. Lateness has meant distance in both space and time from the relics of a contradictory past. As a consequence, both the Middle West and California were more nearly able to develop forms expressive of the American Ideal and at the same time more fitted to the physical needs and physical means of the time and place than were those parts of the American commonwealth more closely connected with its colonial past. It is usually difficult to see clearly the pattern of anything in which one is himself involved. So, for a change, let us look at Mexico. Quite a number of

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American architects attended the Eighth Pan-American Congress of Architects in Mexico City in 1953. What they saw there was a gigantic symbol of modern Mexico on which the final touches were then being put. It was not difficult to see the new National University as primarily a symbol because it seemed that whenever the demands of symbolism appeared to conflict with those of utility and art, the demands of symbolism always prevailed. Fortunately these demands did not always conflict, so that there are some fine buildings as well as fine symbols on the campus. But it was most evident that the intention above all else was to dramatize the new Mexico. The National University benefited by being the modern instance. The picture that appears is of a Mexico that is, first of all, modern. The shapes of the buildings are as late-twentieth-century as scholarship can make them, and their technology as advanced as can be found anywhere. Next, Mexico is big. La Ciudad Universitaria is neither small nor modest; it is enormous and exultant. To make it large and to give it the freedom of an unspoiled site, it was placed so far from the center of Mexico City that its remoteness works a serious hardship on both students and faculty, most of whom must live and work in the city. And despite the fact that a large number of its buildings are quite tall, they are spread so far apart that communication between them on foot is quite difficult. Furthermore, though some of the professional schools might for professional reasons be more satisfactorily located apart—as the law school near the law courts, and the medical school near the hospitals, for example—these buildings are nevertheless retained to swell the size of the total effect. Next, Mexico is strong. La Ciudad Universitaria would have been a tremendous undertaking for the United States, requiring probably five years to design and another five years to build. Yet Mexico completed the design in less than two years and the construction in less than another two, as I recall it. I believe that to do so she used the services of almost every architect and engineer in Mexico, and all but stopped other construction in order to make materials available for this great effort. I have mentioned some of the faults of the scheme as viewed with an eye to utility. But this has been to emphasize the importance placed in this instance on symbolism. La Ciudad Universitaria serves to dramatize not only the National University but, even more, Mexico’s modernity, her technology, her resources, and her power. She has put architecture to work to arouse the pride of her people in their nation and to further her technical and industrial development to a point where succeeding buildings of this kind can be built by means as modern as their product—not by men in bare feet working with bare hands. It is an instance of the dynamic function of architecture—of an architecture’s power to embody the spirit of a nation in a symbol that her citizens recognize and that arouses them to further expressions of it. I have applauded Mexico’s recognition of the dynamic function of architecture and have used it as an example of a national expression. I now want to criticize it because in doing so I can point out a weakness in our own efforts.

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La Ciudad Universitaria satisfies an immediate spiritual need but for the most part lacks the elements necessary for development into something really the Mexican people’s own. The immediate gain can be an ultimate loss if it postpones the development of buildings fitted to their physical needs and expressing in direct, rather than borrowed, terms their more intimate spiritual aim. Mixing pyramids with pilotis has given the Mexican something familiar to take hold of. But unless the Mexican finds other uses for the stilts, the thin vaults, the cantilevers, and the sun-breaks than are exhibited in the National University buildings, they will remain mere symbols of an alien modernity. Colonial forms delayed the development of a truly expressive architecture in the United States and the virulent colonialism of Latin America has delayed the development of a native expression there even longer. Despite the nationalist intention of the new architecture, the new forms from Europe could become the new colonialism of Mexico. It would then enslave rather than free. An architecture that is only a symbol, and a borrowed symbol at that, is a china egg. It will not hatch. Unless it stimulates the hen to lay a real egg it had better not be used. It will be a deterrent to the development of a living architecture. Furthermore, it will prevent people from recognizing a real architecture when it does develop. How is the grip of restrictive forces broken? Usually, by outside forces acting not upon art but upon society. The occasion will be brought about by a new situation and an architecture’s inability to accommodate itself to it. Thus architectural change is the result of social change. Social change in our world has been brought about by science. Sometimes the effect has been direct, as was the concept of organic evolution developed by nineteenth-century biology. Here it is indirect, science working through technology. In any event, the dynamic force at the root of all change today is science. The development of the American continent, the most important occurrence of its kind in the nineteenth century, was accomplished by means of technology. By means of the railroad, the steamboat, the McCormick reaper, the telegraph, the telephone, and, at the end, the automobile—to name but a few—the nineteenth did more than any other century to break the shackles that bound an architecture to its past and to open the gates to an almost unlimited development. This does not imply that the architecture which follows will be any greater than its predecessors but merely that an opportunity was given the twentieth-century architects to make contact with the life of their time. For an architecture to be really great it must express the variety, freedom, expansiveness, and love of the physical world that are the product of the best regionalism—the regionalism of liberation. At the same time it must provide an image of those qualities the people want to believe expressive of themselves and their nation and that unite them in a great national expression.

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On November 4, 1977, the North Carolina chapter of the AIA held a symposium on regionalism in architecture, which was considered central to the future of good design in that state. i This support for regionalism was likely due to the influence of Henry Kamphoefner, who, as dean at North Carolina State University since the 1940s, had built one of the most progressive and modernist architecture schools in the country. ii Kamphoefner brought Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Lewis Mumford to the school as part of its exploration of regional design and modern technology. iii In 1962, after repeated attempts, Kamphoefner had succeeded in bringing Harris to teach at North Carolina State. After growing tired of practicing architecture in Dallas, Harris looked forward to working in a place where nature and the relationship between resident, building, and region were respected. iv The text served as a kind of manifesto for the symposium and encapsulates his thoughts after many years as a regional modernist architect. Harris places a region’s residents and culture over climate or topography as the key concerns for regionalism.

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Harwell Hamilton Harris

Regionalism Originally published in North Carolina Architect, January–February 1978, 10–11. Reprinted courtesy of the North Carolina American Institute of Architects.

It is a state of mind, a cosmopolitan and imaginative people, and an eye to the future.

Love of one’s locality, pride in its accomplishments, and loyalty to everything in it bring about a state of mind known as regionalism. In turn, regionalism elicits the common interests of a community and fires its members with the energy to realize those interests. Every great concept, work of art, institution, world-wide movement has a birthplace. The special nature of the place has something to do with what is born—even with the fact it is born at all. It is born there because a special combination of ingredients exists there. It survives and develops because it is protected and nurtured there. Neither birth nor nurture occurs in an undefined place. It occurs in a region. A region is marked by what is immediate and tangible. Dealing with it frees one’s mind from a mass of abstractions, generalities, and unrealities. There, one finds himself thinking unique thoughts. They are unique because the forces he deals with are unique. Also, everything there is smaller than in the world outside; and the pattern is simpler there. So one dares to experiment and manipulate. If the result has significance for the world outside, it will be accepted outside. What the world could not conceive it now adopts, making it a part of itself. In time, the product will shed both the region’s name and the characteristics peculiar to the region. Thus does a region outdo itself. What is a great region? It is a place rich in a mixture of minds, ambitions, imaginations, freedoms, natural resources, and fortuitous circumstances. In such a place something will be born—something will happen. Creation is always a happening. Planning has little to do with it—beyond making conditions propitious for something to happen. Most important of these conditions is a state of mind. Cultivating a rich state of mind is a region’s most effective means of planning for the future. A great region looks to the future. It is to such a region one traces the birth of a new development in self-government, a fresh expression in building and art, a revolutionary turn in technology, an unexpected change in economic philosophy. A great region attracts a wide variety of minds. It is cosmopolitan. Its people come from different places, bringing with them different experiences, viewpoints, capacities, cultural interests. They come for different reasons:

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To escape tyranny, enjoy freedom, grasp opportunity, realize ambitions. If they come at a time of developed technology, they probably bring with them skills that make them valuable contributors to the development of the region. Probably they are young when they come with energies equal to the new opportunities and time to take full advantage of them. Transplants from the outside, they may fertilize existing seeds of potential growth. Whether original settlers or newcomers, these are the persons whose minds, imaginations, ambitions, and labors provide ferment from which new growths emerge. A great region attracts business minds with its economic resources and promise of success and wealth. It attracts scientists with a nature to be studied, laboratories to implement their investigations, and other scientists to stimulate their minds. It attracts agriculturalists with its soil, its climate, with what grows there, with what can be established there. It attracts writers with wonders to describe, events to record, great libraries to assist them, other minds to excite them. It attracts painters with a nature that arouses them, fellow artists they respect and emulate, museums to inform them, galleries to exhibit their work and a public that buys it. It attracts musicians with great orchestras, discriminating and appreciative audiences, places to perform, and fees to live on. It attracts architects with building activity, wealth to be implemented, clients who want the best and who lay on the architect the heaviest and most intelligent demands for the best. A great region may or may not have exceptional natural resources, a benign climate, or great natural beauty. Natural riches are important; they are especially important in the beginning; but they are far from everything. Most important are the people—people who are fascinated by what they find there and determined to employ all the ideas, materials, and techniques their time affords—or they can invent—to realize whatever possibilities exist there. A great region is a place where people are interested in physical and social betterment—where people’s minds are free from niggardliness in thinking and smallness in planning—where people are determined to have the best and not to settle for the merely bearable or even the second rate. In contrast to the regionalism we have just described is another regionalism. It is that of a region that stood still while the rest of the world advanced. Its living patterns are rooted in a vanished past. It now cares more for preserving an obscure dialect than for expressing a new idea. It prides itself on an exclusiveness that only serves to build-in ignorance and inferiority. The distinctions it now cherishes may once have been so general as to be no distinction at all, but, having disappeared elsewhere, they now appear as the product of this particular place—as “regional.” Such regionalism becomes a cloak for misplaced pride. Such a region’s greatest attraction is to antiquarians and tourists. It is curious; it may be beautiful; but it is dead. A region’s most important resource is its people and not its climate, its topography, nor the particular kind of sticks and stones it has to build with. It is

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the people’s minds that create the intellectual ferment necessary for greatness. It is the free minds, the imagination, the stake in the future that make up the state of mind that creates a great region.

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Introduction to “Regionalism and Invention”

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In 1987, the Center for the Study of American Architecture devoted its entire annual publication, edited by Larry Speck, to the exploration of a “New Regionalism.” It aimed to redress a gaping hole in the historical record, noted in 1979 by Arthur Drexler: “One might expect that regional and vernacular building would by now be the subject of serious critical evaluation. Instead it has been largely ignored.” i The editors were also motivated by the sense that architectural regionalism was a powerful component in the production of cultural vitality and expression, which was coming under renewed interest among academics. The essays included in the issue covered a variety of perspectives, but the tone was set by Larry Speck’s article, which appears first in the collection. In it he echoes the thoughts of Harwell Hamilton Harris, in identifying regionalism as a force for the creation of unique and evocative places, places tied to their specific locale in formal, tectonic, and/or experiential means. In this he sees regionalism as a liberative practice, in contrast to its restrictive and historicist variants (see Harris, this chapter). Lawrence W. Speck (b. 1949) is the W. L. Moody Centennial Professor in Architecture at the University of Austin School of Architecture.

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Lawrence W. Speck

Regionalism and Invention Originally published in Center: New Regionalism 3 (1987): 8–19. Reprinted courtesy of The Center for American Architecture and Design, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, and the author.

I have long been struck by a very earthy quotation from the Roman writer Persius, who proclaimed the stomach the “teacher of the arts and the dispenser of invention.” 1 The quotation acknowledges a source of art and invention outside the head, that is, outside the realm of abstract intellectual constructs. I like the notion of the stomach, the most everyday, common workhorse of the organs, being admitted as a driving force for the most elevated of cultural pursuits. I see some timeless, profound truth in the idea that what is nurturing to human existence, what is driven by necessity, what is tangible and physical, what is constant and customary, may also be truly inspirational. Lewis Mumford, who is a spiritual father to much of what this publication addresses, noted half a century ago that invention springs from two independent yet related worlds—the world of science and the world of practice, or, more liberally, the world of the head and the world of the stomach. Mumford cites inventions arising from conjectural doctrines like the dynamo (strongly reliant on Faraday’s work with magnetic fields) in contrast to mainly empirical inventions like Watt’s enormously influential steam engine. He observed that “from the geometry and astronomy of Egypt and Mesopotamia, both closely connected with the practice of agriculture, to the latest researchers in electrophysics, Leonardo’s dictum holds true: science is the captain and practice the soldiers. But sometimes the soldiers win the battle without leadership, and sometimes the captain, by intelligent strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in battle.” 2 Despite Mumford’s cogent observations early on, society has in the 20th century, and particularly in 20th-century architecture, relied far too heavily on the captain, or the head, for art and invention and has neglected the potentially powerful contribution of the soldiers, or the stomach. Dependence on new dictums and abstract treatises has resulted in neglect of a world full of living, breathing physical environments that stand ready to deliver empirical inspiration for art and invention. Regionalism is a facet of that pursuit which mines everyday life and perception for messages about a truly progressive future. Regionalism addresses the particulars of place and culture. It learns from experience. It tinkers, crafts, accepts, rejects, adjusts, and reacts. It is firmly rooted in the tangible realities

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of its situation—the history, the climate, the geography, the human values, the economy, the traditions, the technology, the cultural life of its place. Attitudes akin to regionalism have a longstanding record of contributing fundamental innovations not only in architecture but in other artistic disciplines as well. Jazz, which is widely noted as the most fundamental and broadly influential creation of 20th-century music, was born as a regional expression. Its invention is inconceivable outside the particular milieu of New Orleans from which it sprang. Jazz is a musical form based strongly in tradition—not only the African traditions of its inventors’ ancestry, but also European traditions that were prevalent in Louisiana at the turn of the century. Jazz is part Congo tom-tom, part missionary revival hymn, part French folk song, part Spanish dancing music. 3 It reflects the polyglot culture of its place. It is reliant on tradition, but is also a fresh new musical creation that potently expresses the emotional and social life of New Orleans—especially the sadness, anger, and vitality of Black culture there. Fueled by an intensity and immediacy that would be difficult to derive from a more cerebral invention process, jazz became immediately popular and influential. Over the past 80 years it has spawned numerous other musical forms from Tin-Pan-Alley to Big Band to Pop and Rock. Its expression stretched far beyond the confines of New Orleans, contributing fundamentally to the worldwide musical scene. But it is important to note that the spark which ignited such an important movement was vividly place- and culture-specific. Invention in 19th- and 20th-century painting is likewise marked by a striking reliance on regional inspiration. When Gustave Courbet became disillusioned with the romantic decadence of the international art world of the mid 19th cen­tury, he sought new inspiration from everyday surroundings. Proud of his rural roots and sensitive to political and economic upheavals in his culture, he produced the revolutionary Stone Breakers (1849), which depicted the plight of two common people of his place—one too old for the backbreaking work in which he is engaged, and one too young. The power of the painting, like the power of jazz music, is in its particularity and its reality. It is the same kind of power that moved Paul Gauguin to leave Paris in 1883 for western France, where he drew inspiration from the common life of Brittany—a life unspoiled by the fashions and artifice of the capital. He studied folk art and medieval stained glass of the region, rediscovering new techniques from those traditions. His later journey to the South Pacific in search of a more fundamental expression in painting is indicative of his reliance on “place.” Gauguin’s art grew out of Brittany and Tahiti and is inseparable from its sources. The principles derived by Courbet and Gauguin from regional sources— principles ranging from subject matter to technique—had an enormous influence on the development of 20th-century painting. As in the case of jazz, regional impetus provoked international changes. Indeed, the development of Modern Art as a revolutionary phenomenon was significantly fueled by principles derived from intensive introspection based on particular events and places. Artists as diverse as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, and Diego Rivera all drew

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significant breath for their art from local culture. Even Picasso, perhaps the quintessential 20th-century international painter, was at his best with rooted subject matter as in Guernica (1937), an intense essay on conflict firmly rooted in his own homeland. Music and painting are portable media. Architecture, the most physically rooted of the arts, bears the capacity to draw even more potent inspiration from its place. It is easy, however, to ignore the degree to which architecture has been strongly place-inspired. The shift from Roman to Byzantine architecture in the 4th and 5th centuries reflected, quite simply, a shift of place. Constantine’s decision to move the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople, provoked—almost necessitated—a fundamental change of architectural expression. Nowhere is this transition so telling as in the history of St. Sophia in Constantinople. The first St. Sophia, built by the Romans and dedicated in 360 A.D., was a timber-roofed basilica modeled on the early Christian churches of the West, such as Old St. Peter’s in Rome. It was an import, rendered in the dominant international style of its day. It bore little imprint of its place. But by the time Justinian decided to build the great Hagia Sophia after its predecessor had been destroyed by fire, the conquering Romans had begun to gain a greater appreciation for the rich history and culture of the region surrounding Constantinople. The result of this new regional awareness was a landmark set of architectural innovations that eventually altered building throughout much of the world and fundamentally affected the course of architectural history. Hagia Sophia fused Greek, Roman, Oriental, and Christian traditions into a new and powerful expression. Its two architects—appropriately, one from Asia Minor and one from Greece—merged the longitudinal axis of the Western basilica with dome and pendentives inspired by the East. They combined the vast scale of the

FIG. 1

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Hagia Sophia, exterior.

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Basilica of Constantine in Rome with the luminous and intricate ornament of Syria, Armenia, Cappadocia, and Persia. The previously dominant classic orders—Doric, Ionian, Corinthian—gave way to the Oriental predilection for surface pattern and a delicate, inventive new capital was born. A sensitivity to the history, traditions and cultural background of Asia Minor and the Near East combined with a realistic acknowledgment of the modern contribution of international Roman culture produced a truly new expression with new spatial possibilities, new technological challenges, new expressive potential. It breathed fresh life into architecture in its era. The new architecture inspired by Byzantium spread across the empire—to Ravenna, to Rome, to Venice, to Gaul—traveling, ironically, to cultures as distant and foreign as Charlemagne’s Aachen of the 9th century. It spawned a wide range of divergent expressions—but, again, the spark that provoked these watershed innovations in design was regionally inspired. The birth of Byzantine architecture was seeded by a new fusion of cultures— a phenomenon that has strong parallels in America and in the 20th century. But regional impetus need not be precipitated only by such momentous cultural events. Innovation and progress may come simply from a renewed awareness of longstanding particulars of a place. It is this sort of regional reassessment that provoked, for example, the Renaissance in Italy in the 15th century. Antonio Filarete complained in 1450, “Cursed be the man who invented this wretched Gothic architecture!...Only a barbarous people could have brought it to Italy.” 4 Indeed, the internationally prevalent Gothicism was ill-suited to Italy. Those great walls of glass that welcomed the soft light of northern Europe hardly acknowledged the bright, sometimes harsh sun of southern climes. The Gothic had never really conquered Italy, but its burdensome dominance had stifled the creation of a truer Italian expression just as the dominance of the Germans in the powerful Milanese court and the French in the southern court had cramped the economic and political power of native trecento Italy. It was Florence that felt this dominance most keenly in the middle decades of the century, suffering under the tyranny of ascendant Milan and Naples. Major segments of the Florentine population hated the foreign influence with a passion. An anti-Gothic movement developed that contained a variety of Guelph, Roman, and Humanist components. Sculpture, and architecture in particular, sought renewal of classic Roman forms as well as a reassertion of Italian Romanesque traditions. Giorgio Vasari wrote of Filippo Brunelleschi, an early champion of the movement: “He was given by heaven to invest architecture with new forms, after it had wandered astray for many centuries.” 5 In order to formulate this new language, Brunelleschi sought “to rediscover the manner in which the ancients had built.” 6 He traveled to Rome frequently in his early years. He measured the major buildings there himself, studying construction technique at least as much as form. He sought to reinvest his region with the clarity, majesty, stability, and power that its architecture once had. It is impossible to imagine the powerful reorientation of architecture that the Renaissance provoked beginning anywhere but Italy. It was a regionalist, place-inspired movement.

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It was even a patriotic movement. Italy in the 15th century was regaining a consciousness of itself. The literature as well as the art of ancient Rome became a source of inspiration. Latin was revived as a medium of living literature. The humanists Latinized their names and Romanized the terms of Christian worship and life. They fashioned their prose style on Cicero and their poetry on Virgil and Horace. In the same spirit, they revived the use of barrel vaults and domes, renewing the techniques of Roman masonry work. They returned to a cool, static, orderly expression that long had served Italy so well. Like the forms of jazz music, the forms of Gauguin’s art, and the forms of Byzantine building, the forms of Renaissance architecture found varied applications around the globe over the centuries that followed. But, again, their original impetus was regional. Even in 20th-century architecture, with its emphasis on international movements, much of the truest and most seminal invention has had regional roots. The extraordinary freshness and vitality of Antonio Gaudí’s work, for example, is deeply rooted in Catalonia. Like the culture of his place, Gaudí’s architecture is full of intensity, fantasy, and color. He acknowledges the building traditions of his region—its Moorish ancestry, its strong influences of Gothic and Baroque building. He revels in the longstanding crafts of his place— particularly the rich and capable ceramic, stonecutting, and ironworking trades. But he also reaches deeper than building and craft precedents of Catalonia, drawing on the primal qualities of the region—its landscape, its vegetation, its connection to the sea. The Casa Mila is expressive of Moorish, Gothic, and Baroque traditions, but it also incarnates the waves, the rocks, and even the seaweed of the Mediterranean coast. Gaudí’s architecture embodies the broadest sympathies of his region’s populace in an eloquent way. As Dickens captured the spirit of London of his day or Goya the war-torn Madrid, so Gaudí captured turn-of-the-century Barcelona. Through the architecture one can feel the exuberance and passion of the culture, while sensing, as well, its almost macabre infatuation with mystery. In the period of Gaudí’s later career, Frank Lloyd Wright was drawing a similar kind of inventive inspiration from emergent Midwestern America. The Prairie Style house grew from its native soil. Wright said, “I was born an American child of the ground and of space....I loved the prairie by instinct.” 7 Taliesin North has everything to do with rural life in the American Midwest. As Thomas Beeby has pointed out in his elaborate analysis of the building, Taliesin is an extension of topographical and geological forms of the region.8 Its dominant horizontality ties it to the broad sweep of the prairie. Its modest tower reiterates the common stone outcroppings of the fields. And it is made of the local stone in combination with the ubiquitous Midwestern wood frame. This and other of Wright’s houses in the era were intended to address the best of contemporary Midwestern American life and values. They were to be free-standing, individual, democratic. They were to be honest, unaffected, and sincere. Emerson wrote essays on the ideals and values of his culture. Wright built essays on the ideals and values of his.

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CRITICAL REGIONALISM

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2

3

4

Antonio Gaudí, Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1926. FIG. 3 Frank Lloyd Wright, Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1894. FIG. 4 Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesen West, exterior, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1938. FIG. 2

The degree to which Wright relied on the inspiration of place in stimulating his inventiveness is evident in the contrast between his home at Taliesin North in Wisconsin and his home at Taliesin West in Arizona. At Taliesin West he is provoked by the desert—its flatness, its ruggedness, its textures, its colors. Radically different in feeling from Taliesin North, the Arizona colony even brings to mind literal building traditions of the region. Wright’s stepped terraces, low, heavy walls made of stone collected from the site, and his flat roofs all recall Pueblo construction. The Taliesin West buildings are bermed into the ground at times like settlers’ dugouts. Elsewhere, they hover thin and light above the desert flatness like itinerate Indian tents. The complex is fresh and new and vigorous, but it is also timelessly bound to its place. It is related to tradition, but it is also a tour de force of invention. Wright, at his best, was able to go into a place like Wisconsin or Phoenix and make magic of elements there—elements that had been undervalued and overlooked by other architects for generations. Whereas many designers would have written both regions off as having no substantial form-giving inspiration to relate to, Wright found the potential latent in even apparently unpromising contexts. That ability is akin to something Alvar Aalto referred to as “the gift of seeing the beautiful in everything.” 9 Aalto, like Wright, often built in places that were not blessed with a strong or cohesive architectural heritage. Yet he felt a deepseated desire to draw on the best qualities of his place. In his earliest buildings this tendency took the form of strong reliance on both board-and-batten Finnish rural vernacular and the Leningrad-inspired Neo-Classical tradition established by C. L. Engel in Finland in the early 19th century.

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By mid-career, however, Aalto was capable of a rich, appropriate regional expression that knit together more broadly “the beautiful in everything” about Finland. The Villa Mairea of 1939 is part Nordic sod-roofed hut, part vernacular log cabin with gutters hewn from tree trunks, part reinterpreted board-andbatten-clad volumes. But it is also part Scandinavian Functionalism that had developed quickly in the decade of the 1930s and part new industrial Finland, with its emerging ceramics and wood-products manufacturing. The Villa Mairea is rugged and crafty and relaxed like Finland, but it is also clean and orderly and precise like Finland. The regionalism here is not a one-liner. It draws on the shapes of local topography and the textures of the landscape as well as on building traditions and social customs. Aalto had invented a new regionalism—a regionalism that was not a style but a sensibility for building in his place. Concurrent with Aalto’s development of this sensibility in Finland, Luis Barragán was searching for a similar poignancy of expression for a very different climate, landscape, and culture in Mexico. His success is comparable to Aalto’s. Barragán loved Mexico and was devotedly Mexican. He knew Mexican vernacular building from his childhood and felt its power deeply. He knew and appreciated Mexican painting, Mexican literature, Mexican religion. He drew on these deep-seated resources in creating his powerful architecture. Barragán’s fountains evoke images of the wooden aqueducts that spanned the streets of the village of Mazamitla that Barragán knew as a child. His walls draw on ubiquitous Mexican traditions of masonry building as well as on common Mexican conventions of rigorous spatial distinction between public and private realms. His vibrant colors are not only rooted in the brilliant hues of the Mexican urban scene but are also sophisticated by the studious color experimentation of Mexican artists like Chucho Reyes and Rufino Tamayo. Even the technology of Barragán’s buildings often relies on traditional construction methods of the pueblo and the hacienda. But Barragán’s work is also rooted in the 20th-century Mexican fervor for modernity. Like most of his contemporaries, Barragán had his own subsuming love affair with Corbusian forms in the 1930s. His later work acknowledges the legitimacy of Modernism’s influence but puts it in appropriate perspective. Barragán is extending a tradition, not freezing a tradition, and he welcomes the evolution that comes from incorporating the interests of each new generation. His is a new regionalism—a product of his place and time. The closest parallel to this fresh new regionalism in the United States lies in the late work of Louis Kahn. Two of the very last buildings he completed before his death make the point strongly. Kahn’s Exeter Library in New Hampshire is a quintessential New England building. It is subtle, chaste, and reserved on the outside. It is demure, even acquiescent, in its context. Its taut red brick skin, its simple stereometric volume, its regular repetitive pattern of wood windows—even its vertical hierarchy from heavy at the bottom to open and diminished at the top—all place it easily within longstanding New England building traditions.

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5

6

7

8

9

10

Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Normarkku, Finland, 1938–39. FIG. 6 Luis Barragán, Fountain at Los Clubes, Mexico City, 1964. FIG. 7 Louis Kahn, Exeter Library, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1967–72. FIG. 8 Samuel McIntire, Pingree House, Salem, Massachusetts, 1810. FIG. 9 Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, 1966–72. FIG. 10 Stock Sheds, Ft. Worth, Texas. FIG. 5

Kahn’s Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth of the same period is as strikingly different from the library as, in fact, north central Texas is from southern New Hampshire. Here, again, Kahn relies heavily on regional inspiration. The broad horizontality of the Texas plains is reflected in the low, flat character of the building. On its front is the ubiquitous Texas porch that doubles as the introduction to and explication of the building’s spatial and structural system. To anyone familiar with Fort Worth, the long gray concrete vaults that form the building draw an easy parallel to the cylindrical concrete grain elevators that

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dot the city and the surrounding countryside. Kay Kimbell, the benefactor of the museum, in fact, made his early fortune in grain. But, horizontal as these forms are, they draw an even closer parallel to the bow-topped stock sheds that stand in regular ranks near the museum and are typical of galvanized metal industrial vernacular of the region. Kahn is not just dipping eclectically into forms he discovered along the highway en route from the airport. He demonstrates a deep and profound feeling for Texas—especially in his handling of color, texture, and light. The tawny grays and tans of the building are like the colors of the native landscape with its parched grasses and limestone substrata. The tactile character of the building’s materials sings out when placed in deep relief by the hard Texas sun. And everywhere light and shade are modulated with great finesse and understanding. The building is truly resonant in its place. These five architects—Gaudí, Wright, Aalto, Barragán, and Kahn—stand among the greatest inventors and form-givers of 20th-century architecture. The inspiration of those forms is significantly a regional inspiration. Our perception of that origin is often clouded by the fact that their buildings are delivered to us severed from cultural ties. It is difficult to understand the rootedness of Gaudí, Wright, Aalto, Barragán, or Kahn by a few closely cropped photographs with no real experience of Barcelona, Wisconsin, Arizona, Finland, Mexico, New England, or Texas. The message is most clear when you are there, experiencing the building as a real artifact in and of its culture. Our understanding of the origin of form and invention and its relation to context in these architects’ work is further clouded by the degree to which their forms have been usurped and exported around the world. The more Richard Meier uses those sensuous Aalto curves in a generic, universal way in Indiana or Hartford, the less we tend to remember their inspiration in Finnish rhythms. The more we see Barragán’s colors, textures, and forms inside lofts in New York’s SoHo, the less we remember their brilliance and appropriateness in the Mexican sun. The lesson in all of these examples—from jazz to Gauguin, to Byzantine architecture, to the Renaissance, to 20th-century masters—is that powerful and salient invention often emanates from a deep and trenchant perception of the particulars of a place. The lesson seems particularly cogent for architecture here and now. In its quest for invention, recent architecture has too frequently found itself chasing ephemeral novelty rather than courting real progress. Mumford warned that invention could “become a duty” and that, like a child delighted with a new toy, we may lose sight of the guidance that must come from “critical discernment.” 10 Invention that comes from abstract models is particularly vulnerable to irrelevance or misdirection, whereas invention based in tangible realities is more likely to provide true service. Regionalism, as a source for invention, represents a return to basics in architecture—a return to what is primal and elemental. Because it is rooted in physical and cultural investigation, it is de facto a critical and responsive approach. It offers hope for a responsible and eloquent architecture, con­stantly renewing itself in service to society.

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In traditional histories of architecture,

climate and availability of materials

such as those based on a survey of

in different places. He sees this

the canonized monuments or the

regional modification as a noble, if not

succession of styles, regions are

natural, process, one compromised

largely absent except when they are

by the rapid industrialization in the

used to identify the location of a work.

nineteenth century, leading to the

Regional variation, when mentioned,

eclecticism that modernism sought

is often short-changed as a force

to end.

of dissolution or ruination to the pure expression of a “certified” or

Newcomb makes two interesting

mandated style. Rexford Newcomb,

points in his concluding discussion.

considered the father of regional

First he clarifies the historical

architectural history by many, takes

associations and distinctions between

a more sympathetic view. By placing

regionalism and eclecticism. Both

consideration of regional location first,

employ the choice of style, but

he produces a history of architectural

regional architecture is adapted to

regionalism closely aligned with those

the specific cultural and physical

traditional histories (as opposed to

aspects of a region by necessity, while

the more polemical variation seen in

eclecticism is the process of selecting

Mumford, this chapter) but one that is,

motifs “inspired by a romantic

nonetheless, unique. i In it the

nostalgia.” Second, by identifying

qualities, characteristics, and history

“necessity” in regional architecture

of peoples in specific locations

he sets up a unique parallel between

manifest as distinct “styles”

the “functionalism” of early modern

appropriate or proper to those regions

architecture and the mid-century logic of regionalism—the natural

Newcomb’s uniqueness is his

differentiation and modification

conviction that these regional styles

of universal precepts. (A similar

can have a strong association

argument can be found in Meem,

with the social and physical

Chapter 3).

characteristics of a place, even though these characteristics may change over time. America is a unique case in the development

Rexford Newcomb (1886–1968) was professor of the history of architecture and dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, and a pioneering historian of Spanish colonial architecture in America.

of regional styles because of the nation’s relatively short history and the fact that it was settled mostly by groups of immigrants with shared heritage. So while he admits that much of American architecture is likely provincialism—the naïve and superficial replication of inherited styles—he sees variation of those imported building traditions as they have been modified by the

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Rexford Newcomb

Regionalism in American Architecture Originally published in Regionalism in America, Merrill Jensen, editor (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1965, c1951), 273–95.

Human experience is predicated upon geography. In fact, human history makes little sense unless it is read in the light of geography. Scholars have been all too prone to compart knowledge and to separate essentially related phenomena. Thus frequently has architecture been divorced from its environment and considered apart from that environment. This is most unfortunate, for architecture, if it is anything, is a function of environment and, like other expressions of human life, cannot be fully understood outside that context. Inseparably linked as it is with its backgrounds, architecture reflects, as do few other arts, the life and thought of a race, a place, or an age. A careful examination of the relationship between any architecture and its environment, geographic or human, will bear out the truth of this statement. Therefore one who would adequately appraise any style or period of architecture must understand not only the history, the genius, and the social and religious customs of its builders, but also the geographic, geologic, and climatic conditions of the land of its inception. In no country is so wide a diversity of architectural expression to be encountered as in the United States, and in no country can the causes of that diversity be more readily discovered. The reasons are clear. Our nation is a far-flung sisterhood of states with varying climates, topographies, and physical resources and with mixed ethnic relationships. The resulting regional patterns of thought and folkways are marked, in spite of increasingly rapid means of communication and transportation. Opened to settlement at a time when the leading nations of the Old World were seeking lands for exploitation, America became a theater for colonial development by the French, the English, the Dutch, and the Spanish, with later infiltrations of Quakers, Swedes, Scotch-Irish, and Germans. Once the country was able to offer wider social and economic opportunities than those afforded by their homelands, America became a Mecca also for the Welsh, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and various other nationalities who came in increasing numbers. Except the Spanish, most of these peoples settled upon the Atlantic seaboard. But once that seaboard was comfortably settled, the more daring and

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restless elements sought new opportunities and the chance of fortune in the regions beyond the Appalachians. Spreading first to Kentucky and Tennessee, these pioneers soon entered the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, then called the Northwest Territory. When the public lands in these areas were taken up, it was the trans-Mississippi territories of Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska that beckoned. Then came the drive to the Pacific Northwest over the Oregon Trail, the settlement of the Mormons in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and the expansion by way of the Santa Fe Trail to our Hispanic Southwest. Following the trail breaker, trapper, and trader, came the farmer and the mechanic; and soon lands that were once called “the great American desert” were converted into profitable farmsteads and cattle ranges. Thus America has witnessed a colorful pioneer pageant the like of which no other country in the world has experienced. It is well known that pioneer communities have never been noteworthy for developed artistic expressions, and only in those sections of America settled long enough to have produced a reasonably integrated culture has architecture reached anything like an adequate expression. These regions are not great in area when compared with the vast American domain. In large sections of the nation, architecture is still in what may be termed a pioneer stage. But staunch and tough fibers, the making of a real national architectural fabric, are assuredly being spun; and out of the background of a history that must potently influence whatever we do for today and for tomorrow is emerging an efficient and adequate expression of modern American life and thought. But there are still many exotic threads in this fabric. It is important to remember that architecture is always strongly influenced by past building experience, and that forms eloquent of one environment are frequently carried from that environment to less receptive situations with the passage of peoples. How amusing thus becomes an English Gothic cathedral in Singapore or a New Mexican Colonial hacienda in the Mohawk Valley of New York. Moreover, acquired building tastes and habits are frequently projected beyond their natural habitats by architectural literature. The whole cult of the classical revival was propagated by means of the literature that grew out of the rediscovery of ...the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. But the copying of styles of past architecture—a practice inspired by a romantic nostalgia—even though it may have a regional distribution, is not to be confused with regionalism itself. One has to look through the superficial charms of the Greek Revival in New York or in Alabama to discover whether or not there are real regional differences. Turpin Bannister points out: “Regionalism is often confused with provincialism. They should be clearly distinguished. Provincialism is the parochial and half-understood reflection of styles radiated from the great

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metropolitan style centers. The products of provincialism may be quaint, naïve, and amusing, but they lack the vitality, spontaneity, and promise of future growth characteristic of truly regional products.” If we accept Bannister’s definition, we must conclude that much of what has transpired in American architecture is mere provincialism. On the other hand, even though our architecture was originally imported from Europe, it soon reacted to the changed environment to exhibit indigenous qualities of its own. “The European tradition was still clear, but the product could only have materialized in the new locale.” Some of these distinctions upon regional bases we shall attempt to point out. When the English colonists first reached our shores, rural England had not as yet embarked upon that revival of classic architecture which had already set in at London and the larger centers. The rural districts still employed medieval types of structure. 1 Many of the colonists came from rural districts where wood was still plentiful and buildings were of the time-honored “half-timber” construction. The frames of such buildings were assembled upon the ground, then raised into place and pinned together with heavy dowels. The interstices were filled with “wattle and daub” or with rough mud bricks of clay and straw called “cats.” Sometimes sun-dried and, upon occasion, even burned bricks were used for filling, the resulting “half-and-half” wall being plastered inside with whitewashed clay, and covered upon the exterior by a coating of lime plaster. The colonists were thoroughly familiar with this type of structure and, finding wood plentiful in the New World, they employed it widely. But this wattle and daub, satisfactory enough in genial Old England, would not do in the rigorous climate of New England. Thus environment stepped in to alter an historic architectural procedure. Thereafter, the colonists rived, split, or sawed out a covering of “clapboards,” with which they sheathed the exteriors of these half-timber houses to shed the water and keep out the wind. So efficacious were these clapboards that they were universally adopted and became an important feature of subsequent American wooden architecture. Clapboarding, now universally produced in long lengths on machines, comes down to our day in what we call weather-boarding or siding. 2 The rigorous climate is likewise to be noted in the compact plans evolved in New England. The chimney was placed in the center of the building, the fireplaces for the various rooms opening into it. This arrangement conserved heat and stiffened the frame. In time, the central chimney was crowded out of its place by an axial corridor or hall which was projected through the middle of the house, the rooms flanking it on either side. From this hall a stairway, more or less elaborate, led to the upper stories, while the fireplaces with their respective chimneys were relegated to positions at the ends of the house. With this symmetry of plan came also a gradual infiltration of classic details and proportions. Thus the somewhat bleak, bare, and puritanical Early American house gave way to the classically inclined Georgian residence. 3

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But whatever the change, in obedience to climate the New England plan remained compact, and when more room was needed, the house went up instead of out. This was accomplished by the adoption of the two-plane or gambrel roof. This change permitted greater space in the attic, which, in effect, now became a third living floor. When, following American independence, prosperity came to the seaport cities and wealthy shipowners built pretentious homes, even then the house did not expand laterally. The gambrel was replaced by a full third story, crowned by a balustrade-enclosed roof with a so-called “captain’s lookout” from which a mariner with glass might discover whether or not his ship had arrived in port. Curiously enough, when New England architectural patterns traveled westward, the “captain’s lookout” went along. Thus today one discovers these features atop houses in the Middle West which afford vistas no more exciting than broad fields of wheat, soybeans, and corn. In the Middle Atlantic region, colonial architecture contrasted markedly with that of New England. Here, in the absence of splendid white pine, brick made of local clays was widely employed, except in certain sections of Pennsylvania, where structures of native stone, roofed with local slates, became the rule. 4 So potent has been the influence of the staunch old houses of the Philadelphia-Germantown area that to this day houses are erected in this timehonored vernacular. Farther south, in Maryland and Virginia, where the climate introduced a different social and economic system, the effects are plainly seen in houses admirably adapted to life on the great maritime plantations where cotton and tobacco were raised and where large numbers of black men carried on most of the hard labor of production. In this genial climate and under a favorable social organization, architecture became formal, balanced, and aristocratic. Plans became extended and detached. It made little difference how far the kitchen might be from the breakfast room or dining room, for there were plenty of servants to take the steps, and covered dishes to keep the food warm. Thus the kitchens were usually far removed from the apartments of the master’s family. The housing of these slaves called for special arrangements. On some plantations, slave families lived in small individual cabins; on others, in long ranges of “quarters.” The personal servants of the master’s family ate in the kitchen of the “big house,” which was, of necessity, large. Often there were two kitchens, one in the main house and a detached kitchen where baking, preserving, and the like were carried on. In Virginia the plans are more open and detached than in Maryland, in some cases the service departments being completely separated from the main house. Larger openings, lower roofs, and open two-storied porticoes reflect the climate of this sunny littoral. In the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama, the same open forms were prevalent but with local variations. In this section the two-story portico, like that on the Miles Brewton house in Charleston, was very popular. After the Revolution, and especially during the Greek Revival period, porticoes with columns two stories high became the fashion. Thus,

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in the South, geography and a different social order produced con­comitant changes in architectural expression. 5 Another interesting European influence upon American architecture is encountered in those portions of the Atlantic seaboard settled by the Dutch. Dutch influence centered on Manhattan Island, but it extended up the Hudson, into Connecticut, and into Long Island and New Jersey. Here the Dutch built stone town houses with stepped gables and compact and thrifty farm structures. The more prosperous Dutch houses were two rooms deep, crowned by a roof of low slope with deep projections front and rear. This overhang was soon extended in such a way as to form a true porch or, as it was later called in the New York area, a piazza. Many consider this the origin of the American veranda or porch. The Dutch also appropriated the gambrel roof, to which they imparted a peculiar slope resulting in a form which to this day is called a “Dutch” roof. These old Dutch buildings have a substantial, homelike air that reflects in every line the national qualities of their builders. In certain sections of New York and New Jersey, these forms still potently influence the line and massing of modern residential structures. 6 Another region of transplanted culture was that of the colonial German settlers who concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania, where they were for the most part farmers. Here the quaint, picturesque, and substantial buildings which they erected still impart a genuine touch of the Old World to the American scene. While they utilized local materials, the German builders handled these with that thorough regard for craftsmanship that has always characterized the architecture of their homeland. The Pennsylvania Dutch interior was simple but colorful. A deep, clear blue, combined with an intense yellow, crude reds, and deep greens, was a favorite color scheme. Furniture, fabrics, and accessories all exhibited vivid hues. Thus Pennsylvania and America have been enriched by this German contribution which, like the Dutch Colonial, has decidedly influenced the residential architecture of the mid-Atlantic region and indeed that of regions beyond the mountains. 7 French occupation of territory in what is now the United States was slight, but in the settlements at Michilimackinac and Detroit, Michigan; Vincennes, Indiana; Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort Chartres, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois; St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Charles, Missouri; and along the Mississippi to New Orleans, definite French traits are to be found in the architecture. Of these areas, Louisiana was most profoundly influenced, and a visit to the Vieux Carré of New Orleans is almost like a trip to some provincial town of old France. To Louisiana was added a second French increment when the Acadians from the country around Grand Pré, Canada, were removed thither. Thus “Cajun” traits are to be traced in the present-day language, folkways, government, and institutions generally.

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But for the more indigenous architectural developments we are indebted to the French families who received large land grants and who under the institution of slavery built up great plantations. These interesting old plantation mansions along the Bayou Teche and the lower Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Francisville are eloquent reminders of that unique landed aristocracy developed under French and Spanish protection. 8 French Colonial houses in the upper Mississippi Valley were of simple arrangement—two or three rooms placed side by side, each with a door opening upon a galerie that extended across the front of the house. Sometimes these galeries flanked two sides of the structure and often completely surrounded the house. Three types of construction were prevalent in this region: poteaux en terre, a sort of loose stockade of vertical posts set in the ground with stone and mortar infilling; poteaux sur sole, a more carefully built wall of squared posts set upon a sill with stone foundation; and solid stone masonry. The roof of the galerie was pitched lower than that of the main house, the result being a two-plane roof with a decided flare at the bottom. Excellent examples of French construction are still to be seen at Cahokia, Illinois, and Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. 9 The principal regional traits of the Louisiana house are two: it is always raised above the ground, and a galerie encloses one or more sides of the structure. In the smaller houses the main floor is raised only two or three feet to permit a free circulation of air; in the larger structures the living floor is up one story. This, of course, is to avoid dampness in the living areas. 10 The galerie, though perfectly reflective of the Louisiana scene, was widely used in the French Illinois country also, where it appears to have been imported by way of Canada. Indeed, two-story galeries were not infrequent in old St. Louis. The facts that this country became American territory through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and that many of the great Louisiana plantation houses were built after American occupation should not disturb us, for while this excludes them from the Colonial category chronologically, it certainly does not culturally. Here, perhaps more completely than elsewhere in America, metamorphosed geography and history live down to the present. 11 The habitat of our Spanish Colonial architecture contrasts markedly with that of other European types so far discussed. It includes vast sun-drenched, semi-desert areas in the present states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California, with settlements also at St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida, in Georgia, and along the Gulf Coast. Here, principally through the leadership of the Franciscan friars, who organized great ecclesiastical establishments and built up vast landed estates, Spanish institutions and customs were introduced. Spanish Colonial architecture, while it was expressive of the pioneer life and setting which gave it birth, was nevertheless the result of a long heredity which markedly influenced its expression. That heredity is traceable back through Mexico to the mother country, Spain. But in Spain itself architecture had already experienced a varicolored career. The country was originally inhabited by the Iberians, who were doubtless a

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division of the great early Mediterranean race. Into Spain eventually came the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Romans, who, when their power waned, were succeeded by the Visigoths. In the early eighth century the Visigoths were conquered by the Moors; and the Moors, in turn, were driven out, after seven hundred years of occupation, by the successors of these very Visigoths whom they had driven northward into the Pyrenees. Thus Spanish blood, Spanish institutions, and Spanish architecture were definitely cosmopolitan. 12 When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, naturally they began to build in the fashion of the Spanish homeland. They appropriated few, if any, of the ancient Aztec forms, although, through the employment of native Indian artisans, a certain barbaric splendor was in time imparted to Mexican Colonial architecture. And indeed a reflection of this filtered through to the provincial churches and other structures that were eventually built in the American Southwest. Meeting peculiar environmental conditions in each of the future American states to which it spread, this age-old Spanish-Mexican style was in each situation modified to produce a new regional variant. For instance, California, with her wide range of climate, her maritime geography, and her variegated flora, permitted architectural forms that would appear exotic in New Mexico or Texas. Here the simplest of shapes, enhanced by a wonderfully clear and vibrant atmosphere and the deep shadows which a vivid sunshine induces, make unnecessary the elaborate forms and minute detail called for by less brilliantly lighted landscapes. 13 The architecture of Arizona, on the other hand, was allied more closely with the Sonoran types of northern Mexico and partook of a certain regional desert quality which recalls, perhaps more forcefully than anything else encountered in America, the desert architecture of Moorish North Africa. Here the roof—in California always a crowning glory of red tiles—became so flat as not to figure in the perspective, except on churches where low masonry domes were used. 14 Again in New Mexico we encounter an entirely different architectural expression. Here the Spaniards found a sedentary Indian population which had already developed an appropriate native architecture. Thus, when the conquistadores employed these Indians to build structures with European plans and utilities out of native materials, there resulted a new regional type, half Spanish, half Indian, the like of which has been nowhere else evolved. 15 In Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and in Florida new exposures and different conditions were encountered. The result was other regional variants of this adaptable and cosmopolitan style, so appropriate geographically and racially to the large Hispanic areas of the American Southwest. 16 Recent years have witnessed a revival of the Spanish Colonial, not in any strict archaeological fashion, but as a living style and with correct deference to its regional variations. Excellent modern examples of the style can be seen in most of our states which were once parts of the Spanish domain. In two states, California and Florida, this sun-begotten architecture has been so well adapted to modern American living that it has become a vital, new style. Combining as it does echoes from more than one Mediterranean land, the author, in 1928,

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proposed the term Mediterranean to designate this cosmopolitan vernacular. 17 Since that time, much has developed in New Mexico, where a highly regional Santa Fe school flourishes, and in Texas and Arizona, where local regional types are perpetuated. What these states have done and are doing, an informed citizenry and an artistically alert architectural profession may do for other areas of our country. 18 America’s great intermountain area was settled from two sources. Ohio, southern Michigan, northern Illinois and Indiana, southern Wisconsin, and parts of Iowa and Kansas were peopled mainly by Northerners, while Kentucky, Tennessee, and the New South were recruited from Virginia and the South Atlantic seaboard. With this westward movement of peoples—one of the great treks of human history—building forms known in the East reached the Middle West for the first time. However, the settlers in the western country could not immediately duplicate the structures which they had left behind in their home states. For the first few years they resorted almost exclusively to the log cabin. This type of structure, which played so large a part in the development of the West, was of north European origin and was first introduced into America by the Swedes who settled on the Delaware River in 1638. Eventually adopted by the Pennsylvania Germans, the Scotch-Irish, and other restless folk who settled the West, it became the universal structural form in all pioneer wood-bearing sections of the country. In fact, “the log cabin was exactly what the pioneer needed.” It was “a type of habitation that could be built of materials taken from the land in clearing it” for cultivation. It could be “put together with the same tool used in felling the trees; and it presented a combination of economy and convenience admirably adapted to the westward movement.” Houses, jails, schools, churches, and courthouses alike were built in this manner. The early cabins were of one or two rooms, but by the addition of appendages they were considerably amplified. Often the Southern settler orientated his home so that the prevailing summer breezes were directed through a “dogtrot” porch connecting the kitchen and the main cabin. Such a breezeway was a pleasantly cool spot in summer. It served as the family washroom, complete with bench for water bucket and wash basin, and as a storage place for the kitchen firewood. Chimneys were at first of logs. The next development came with the construction of squared-log structures of one or two stories with stone foundations and stone or brick chimneys. In plan these houses were not unlike types found beyond the mountains. In fact, after clapboards became available, many a house of such construction was converted into what, from all outward signs, appears to be a framed house. 19 Eventually the settlers turned to the more permanent materials; and in Kentucky, particularly in the bluegrass region, small houses of stone or brick appeared. In time these smaller habitations became tenant houses or slave quarters, and the master built for his family a great brick mansion. Brick came into vogue about 1786, just as the Georgian manner went out of use and the Federal style came in. As a result, Kentucky has many excellent examples of

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such architecture, 20 as have Tennessee and other parts of the New South. 21 Some of the pioneers who came over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee eventually pushed onward to become settlers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This settlement antedated the movement of New Englanders westward and was largely participated in by those Southern hunter-pioneers who, having seen service in the Indian wars, were accustomed to rough life in the open. The Ohio and the Mississippi formed the highways by which many of these backwoodsmen came westward. Gradually they chopped their way northward and westward along the wooded banks of the tributary streams, not as yet venturing out upon the open prairie. These settlers covered roughly the southern half of the states mentioned, there meeting emigrants from New England and the Middle Atlantic who, after 1830, swarmed into the northern areas. These settlers from the South, recalling the open, airy structures of their home states, erected houses as nearly as possible like those which they had left behind. The settlers from New England built structures similar to those in which they had dwelt beyond the mountains. South of a line roughly marked by the Old National Road, one still finds this architecture of Southern lineage. It exhibits a predilection for brick as a structural material, a symmetrical arrangement of structures and their wings and appendages, detached service buildings, classical frontal porticoes, open two-story galleries, wide central halls, and high ceilings. 22 North of this line are buildings of Yankee lineage. Many who had lived in Early American homes, i.e., homes erected before 1720, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, built edifices of a similar plan in northern Ohio, despite the fact that such houses had passed out of fashion in the East seventy-five years before. Moreover, since carpenters were no longer versed in Early American carpentry, they dressed these old-fashioned plans out in the latest Federal-style forms. To be sure, as time went on, these compact New England plans were modified to accord with life as it was lived in the West and with the changed climatic scene. Thus Yankee architecture spread across the Middle West. 23 It is to be remembered, however, that Yankees sometimes settled in southern situations, like Marietta on the Ohio, and that Southerners, upon occasion, penetrated to northern points like Galena, Illinois. The accent upon religious freedom in Article I of the Ordinance of 1787 encouraged sects of all kinds to settle in the Northwest Territory. Thus came Moravians, Mormons, Rappites, Zoarites, Mennonites, Dunkers, Shakers, Quakers, and Catholics, besides adherents of all sorts of Protestant faiths, each faith bringing its own type of meetinghouse, a little white church or a temple. The result was a variety of ecclesiastical architecture. On August 1, 1792, the governor and judges of the Northwest Territory adopted an act “directing the building and establishing of a court-house and county jail...in every county.” By this legislation the officials of the territory provided an architectural setting for the legal business of the region. In the rural districts of the Old Northwest these structures became, as often they remain today, the most important edifice within a county.

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Article III declared: “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Out of this provision and the subsequent enabling legislation grew the public school system and the many colleges and universities, denomi­national and otherwise, that early arose in this region. In addition to the movement of Americans into the Old Northwest, we must mention also the marked infiltrations from Europe with concentrated settlements here and there. As early as 1826, Timothy Flint remarked the curious mixture of races and classes in the West, all commingled in “a spirit of adventurous enterprise.” What a melting pot the Northwest was to become during the next forty years can be fathomed only by an examination of European immigration into the area during these years. Hither came Cornishmen to the lead mines of southwestern Wisconsin, Welshmen to Ohio and Wisconsin. The Irish settled in great numbers in most of the states; and there were heavy concentrations of Germans at Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; and German-Swiss at Highland, Illinois, with other settlements at Vevay, Indiana, and New Glarus, Wisconsin. The Dutch came to Holland, Zeeland, and Grand Rapids in Michigan, also to Wisconsin and Illinois; the Norwegians to northern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin; and the Swedes and Danes to Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 24 Where concentrated, each of these groups has to a degree influenced architectural expression, sometimes as to style, again as to plan and arrangement, but more frequently as to construction and craftsmanship. When the Northwest Territory was opened, architecture upon the Atlantic seaboard had passed through the Colonial period, already described, and the Federal style—a sort of American Empire—was in vogue. This was to prevail until about 1820, when the Greek Revival set in. This latter somewhat archaeological manner, introduced into America by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820), became the principal American architectural vernacular between 1820 and the Civil War. American builders knew little about Greek construction, but they employed current methods of building to achieve the classical forms which they copied from builders’ handbooks which circulated widely. Marble, the popular antique material, was, of course, out of the question, but temple-like structures of stone, brick, and even of wood were erected to serve as residences, churches, and public buildings. In general, it was the Greek Revival—in its heyday during the developing period of the Old Northwest—which followed the log cabin when better homes could be built. 25 The Greek Revival exhibited wide regional adaptations. Another style coming to us from England was the Gothic Revival. Beginning as a style for churches, this romantic vogue was used mainly for residences, schools, and college buildings. Little was understood of medieval construction, however, and whatever Gothic quality was achieved was the result of copying medieval ornamental details from imported architectural handbooks. Of course all of this has little to do with regional expression, except as local usages and traits emerged within the confines of a revived historical medium.

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Meanwhile the tide of settlement moved westward. In 1836, four hundred and fifty steamboats helped bring to Chicago throngs of Easterners, most of whom outfitted here for the journey onward. “The Yankees,” says Nida, “quickly took possession of all the woodlands and knowing little of how to farm the open prairie, refused to abandon the timbered regions until all were taken. Then some moved out on the higher prairies and fortune smiled on them.” 26 Building a home upon a treeless prairie was not an easy task. If the prairie was near a wood, logs for a house might be purchased. But often there was no timber and the settler had no funds with which to buy. So he had to content himself with indigenous materials. Thus the sod house came into being. Such houses were made of sods two feet long, eighteen inches wide, and four inches thick. Cut out with a spade, they were laid in a wall much like bricks and held together with wooden stakes driven through two or more courses. If a roof of shingles could not be secured, the pioneer had to content himself with a covering of turf or straw. However, the introduction of sawmills in the timbered portions in time solved the problem and frame houses replaced the sod cabins. By this time the balloon frame, invented by a Chicago Yankee, George Washington Snow (1797–1870), to save precious lumber, had come into use. First employed in the fast-growing town on Lake Michigan in 1833, the balloon frame soon spread over the prairies and in time became, as it is today, the typical constructive scheme for light timber buildings. 27 Presently roads, canals, and eventually railroads made possible a wider distribution of structural materials. The story that has been related of architecture in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana was repeated upon every new frontier of the American plowman. In Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska the log cabin and sod house were followed by frame houses of questionable utility and little artistic merit, these, in time, to be supplanted by better-planned and happier structures. And so the story has run in each new community—an evolution from the flimsy, crude, and ugly to better and more appropriate types. As civilization moved westward across the continent, the transplanted New Englandism of the Old Northwest, together with purer strains carried thither from New England itself, reached the Pacific slope. At Astoria, Oregon City, Portland, Salem, and other early settlements in the new Northwest, AngloSaxon architectural notions, modified to meet local conditions, brought forth simple and well-proportioned structural types. Plentiful wood in the Pacific Northwest again made possible the cabin of horizontal logs which is to this day manifest in the Mountain States. This same wood made possible also the jigsaw monstrosities of the Victorian era. Many a Yankee family settled in Hispanic California, where the old houses which they reared exhibit a happy commingling of the forms appropriate to the use of adobe as a building material with utilities characteristic of New England. Thus resulted the so-called Monterey style—a type which combines the heavy adobe walls, the overhanging balcony, and the patio of Spanish precedent with the deep-revealed double-hung windows, the picket fences, and the roofs of split shingles reminiscent of New England. 28

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Another type, currently enjoying a revival, is the Western ranch house, which incorporates traits growing out of American building experience upon the great sheep and cattle ranches of the West and Southwest. Nor must one omit the ubiquitous wooden bungalow, allegedly of Oriental (Indian) origin, which blanketed the Pacific Coast, then swept the nation to the detriment of more appropriate and indigenous cottage types in many regions. In addition to the well-defined regions discussed above, there are many fringe areas where cultures meet with resultant mixed architectural expressions. Texas is a good example with its clear references to the Old South, Negro life, Mexican infiltrations, and ranch life. Here the wood building of the eastern pineries gives over to adobe construction as one moves southwestward. In Utah, also, the Yankee building habits of the Mormons were refashioned to include the adobe and granite construction which a new habitat afforded. The results were striking. The rapid industrialization which followed the Civil War radically affected our social and artistic continuity. We witnessed the rise of industrial cities in what had been largely an agrarian scene and the accumulation of great fortunes from lumber, meat packing, grain, steel, oil, and manufacturing. The bulk of the nation’s business came into the control of great corporations. Labor became highly organized, and struggles between labor and management developed. These were indeed important changes. The old order was passing; a new order was replacing it. From this time on, more careful social and economic planning became necessary. This resulted in antitrust laws, civil service reforms, the regulation of public utilities and common carriers, workmen’s liability, child labor laws, collective bargaining of labor, arbitration of labor disputes, the imposition of income taxes, and the enfranchisement of women. Meanwhile, over the nation swept every architectural fad, native or imported, that reached our Atlantic seaboard. First it was the French Renaissance of Richard Morris Hunt (1828–95), first native-born American to obtain a diploma from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. His work, based upon a study of French chateau architecture and the pavilions of the Louvre, bristled with towers, turrets, and mansard roofs. His W. K. Vanderbilt house (1879–81) in New York, while beautiful architecturally, was neither American nor regional. 29 Shortly, H. H. Richardson (1836–86) returned from Paris to practice in Boston. Using the time-honored Romanesque monuments of southern France and northern Spain as models, he designed robust stone structures of picturesque mass and romantic interest. His masterpiece, Trinity Church in Boston, was widely acclaimed and, as a result, he received commissions for buildings throughout the nation. In fact, the vogue for the Richardsonian Romanesque became so pronounced that in the eighteen-eighties and nineties it was proclaimed the national style. 30 Soon Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909) returned from study abroad to enter a three-year tenure in the office of Richardson. Following this experience

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he joined Mead and Bigelow in New York City in the practice of architecture. In 1879 the firm of McKim, Mead, and White was formed when Stanford White replaced Bigelow. Rejecting the popular Romanesque, McKim, Mead, and White practiced a variety of refined classic design based upon the French néo-Grec. This change was most acceptable to a nation schooled to the quiet simplicity of the Greek Revival and already tired of the restless, if picturesque, silhouettes of Richardson and Hunt. The Neo-Classic of McKim achieved a genuine rebirth in the snow-white buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and from then on the nation welcomed designs of classic purity for its schools, libraries, courthouses, and other public structures. 31 To be sure, these were not the only styles in which architects attempted to express the nation’s changing social needs. Indeed, added to this battle of the styles were experiments in Neo-Gothic, Neo-Byzantine, Neo-Colonial, and even Neo-Egyptian. The results of these changeful modes are plainly visible in cities throughout the country, and the picture is not a happy one. The whole approach appears to have been at fault. For one thing, the architectural profession, having become unified nationally about this time, began to exert an important role in American culture. Too much emphasis was placed upon style as such, rather than upon functional solutions of our building problems. Indeed, it was generally believed that there should be a unified national style. How wrong these tenets were it remained for men like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to demonstrate later. If Boston and New York may be said to have been the foci of post–Civil War architectural activity, under the leadership of Sullivan that focus was to shift to Chicago and the Midwest. Born in New England, Sullivan was trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in Paris. In 1881 he came to Chicago, where he joined in a partnership with Denkmar Adler to practice architecture. Having announced his philosophy that architectural form should follow function, Sullivan proceeded to apply this logic to the solution of professional commissions entrusted to his firm. Meanwhile he converted to his doctrine of architectural independence a group of brilliant young architects who had been attracted to Chicago by the building activity that followed the Great Fire. Among these were Frank Lloyd Wright, Dwight Perkins, George G. Elmslie, Irving K. Pond, Hugh Garden, George Maher, Max Dunning, Walter Burley Griffin, and others who constituted the little group of modernists who came to be known in architectural circles as the Chicago school. Out of the work of these men and a group of followers, there grew a regional type which emphasized horizontal lines and wide overhangs and was widely hailed as the prairie style. Except for the work of Wright, who has never surrendered, a revived traditionalism spelled doom for this movement. However, Wright’s sons, his pupils Barry Byrne and George Fred Keck, and younger disciples carry on in an independent vein. While this Chicago school concerned itself largely with aesthetic considerations, others were pioneering in the means to an expression of functional form in newer structural materials, like steel and concrete, which

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luckily at this time became economically available to American builders. This movement was participated in by three prominent firms of architects who sought to house the growing business of the Illinois metropolis in multiple-storied structures. The heads of these firms and the men most importantly associated with this development were William Holabird (1854–1923), William LeBaron Jenney (1832–1907), and Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912). Before 1883, masonry structures were of the Richardsonian wall-bearing type. Late in that year, Jenney was commissioned to design the Home Insurance Building. In this edifice, for the first time in history, Jenney carried the weight of his structure not upon the walls but upon a skeleton framework of iron concealed within the walls—cast-iron columns and wrought-iron I-beams. While this building was under construction, the Carnegie-Phipps Steel Company turned out the first of its Bessemer steel beams and asked permission to substitute these for iron beams in the upper floors. This agreed to, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago became the first of all skyscrapers and the progenitor of a movement that was to culminate in New York’s Empire State Building. Other Chicago buildings in this line of development were the Tacoma Building (1888), the Rand-McNally building (1889), which was the first to have an all-steel frame, and the Monadnock Block (1891). For some time, however, engineering and aesthetics went separate ways, and these early skyscrapers were sheathed in traditional raiment. It remained for Adler and Sullivan, in the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1891), first to express adequately the structural frame of the building in its external lines. This was achieved by giving the vertical members, which carry the main loads, dominance over the horizontal members, which carry the loads of one floor only. Carrying this idea further, Sullivan succeeded in expressing in even more beautiful external form the internal steel structure of the Guaranty Trust Building in Buffalo, New York (1895). This noble and practical demonstration of his doctrine of function versus form set a precedent that was to shape all subsequent skyscraper design. 32 Meanwhile new materials, new systems of construction, and new inventions—further results of industrialization—came to influence American life and architecture. Consider the consequences of the internal-combustion engine and its derivatives, the automobile and the airplane. In the wake of these inventions came garages, private and public, filling stations, great automotive factories, parking areas and buildings, hangars, airports, superhighways, and a streamlining of life in general. Ponder also the possible architectural implications of aluminum, enameled steel, glass, plastics, air conditioning, radio, and television! Thus, in spite of fitful fads of eclecticism and flashbacks to traditionalism, an architecture expressive of current American life and thought is definitely, if slowly, emerging. Today the emphasis is less and less upon the superficialities of style and more upon living, functional forms. The important trends in architecture are not the result of personal caprice, but the product of deep-moving social forces; whatever its pattern, there is an abiding continuum that indelibly stamps American architecture as truly American.

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From what has been said, it will be discerned that there are two forces at work in American architecture—one centrifugal, the other centripetal. The first comes about through our strong democratic nationalism, a fairly common pattern of folkways, easy means of communication and transportation, a wide distribution of architectural information in periodical literature and books, new nationally distributed inventions, and a general gregariousness of thought which prompts the Smiths of Kansas City to want a house like that of the Joneses in Santa Barbara. These factors tend to break down regional differences. The second force results from our extended geography, with corresponding climatic variations, topographies ranging from desert to alpine, and vegetation ranging from semitropical to north temperate. If nature were allowed to take her course, regional differences, both social and artistic, would be far more pronounced than they are. In view of all these variables, a unified national architectural expression is not to be expected or desired. In our American states, society will never be identical, and, even if it were, climate and other environmental factors would prevent a uniformity of architectural expression. Architecture is a living, dynamic social expression. Creation is not yet complete. New and significant regional forms are yet to be expected.

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Introduction to excerpts from The South in Architecture

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The South in Architecture documents

historical and regionalist, are

the Dancy Lectures of 1941, a

informed by interventionist ethics, for

biannual lectureship launched in 1939

which they are considered important

for distinguished scholars of literature

precursors to the critical regionalism

at Alabama College. Under the guise

of Tzonis, Lefaivre, and Frampton.

of acknowledging contributions of

Set against the totalitarianism of the

the American South to architecture,

Nazis and critical of the hegemony of

Lewis Mumford sought to tease out

universal civilization, Mumford’s call

the inextricable linkage he felt lay

for a balance between the universal

between architectural forms and

and the regional through architecture

social forces. He also sought to

is both unique and powerful.

restate his concept of architectural regionalism—a synthesis of the

The excerpts collected here are from

universal/classical and regional/

the first and second lectures, “The

romantic tendencies in architecture.

Basis for American Form” and “The

Architecture is a field capable of

Universalism of Thomas Jefferson.” ii

giving, in Mumford’s words, “form

One of Mumford’s important insights,

and order to democratic civilization,”

often passed over by recent critics of

in which stewardship of the land,

regionalism, can be found in the first:

community, and health are priorities. i

“Every culture must both be itself and

As such it should acknowledge

transcend itself.” iii

region, because it is through the physical and cultural ties to a place that the reality of supply and demand, ecological balance, and scale of social interaction are manifest.

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was one of the twentieth century’s leading intellectuals. By turns journalist, critic, and academician, he was the author of more than twenty books and over one thousand articles and reviews on subjects ranging from art and literature to the histories of technology and urbanism.

These lectures were delivered to cadets who were about to leave for war. Mumford walks a fine line, making a case for regionalism while criticizing the “barbarous and anti-human” nationalism and identity politics employed by the Nazis. The U.S. had not yet officially entered into the war, and a vigorous interventionists-isolationists debate was under way. Mumford, an interventionist, called the United States’ lack of participation the “end of civilization” and likened it to a brush fire rushing toward a neighbor’s house—a situation in which one is ethically bound to act. His four lectures, although primarily

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Excerpts from The South in Architecture Originally published in The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1941; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1967): 21–32; 51–52. Reprinted courtesy of The Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright 1941 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss.

The first thing to remember, perhaps, is that the people who came to America did not magically transform their personalities as soon as their feet touched the earth of the new continent: they were still Spaniards, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Swedes, Frenchmen. There was no culture here that they respected sufficiently to take over as a whole. The hard pressure of necessity made them adopt eventually some of the Indian’s ways; but it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that a new frontier type emerged among the trappers and hunters. Not merely were the original American colonies outposts of Europe: they were actually closer in some ways to their medieval past than they were to the life that flourished in the courts and capital cities of contemporary Europe. Just as the colonization movement itself had in it some of the original spirit of the Crusades, so the new settlements resembled not a little the towns that were carved out of Northern Europe in the thirteenth century. These new settlers had, for the most part, no romantic love of the wilderness; and they were not at home in it: a century or two must pass before the white man felt secure enough to value the wilderness because it was wild and to turn his back on his fellows because his hard ego would conform to no other human will than his own. Whatever people saw or heard in this new land had value to them at first largely because it reminded them of Europe: in that spirit, you will remember, they called one of our American thrushes a robin redbreast, though one must be almost blind to both color and size before one can confuse the two species. It was natural, therefore, that the houses they erected, after the first hardship of living in caves or dugouts or huts, were houses of a definitely European pattern. North of Mexico, the architecture of the Indian counted for nothing: neither the tepee nor the Iroquois long houses left an impression on the new settlers. Even the log cabin was not a primitive adaptation to the forest culture: it came through imitation of the Swedes, who brought over their traditional form of log-building: a very convenient form, for both building and military defense, in the early days. The gradual adaptation of European modes of construction to American climatic and technical conditions is one of the most interesting sides of our

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architectural history. Although houses of clapboard and shingle were known both in Holland and in England in the seventeenth century, it took some experience of the rigors of a Northern American winter before the half-timbered houses of typical Elizabethan design were covered over with an extra layer of clapboard, to prevent leakage and to preserve warmth; and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that our typical light frame construction, with an air space to serve for insulation, became a characteristic American form. That change awaited not merely the development of sawmills; it also awaited the mechanical production of cheap nails, to serve as substitutes for the heavy wooden pegs that were necessary, along with a cutting of joints, when heavy beams were in use. Recently I had occasion to raise the roof of the century-old farmhouse in which I live; and I was amused to hear the chief carpenter rail at the clumsy mode of construction used in the old house, in comparison with that which he was using; there was no antiquarian piety in his voice, for he knew—and he was right—that the mode of construction now followed involves a smaller wastage of lumber and of man power, for a more effective result. Since there was a complete dearth of professional architects, until Peter Harrison appeared in Newport in the middle of the eighteenth century, the designs of American buildings were usually drawn at second hand from the current pattern books of the period; and these designs were carried out with such local modifications as lack of labor, lack of materials, or lack of taste might suggest. These subtle changes are precisely what gives our early provincial work much of its freshness and charm. But the builders’ concern with plans and layouts prepared for countries with quite different climatic and social conditions acted as a brake upon American invention. It is much easier to copy ornament than to find out all that needs to be found out about the geology, the soil, the climate, the working conditions, and the sacred customs of the neighborhood for which a building is designed; and the truth is that although there were many empirical improvements in American architecture to adapt it more closely to its environment, the conscious effort to make full use of regional resources and regional opportunities, in the design itself, goes back no farther than the eighteen-eighties. In some measure this judgment contradicts the popular notion about American inventiveness. Did not our early architects, from Jefferson on, experiment with new geometrical designs, like that for the octagon house, as a rational modern ground plan? Did not we improve the heating systems of our homes, first by the Franklin stove, then by a central hot-air furnace, and then by steam or hot-water heating? Is the skyscraper not a unique example of the force of the American imagination, making use of its peculiar opportunities, without a cramping regard for Old World precedents? I would not take away any luster from these inventions; but I would simply point out that they were, for the most part, as little concerned with regional adaptation as were the cruder plans and methods that were derived from the Old World. Take for example a capital matter: adaptation to our trying American climate, with the extremes of temperature that prevail in the North and the subtropical conditions that

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exist in large portions of the South. To achieve an architectural adaptation to these conditions is not a mere matter of adding a system for heating or cooling the structure: it is a matter of orienting it for sunlight and summer winds; it is a matter of differentiating the use and the amount of window space on the north and the south sides of the structure; it is a matter of providing a means of altering the amount of light and insulation according to the season of the year and the time of the day. Our current systems of air-conditioning are exceedingly crude and unbearably expensive, because architects have for the most part so little real insight into the facts of climate and weather in relation to human physiology: perhaps the most advanced technical adaptation that has so far been made was the old-fashioned slatted shutter, which controlled both the amount of heat and light that entered a room. The shutter was in effect a removable wall, until architects began to treat it as an ornament and fasten it permanently to the outside wall. If we are to have any conspicuous advance in the adaptation of American buildings to climate, I hazard the prediction that it will be along the lines opened originally by the use of the shutter, that is, by the provision of removable walls. In future, instead of conceiving of a building as built of permanent walls, broken by permanent windows, our architects will use the resources of modern fabrication to create houses with double or perhaps triple walls: one to control light, one to control heat, and one to control the entrance of living creatures, from insects to people. Such buildings will open or contract according to the season or the time of day, according to the demand of the occupants for privacy or for exposure, for retirement or for oneness with the outside world. Our climate, even apart from our social needs, requires such flexible forms of construction: yet for lack of regional insight our mechanical ingenuity has gone into absurdities like our present air-conditioning systems, which, if they were widely adopted, would in most parts of the country make an impossible demand upon the water supply. The forms of building that prevail in any region reflect the degree of social discovery and self-awareness that prevails there. With respect to materials the problem before the American architect was a much simpler one—if only because in the early days there was usually, in contrast to Europe, wood to burn. Perhaps the best part of our American architectural tradition, certainly the most homely part of it, reflects our expertness in using wood; and a recent observer of American architecture, the distinguished Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion, has noted that the wooden clapboard house, which has formed a stable continuous tradition for three centuries in America, has been more vital and more consistent than any surviving tradition in Europe. We shall see when we come to deal with Richardson that his understanding and his further modification of this tradition constitute one of his highest achievements. But with brick and stone the case was a little different. It took time to explore the resources of clay and stone, to test out their hardness, their ability to stand fire, their weathering qualities. Native resources are not always immediately visible; and when they are, there are often difficulties

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of transportation to overcome. Jefferson, for example, believed in the use of indigenous materials, and tried to use some of the local stone—a schist—for the capitals of his University of Virginia buildings. But he was disappointed: the stone proved to be coarse and crumbly, altogether unsuited to the refined carving he had in mind. A modern architect, faced with the same problem, might have altered the mode of ornament and exploited the coarseness itself as an indigenous quality. But given Jefferson’s ideas of classical form, the very possibility of changing the mode of decoration simply could not have occurred to him. So he procured marble from a distant quarry, even as he reached across to Italy to import a couple of Italian stone-carvers to cut these capitals. You will note that even in the use of materials, to say nothing of much more complicated adaptations, the regional attributes of architecture do not at first disclose themselves. People often talk about regional characters as if they were the same thing as the aboriginal characters: the regional is identified with the rough, the primitive, the purely local. That is a serious mistake. Since the adaptation of a culture to a particular environment is a long, complicated process, a full-blown regional character is the last to emerge. We can see this very plainly in wine culture. It is only after hundreds of years of planting grape vines and making wine that the people of Burgundy, say, developed the grapes that were specially fit for their soil; and it needed much further sampling before one patch of soil could be distinguished from another, by reason of subtle differences of flavor in the wines. That kind of co-operation and re-adaptation and development is what is necessary to produce a truly regional character. The very last refinement of regional culture in wine-making is limited perhaps to an acre or two of ground; and centuries were needed before the grape, the soil, the skill in wine-making, and the sensitivity in wine-tasting were brought into a harmonious partnership. The right grape is not always indigenous to the spot where the best wine can be made. It takes generations before a regional product can be achieved. So it is with architectural forms. We are only beginning to know enough about ourselves and about our environment to create a regional architecture. Regionalism is not a matter of using the most available local material, or of copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for want of anything better, a century or two ago. Regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soil but they reflect the current conditions of culture in the region. Now still one other error must be guarded against, and this is the notion that the regional should be identified with the self-sufficient or the self-contained. As far as sociologists can find out, there has never been a human culture that was entirely self-contained in both time and space: those cultures which have been nearest to this condition have been extremely primitive and have ranked low in their capacity for self-development. This is another way of saying that every regional culture necessarily has a universal side to it. It is steadily open to influences which come from other parts of the world, and from other cultures, separated from the local region in space or time or both together. It would be

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useful if we formed the habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of universal—remembering the constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it. To make the best use of local resources, we must often seek help from people or ideas or technical methods that originate elsewhere. These outside influences must usually be modified; they must always be assimilated. Sometimes they are too numerous, as was the case with the various religious cults that Imperial Rome sought to take to her bosom; sometimes they are too overwhelming, as was the case when highly organized machine industry wiped out the handicraft industries that might often have survived on a basis of local service, but could not compete with the machine in a distant market. But the drama of human develop­ment centers in part on this tension between the regional and the universal. As with a human being, every culture must both be itself and transcend itself: it must make the most of its limitations and must pass beyond them; it must be open to fresh experience and yet it must maintain its integrity. In no other art is that process more sharply focused than in architecture. ... Now there are two elements in every architecture, indeed in every esthetic or cultural expression. One of them is the local, the time-bound, that which adapts itself to special human capacities and circumstances, that belongs to a particular people and a particular soil and a particular set of economic and political institutions. Let us call this the regional element, though one must of course include in this term far more than the purely geographic characteristics. The other element is the universal: this element passes over boundaries and frontiers; it unites in a common bond people of the most diverse races and temperaments; it transcends the local, the limited, the partial. This universal element is what makes it possible for us to read Homer today, and to feel as sympathetic toward Odysseus as we do to a contemporary refugee who is buffeted from one country to another, or to enjoy the encounter of Nausicaä and Homer’s battered hero, with perhaps even a little greater relish than one does the latest situation between a Hollywood actress and her male counterpart in a current motion picture. Without the existence of that universal element, which usually reaches its highest and widest expression in religion, mankind would still live only at the brute level of immediate impulses, sensations, habits; and there would be a deep unbridgeable gulf between the peoples of the earth.

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Introduction to “Regionalism within Modernism”

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This article emerged from a seminar

which more specifically deals with

conducted by the Aga Khan Award for

the author’s sense that regions

Architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in

and regionalist practices are more

1985. The symposium was one of the

complex than first thought, but

last in a series entitled “Architectural

Ozkan’s original analysis remains

Transformations in the Islamic

definitive.

World” and was published under the title Regionalism in Architecture. It was one of fifteen international

Suha Ozkan (b. 1945) is the secretary general of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, an architect, historian, theorist, and administrator.

seminars convened by the Aga Khan throughout Asia and east Africa to explore issues and concerns relative to Islamic culture as expressed through architecture. Written by Suha Ozkan, then the secretary general of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, this article served as the introduction to the seminar and set the stage for discussion. It is an analytic piece that lays out a sober taxonomy of theoretical and practical approaches to architecture in the Islamic world as it has encountered the effects of rapid modernization. Although primarily a critical study, it betrays a subtle polemic striving for a “middle way” between modernism—with its subtheme of internationalism and universal architectural values—and regionalism. To Ozkan, regionalism should be socially, culturally, and geographically specific and should consider the entirety of a region. It is a means by which the difficulties of cultural identity that accompany major societal transformation can be ameliorated. A few years later, in collaboration with Robert Powell, Ozkan refined and expanded on the analysis presented here in an article entitled “A Taxonomy of Regionalism,” i

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Regionalism within Modernism Originally published in Regionalism in Architecture, Robert Powell, editor, (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985), 8–15. Reprinted courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the author.

With the all-obliterating spread of Modernism, the efforts which were made to highlight regional and local concerns were left without enough support to survive. Alvar Aalto found a medium to exercise his own kind of regionalism which allowed it to exist within the parameters of modernism, but one can find few other references to regionalism until the early seventies. There are notable exceptions, for example the works of Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry, Hassan Fathy, and Rifat Chadirji. During the first regional seminar of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Kuala Lumpur, we discussed issues related to Identity in Architecture. As far as architecture and design are concerned, it is very hard to talk about identity— except the identity a particular architect brings to his designs—without going into regionalism. A geographical region defines many aspects of a society both culturally and environmentally. Culture includes aspects of life and prevalent modes of expression. Natural environment includes climate and topography. A region, when properly defined, represents all of these in a very complex amalgamate. Modernism, through its sub-theme of internationalism, proclaimed universality and worldwide applicability of certain values of architecture and over the past sixty years, almost totally discarded all the “regional” building activity. The schools of architecture, the building industry, and popular “taste” all united in the reinforcement of internationalism until it became an ideology representing the aspirations of all sectors of modern society. For more than half a century internationalism in style became synonymous with the representation of contemporaneity. The main critical movement, as a reaction specifically to internationalism or implicitly to modernism, is regionalism. The regionalist approach recognizes the vernacular modes of building at the one extreme, and abstract regionalism at the other. Even though it covers such a wide array of attitudes, regionalism has respect to the local culture, to climate, and at times technology, at its core. If one has to classify the approaches, the following are the categories to be observed in regionalism, though of course the boundaries of separation are not too distinct. Firstly Vernacularism and secondly Modern-Regionalism.

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Vernacularism

Bernard Rudolfsky’s Architecture without Architects exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and the catalogue, which subsequently became an indispensable reference of vernacular architecture, pointed out an area that had been ignored for a very long time. By the mid-seventies vernacular architecture distinguished itself as an important source where the basic components of design such as climate, technology, culture, and related symbolism have existed and matured over the centuries of man’s involvement with architecture. Paul Oliver’s contribution in Shelter and Society and Shelter, Sign and Symbol cultivated the theoretical grounds of vernacular architecture. 1 He brought together the research of defined geographical areas of shelter in Africa, Greece, and Afghanistan which displayed remarkable examples of these ignored areas, not only as sources of inspiration for architect-designers but also as a viable alternative for solutions emerging in Third World countries. The research continued, especially in the academic and research organizations in the West, and has grown by leaps and bounds since the mid1970s onwards. There is now a fairly articulate stock of research covering the whole world. Both the vast research on vernacular modes of building and the cultures which generated it brought back genuine interest and admiration. The building tradition that has existed and excelled over centuries has been credited and recognized as a design approach within the realm of architectural design and its subsequent discourse. In a very broad classification we observe two approaches to vernacularism: first is the conservative attitude and second, the interpretative attitude. While both kinds of vernacularism have the ideals of bringing a new and contemporary existence to vernacular forms and spatial arrangements, they differ in the way they treat technology and community. The most important contributor to conservative vernacularism is Hassan Fathy. He devoted more than half a century of his professional life to bringing back to the vernacular mode, [a] building tradition in danger of extinction due to the massive post–World War II building activity. The architecture employed in this activity was indifferent to the community, its inherited traditional technology, local materials, and the natural environment. Fathy, single-handedly. strived to revive a building tradition and tried to grasp it on the eve of its disappearance. He was firm and uncompromising in incorporating the societal forces but was, at the same time, innovative in bringing architects’ know-how and design expertise onto the scene. He cherished the materials, technology, and art of building of Egyptian society and throughout his work brought a new life and meaning to them. The success of his regionalism varies. It did not work out well in the rural communities, whose distorted aspirations and values attached to their understanding of contemporaneity did not match the environment that Fathy offered them. Nevertheless, the meticulous and sophisticated architectural design, executed solely from local materials and means, displayed qualities for the generations to come. When Fathy adopted the same approach, but in a more durable material—stone instead of earth—this not only increased the

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acceptability but also offered him the opportunity to incorporate the finest examples of revived building crafts. Of course this category of building had to be private residences. While he displayed this design excellence in these buildings, the ideas he developed for the rural habitat echoed all over the world as a viable alternative solution for the action groups, like Craterre Development Workshop and ADAUA, who employed his ideas. Architects such as André Ravereau, Nader Khalili, Abdel Wahed EI-Wakil followed in his footsteps in vernacular technology. The interpretative version of vernacularism is referred to here as neovernacularism which has emerged as an approach to bringing a new life to vernacular heritage for new and contemporary functions. The widest area of the application of this approach is obviously the architecture for tourism and culture. During the short-term experience when tourists take their vacation, the regional vernacular becomes an integral part of the anticipated ambience. Therefore tourist developments became the pioneering example of neovernacularism. Since modern comfort, ease of construction, and maintenance are inevitably important factors, they utilized levels of technology which usually had nothing to do with those which existed regionally. Similarly with the infrastructure, heating, cooling, and technical services. In these efforts more of a lip service was given to the regional components, and therefore architecture became more of an expression of local shapes and forms where culture is also reduced to souvenirs and folklore. Like any other architectural involvement, these attempts met with the varying degrees of success, depending on the sincerity of the designer-architect; on whether they wanted to simply design a stage-set with pastiche or if they wished to create genuine spatial and architectural experience. Despite all the problems stemming from the preoccupation of imagemaking, these developments, being more in line with the local setting, created less oppres­sive environments. They also helped to develop a vocabulary of contemporary architecture which has its roots in the building tradition of a particular culture. In short, vernacularism and neo-vernacularism differ from each other mainly at the level of the user, labor for building, materials used, and the construction technology employed. This means a lot of difference in reference to the societal context. Neo-vernacularism approaches have dominated a vast amount of design activity to mainly accommodate habitation and tourism functions. It must be due to them being “taken for granted” or to their less innovative, more conformist nature that they did not generate any noteworthy or great architecture. The practitioners of this approach mainly became unknown or unnoticed architects. The applicability of this mode of design has limited validity, however, especially when small-scale units become a large building, e.g., a civic complex. The relevant guidance of vernacularism is limited, unless a reinterpretation is made or what has existed is stretched. Here the terminology has to be changed, as vernacularism represents only one, admittedly limited, section of regionalism.

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1

2

4

3

Hassan Fathy, Village of New Gourna, Luxor, Egypt, 1954. Fathy has attempted to build within that cultural heritage. His lack of success echoes the concerns of Doshi. FIG. 2 UNESCO/BREDA, Agricultural Training Centre, Nianing, Senegal, 1977. A labor-intensive building system developed to generate new and complete architectural language. FIG. 3 Raoul Snelder, Daara School, Malika, Dakar, Senegal. An intermediate technology developed to generate a new architectural language as an archetype for construction problems in a country with scarce building materials. FIG. 4 A building in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, 1985. A typical clip-on regionalism exercised on a mediocre modern building in an attempt to have it contextually relevant. FIG. 1

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Modern Regionalism

It should be repeated here again and must be clearly pointed out that what has been rejected by most of the regionalist architects is not modernism but internationalism. Modernism demands a respect for inherent qualities of building materials, expressiveness for structure, functional justifications for forms that constitute buildings. These abstract demands do not contradict much, in essence, with anything done by an architect who wishes to adopt a regionalist approach. Internationalism however, demanding the necessity to reduce the building to skin and bones, has a completely different line of discourse which is a well accommodated sub-theme in modernism. Therefore, it would not be wrong to stress that the polarity is between internationalism, which demands a global relevance for its existence, and regionalism, which seeks meaning and content under specific local conditions. To achieve the goals of the latter, modernism provides tools and techniques to cope with the problems. Additionally it also offers a code of ethics and categories of aesthetics by means of which the achievements can be assessed. Unlike vernacularism, modern regionalism can be employed at all scales of building activity, since it derives from the monumental architecture of the past, as well as to the civil architecture to which vernacularism has to confine itself. Modern regionalism in very broad terms can be handled by employing two categories of reference: concrete and abstract. Concrete regionalism accommodates all approaches to regional expressions which copy features, fragments, or entire buildings, in the region. When these buildings are loaded with spiritual values of symbolic relevance, they become much more acceptable in their new form, owing to the values attached to the original. Of course it brings a comfortable defense in support of the new, backed by the qualities of the old. In many cases, when the existence of contemporaneity in new is stressed, they become so well accepted that they are considered as being “ideal.” In this approach the mutual existence of rejection and acceptance of time has a “schizophrenic” mix. Contemporaneity is accepted by acknowledging the need to accommodate the requirements. This is further acknowledged by the use of contemporary materials and construction techniques. However the forms and spaces usually belong to the distant past. The concrete replication of the motives and achievements of the past now has a very comfortable cover as they are interpreted as references to the past. There is however a wide spectrum of architectural involvement from a thoughtful eclecticism to a worthless pastiche. The ethos of both extremes has not been spelled out properly and it demands elaboration. Therefore the references for judgment remain vague, and seemingly they will remain so for some time because a reaction to the Modern Movement and the achievements of post-modernism—which definitely covers what we call here concrete regionalism—has not yet developed its own ethos. To judge this against the ethics and aesthetics of Modernism would not be fair. The vacuum this creates is dangerous because it would lead to an “anything goes” situation, which probably is what has been happening all over the world, especially in

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5

6

7

Balkrishna Doshi, Sangath, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, 1980. A series of simple vaults blending into the landscape. FIG. 6 Mohammad Makiya, Rafidain Bank, Kufa, Baghdad, 1968. Corbelling arches, protected recessed windows, and cantilevering eaves subtly refer to the sun-lit macro climate of Baghdad and its architectural past. FIG. 7 Sedad H. Eldem, Tashk Coffee House, Istanbul, 1956. A distinctive example of using elements of traditional architecture in contemporary context. FIG. 5

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the Islamic world, in which many of the countries that are building nowadays are situated. Abstracting elements from the past in order to derive building form from it constitutes what we call “abstract regionalism.” It is a very difficult and fine line to follow. It mainly incorporates the abstract qualities of a building, for example, massing, solids and void, proportions, sense of space, use of light, and structural principles in their reinterpreted form. It also endeavours to bring back to existence the cultural issues. An attempt is made to define in terms of design elements the prevalent culture of the region concerned. This is a long, tedious, and sometimes endless devotion to an ideal. The line which separates a solemn, praiseworthy, regionalist achievement from a worthless pastiche or a pot-pourri of the past is very thin and delicate. In the division of the two we still do not have any other criteria than that we have developed with modernism. To these, many of the contributors to regionalist endeavor have subscribed. These contributors to the regionalist modernism emphasized and developed certain important aspects of regionalism. Charles Correa has put his endeavor into a nutshell by entitling his approach: “Form follows climate” where he gives priority to the macro environment which determines many aspects of the built form. Rifat Chadirji generated an articulate façadism which refers back to the architectural heritage in Iraq. Mohammad Makiya, another eminent Iraqi, especially in his earlier buildings, searched for sublime regional expressions for modern buildings. Sedad Eldem has coupled a continuous search into sources of traditional architecture with a modern practice which derives from, and reinterprets, the findings in these sources. From the younger generation, Raj Rewal brings a contemporary existence to the traditional understanding of space and to its cultural implication. Rasem Badran, Doruk Pamir, Charles Boccara, and many others have elevated the quality of the contemporary architectural environment by employing the regional idiom, regional input, and environmental determinant. In Dhaka, the efforts of Muzharul Islam, from Bangladesh, to develop an architectural idiom from limited resources and technology is a noteworthy contribution to regionalism for future generations to study, explore, and develop.

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Introduction to “Cultural Continuum and Regional Identity in Architecture”

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The following essay resulted from

Chapter 5). ii Doshi sees India as a

the same seminar that featured Suha

society in which lifestyle, climate,

Ozkan’s essay, conducted by the Aga

building patterns, and local economies

Khan Award for Architecture in Dhaka,

were in sync until disrupted by

Bangladesh, in 1985. While both

globalization, industrialization, the

were important contributions to the

modernizing effects that accompanied

final seminar in the series, entitled

post-colonialization, the adoption

“Architectural Transformations in the

of alien models for architecture,

Islamic World,” Balkrishna Doshi’s

and the technological capability

essay defined and illustrated the

to ignore climate. These forces

meaningful center of that discussion,

stretch and reweave the web of

which had to do with the role

life according to new parameters,

architecture played in the continuity

resulting in a loss of confidence

of culture in regions undergoing rapid

and self-sufficiency. He accepts the

modernization.

benefits of modernization but not its logic, which values efficiency

Balkrishna V. Doshi has become

and universality over human dignity.

increasingly well known for his work

In the forms of the past he sees

in city planning and housing the poor

order and models for relationships

throughout the developing world, with

between families, communities, cities,

a special focus on India, where he

and regions. The value of building

lives and works. He has said that at

regionally—that is, working within

his firm, Vastu-Shilpa, architecture is

local economies, utilizing local labor, and acknowledging local material

fundamentally a social enterprise. The

and spatial associations—is that

form it takes is a result of personal

it strengthens local relationships.

expression informed by history, culture,

Regional building constructs a cultural

and human behavior, is the way in which

continuum that builds on the past,

it is appropriated by its inhabitants.

within the present, and into the future.

And secondly, the degree to which it is imbibed with a timeless and memorable presence. i

Balkrishna V. Doshi (b. 1927) is an architect, planner, and dean emeritus and distinguished professor at the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad.

Accordingly, the analysis he contributes here takes a somewhat psychological and social look at the problems facing architecture in the developing world—in the clash between modernity and tradition, world and region. His apprenticeship with Le Corbusier exposed him to the possibility that the progressive goals and promise of modernism could sit comfortably with respect for folk culture and history (see Le Corbusier,

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Balkrishna V. Doshi

Cultural Continuum and Regional Identity in Architecture Originally published in Regionalism in Architecture, Robert Powell, editor (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985), 87–91. Reprinted courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the author.

Introduction

The last few years have rightly witnessed a growing debate among the developing countries, particularly those which experienced intense colonization, about the state of architectural design and planning practices. The realization that Western models of architecture and urban planning introduced by the colonizing agencies, as well as the subsequent developments in the West, were not very suitable to their own resources and climatic circumstances and socio-cultural well-being has led to lot of healthy questioning. This has also required them to look into their own past heritage to understand the architectural and planning practices which evolved over centuries of adaptation and in few cases adoption. The theme of this Seminar, some of the recent publications like MIMAR, and a shifting emphasis in research areas among academics are indicative of a very subtle beginning in an extremely crucial aspect of built environment design: that of seeking beyond mere visual aspirations dominated by and large by the International Modern Movement, and exploring the abstract, cultural undercurrents which nourish society, using the built environment in its dual cause-and-effect role. This paper discusses two major parameters of this role of the built environment. It begins by dealing with more tangible issues, reviewing current design practices vis-à-vis the traditions and resource situation in India. Later it deals with the intangible parameters, which seeks to explain built form as a manifestation of socio-cultural institutions which are locked into a dynamic relationship nurturing and complementing each other. Search for a “Post-Modern” regional architecture

Pre-industrial architecture of any given region had the strength to serve the physical and spiritual needs of people, from a single family to the entire community. At the physical level, it embodied centuries of learning with regard to orientation, climate, building materials, and construction techniques. At the

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spiritual level, the built-form conveyed total harmony with the life-style in all its daily as well as seasonal rituals, unifying the socio-cultural and religious aspirations of the individuals and the community. To achieve this unity and to integrate physical and spiritual needs, due importance was given to nature and its basic laws. Nature was accepted as it is. Life-style and activity followed in consonance with nature and architecture with nature. Concern for resources and conservation of energy was reflected in all rituals, social actions, and very clearly in physical planning. The compactness of the town plan, building using thick walls with niches, and a variety of in-between elements like balconies, incorporated both the symbolic as well as social meaning. Jaisalmer, old Jaipur, and old Delhi are testimonies to such thinking. The application of such realistic and yet valueoriented attitudes, gave society a sense of confidence and a much needed feeling of self-sufficiency. External considerations were accepted under duress and were gradually absorbed to facilitate the continuance of the envisaged life-style. The transformation of the Mughal architecture to suit India is a case in point. In this process, the role played by everyone including the architect was that of shareholders in an enterprise. While the roles of each discipline may be demarcated, the final outcome expressed the multiple considerations that went into making it. That is how all different forms of art in India have, over the centuries, given birth to a vernacular idiom, sustained the culture, and, in the process, sustained itself. The transformation

Unfortunately, during the last two centuries, our concepts and life-styles have undergone considerable changes. Initially, it was the internal strife, then the foreign rule, then the destruction of small-scale home-based crafts which affected the nature of the social pattern. Subsequent emphasis on industrialization, the advent of new building materials, and a desire to “modernize” gave rise to different patterns of building and community-city planning. The models for such development were neither conceived on the basis of our climate, nor social needs, nor life-style, nor did they incorporate the attributes of the process mentioned earlier. The consequence was an increased use of resources, of energy and subsequent degradation of the environment. Today, our situation is even worse. We have a large and growing population below subsistency level, the natural resources are depleting, the forest cover is being used as fuel, and the metropolitan cities are expanding. Our physical environment is desolate, without trees, with isolated “modern” buildings surrounded by slums, and pollution is on the increase. Another disturbing factor is the high-technology–oriented industry in the metropolis and the neglect of cottage industry in the rural area. The rural-urban harmony and interdependence is broken in this process. All this is occurring in the villages, towns, and cities, which have a rich cultural heritage. What we constantly realize is the apparent contradiction

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between what we had and what we have now. Thus, we live in an atmosphere of contradictions because we like what we had but do not yet know well how to improve the present and ensure a better future. As a result, we attempt superficially certain measures in town and city planning, house designs, and housing layouts. The cultural heritage does not appeal to the heart of the younger generations—they do not wish to retain it since it does not symbolically or culturally belong to them. They look towards the new world, which they witness through the ever-expanding communication media. The young generation’s image is that of the outside world, because they do not have any clue of our own heritage The confusion we face today

Since Independence, either due to an urge to keep up with a rapidly modernizing economy, or lacking a societal concern, the profession has followed a different path. As against the traditional solutions which responded to the local resource and climate, the designer has opted for techniques and forms propagated by the new technology. The hot, impersonal bee-hives of flats, in concrete, in isolated locations, separated by unsuitable public spaces have led to social disintegration and environmental degradation. In settlement planning similar things followed. As against mixed land use which promoted economies of various types, the single function zones were created. This not only wasted space but also added strain on energy in transportation of goods and people. This situation, coupled with an irrelevant academic curriculum, and lack of professional leadership, developed a breed of professionals whose main interests revolved around the estate developers’ needs. Social responsibility and cultural values were too dangerous to seek for fear of losing the commission. Because of tempting commissions to build for an elite group which responds to an alien “modernity,” the professionals and the academic institutions failed to advocate the achievements and the essential order of the dynamic design process of the past. In the absence of this, a formal character of design was repeated without hesitation as the only solution. The cultural shock is even greater. It even makes the uninitiated question the basis of earlier life-styles and the worth of past architecture and city-planning practices. The conflict is between the “old” which was one’s own and the “new,” which though alien, is apparently impressive. A case in hand, at national level, is our more than half a million villagers with about 580 million population. Even today, after 38 years of independence, our rural economy is faced with the problems of shortages in food, clothing, shelter, educational and health facilities. This is the result of our initial emphasis on heavy industries and not on developing small and medium towns as integrated communities providing opportunities for a wholesome life. We have today extremes of development without proper links. We have sophisticated technology including the atomic power plants and jet airtransportation on the one hand, and bullock-cart on the other. A few cities are becoming overpopulated with the concentration of industries, and the smaller

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towns and villages are becoming depopulated due to lack of basic needs and work opportunities. In such a state of unbalanced development, what should be the priorities of architecture and planning? What is the so-called “true” architecture? Which end of the stick should we grasp first? Such a state of affairs, once it has set in, is difficult to correct. In such a situation, the technologies for production of basic needs are in great demand. The mass media, radio, television, and films have brought to the mostly uneducated population an awareness of the life in developed countries. As a consequence, the growing number of people dependent on a limited developed land area aspire for a new world, a world of plenty and comforts. New gadgets that are seen through the mass media become a fascination. The choice open to them is to search for a place where the happiness of their dream can be realized. The reaction naturally is to move to a better place. Thus movement from less developed to developed places takes place. No one is able to control this exodus. The emerging issues

We note that this situation is an unavoidable consequence of industrialization. What solution do we have for either the urban or the rural areas? Since the technological benefits should be given to the masses, irrespective of their location, what are we, as architects and planners, doing? Are we really developing a technology for orderly and contented living conditions for many, or are we generating through education and planning some ways of helping the rural population to have a better place or well con­ceived industrial activities for lean periods, or better tools for farming? In such situations, what kind of role can be expected from architecture and community planning? Since the entire development has depended on uncontrolled circumstances and has discounted “man,” what style of buildings can we expect? What can be taught to the coming generations? What professional services can we offer? Where do we really begin? The effects of such uncoordinated development has had more disastrous effects in developing countries than in the developed countries. For where can the poor nations find additional resources to rectify its ever-growing mistakes of blind imitation? The Indian cultural heritage and community environment

Over the centuries, Indian culture, through its socio-economic ramifications, has given a sense of security and yet allowed wide choices. In the traditional Indian society, one is not alone, but part of a community. Buildings are not built in isolation, but in groups leading to a total environment, merging buildings, spaces, and culture in a unified whole. The community shares everything, be it an economic activity or a festival. Unless this socio-cultural tradition is understood, the organization of buildings, streets, spaces, and their forms cannot be the desired fabric wherein the community wants to live. It is, therefore, necessary to talk about physical environment in terms of culture rather than only in terms of buildings, space, technology, or economy.

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The house form which has evolved in India, say in Ahmedabad, can be cited as an example. This form has behind it centuries of tradition, which not only ties the community of one generation together, but also the successive generations within the house. In the house plans, it is difficult to perceive this immediately, but seen through the minute activities and functions carried out in the house, it can be felt that there exists a strong sense of identity. This must be incorporated in designing new environments, and to do this, it is necessary to understand the socio-cultural patterns. The illustration of a simple village well, as an element representing a sociocultural pattern, has often been quoted. The water well is an institution which binds the community very strongly because this is where people meet each other daily, discuss their problems, find solace in their grief, and feel socially cared for. The village well over centuries has grown as a very prominent social institution. There are a large number of such manifestations in the old and existing institutions which tell us about the socio-cultural tradition of the community. Detailed study of these can provide us with a genuine understanding of the real com­munity needs, which must be given importance in architecture and design. Therefore, institutions became the primary design elements in creating an environment. Religious institutions, particularly the temple, through the ages have greatly influenced the community environment. There are temple cities in India which have survived for centuries because the religious institutions have provided the community with cultural stability, occupation, and guidance in its behavioral patterns. These also helped in establishing value systems and a strong conviction in continuous community belonging. For the institutions to survive, grow, expand, and be a part of the culture, there was an organizational structure evolved by the society. In the Ajanta and Ellora caves, while the building activity continued over centuries, the quality of execution and the craftsmanship continued to grow better. Today, the work assigned to an assistant or to a contractor cannot achieve the expected quality if the designer is absent for even a few months. In the case of these caves and temples, the chief architect or the “sthapati” would come, spend some time, and then go away. He perhaps would not come again, but the work went on through generations, with the quality remaining constant and often improving. This process had within it the built-in mechanism of community commitment and convictions passed down through generations. The generations of designers, builders, and craftsmen would continue to build the institution, each excelling the previous one, motivated by their commitment to remain true to the major principles and guidelines established by the sthapati with regard to the location, the materials, the technology, the design of the carvings, and the sense of depth. This suggests that within a main concept, an organizational system and a method must be developed to continue the work, to provide choice for participants to identify themselves with the work and thus generate excellence. This quality of transition, of commitment to the community, and the ability and sanction to interpret principles by individuals are very much in contrast to contemporary practices. There, perhaps, greater importance is given to the individual and his

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role, and not to the organization. People today, presumably, believe that when the individual dies, the organization also comes to an end. It is interesting to see therefore why Indian culture has survived through many centuries and why it is good in some ways. This is because, through centuries, institutions have evolved along with the living environment and provided a broad flexible structure which an individual has the “choice” to interpret in his own way. As a result, the commitment to the concept of community has been deep-rooted and this has tended to provide for total harmony. The built-in variations in all aspects of Indian life and activity-creation always provide an “open end” with regard to growth, evolution, and change. This is another very important aspect to remember. In our modern attitude to development planning, building, and designing, these issues, though basic, are often ignored when preconceived or alien strategies do not work and hence planning and designing become totally inefficient. Such attitudes to organization, structure, and design can be discovered in past Indian architecture, particularly that of the temples which have served as the most important catalytic institution to preserve the culture. In Indian architecture, the creators, the designers, thought about many functions other than just simply the basic functions the buildings should perform. The idea of a staircase performing only the function of movement, a window that of lighting and ventilation, or a roof that of providing shelter from the weather, are basically alien to Indian culture since such cannot satisfy the diverse needs of diverse groups. A staircase can mean many things, a place to sit or, if bigger, perhaps a place to sleep. All elements were considered as multifunctional. That is what Indian culture has grown with, and that is how the Indian temperament is built. Growth of buildings is not just additive but is basic to the balanced life. Therefore, all elements of the environment must be designed to satisfy more than one situation. This reminds one of Charles Eames’ description of a “lota,” the traditional vessel for fetching water, and also a conversation recorded in Vishnudharmottar Purana, a 12th-century treatise of arts. In the example of the lota, Charles Eames, with his highly developed sense, saw in it the total process of not only its making, its form, or its use as a container, but also in it the users’ various postures when carrying it from the well or the river, on the head or on the waist or in the hand. He also heard in it the sound of water, and therefore regarded the form of the lota as a demonstration of one of the most essential processes of design which is neither time- nor space-bound. How its design came about or who was the designer is not clearly known. The fact that it has so many attributes gives it a place in the history of design. In the other example from Vishnudharmottar Purana, the King asks Lord Markendeya how to build a shrine for Him so that the Lord is available for daily worship. In His reply, the Lord explains to the King the process of design and how to learn this process. Here, phonetics, poetry, literature, art, music, painting, and sculpture are mentioned as basic and successive tools of learning without which a designer

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cannot fulfill his task of building a temple cohesively related to the symbolic and functional aspects. It is apparent from the above that a good design must include several tangible and intangible functions: what Louis Kahn called the measurables and the unmeasurables, the physical and the spiritual or the symbolic. Directions for the future—the possibilities

With today’s technologies, it should be easy to build a new world, a world which can be linked with the past by building on the basic values, and with the future in terms of the well-being of a larger number of people. Planning will only succeed provided uncertainties about “values” are reduced to a minimum and not subject to pressures of immediate circumstances. Fortunately, we are becoming aware of the consequence of our present-day actions and we are dissatisfied. We realize that it is necessary to accept technological advances and explorations of new avenues for growth. It is of great importance to harness resources and energies to support the ever-increasing population. What we have not, perhaps, understood properly is a place for the technology. It is really a tool, but the tool has become a hammer which we can’t wield. Technology is not an end in itself. Unbridled technology can lead to overproduction resulting in wasteful consumption. Essentially, technology should be utilized in relation to man’s welfare. Our main aim should be to become industrious, not merely industrialized. By becoming industrious, that is, through skill and healthy competition and choice, we can have a better rapport between work that one enjoys doing and leisure as its counterpoint. Our approach should be based on using life, time, and space more fruitfully. With this the problem of quantity, that is, the needs of the large number of people, will be interlinked with quality. This will improve the values since quality will convert the quantity into an expression of life’s desire and will not belong to the realm of competition, because it will not be superfluous but inherently essential. To this end, what sort of planning and architecture is most helpful? What considerations should the professionals have, so that its expressions have a bearing on the history and the culture of the people? Should our architectural and community planning focus on social expectations, religious faith, aesthetic outlook, or only on economic affluence? It is accepted that we as professionals, with a limited field of control, cannot directly provide for the amelioration of economic conditions. We may, however, be able to decide on courses through which economic growth not only becomes possible but progressive. This we can do. On the other hand, we may not be able to change the social customs and manners of a people, but we can plan in a manner that provides for a healthy accommodation of these. The architect-planner naturally cannot preach any religious doctrine, but whatever the religious form, he can plan and provide for the individual or for the community, choices for prayers, for meditation, for ceremonies, or for festivals.

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In terms of operation and management for balanced growth, we need to discover scales which are self-sufficient in certain respects and, at the same time, inter-dependent for certain operations. We should define, at least to a close approximation, the scales of various operations for an individual, family, and community in villages, towns, and cities so that their mode of living is in relation not only to a cycle of 24 hours but also in relation to weekly, monthly, and annual needs. In this way every individual, who ultimately constitutes the community and the city, has his own choices for work, rest, reflection, and creation. Quality will naturally emerge in time, provided the entire process is nurtured with this faith. This should be the basis of planning or architecture. This is what we call culture, and the structures around which people like to throng are the “institutions of man.” We should search for our cultural “catalysts,” which become the institutions of man and which give life its meaning. In planning practices and in architectural expressions, this is what we have to look for and build.

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Introduction to “Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East”

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This article originally appeared in

any thoroughly regional work.

MIMAR: Architecture in Development,

Reminiscent of Patrick Geddes’s

a quarterly international journal

“regional survey” (a strategy adapted

published by the Aga Khan Award for

by Lewis Mumford), Boussora’s text

Architecture from 1981 to 1992. At its

reinforces the “region” in architectural

inception, it was the only international

regionalism.

journal that focused on architecture in the developing world; it was

Kenza Boussora (b. 1961) is an architect, author, and senior lecturer at Biskra University, Algeria.

intended to complement the award and its seminars on architecture in the modern Muslim world (see Ozkan and Doshi, Chapter 2). The journal promoted projects and architects who practiced a blend of Western modernism and indigenous architecture—an architecture that had visual, spatial, and material relevance to local cultures. Similar to developments in the 1930s and ’40s in America, architects in these countries sought a kind of “regional modernism” that would provide the benefits of modernity while mitigating the loss of cultural meaning. Kenza Boussora’s article appeared in one of the final issues of the magazine, and it represents a critical reappraisal of efforts at achieving regional modernism. The essay, which stems from her thesis work and is accordingly academic and thorough, begins, not unexpectedly, with an account of the negative effects of rapid development and the importation of Western architecture. “Regionalism” has been touted as the solution to this in both MIMAR and other Aga Khan publications, but it has, she finds, exhibited only limited success. Her solution is provocative and pragmatic, consisting of a rigorous inventory of regional features, meanings, and possibilities: a context for the production of

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Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East Originally published in Mimar: Architecture in Development 10, no. 3 (September 1990): 64–71. Reprinted courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the author.

In Algeria, as in other Middle Eastern countries, the rapid rate of development following independence, the oil boom, and industrialization has accelerated the importation of modern architecture to meet the growing demand for buildings. In many cases, the result has been not only technical, aesthetical, and social failures, but also a lack of consideration for the relationship between buildings and their environment. A growing wave of protest against the adoption of modern architecture is apparent not only amongst Middle Eastern architects, critics, and planners, but also in Western architectural literature about the Middle East. Alternative design approaches to modern architecture are being discussed and most of them focus on the concept of regionalism in architecture as a potential solution. The aims of this article are, firstly, to identify the problems resulting from the adoption of modern architecture in Algeria and in the Middle East generally; secondly, to identify the concept of regionalism in the literature; and thirdly, to assess the extent to which regionalism can be viable in solving the problems that result from the adoption of modernist architecture in these areas of the world. In Algeria, the process of transformation of the physical environment was started by the French during the colonial era. This continued, and even accelerated after Algerian independence in 1962, favored by the rapid rate of development following the new economic policies which changed their emphasis from agrarian to industrial. In the early years of independence, the building sector lacked not only the institutional infrastructure necessary for large-scale building activity, but also resources and skilled labor. There was also a lack of comprehensive planning; government intervention in urban areas during this period was restricted to the completion of projects already started on site by the French. Parallel to this weakness in the building sector, there was rapid development in accordance with the new economic policies which encouraged industrialization. This led to rapid growth in urban populations. Cities, especially those in the northern part of Algeria, experienced great population pressures, due to rural migration and the high birth rate. It was not until 1966 that the government

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recognized the alarming situation. New types of universities and hospitals were needed, as was housing. The government adopted the policy of intensifying the use of industrial building systems. This accelerated and increased the contact and exchange between Algeria and a great number of countries. Not only were materials, mass-produced components, foreign companies, and foreign expertise (including architects and engineers) imported, but also a great number of Algerian architects and engineers were sent abroad for training and specialization. As a result of this, a rapid and strong internationalization of architecture took place. Some of the major public institutions and housing projects were designed by well-known international architects and executed by foreign engineering companies. Among these projects were the universities of Algiers and of Constantine designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the university of Oran designed by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, El-Aurassi hotel designed by Luigi Moretti, an Italian architect, a rural housing scheme designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs designed by an Italian company. This latter project is considered to be the first manifestation of post-modern architecture in Algeria. 1

2

El-Aurassi Hotel, Algiers, designed in 1973 by the Italian architect Luigi Moretti. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Algiers, designed in 1956 by Italian architects. This is the first manifestation of postmodern architecture in Algeria.

FIG. 1 FIG. 2

The wave of opinion against the import of Western architecture in Algeria today, and in many other countries of the Middle East, is based on four arguments. First of all, many modern buildings are seen to be climatically inappropriate in the hot, dry climate of the Middle East and North Africa. Modern architecture based on the extensive use of high-technology materials, such as reinforced concrete and glass, is inappropriate in such a climate. Usually, the solution adopted to maintain comfortable thermal conditions inside such buildings is the installation of an artificial cooling system. However, this solution is seen as inappropriate, not only because of the wasteful energy consumption, but also in view of the difficulties for these countries in maintaining and producing the energy-intensive systems for cooling, which are at the moment imported from the West.

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Secondly, modern architecture seems to contain spatial norms that are derived, inappropriately, from Western culture. Usually these norms vary from one culture to another, and determine the ideal size and shape of spaces. Western designers have very often ignored the social norms of the people of the Middle East. Instead, they introduced principles of purely functional and rational design drawn up in Western countries. Most of these modern standards, whether relating to sanitation, communal living, or assumptions about privacy and comfort, are inapplicable to Algeria and to the countries of the Middle East. Thirdly, modern architecture in Algeria has apparently failed to take into consideration local resources, whether in terms of materials, labor, technology, or finance. Many new projects are still designed in Algeria according to modern systems of building and very often their execution necessitates the importation not only of building material and building equipment, but also of skilled labor. This situation has many implications for building supply. Among these are delays during construction, high costs, problems of maintenance after completion, and difficulties in replacing deteriorated parts. Another major problem of construction is the shortage of building materials. To satisfy demand, for example, no less than two million tons of cement are imported each year. The shortage of skilled labor and of professionals such as architects and engineers is also significant. Only a small percentage of Algerian labor has the necessary qualifications to use modern construction techniques. In parallel with this situation, the cost of construction has increased rapidly. The total budget allocated for a building is very often consumed before its completion, which leads to long delays while more finance is found. Finally, modern architecture may be seen as culturally destructive, since it does not seem to make any reference to the region’s traditional architectural heritage. According to Professor Dogam Kuban, “the physical components of the city image have no equivalent components in society and in the minds and behaviour of individuals.” 1 Some argue that because of this many people in the Middle East feel disorientated in an environment which has changed so much. These dilemmas are not new; nor are they unique to Algeria or the Middle East. However, it is our purpose here to try to define regionalism, a notion which has been proposed as a potential solution for these problems. Much of the construction work undertaken today in these countries, it has been claimed, falls into this category. However, a review of the literature which attempts to identify and define regionalism not only demonstrates the divergences of definition, but also reveals the complexity, confusion, and subjectivity of this literature. One theme which commonly occurs is that regionalism is seen as a reaction against the universality and uniformity of modern architecture. Now it is essential to define this concept as clearly as possible before any evaluation of its appropriateness as a design solution can be attempted. The method adopted here is to extract definitions of regionalism through an examination of the objectives and methods of implementation advocated in the literature. Four main objectives have been identified.

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One announced objective is to build in harmony with social needs. Authors advocating this objective can be grouped into two main categories, according to the means they advocate of achieving it. In one category are those arguing that harmony with social needs can be achieved if consideration is given during the design stage of a building to the life-style of local people, and in particular to that of the future users of a building. Those in the other category consider that harmony with social needs can be achieved through the satisfaction of human emotional demands, as interpreted by the architect and incorporated into building design. User participation methods are proposed for integrating the local life-styles into the design. However, this method is complex and research is still being carried out to test its appropriateness. The second objective of regionalism is to build in harmony with local resources. “Local materials” and “local technology” are the two factors most frequently referred to. But it appears that there is little or no common agreement among authors about what they mean when they speak of “local materials.” On the one hand, authors define local materials as only those indigenous to a specific region. 2 Others consider that “local materials” means those which are locally available. This includes not only indigenous materials but also any modern ones produced locally. 3 Moreover, there are authors (like Li) who do not distinguish between locally available materials and those that are imported; yet both local and imported materials are to be found today, in most places. 4 It is sometimes cheaper to import certain materials than it is to use locally produced ones. Nevertheless, the cost of the imported product should be considered before accepting this argument, since economic factors are among the major problems faced today, particularly in developing countries. Similarly, there is no general agreement about exactly what is meant by “local technology,” and how it should be used in new buildings to achieve regionalist architecture. Proposals fall into two categories: some authors define local technology as traditional craft techniques and propose the use of this craftsmanship and indigenous techniques in the design of new buildings. 5 Others propose a combination of traditional craft techniques and modern technology. They explain that this could be achieved by combining extremely modern materials with traditional ones, by giving more attention to finishes. Craftsmanship, in our opinion, should be incorporated into the design for new buildings only in regions where it is still alive—since in some regions craftsmen with traditional skills no longer exist. The third objective of regionalism is to build in harmony with the geographical characteristics of a region. The geographical elements referred to are mainly climate and topography. Climate appears to be a rich theme in this. Some authors consider it as a determining factor in architectural regionalism. This latter view usually derives from the belief that regional architecture in the past was shaped by climatic conditions. Li challenges this argument; he contends that climate is no longer a critical factor since the introduction into buildings of mechanical systems, such as air conditioning, can solve any climatic problem.

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3

4

The University of Qatar, designed by Kamel ElKafrawi; the wind catchers provide cool air inside the building and offer a new interpretation of traditional devices rather than air-conditioning systems. FIG. 4 Makham ech Chahid Monument—part of the cultural and commercial complex. The form echoes a palm tree, which symbolizes victory in Algiers. The monument has become a “beacon” of Algiers. FIG. 3

However, Li seems to ignore the increasing wave of criticism regarding the use of air-conditioning systems, especially in the hot climate of the Middle East. To achieve this objective, three principal methods are proposed. The first is the reinterpretation of traditional climatic devices for use in new buildings. Examples of the use of these methods are found in projects such as the University of Qatar, designed by the architect Kamel El-Kafrawi; he reinterprets the principles of wind catchers in a modern way, using contemporary technology, to provide cool air and reduce humidity inside the building. The second method proposes to correlate the form and organization of buildings, and urban development, with the climatic conditions of a particular region. The third method is to create visual links with common natural features, and to integrate a building into the landscape, using sympathetic forms and materials. The fourth objective of regionalism is to build in harmony with the existing built form. This objective seems to characterize best the concept of regionalism. Its concern is with the physical and aesthetic aspects of a building, aiming to retain the specific architectural character of each region by reviving an older, local style. This aim is best summed up by Abel’s definition of regionalism, “...an attempt to put back into architecture what modern architecture has taken out, principally the continuity in a given place between past and present forms of building” 6 One strategy proposed to attain this objective is to relate new buildings to the specific architectural character of a particular region. This is achieved by examining critically and comprehensively the existing buildings; their scale, their façade treatments, the open spaces, the spatial organization and circulation pattern, and then fusing these with the contemporary needs of people and modern technology. This does not mean a simplistic copying of old forms

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and ornamentation, which would not only add to the existing visual chaos but also prevent any change or innovation in design. Other strategies proposed to achieve harmony with the existing built form encourage a different approach to past styles and architectural heritage, such as the preservation, restoration, and rehabilitation of existing traditional buildings as an alternative to new building wherever possible. It must be noted that these operations should be limited to specific buildings, since not all old buildings are worthy of being preserved. Examples of a regionalist approach can be found in French architect Ferdinand Pouillon’s designs for tourist villages in the northern part of Algeria. The late Pouillon was preoccupied with the idea of modern building as an analogue of the traditional urban fabric of Ghardaia, a town in the Algerian Sahara, which he began to study many years ago. In his design, Pouillon succeeded in translating the principles of desert towns into a modern idiom, using modern technology and materials. Traditional architectural elements which he retained include the courtyard, arches, domes, windowless walls, meandering ambiguous spaces, and narrow streets. Sometimes he also uses ceramic on walls and combines arches so as to give a subtle play of light. The regionalist approach in Algeria is reflected also in Riad el Feth cultural and commercial complex, with its Moudjahid museum and Makham ech Chahid monument, and the Palais de la Culture. This complex was built for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Algerian independence. The form of the monument echoes that of the palm tree, which in Algerian culture symbolizes victory. The structure is 90 meters high and was conceived as a pre-cast concrete system, with three independent palm trees joined together at the top. Today, this monument is the beacon of Algiers. The museum and the Palais de la Culture are, also, intriguing attempts at fusing regional, national, and colonial architectural types. How these four objectives of regionalism have been defined and applied is influenced by the context of a building, and in some cases the objectives appear to be inapplicable. For instance, how is harmony with existing, traditional built forms to be achieved on a completely virgin site?—or in an urban area, where all the existing buildings are modern ones? Another problem is how to achieve harmony with local resources where these are inadequate to respond rapidly to the need for extensive building supplies, as is the case in Algeria. Although regionalism appears to offer solutions for both urban and rural areas, the greatest number of projects described in the literature on regionalism are small-scale buildings, mainly individual houses in rural areas. However, the problem that modern architecture has tried to resolve in Algeria is an urban one, namely, how to supply a large number of different building types, particularly housing, rapidly and at low cost. Thus, any solution proposing to replace modern architecture should consider these needs. Regionalism as described does not appear to consider these factors. Various phenomena characteristic of the present climate act against the development of regionalism. These phenomena are the international media, the sophistication of travel and communication, economic growth, the

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standardization of building elements and building systems, the rising cost of traditional skills and materials, and finally, the emergence and multiplication of legal requirements. The existence of these factors suggests that any decision to adopt regionalism as a solution would be realistic only if detailed consideration was given to them. Any strategies that attempt to apply regionalism in a general way must take these phenomena into account. A comparison between the objectives of regionalism and the problems resulting from the adoption of modern architecture in Algeria and in the Middle East suggests that regionalism addresses these inherent problems only superficially. An analysis of several regionalist buildings, given as examples in the literature, illustrates that not all the objectives of regionalism were achieved. Those that have been successful vary according to the context of the project: urban or rural. In fact, little real consistency exists between the different methods employed; usually these differ from one project to another. Our study concludes that there is a gap between the theoretical objectives of regionalism and their achievement in practice. This gap persists because of an incompatibility between the objectives of regionalism and the specific context in which a building is to be erected. This suggests that any further attempt to adopt regionalism should begin by identifying relevant elements in each context and then proceed by understanding the relationship between them. To do this, considerable research should be conducted at both national and regional levels, in order to assess the possibilities within each region. It is only on the basis of such research that the objectives of regionalism and methods for achieving them can be defined. The necessary research can be summarized in the following recommendations. The research should make an inventory of the following: —The traditional architectural heritage, in terms of the types of building, their form and materials, and techniques used in their construction. —A survey of current local life-styles not only in order to identify social needs, but also to define the pattern of daily activities. —An assessment of the types of buildings required, based on findings of the life-style survey. —A survey of the climate in the region to identify specific climatic features and the problems they pose for design. —A detailed assessment of economic factors, not only of the funding available, but also of comparative costs of building materials and methods available. —An assessment of the material available, not only locally, but also from other sources. —A survey of the relevant labor available, not only in order to discover the types and levels of skills (including the number of people with traditional, local craft skills), but also to assess what training may be needed and/or the development of new skills. —An assessment of the relevance of the existing regulations in relation to the objectives of regionalism, i.e., regulations about spatial planning, environmental protection, protection of cultural heritage, building and housing laws. —An investigation of local policy and plans, to see to what extent they take into account the different cultural and geographical regions within their boundaries.

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128

Juhani Pallasma’s essay was initially

unconventionally in order to generate

a lecture given at a conference on

awareness. Pallasmaa’s formulation

Nordic tradition in Copenhagen

would likely reject such a gesture as

organized by the magazine Skala in

further alienating in itself, perhaps

March, 1988. In preparing his essay

only exacerbating the problem it

for this volume he commented: “The

meant to solve.

themes of my paper were raised by the evident loss of the sense of place

To this Pallasmaa proposes a second

and cultural specificity projected

regional modernism, for which

by processes of globalization and

the primary problem is the loss of

commodification.” i Like the proponents

meaning and participation, not fear of

of critical regionalism, Pallasmaa is

eclecticism or the avant-gardist desire

concerned with the debilitating effects

to represent emerging technologies.

of postmodernity on the value and

He argues for an experientially rich

meaning of architectural environments.

and culturally adapted architecture

But as a theorist and architect

that integrates culture, the

who employs phenomenology,

environment, symbolic meaning, and,

his perspective on such issues is

by necessity, traditions, much as Aalto

predominately experiential and

did with his regional modernism. In

psychological. Accordingly, Pallasmaa

summarizing his contribution in 2005,

emphasizes the estrangement and

the author commented: “I wanted to

alienation produced by many modern

point out the significance of tradition

and postmodern developments

for architecture, and, in fact, for all

including cultural overemphasis on the

creative work. During the 1980s

promise of technologically mediated

modernity was frequently accused

experiences and the establishment

of abandoning history and tradition;

of economics and efficiency as the

this argument was central in the

primary basis of value.

post-modernist ideology. I intended to remind the reader that tradition

Regionalism, or regional practice,

and history are complex phenomena

opens up possibilities available

and they are strongly present in the

only on the “fringes” of consumer

dialectical process of questioning

society (an echo of Frampton’s use

characteristic to the modern attitude.” ii

of “interstitial,” see Chapter 7) for the resuscitation of an architecture of meaning—an architecture that

Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936), Hon. FAIA, is dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Helsinki Institute of Technology.

supports the cultural identity of those it serves. But it is also potentially a path to “sentimental provincialism” and chauvinism. This same fear led Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre, via Critical Theory, to propose the strategy of “making strange,” in which regional elements are employed but used

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Juhani Pallasmaa

Tradition and Modernity: The Feasibility of Regional Architecture in PostModern Society Originally published in The Architectural Review, May 1988, 26–34. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

Techno-Utopia and Identity

In his book Homo Faber the Swiss writer and playwright Max Frisch, an architect by training, portrays a Unesco expert, an engineer—symbol of Modern Man—who continuously travels around the world on his missions. He is a rational and realistic man whose life should be under perfect control. However, he slowly loses contact with locality and place, and finally with his own identity, so much so that he ends up falling in love with his own daughter whom he does not know as the tragic consequence of his loss of roots, the ultimate criterion of reality. Their love ends violently in the daughter’s death. Homo Faber’s grave mistake was his conviction that with technology the world could be transformed so that it need not be experienced through emotions. The Modern Movement enthusiastically aspired to create a universal culture. The new “machines for living in” set in “space, light, and greenery” were to emancipate their inhabitants from their bonds with the past, and to cultivate a New Universal Man. Half a century later, however, the techno-rationally biased and economyobsessed buildings that have become only too familiar everywhere impair our sense of locality and identity. The standard building of today accelerates estrangement and alienation instead of integrating our world-view and sense of self. Simply, we have lost our faith in utopia. Meanwhile, we have learned to admire unique and authentic forms of indigenous and vernacular traditions which were earlier hardly considered part of the realm of architecture. We admire the tangible integration of natural and material conditions, patterns of life and forms of building in traditional societies, and this gives us a strengthened sense of causality and existence.

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The diversity of building in traditional societies is brought about by the impact of local conditions and the specificity of culture. In our own culture the sheer force of industrial technology, combined with mobility, masscommunication, and uniformity of life-style, is causing cultural entropy that minimalizes diversity. What is the feasibility of regional culture and architecture in a world in which two billion people gather simultaneously around TV sets to watch the same football match? Are we not gradually becoming detached from our foothold in geographic and cultural soil and going to live in a fictitious and fabricated culture, the culture of simulacra that Umberto Eco has written about? Are we not moving towards a worldwide consumerist folklore, a mosaic of impacts and information detached from their origin. Isn’t our culture doomed to lose all its authenticity and turn into a planetary waxworks-show? Diversification versus Unification

Beyond doubt, the gradual disappearance of a sense of locality and of human message from our buildings is the result of cultural factors underlying the act of building—the values and ways of thinking and action that govern our civilization. Is it possible to alter the course of our culture? Is the resuscitation of regional architecture in postindustrial and Post-Modern society feasible? Indeed, can authentic architecture exist at all in the metaphysical materialism that we live in? Clearly our identity, and mental well-being, cannot he supported by a universally standardized and abstracted environment. Cultural anthropology has revealed that we do not live in separate physical and mental worlds. The two realms are totally fused and consequently the organization of our physical world is a projection of the mental one and vice versa. An architecture capable of supporting our identity has to be situationally, culturally, and symbolically articulated. I am disturbed by the notion of regionalism because of its geographic and ethnological connotations and would rather speak of situational or culture-specific architecture. The fundamental message of architecture is the very basic existential expression: How does it feel to be a human being in this world? And the task of architecture is to make us experience our existence with deeper significance and purpose. Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are. In the words of Aldo van Eyck: “Architecture must facilitate Man’s homecoming.” Constituents of Locality

What are the constituents of a sense of specific locality? They are of course reflections of natural, physical, and social realities. They are expressions and experiences of specific nature, geography, landscape, local materials, skills, and cultural patterns. But they are not detached elements: the qualities of culturally adapted architecture are inseparably integrated in tradition. Without continuity of an authentic tradition even a well-intentioned use of surface elements of regional character is doomed to sentimental scenography, to be a naïvely shallow architectural souvenir.

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Culture is not composed of elements which can be disassembled and re-composed: culture has to be lived. Cultures mature and sediment slowly as they become fused into the context and continuity of tradition. Culture is an entity of facts and beliefs, history and present material realities and mental conditions. It proceeds unconsciously and cannot be manipulated from outside. Hence, an authentic culturally differentiated architecture can only be born from differentiated patterns of culture, not from fashionable ideals in design. But do such conditions really exist in our time? The profoundly Mexican architecture of Luis Barragán, for instance, echoes distinct deep-structure features of Mexican culture and life, particularly the presence of death as an accepted dimension of life, and turns these cultural ingredients into his unique metaphysical and surreal art, which is traditional and individual, timeless and radical at the same time. The architecture of Alvaro Siza is an abstraction and condensation of social and building traditions of Oporto. His architecture is abstracted to the degree that one can hardly trace this tradition but its presence is felt in the authoritative quality of his architecture. The regionalist architecture of Hungarian Imre Makovecz is more explicitly generated from images of Hungarian mythology and folklore and there is a feeling of cultural scenography in his work that suggests archaic rites; one expects people to appear on the scene dressed in medieval tunics. It seems that in our time regional identity is possible only on the fringes which have not been conquered by consumer society. The Hidden Dimensions of Culture

As structural anthropology has taught us, the relations of man, artifacts, and culture are very complex. The difficulties of rationally conceiving these relations arise mainly because decisive interaction takes place on an unconscious biocultural level. These hidden dimensions have been brilliantly pointed out by Edward T. Hall, whose books on unconscious and culturally conditioned uses of space are invaluable to an architect. To deny these differences is now pure ignorance. Knowledge of the cultural conditioning of our behavior in space and place is rapidly increasing. Recent studies on the spatial geometry concealed in language, for instance, show that even language conditions man’s spatial behavior in a way specific to that particular language. The psycho-linguistic studies of the Norwegian-born Finn Frode Strømnes have revealed astonishing differences in spatial imagery and use of space between Finnish- and Swedish-speaking people, for instance, and these differences are no doubt reflected in Finnish and Swedish architecture. It is difficult to analyze what constitutes Swedishness or Finnishness in architecture but it is perceived at a glance. Language itself can be used to generate architecture. In addition to his morphological studies of Finnish landscapes, Reima Pietilä has deliberately attempted to project the rhythms, complexities, and topological nature of Finnish language in his architecture. We Finns tend to organize space topologically on the basis of an amorphous

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“forest geometry” as opposed to the “geometry of town” that guides European thinking. The geometry of the forest is most clearly expressed in Alvar Aalto’s work in the elaborate use of forest metaphor at Villa Mairea and the New York Pavilion. This assumption is not at all surprising if one knows Hall’s observations on the radial pattern of thinking among the French and the gridiron thinking of the Americans. Certain deep-structure properties specific to local culture vigorously resist change. For instance, the tone of speech characteristic to a region has been observed to persist through many successive generations after a family has moved from the region. I have been astonished by the persistence of gestural and body language characteristic to a given culture. There is no way of mistaking a French or an Italian by his gesturing or an American by his way of walking, or of not instantly spotting an American in European context by his higher level of voice. Body and muscle systems are strongly connected with cultural identity. Evidently an authentic building tradition must be related to such unconscious factors. Mud-building traditions, in West Africa for instance, seem more related to man’s tactile sense than visual. Culturally there is a tendency to develop away from the tactile towards the visual. Yet we return to the tactile mode in certain emotional states, for instance, caressing our dear ones. Consequently, a culturally adapted architecture is not merely a matter of visual style but of integration of culture, behavior, and environment. To deny cultural differentiation is foolish. A culturally specific character or style cannot be consciously learned and added on the surface of design; it is a result of being profoundly subject to a specific pattern of culture and of the creative synthesis which fuses conscious intentions and unconscious conditioning, memories, and experiences in a dialogue between the individual and the collective. All artists elaborate their self-image in their art, and a differentiated building tradition supports the collective self-image of an entire culture. This applies also to apparently traditionless building in America—the strip, for instance. Individual and Tradition

The creative artist’s relation to history is equally complex. Authentic artists are usually more concerned with a general feeling for time and history than any factual history or its products. In an essay written in 1919, entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot describes perceptively this “historical sense” and a poet’s position in the challenge of tradition: Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense...and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature...has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a

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writer traditional and it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. 1

Today’s fashionable attempts to re-create a sense of place and rootedness in history through application of historical and regional motifs usually fail because of the one-dimensionally literal use of reference and a manipulation of motifs on the surface level. Instead of being born from an integrity of cultural forces—the inner necessity, as Kandinsky named it—the historicism of today is a form of intellectual manipulation. Culture is taken as an objectified, external, and given reality which can be consciously applied and expressed in design. The past is taken as a source from which to select instead of being the continuum and context of creative work. Instead of being accepted as an autonomous process, culture has been turned into an object of deliberate fabrication. The present concern with regionalism has the evident danger of turning into sentimental provincialism, whereas vital products of art in our specialized culture are always born from an open confrontation between the universal and the unique, the individual and the collective, the traditional and the revolutionary. In an essay entitled “What is a Classic,” T. S. Eliot describes mental provincialism: ...a provincialism, not of space, but of time: one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. 2

Alvar Aalto’s Regionalist Strategies

The most outspoken advocate of situationally adapted Modernity in the Nordic countries as well as within the Modern Movement as a whole was, of course, Alvar Aalto. After his short enthusiasm for the main stream of the Modern Movement and its universalist ideals, Aalto emphatically expressed his suspicion of universal and techno-utopian ideology. In Aalto’s thinking the task of architecture was to mediate between man and technology and support his social and cultural integration. There is an unexplainable sense of rootedness and Finnishness in Aalto’s designs. His architecture seems to activate certain deep responses in the observer. His biomorphisms give subconscious associations with the organic world, and his layered compositions give an impression of environments formed by tradition and history. Aalto uses imagery that activates subconscious association. He uses, for instance, metaphorically condensed images of town and landscape reminiscent of medieval paintings. In one of his early essays,

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presumably an introduction to a planned book which never progressed beyond this introduction, he praises Andrea Mantegna’s painting Christ in the Vineyard as a magnificent representation of “an architectonic landscape” and a “synthetic landscape.” The desire to create a “synthetic landscape” seems to have persisted in his own work throughout his life, and it clearly contributes to the adaptive character of his architecture. He synthesized not only the Finnish landscape in his architecture but also the Finnish temperament. In his compositions Aalto tended to understate main compositional elements, like the entrance, and guided one’s attention elsewhere. This understatement is reminiscent of Pieter Brueghel’s paintings in which the mythical event is hidden in the middle of everyday life. There is a relaxed vernacular feeling, an air of invitation and curiosity rather than an attempt to impose and silence. Aalto’s architecture is connected with a general sense of time and place rather than with any specific style or place. His work gives simultaneously faint hints of archaic history, antiquity, vernacular Mediterranean building, and anonymous Finnish peasant tradition. The work of Henry Moore evokes a similar abundance of imagery related to nature, geology, plant forms, animal skulls and bones, as well as of archaic products of Man. Aalto’s architecture did not aim at the absoluteness typical of the main line of the Modern Movement. As a result, he could use motifs of history and vernacular tradition, combined with a Modern language, and create architecture remarkably rooted in place and time. Vernacular style is usually an unorthodox mixture of influences and motifs which have lost much of their original meaning and intactness. In a similar manner, Aalto used the Modernist vocabulary in shamelessly unorthodox combinations with romantic, historicist, and folk motifs. But Aalto’s motifs are not borrowings; they are re-creations and they merely hint at a possible origin elsewhere. The use of vernacular motifs gives his buildings a relaxed and unpretentious atmosphere and certainly has facilitated public acceptance of his Modernity. This applies also to Aalto’s furniture designs, which represent the very few examples of Modernist vernacular. Innumerable variations and modifications by other designers are a clear indication of the acceptance of Aalto’s design as a modern vernacular. Interaction between the self-conscious high-style of the academic discipline of architecture and unself-conscious vernacular application is an essential aspect of the evolution. A style becomes socially significant as it generates a tradition of anonymous application. And one of the shortcomings of the Modern Movement at large has been its inability to produce a positive vernacular. Culturally adapted architecture reverberates with tradition. It fuses and reflects the timeless vernacular idiom and, consequently, an authentic culturespecific architecture cannot be invented. It has to rediscover and revitalize aspects of tradition, either explicit characteristics of style or, more convincingly, the hidden dimensions of culture.

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Uniting Opposites

The architectures of Alvar Aalto and Luis Barragán reveal that culture-specific character of architecture is not a matter of simple manipulation of recognizable elements. Cultural isolationism and protectionism do not offer any guarantee of unique architecture. Regional character may be achieved—and usually is—from totally contradictory ingredients. Frank Lloyd Wright’s American architecture synthesized themes from North American and Mexican Indian cultures, and European architectural history as well as traditional Japanese architecture. The impact of traditional Japanese art on twentieth-century Western aesthetic ideals is another example of the incredibly composite nature of culture. On the other hand, Le Corbusier’s architecture, which was strongly influenced by Mediterranean vernacular tradition, has given rise to one of the strongest contemporary traditions in Japan and India. And this influence is again reflected back to Europe and other parts of the world in the work of Tadao Ando, Charles Correa, and many others. The journey of Louis Kahn’s architecture from his native Estonian island of Saaremaa via Philadelphia to Bangladesh, where his geometric architecture has created a strong school, is equally astonishing. The most outspoken regionalist group in Finland today, the northern Oulu School, has been most strongly influenced by Charles Moore, whereas today’s strong Estonian avant-garde is a curious fusion of Russian Constructivism and American Post-Modernism, an artistic marriage of Leonidov and Graves. A colleague recently made a comment that regional architecture today looks the same in all parts of the world. All great art tends to be regional for the simple reason that it is open to interpretation and, consequently, can echo any cultural conditions. All great art is the common property and heritage of mankind. But these crusades of inspirations and impulses in the development of culturally adapted architecture are not just products of our communication age. Peasant churches in Finland, which are usually considered to be genuine products of an indigenous tradition, are clearly echoes of continental high-style. Similarly, the architectural identity of the Grand Duchy of autonomous Finland was created in Neo-Hellenic spirit which, of course, was totally alien for the underdeveloped forest land of the time. The National Romanticism of the turn of the century, which deliberately aimed at creating a national style and overtly sought its inspiration from indigenous mythology and tradition, was, in fact, closer to contemporary examples in Germany and Scotland, even on the other side of the Atlantic in the American Midwest. The Nordic Classicism of the 1920s found inspiration in the Classical vernacular of northern Italy. And half a century later the universal ideals of the International Style were turned into a humane and somewhat romantic version of post-war Modernity in the Nordic countries. One of the most convincing achievements of Western architecture in an alien cultural context is Henning Larsen’s Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry Riyadh which clearly shows the Nordic sensibility of cultural assimilation. This building

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is an exceptionally successful example of architectural diplomacy. Psychologists speak of “situational personality,” referring to the fact that the behavior of a single individual varies more under different environmental conditions than the behavior of different individuals under the same circumstances. Maybe we should credit a designer’s exceptional cultural adaptability to a particularly adaptable situational personality. One more note in this concoction of regionalism: Eliel Saarinen created the prototype of the American skyscraper, the Chicago Tribune Tower, in the wood of southern Finland; his painter friend Gallen-Kall started his illustrations of Greater Kalevala, the Finnish folk epic, in Chicago. “Only in the desert of Chicago did my father’s imagination burst into bloom,” wrote the painter’s daughter. Constituents of Style

Architecture is not an expression of knowledge and certainty, but of existence and faith and a perpetual search for reconciliation. An architectural style is defined, both on individual and collective levels, by a combination of certain mental orientations. Stylistic evolution seems to take place in a pendulum fashion as priorities shift from one polarity to the other. The orientations are exemplified by the opposite notions like those in the table. universal

situational

collective

individual

standardized

unique

conscious

subconscious

future-oriented

history-oriented

idealistic

realistic

structure-oriented

form-oriented

rational

emotional

absolutist

relativist

theoretical, orthodox

pragmatic

exclusive

inclusive

The first set of orientations clustered together in the main stream of International Style, whereas the second set of orientations have characterized Nordic architecture through the century. Today there seems to be a rather universal shift towards the latter orientations, away from the mental construction of the International Style. Consequently, a culture-specific trend is gaining strength universally and one could foresee a renewed interest in Nordic architecture. Without wanting to expand the vague terminology of architectural debate, I would argue that Modernity has progressed to a new phase during the past two decades. I would like to speak of a “First” and a “Second” Modernity. This implies a change in external stylistic features, but, above all, in mental factors and a new understanding of culture.

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In his thought-provoking book Art of the Novel Milan Kundera declares that Modernity has transformed to kitsch: The aesthetics of mass media are by necessity the aesthetics of kitsch; as the mass media gradually extend and penetrate into every aspect of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetics and morality. Only some time ago Modernism implied a non-conformist rebellion against received thought and kitsch. Nowadays Modernity blends into the immense vitality of mass media and to be modern means a fierce attempt to keep up with time and adapt, to be even more adaptive than the most adaptive. Modernity had pulled the robe of kitsch on its shoulders. 3

There is no reason to deny Kundera’s severe verdict, but I think that only the Modernist dialectical relation to history, culture, and society can emancipate architecture from kitsch. And I am convinced that the New Modernism that is taking shape now is again shaking the robe of kitsch off its shoulders. The Two Modernisms

The First Modernism was a utopian, idealistic, purist, and demagogic movement, which drew its artistic strength from an innocent faith in a future brought about by new architecture and art. It was a fighting movement with impetus and polemic. It believed in the possibility of cultural expansion and radical change, which could quickly lead to a humane, healthy, and sane world. The Second Modernism is a realistic view of culture unblinded by illusions. It has lost innocent faith in an immediate victory of humanism and it sees its potential merely as a strategy of cultural resistance in slowing down undesirable anti-human development. Stylistic change has been equally multi-faceted. The First Modernism aspired to immaterial and weightless movement, whereas the Second frequently expresses gravity and stability and a sense of materiality and earth. The return of earth and gravity as expressive means of architecture has more than metaphoric meaning; after its arrogant and utopian journey, architecture has returned to the safety of Mother Earth, back to the sources of rebirth and creativity. In its aspiration for pure plastic expression, the First Modernism avoided symbolism, allusion, and metaphor, which have become an essential part of the expression of the Second. As the first phase aimed at an impression of timelessness, new Modernism seeks an experience of time through material, memory, and metaphor. The First Modernism admired perfection and finiteness, while unfinishedness, process, and imperfection are part of the new expression. The First Modernism aimed at perpetual innovation, the Second consciously uses stylistic borrowings. I want to stress, however, that the contemporary use of quotation takes place in two directions in history, and it gives the past a new meaning as opposed to the one-directional appropriation of eclecticism. There is always an air of necrophilia in eclectic art because of its inability to resurrect the dead.

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Motifs of Change

The motive forces behind the change are alterations in consciousness that have taken place during the past two decades and which are more radical than most of us are willing to accept. The Third World, the energy crisis, the university revolution, the development of mass-communication and data-processing are all part of the mosaic of change as well as the whole Post-Modern debate. But also an awareness of the dangers implied by the technical development and a disappointment with the achievements of Western democracy lie behind the Second Modernity. The transformation of Modernity did not happen at once. Even in the early phases of Modernism, expressionist, organic, and regionalist tendencies existed within the Movement. The momentum of the First Modernism began to run out in the ’50s and the emerging change was revealed in the discussions of CIAM. Louis Kahn and Aldo van Eyck appeared as the most outspoken heralds of change. Kahn brought back the archaic and metaphysical dimensions, and van Eyck introduced an anthropological and structuralist view. My view of continuous Modernity is based on a view of the dialectics of evolution, which is more explanatory and hopeful than the popular thought of a bankruptcy of Modernity. Fundamentally I see Modernity as a dialectic view of culture that perpetually challenges and resurrects the past. The New Tradition

The touching and optimistic vitality of early Modernism arises from its origins at the confrontation of tradition and reform. Modernity lost its spiritual depth through the generations, which accepted the style as a ready-made aesthetic without its cultural background and the continuity of tradition implied by Modernism. The interdependence of architecture and culture has not been sufficiently recognized. The international, consumerist architectural journalism of today violently detaches buildings from their cultural context and presents them in an arena of individual architectural showmanship. The Second Modernity has to relearn a way of seeing architecture as part of cultural tradition as well as analyzing the timeless essence of architecture. It is also significant that the creators of First Modernism were themselves artists or collaborated closely with artists. The spiritual withering of Modernism is associated with the post-war generations that alienated themselves from the fine arts both through prevailing educational practice and shallow professionalism. The New Modernism of today seeks again inspiration from the soil of the arts. Populism

The assumed failure of the mythical hero architect has given rise to a populism and a reverence for consensus or popular taste as the sole authority of design. This view denies the essential dynamism of cultural development, the dialogue and opposition between the creative individual and the convention.

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In the epilogue to his novel The Name of the Rose (one of the literary successes in terms of popularity in recent years), Umberto Eco states that there are two types of writers, the ones that attempt to write what they expect their readers to want to read, and others that construct their ideal reader as they write. And only the latter type of writer is able to write significant literature. Only an architect who mentally constructs an ideal client and ultimately an ideal society as he designs can create memorable architecture. This view does not imply empty utopianism or a belief in a messianic mission of architecture. Simply, touching art is born from the reality of hope and idealization, a belief in a better future. The art of architecture turns into production of commodities for the consumer society when it loses its poetic and metaphysical content and sees as its duty the mere fulfillment of popular desire. “To caress a cat to death,” is the wise warning of a Polish proverb. In my view, architecture, like an art, is simultaneously autonomous and culture-bound. It is culture-bound in the sense that tradition, the cultural context, provides the basis for individual creativity, and it is autonomous in the sense that an authentic artistic expression is never an answer to prescribed expectation or definition. The fundamental existential mystery is the core of architecture, and the confrontation of this mystery is always unique and autonomous, totally independent of the specifications of the “social commission.” A church and a cellulose factory do not differ at all as commissions for an architect. The human task of architecture is not to beautify or to humanize the world of everyday facts, but to open up a view into the second dimension of our consciousness, the reality of images, memories, and dreams. Quasi-Intellectualization

... In our obsessive consumerist culture which gradually detaches objects and buildings from their use value and turns everything into marketable signs, the traditional Nordic functionalist morality, restraint, and asceticism acquire a wider cultural value. In a culture that tends to turn into a Sargasso Sea of too many goods, too much information, too many ideologies, too much of everything, the idea and aesthetics of noble poverty have a new moral value. As our materialist culture hysterically produces new marketable images and turns even crime, violence, and decadence into profit, the Norwegian tradition represents a philosophy of common sense and a poetry of the commonplace. Regionalism in the industrial world cannot any longer be founded on a set of isolated and perfectly integrated conditions. Perhaps the most meaningful form of cultural survival that remains is a regionalism of the mind, the strategy of resistance, the subculture that believes in and searches for authenticity. Not authenticity on ethnographic grounds but that of human experience and interaction. The mission of Nordic architecture lies in the continuous development of the tradition of socially concerned, responsive, and assimilative Modernity.

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Introduction to “Critique of Regionalism” and “The Concept of Regionalism”

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In the next two essays, theorist and

that it disappears within normative

architect Alan Colquhoun subjects

practice and critical appreciation. In

regionalism to two scathing critiques.

other words, that regionalism cannot

In its many forms of theorization

consistently be formulated as a theory

he finds contradictions, problems,

in itself, but is perhaps an attitude or

inconsistencies, and misplaced

merely “an object of desire.”

assumptions that he feels doom any proposals for a robust theory or

Colquhoun’s criticisms are an attempt

practice of regionalism. When asked

to raise the awareness of regionalist

to revisit these critiques in 2005,

architects and theorists—a call for

Colquhoun stated:

more rigorous and disciplined thinking about the possibility of a

My two essays on regionalism were an

theory that relies on stable meanings

attempt to refute a certain type of “soft”

in a world that does not appear to

leftist cultural critique that was common

recognize them. As a solution he

in the 1980s in America (represented in

proposes a destabilized model of

architecture, for example, by Alexander

practice that is unconcerned with

Tzonis and Ken Frampton), which invoked

authenticity and dedicated to

the model of an organicist society

producing “original, unique, and

but at the same time tried to avoid

context-relevant architectural ideas.”

advocating a regressive utopia. In both essays I tried to show, by two distinct

Alan Colquhoun (b. 1921) is professor emeritus in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

but related historical analyses, that this was an impossible project, and that the survival of “humanist” values would depend on the emergence of new forms within the relatively open structures of late capitalism. It seems to me that the problems I dealt with in these essays have now lost some of their relevance. The recent acceleration of globalisation due to digital technology has opened up vast new cultural and political problems— not only within the so-called “developed” world but the world as a whole.” i

Taken together, the two critiques suggest that regionalism, like any “ism,” must be fluid enough to embody its contradictions yet firm enough to yield socially beneficial results. Colquhoun suggests that regionalism must constantly adapt to our changing circumstances or else become so specific to each culture

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Alan Colquhoun

Critique of Regionalism Originally published in Casabella, January–February 1996, 50–55. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

I. Regionalism, Romanticism, Historicism

The discourse of regionalism belongs to the larger collection of ideas normally known as historicism, according to which cultural values, including those of architecture, are not a priori, unchanging, and universal but depend on particular, local, and inherited practices. This concept carries with it the apparently paradoxical assumption that one culture is able to “understand” another, thus reintroducing, at another level, the universalism that it has just thrown out. Regionalism also implies the belief that regional cultures are autochthonous and spring from the folk rather than from standards imposed by social and intellectual elites. Generally speaking, supporters of regionalism have been concerned with anonymous, vernacular architecture (though there are exceptions, as when classic traditions are identified with particular nationstates, to be discussed later). Regionalism has always been implicated in a metaphysics of difference, rejecting all attempts to generalize cultural values into systems based on the concept of natural law or other such universalizing theories. The idea that culture is particular and hereditary rather than universal and rational sprang from anti-Enlightenment tendencies within 18th-century thought, exemplified—though in different ways—by Herder and Vico. Later historicists were to see history as an evolving system, but for Herder and Vico history was a decline from a golden age, and this idealization of the past was to be shared by the various regionalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Historicism and romanticism led the attack on the classical system of the arts that had dominated Europe since the Renaissance. The Enlightenment had already disputed the mythical substructure of classical thought but it had left in place many of its concepts, including that of imitation. In Romantic theory, imitation ceases to be the representation of external forms and becomes the revelation of an inner, organic, and indivisible structure. In a corresponding movement, historicism forbids the artist the freedom to combine, mechanically, as it were, different historical forms as if they were lying ready-to-hand in the same historical space. But the 19th century, in its obsession with the past, never freed itself from the classical tradition of imitation. The problem of how to recover eternal architectural values without imitating the forms in which they were embodied was apparently insoluble. Thus, there were two traditions leading to regionalism, one stemming from classicism and the other from Romanticism; one figural and combinatory, the other functional and holistic.

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II. Regionalism and Eclecticism

At first sight eclecticism would appear to be the antithesis of regionalism, with its doctrine of authenticity. Yet if we accept the proposition that regionalism was heir to two separate traditions and that its proponents have always had difficulty in relinquishing stylistic imitation, we must admit that the two concepts are dialectically related. Within eclecticism the cri­teria of choice are still the classical ones of propriety and character. Just as, in the classical tradition, the different orders were the appropriate metaphorical representation of certain ideas, so, in 18th-century eclecticism, different styles produced certain associations. In both cases, architecture was seen as capable of creating specific moods in the observer. In the classical tradition it was accepted that this was achieved by artifice, in other words by deception, (the vraisemblable). Although this idea began to be challenged in the late 18th century, 19th-century eclecticism still followed it implicitly. The romantic attack on the classical tradition was, on the contrary, based on the belief that the “idea” could be symbolized without the mediation of secondary images. Translated into the terms of regionalism, this implied that the genius of the folk had a subtle body that persisted though changes in external form. This simultaneous appeal to the Zeitgeist and to the past depended on the possibility of the resurrection and transformation of an essence—an idea that could take hold only when history came to be seen as evolutionary and apocalyptic and the idea of a fixed golden age had lost its power. III. Regionalism and Nationalism

Regionalism owed much of its influence to the growing power of the centralized nation-state. The relation between them was two-fold; on the one hand, peoples whose cultural identity had been suppressed used the concept of the Volk to legitimize claims to unification or independence: on the other, nation-states themselves sometimes idealized their own folk traditions. Germany in the early 19th century and France in the late 19th century are the main examples. It is often hard to distinguish between these two types. German Romanticism, which was searching for a common cultural and political identity, was exported to France and England, both of which already had such an identity, and all three nations claimed a similarly reconstructed medieval world as their own. The phenomenon of international cultural traditions being used to reinforce the self-image of individual nation-states occurred again in the early 20th century, when both Germany and France appropriated aspects of the classical tradition. The Romantic idea of the Volk and the positivist idea of material progress (and its corollary, liberal politics) were in contention with each other throughout the 19th century. In the 1890s there was a renewed burst of interest in folk myths, and this found expression in the movements of reform of the crafts as well as in the Art Nouveau movement. These tendencies were simultaneously progressive and regressive. Enthusiasm for primitive, naif, and popular art prompted the rejection of classicism and the search for new forms. But they also encouraged a return to tradition and the condemnation of industrialism. In Belgium and Catalonia the Art Nouveau movement emphasized modernity and

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novelty and became the emblem of a new industrial bourgeoisie. In Finland, on the other hand, it played a more mystical role, conjuring-up remote folk origins, even if it represented these in the current idioms of the Arts and Crafts movement, just as in the music of Jean Sibelius we find late Romantic forms being used to convey the primitive essence of the Finnish landscape. In Germany and France, too, conservatism existed alongside experimentalism. Julius Langbehn’s best-selling book Rembrandt the Educator (1890) claimed völkisch origins for a common Germanic Kultur. In France, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès promoted region­al diversity and rejected a republicanism that had suppressed regional traditions in the name of an abstract, universal principle. This ideology was accompanied by a regionalist move­ment in architecture, equivalent to the Heimatschutz movement in Germany. IV. Regionalism and the 1920s Avant-gardes

The pages of L’Esprit Nouveau testify to the antagonism of Le Corbusier to the eclectic regionalism that dominated popular architectural taste in post-war France. Le Corbusier was merely the most persuasive of those in Europe as a whole who opposed eclecticism with the ideal of universal modernism based on the abstract forms of modern painting and the industrialization of the building industry. Unlike Mies van der Rohe, who was still designing Biedermeier villas for wealthy clients as late as 1926, Le Corbusier had renounced his pre-war, Behrens-inspired neoclassicism. But he nevertheless claimed to be working within the French classical tradition—a claim that was in harmony with post-war French nationalist sentiment and critical opinion. It is not only in the context of post-war France that we find this rappel à l’ordre—this connection between modernism and classicism (a connection that had, in fact, already been made in Werkbund circles before the war). In Scandinavia the modernism of the 1930s grew directly out of the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as can be seen in the early work of Asplund and Aalto. In Germany, critics supporting the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting recognized its kinship with the French postwar neoclassicism of painters like Picasso. If we slightly extend the meaning of “classical,” we can add to this list the Dutch de Stijl movement, which promoted a rationalism that was opposed to the idea of an organic architecture springing from the soil. But in spite of the predominantly rationalist spirit of the post-war avant-garde, völkisch and anti-rationalist ideas lay just below the surface. The “organic” or “functionalist” school in Germany, and the post-1929 work of Aalto (so enthusiastically championed by Giedion in the later editions of Space, Time and Architecture), proposed a regional modernism based on con­crete local conditions and specific programs. Even before the First World War, as I have already suggested, classicism had been seen as an essential ingredient of regionalist architecture in France. It is therefore not altogether surprising to find Le Corbusier, in 1928, writing a book (Une Maison—Un Palais) in which a fisherman’s hut is seen as the humble forerunner of high classicism, thus separating classicism from its aristocratic and elitist connotations. We seem to be dealing here with an abstract notion of

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classicism which, with its emphasis on ethnography, is conformable to romantic theory. From the late 1920s Le Corbusier’s interest in vernacular and regional building increased. Disillusioned, like many French intellectuals of the period, with parliamentary democracy, he became involved with the proto-Fascist neo-Syndicalist movement, with its combination of populist regionalism and authoritarian technocracy. Unlike the governments of Germany and the USSR, which outlawed modernism and returned to eclecticism, Le Corbusier and the neo-Syndicalists conflated regionalism with modernism, believing that art and technology were inseparable and that modern architecture would become popular. The belief that popular customs and regional traditions could be reconciled with modern technology remained the mainspring of Le Corbusier’s work for the rest of his life. Already in 1929 he had stated the problem with characteristic lucidity: L’Architecture est le resultat de l’état d’esprit d’une époque. Nous sommes en face d’un événement de la pensée contemporaine; événment international...les techniques, les problèmes posés, comme les moyens scientifiques de réalization, sont universels. Pourtant, les régions ne se confondront pas, car les conditions climatiques, géographiques, topographiques, les courants des races et mille choses aujourd’hui encore profondes, guideront toujours la solution vers formes conditonnées. Translation: Architecture is the result of the state of mind of its time. We are facing an event in contemporary thought; an international event, which we didn’t realize ten years ago; the techniques, the problems raised, like the scientific means to solve them, are universal. Nevertheless, there will be no confusion of regions; for climatic, geographic, topographic conditions, the currents of race and thousands of things still today unknown, will always guide solutions toward forms conditioned by them. 1

This statement can be taken as more or less representative of a post-1930s architectural avant-garde that sought a modernism that would be determined simultaneously by modern technology and by the perennial architectural values inscribed in regional materials and customs. V. Regionalism and Late Capitalism

The statement by Le Corbusier quoted above makes several assumptions, the most important of which are: 1. Modern architecture is (should be?) conditioned by a universal technology. 2. Modern architecture is (should be?) conditioned by local customs, climates, etc.

Despite (or because of) the clarity of the statement, it presents two determinants as independent absolutes whose relation to each other remains a total mystery. What it ignores is the possibility that universal technology and local custom are intimately connected, so that a change in one necessarily produces a change in the other. The idea that they are somehow independent of each other seems to be derived from the Saint-Simonean notion that technical

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decisions made by specialists who “know what they are doing” merely provide the optimum conditions for the peoples’ enjoyment of unchanging needs and desires. But under the conditions of late capitalism desires and needs do not remain constant. They are affected by the changing technologies which make them possible. This is precisely the difference between the modern and the pre-industrial world. But in revenge, if, in this way, desires seem to become fluid, the gross economic conditions that create this fluidity become increasingly universal, abstract, and interdependent. Once the economy as a whole is commercialized the “natural” (i.e., stable) relation between the individual and the social group ceases to exist, as sociologists like Georg Simmel and Max Weber pointed out many years ago. When subsistence farming gives way to cash-crop farming (as has happened in Europe and is even now happening in, for example, India), the old symbiotic relation between culture and nature disappears. In western Europe, manual, rural economies co-existed for a long time with industrialization and this gave some plausibility to the regionalist argument. But in late capitalism the arm of technology extends into the remotest regions, even in the so-called “developing” countries which have no choice but to modernize. The relationship between industrialization and traditional cultures and techniques is not one in which they become organically fused with one another, as Le Corbusier implied, but one of hybridization, where different cultural paradigms, detached from their original contexts, co-exist in an impure and unstable form. As an example of this in the area of urbanism, one can cite the co-existence of different economies in a city like Chandigarh, where an “unofficial” economy of recycling has become necessary to facilitate the circulation of goods to the lowest social strata. (In Le Corbusier’s plan such a theoretically impossible situation was not allowed for.) But this is the first stage of a process in which age-old habits become transformed and contaminated with international cultural paradigms spread by modern systems of communication. Local customs do not disappear completely; they become “re-territorialized.” Virtual cultures of choice take the place of cultures born of economic necessity. Dubrovnik becomes Disney World. In conclusion, it is worth mentioning a third assumption in Le Corbusier’s statement according to which society is conceptualized as an end-game situation. Culture is seen as having achieved a state of harmony and balance. An imagined and ideal state of organic unity is presented as a situation immediately attainable—an instant utopia. In this situation of tautological illusion all “solutions” become self-fulfilling prophecies. This is true both of the claim that there is a “spirit of the époque” and of the belief in the persistence of regional cultures. But the real situation is not one of cultural stasis and fulfillment, but of indeterminacy and change, in which a complex, interlocking global economy creates new forms out of old cultures as it goes along—forms whose precise and determinate nature cannot be foretold with any accuracy. Architecture will certainly, when the economic conditions allow, continue to imagine ideal sociocultural forms, but its influence over social reality will be limited.

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Alan Colquhoun

The Concept of Regionalism Originally published in Postcolonial Space(s), Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai, editors (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 13–23. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

Ever since the late eighteenth century one of the main directions of architectural criticism has been that of regionalism. According to this approach, architecture should be firmly based on specific regional practices based on climate, geography, local materials, and local cultural traditions. It has been tacitly assumed that such a foundation is necessary for the development of an authentic modern architecture. I want to subject this idea itself to criticism and to consider the notion of regionalism so defined in relation to the conditions of late capitalism. I would like first to put the concept of regionalism into its historical context. Let me begin, therefore, by looking at the historical period nearest to us, the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. The twentieth-century avant-garde can always be viewed from one of two perspectives: either as having inherited the principles of the Enlightenment, or as emerging from the tradition of the Enlightenment’s great enemy, romanticism. One can hardly avoid noticing the presence of these contradictory strands: on the one hand the promotion of rationalism, universalism, and identity: on the other a recurrent enthusiasm for nominalism, empiricism, intuition, and difference. These contradictions came into the open during the famous debate between Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde at the Deutsche Werkbund Conference at Cologne in 1914, when Van de Velde maintained a Ruskinian belief in the virtues of the artist/ craftsman and a betrayed medieval tradition. At first glance it would appear that the former stand — universalism and rationalism — was triumphant in the Modern Movement of the 1920s. The elementariness of de Stijl, the rappel à l’ordre of Le Corbusier, and the Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany and Switzerland were all basically rationalistic. But, as has often been pointed out, the situation was in reality a good deal more complicated; rationalism was only one side of the Modern Movement. For example, when the paradigm of Schinkelesque classicism emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century, it not only laid claim to universal values but took over and transformed the regionalist philosophy of the Art Nouveau movement that it replaced. One example of this phenomenon is that classicism and “Mediterraneanism” were adopted by the cultural nationalists of Suisse romande. 1 This fact was extremely influential in forming the mature ideology of Le Corbusier, in whose work reference to the Mediterranean vernacular (cubic form, white walls, etc.) was just

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as prominent as the idea of industrial standardization. These tendencies became increasingly important in Le Corbusier’s work in the 1930s when, under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism, he began to think in terms of separate vernacular regional traditions, and even proposed a Europe divided into “natural” regions, including a Mediterranean region. 2 But Le Corbusier was only one case among many, though certainly the most articulate. Mediterraneanism was, I believe, deeply embedded in the whole Modern Movement from 1905 onwards. As for regionalism, one only has to look at the introductions to the successive editions of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, first published in 1940 and revised in five editions until 1968, to realize the extent to which regionalist ideas increasingly permeated modernist theory in the post–World War II period. For example, Alvar Aalto’s work was added in the second edition. So there is a case for saying that the 1920s was not just the simple triumph of rationalism that it often seems. Instead, it should perhaps be seen as the stage on which a deep conflict of ideologies was still being enacted. What was the nature of this conflict? To answer this question it is necessary to go back to the eighteenth century and the beginnings of romanticism and historicism. It was then that Europeans started to notice the existence of ancient cultures that were neither antique nor Biblical. At the same time they began to be interested in their own pasts — in the vernaculars that had existed before the revival of antiquity in the Renaissance. One of the most significant results of this process was the creation of an alternative model for humanistic culture, one that made a sharp distinction between the study of nature and that of human history. Both Johann Gottfried Herder and Giambattista Vico independently claimed that the two studies demanded totally different methods, scientific in the one case and hermeneutic in the other. This doctrine had a powerful effect in the German-speaking countries because it coincided with the revolt against the hegemony of French culture. But it also affected France and England. Elaborate genealogies were invented to support the new sentiment of nationhood. The English traced their ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons, or, even more remotely, the Celts, who, in their Scottish Highland incarnation, arrived complete with a fictitious poet, Ossian. In Germany, the Goths were supposed to have invented Gothic architecture on German soil until it was proved (by an Englishman) that this event had taken place on the Isle de France. I will return to this “invention of tradition,” as it has been called by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, 3 when I come to mention the national romanticism of the late nineteenth century. More important for an understanding of the origins of the doctrine of regionalism are the theories that were developed later in the nineteenth century, again mostly in Germany, concerning the problem of the rationalization of social life under industrial capitalism. This process was perhaps given its most powerful formulation by Max Weber when he coined two expressions that are still by-words for our present situation: the “disenchantment” of the world due to rationalization and secularization, and the “iron cage” of capitalism in which the modern world is imprisoned.

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Among the concepts that German postromantic theory used, two are of particular interest, if only because they reduce the problem to simple binary oppositions. The first is the distinction between Zivilization and Kultur. As Norbert Elias has shown, this distinction goes back to the early nineteenth century and was the direct result of the German revolt against French cultural dominance. Zivilization meant aristocratic materialism and superficiality, as opposed to the less brilliant but more profound Kultur. 4 The idea of this distinction spread to other countries with the dissemination of romanticism. In England Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the word “culture” with its German connotations. The concept was absorbed by John Ruskin and William Morris and, in the form of medievalism, became the cornerstone of the Arts and Crafts movement. In France itself, a school of historiography influenced by Chateaubriand held the view that the Frankish invasions of the fifth century were the true origins of modern French culture, rather than the institutions founded by the Gallo-Romans. 5 In the late nineteenth century the idea of Zivilization received the slightly different connotation of modern technological society, in opposition to preindustrial human values. But, both in the earlier and later senses, Zivilization represented the rational and universal as against the instinctual, autochthonous, and particular. We find approximately the same set of ideas in Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture when he talks about the split in modern life between feeling and intellect — a conflict that he hoped to dissolve by arguing that science and modern art were in reality dealing with the same phenomena but from different perspectives. The distinction between Zivilization and Kultur is a fruitful way of looking at the widespread nationalist movements of the 1890s, which in so many ways repeated the impulse of the earlier romantic movement. Just as the Germans had done around 1800, so a number of groups distanced themselves from the countries by which they had been politically or culturally dominated: the Irish from the English, 6 the Catalonians from the Castilians, the Finns from the Russians and the Swedes. In Finland, for example, the Finnish language was officially adopted, 7 an ancestral aural literature was “reconstructed,” and an eclectic architecture representing “Finnishness” was put together from various stylistic sources, some indigenous, some external (for example, one of its main sources was the English Arts and Crafts movement). It need hardly be said that such a representation of national “essence” was largely fictional, but it had a clear ideological function: the legitimization of a nation-state in terms of a regional culture, and in this it was successful. The notion of Kultur was taken up, in spirit if not in name, by chauvinistic movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Maurice Barrès wrote in 1902, There is in France a static morality...Kantianism. This claims to regulate universal man, without taking individual differences into account. It tends to form young persons from Lorraine, Provence, Brittany, and Paris in terms of an abstract, ideal man, who is everywhere the same, whereas the need will be for men rooted solidly in our soil, in our history. 8

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In Germany the idea was adopted by the National Socialists in the 1920s, taking up the ideas of writers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had used the distinction Zivilization/Kultur to promote the concept of racial purity. 9 In so doing they recruited several architects of the Heimatschutz persuasion, such as Paul Schulze-Naumburg, whose ideas were derived from the Arts and Crafts movement. The second concept I want to discuss is the distinction hetween Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft — a distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies in his book of that title of 1887. 10 According to Tönnies these two words represent two types of human association. Gesellshaft-like associations are the result of rational deliberation, whereas Gemeinschaft-like associations are those that have developed organically. Again, we find the same opposition as in the case of Zivilization and Kultur, one term based on the idea of a natural law independent of historical or geographical contingency, the other implying rootedness in the soil. Examples of the former are bureaucracies, factories, and corporations, in which social relations are rational means to a desired end. Examples of the latter are the family, friendship groups, clans, and religious sects — all groupings in which social relations are ends in themselves. I do not need to demonstrate that the doctrine of regionalism belongs to the Kultur and Gemeinschaft side of these oppositions. The problem I would like to address is this: Given the radically changed circumstances of the modern world, does this cluster of concepts still make sense, and, if so, in what way will its culture — above all in its architectural manifestations — differ from those of its earlier incarnations: romanticism, Art Nouveau, and the early-twentiethcentury avant-garde? Obviously, the anxieties that were experienced in these periods have not simply evaporated. Many still feel disquiet at the increasingly abstract and homogenized world of modern postindustrial society. But it is questionable whether these doubts can any longer be expressed adequately in terms of the oppositions I have outlined. Clearly, the doctrine of regionalism is based on an ideal social model — one might call it the “essentialist model.” According to this model, all societies contain a core, or essence, that must be discovered and preserved. One aspect of this essence lies in local geography, climate, and customs, involving the use and transformation of local, “natural” materials. This is the aspect that has most often been invoked in connection with architecture. The first thing to note about this model is that it was formulated in the late eighteenth century precisely at the moment when the phenomena that it described seemed to be threatened and about to disappear. This is hardly surprising. The elements of society that operate without friction are invisible. It is only when imbalances and frictions begin to occur that it becomes possible to see them. So, from the start, the concept of a regional architecture was not exactly what it seemed. It was more an object of desire than one objective fact. That is why the architecture of regionalism put forward by the romantics could not be that “authentic thing” of which it had formed a mental image, but only its representation. The question as to whether such an “authentic thing”

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ever existed is an idle one, so long as our only access to it is by means of its later conceptualization. Nevertheless, the theory of regionalism adopted by the Modern Movement insisted on the need of such an architecture to be “authentic.” Thus, what had to be eliminated were the very practices of the romantics themselves, by which Gemeinshaft-like societies had been invoked by mimicking their forms. It not by such means that the essence of regional architectures could be recovered, but rather by discovering the causal relations that existed between forms and their environment. But if what I have said is correct this would be a hopeless task, even if we restricted ourselves to the regionalisms of romanticism. What would be discovered after the outer layer of mimetic forms had been removed would simply be a deeper level of mimesis. The use of local materials, sensitivity to context, scale, and so on would all be so many ways of representing “the idea” of an authentic, regional architecture. The search for absolute authenticity that the doctrine of regionalism implies is likely to create an oversimplified picture of a complex cultural situation. Fear of such an oversimplified approach seems to have lain behind one of the more sophisticated recent theories of regionalism. By qualifying the old term “regionalism” with the new term “critical,” Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre have tried to preempt any imputation of regressive nostalgia. According to them, the word “critical,” in this context, means two things. First it means “resistance against the appropriation of a way of life and a bond of human relations by alien economic and power interests.” 11 If we take away the mildly Marxian overtones of this statement what is left corresponds exactly to the notions of Kultur and Gemeinschaft that I have outlined above. It represents an attempt to preserve a regional essence that is seen to be in mortal danger and to uphold the qualities of Kultur against the incursions of a universalizing and rationalizing Zivilization. But any doctrine of regionalism has always implied such an intention, so that, taken in this sense, the word “critical” would seem to add nothing of substance to the concept. The second meaning Tzonis and Lefaivre give to the word “critical” is to create resistance against the merely nostalgic return of the past by removing regional elements from their natural contexts so as to defamiliarize them and create an effect of estrange­ment. This seems to be based on the Russian formalist theory of “making strange.” Now, these two meanings do not seem to have anything to do with each other. It seems that what is being presented as a single idea, “critical regionalism,” is in fact two separate ideas. But the problem goes deeper, because the second interpretation of “critical” actually appears to contradict the first. It draws attention to the fact that the postulated organic world of regional artifacts no longer exists. Far from resisting the appropriations of rationalization, it confirms them by suggesting that all that remains of an original, unitary body of regional architecture are shards, fragments, bits, and pieces that have been torn from their original context. Taking this view, any attempt to retrieve the original contents in all their original wholeness would result only in a sort of kitsch. The only possible attitude towards regionalism and the values of Kultur and Gemeinschaft would therefore be one of irony.

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Behind the doctrine of a regionalism based on the old virtues of an organic (and therefore unconscious) social and artistic unity, there lies the doctrine of a sophisticated manneristic art that consciously juxtaposes incongruous elements to produce unstable combinations. This being so, perhaps we should stop using the word “regionalism” and look for other ways of conceptualizing the problems to which the word is supposed to respond. In saying this I am not saying that there are no longer any regions with their characteristic climates and customs. What I want to say is that regionality is only one among many concepts of architectural representation and that to give it special importance is to follow a well-trodden critical tradition that no longer has the relevance that it may have had in the past. It is true that many interesting contemporary designs refer to local materials, typologies, and morphologies. But in doing so their architects are not trying to express the essence of particular regions, but are using local features as motifs in a compositional process in order to produce original, unique, and context-relevant architectural ideas. Take, for example, a recent building by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. In this small house in Italy there is play between local dry-stone walling (standing for the rural) and a “rational” concrete frame such that wall and frame are related in unexpected ways. It is impossible to read this building as a synthesis. Rather it is a sort of endless text. What we find here cannot be called “regionalism.” Instead it is a work that makes subtle comments on a number of architectural codes, including the fenêtre en longueur, the cube, the frame, and the organicity of natural materials. One is not quite sure whether what is being suggested is tectonic solidity of theatricality, closure, or openness. In contemplating the building the mind tends to oscillate between a number of hypotheses, none of which are completely confirmed or denied. Another example is the housing recently built in The Hague, Netherlands, by Alvaro Siza. Here Siza imitates — but rather indirectly — certain features of Dutch vernacular classicism, such as its entry system, window proportions, and materials. Can this be called regionalism? If so, whose regionalism? But is not the question an absurdity? The one fact that could be called “regional” is its ownership. If one wants to use the word “regional” in such a context one must see it as a second-order system, filtered through the eclectic sensibility of a particular architect. It is the result of a voluntaristic interpretation of urbanistic values, one that takes into account existing urban forms as an artistic context; it is certainly not a confirmation of a living local tradition. The architectural codes that were once tied to the customs of autonomous cultural regions have long ago been liberated from this dependence. It is a matter of free choice. Localism and tradition­alism can therefore be seen as universal potentials always lurking on the reverse face of modernization and rationalization. One of the intentions of a regionalist approach is the preservation of “difference.” But difference, which used to be ensured by the coexistence of water-tight and autonomous regions of culture, now depends largely on two other phenomena: individualism and the nation-state. As regards individualism, the architect, as the agent through which the work of architecture is realized,

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is himself the product of modern rationalization and division of labor. Designs that emphasize local architecture are no more privileged today than other ways of adapting architecture to the conditions of modernity. The combination of these various ways is the result of the choices of individual architects who are operating from within multiple codes. In respect to the nation-state, in spite of the world-wide and almost instantaneous dissemination of technologies and codes, which results in an underlying similarity of the architecture in all Western and most Eastern countries at any one moment, it is usually possible to distinguish between the more typical products of individual countries. In a sense, the nation-state is the modern “region” — a region in which culture is coextensive with political power. But this culture is of a different kind from that of the regions of the preindustrial world. We may not quite agree with Ernst Renan when, in a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, he denied that national boundaries were dictated by language, race, religion, or any other “natural” factor. 12 But at least we can admit the truth of his statement that what creates a nation is a will towards political unity rather than any preexistent set of customs. These two functions may be coextensive but they do not have to be. The need for placing regions that often differ from each other under a single political umbrella comes from the needs of the modern industrial economy. As Ernest Gellner has pointed out, the reasons for the rise of the nation-state were the opposite of those underlying regional differentiation. Differences between regions were part of the structure of the agrarian world. The needs of industrial society, on the contrary, demand a high degree of uniformity and the flattening out of local differences. 13 Perhaps it will be argued that this is not true universally. Recent events in the ex-Yugoslavia and the ex-USSR have shown that old regional identities are still very much alive. But it is difficult to assess the status of regionalism in these cases, since it is obvious that ethnic emotions are being fanned for political reasons — that is, reasons connected with the formation of modern nation-states and the control of political power. The conflict in the ex-Yugoslavia cannot be attributed to profound differences in regional cultures but rather to residues of previous conflicts between the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. As far as architecture and everyday artifacts are concerned, the cultures of the combatants are identical. The person who stands for the satanic “other” is not marked by any specific cultural differences. Indeed, one of the striking aspects of the television coverage of the war is that it is taking place in the familiar and banal context of badly built modern blocks of apartments and supermarkets — contexts common to the entire modern world. A more plausible exception may be made of the so-called “developing world” — especially that part of the Third World consisting of ancient cultures, such as the Indian and the Islamic. In these countries, it will be argued, nationhood does sometimes coincide with living cultural traditions — traditions that are in conflict with modernization. But however much we hope that crucial aspects of these traditions may turn out to be conformable with modernization,

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we have to admit that the modern technologies and cultural paradigms that increasingly predominate in the urban centers of these countries also affect the rural areas. In these societies, different historical times exist together, and under these circumstances it is already difficult to speak of “authentic” local traditions in a cultural field such as architecture. It may be desirable to satisfy the demand for traditional forms with their socially embedded, allegorical meanings, even though the artistic and craftsmanlike traditions that originally supported them have begun to atrophy, due to prolonged contact with the West. But these are matters of strategy rather than of essence. With these questions we come to the core of the problem. What is the relation between cultural patterns and technologies? The problem is, to some extent, obscured in the West, because industrialization evolved out of local cultural traditions, and adaptation to a postindustrialized culture is already quite far advanced. The problem is glaring, however, in the East and in Africa because of the friction between two worlds and two times: the agrarian and the industrial. Are cultural patterns absolutely dependent on an industrial base, or can they maintain a certain independence? Is an industrialized culture irrevocably Eurocentric? But these questions take me too far from my theme, and I would like to end by looking again at the problem from the point of view of the technologically advanced countries, and at the same time to sum up my observations on the concept of regionalism, as it concerns these countries. Modern postindustrial culture is more uniform than traditional cultures because the means of production and dissemination are standardized and ubiquitous. But this uniformity seems to be compensated for by a flexibility that comes from the nature of modern techniques of communication, making it possible to move rapidly between codes and to vary messages to an unprecedented extent. This greater freedom, this ability of industrial society to tolerate difference within itself, however, does not follow the same laws that accounted for differences within traditional societies. In these societies, codes within a given cultural region were completely rigid. It was precisely this rigidity that accounted for the differences between different regions. In modern societies these regional differences are largely obliterated. Instead, there exist large, uniform, highly centralized cultural/political entities, within which differences of an unpredictable, unstable, and apparently random kind tend to develop. The concept of regionality depends on it being possible to correlate cultural codes with geographical regions. It is based on traditional systems of communication in which climate, geography, craft traditions, and religions are absolutely determining. These determinants are rapidly disappearing and in large parts of the world no longer exist. That being the case, how is “value” established? Whereas in earlier times value belonged to the world of necessity, it now belongs to the world of freedom that Immanuel Kant foretold at the end of the eighteenth century. Modern society is polyvalent — that is to say, its codes are generated randomly from within a universal system of rationalization that, in itself, claims to be “value free.”

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Clearly this way of generating meaning and difference in modern technological society has serious consequences for architecture, whose codes have always been even less amenable to individual and random manipulation than the other “arts” and more dependent on impersonal and imperative typologies and techniques. In the preindustrialized world these technologies— summed up in the Greek word techne—were connected with myths relating to the earth and the cosmos. In modern society “technique” is irreversibly disconnected from the phenomenal world of the visible, tangible experience upon which such myths were built. In the modern media the process of meansend abstraction has resulted in the rerouting of artistic codes from the stable to the apparently random. To speak more accurately, they have been rerouted from the public to the private realm. Such a process of “privatization” was suggested by Michel de Certeau, for whom modern technocratic life has not so much destroyed the myths and narratives characteristic of agrarian societies, as it has confined them to the family and the individual, where they reappear as fragments of an older narration. 14 This, then, is the problem of architecture in the postmodern world. It seems no longer possible to envisage an architecture that has the stable, public meanings that it had when it was connected with the soil and with the regions. How should we define the kinds of architecture that are taking its place?

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Introduction to “Four Approaches to Regionalism in Architecture”

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In January of 1989, the first

subsequent building, should it desire

international seminar dedicated to

the label “regional.” In this sense,

critical regionalism was held at Cal

those features “define” the style most

Poly Pomona. Its aim was to “oppose

appropriate to the region. Under this

the triumphant postmodernism

formulation, to be a regional architect

promoted by Charles Jencks and the

in Santa Fe is to work in adobe.

1980 Venice Biennale.” i In the next two years, meetings in Delft and

This classic causal argument

Milan further honed and promoted

reveals, if not some clear-cut cases

an architecture of resistance to

of regional architectural practices,

postmodernism. The record of that

a provocative set of analytic

first meeting, known colloquially

categories by which the whole

as the “Pomona Proceedings,”

practice of regionalism may be better

contained a wide variety of essays

understood. Each serves as a kind

on regionalism. It is a much sought

of lens revealing different facets of

after, hard-to-find document as it

the region that the regional architect

was the first collection of writings

may respond to, imitate, abstract, or

specifically focused on regionalism in

experience.

architecture. Eleftherios Pavlides (b. 1948) is a professor of architecture at Roger Williams University.

Eleftherios Pavlides’ essay, which appears toward the end of the Pomona Proceedings, is distinct for its pragmatic and analytical approach to regionalism as both a practice and a topic of research. He lays out four distinct approaches to regional research: folkloric, ideological, experiential, and anthropological, each of which offers a different way to gather facts and impressions definitive of a region and outlines an ideology for regional design. For example, a folklorist who “collects” motifs and details provides the revivalist regionalist architect raw material for the preservation, reconstruction, or design of new structures. The Santa Fe regional style is a case in point, in which a set of materials (adobe and wood) and details (rounded edges) became codified as features to be replicated in all

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Eleftherios Pavlides

Four Approaches to Regionalism in Architecture Originally published in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, Spyros Amourgis, editor (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991), 305–21. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

Introduction

Architecture responds to nearby and distant influences, both in time and place. This paper examines how local influences have been used to generate local character in architecture, which has been called “regionalism” in architecture. “Regional” architecture is the existing vernacular architecture of a region; it is the given built environment; sometimes it is not even recognized as architecture. “Regionalism” is the architect’s response to these regional architectures. There is great diversity in the way regionalism has been practiced. Most of the discussion on regionalism in architecture has focused on trying to identify the qualities and processes that distinguish between various regionalistic responses. There is also extensive discussion on what generates quality in regionalism. By contrast, there has been little examination of the theories and methods used for studying regional vernacular architectures. However, depending on how and why one studies regional vernacular architectures, the influence on architectural practice can be very different. The same regional vernacular results in divergent and even contradictory regionalisms, depending on which assumptions are made about vernacular buildings, which methods have been used in data collection, and what kind of analysis has been carried out. The variety of approaches taken to study regional architectures differ radically in their basic assumptions. This paper examines four distinct academic traditions which have been applied to the study and teaching of regional vernacular architectures and their regionalist responses. These are: the “folkloric” approach, originating at the end of the nineteenth century, and a corresponding “typological” or “platonic” regionalism; the “modernist” approach, starting in the 1910s, and a corresponding “ideological” regionalism; the approach initiated by Bernard Rudofsky in 1964 emphasizing the “experiential” qualities of architecture and a corresponding “experiential” or “Aristotelian” regionalism; and the approach initiated by Labelle Prussin and Amos Rapoport in 1969, which examines the cultural context of vernacular architectures and the possibility it has of leading to an “anthropological” regionalism.

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The Folklorists

The folkloric approach to vernacular architecture emerged from the “antiquarian movement” of the 19th century (Dorson 1973: 1). Although many schools of thought have developed in the folkloric approach to the built environment, they share a common methodology and certain underlying assumptions, namely: 1. The unit of study is the house as whole and the objective is to identify and typologically classify all the houses of a region, according to their overall plans or elevations. In selecting houses to be studied, those thought to be typical and representative of a group of people are chosen (Megas 1942: 41–44), and a “median” house is preferred to an extraordinary or unique one (Jenkins 1973: 509). This “median” house is used as an archetype to represent the area being studied. The way a house is used and its physical surroundings are not examined closely by folklorists. Even if there is information on sun orientation, on adjacent exterior spaces or topography, or on the uses and function of a house, this information is not analyzed nor is it taken into account in making typological classifications (Glassie 1975). 2. The context for study is a region ranging in size from a province to a hemisphere. Folk artifacts are thought to exhibit major variation over space and minor variation through time. Folk research relies on the concept of “region,” and folklorists have always studied the house within the context of regions. This concern with areal differentiation leads from the extremely detailed study of small regions to the study of large regions such as an entire hemisphere (Evans 1973: 518); (Dorson 1973: 43). There are a number of ways in which the size of regions can be identified depending on the criteria used in constructing house typologies (Dorson 1973: 40); (Glassie 1968: 34). For example, regions can be defined according to national or linguistic groups, topographic features, or other criteria. With such varied criteria, the earth can be subdivided in infinitely varied ways (Evans 1973: 530). By contrast, products of the industrial culture, e.g., mass-produced housing by developers or products of academic culture (buildings designed by architects), seem to exhibit minor variation over space and major variation through time (Glassie 1968: 33). “A search for patterns in folk architecture yields regions where a search for patterns in academic or popular architecture yields periods” (Glassie 1968: 33). 3. Perhaps the most important contribution of folklorists has been the voluminous information they collected on “folk society” in general and “folk architecture” in particular. Folklorists emphasize the information-gathering aspect of their work. They collect detailed information on both the folk artifact, the house, as well as information on the society that produced it (Jenkins 1973: 498). Dorson characterizes folk researchers who work on folk architecture as follows: “At the present time they are more hortatory rather than theoretical,

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ethnographic rather than philosophical” (Dorson 1973: 40). A great deal of information would have been lost if it had not been salvaged by the folklorists, since the material they study is rapidly perishing. In gathering information about houses, folklorists have emphasized the diagram of its plan. In contrast to its material construction or its use, the plan diagram is regarded as the most persistent, the least changeable of its attributes, and therefore the most valuable to the folklorist (Glassie 1968: 8). According to Glassie the primary characteristics of a usual American folk house type is height and floor plan. Trim and appendages, such as porches and other additions, are considered to be secondary characteristics. Therefore even if a wide range of detailed visual and verbal data is collected, only diagram­matic information is used for generating typologies. 4. In its nature and value, folk architecture is viewed as timeless, uniform, severely utilitarian, and as representative of a people’s “soul.” According to folklorists, academic and popular architectures change style frequently, as fashions change, while folk architecture stays basically the same for long enough periods to be considered timeless. For example, Glassie observes that a rectangular building type with a gable roof projecting on one side over a door, found today in Central Europe and Scandinavia, was common in Neolithic times (Glassie 1968: 8). According to folklorists, folk architecture exhibits great variation from one region to another, while within a certain region, it is characterized by uniformity or by conformity to a certain norm. The construction of typologies reflects this assumption of uniformity. In addition to timelessness and uniformity, folk architecture is also assumed to be severely utilitarian. It is “architecture of necessity by contrast to architecture of pride.” Some folklorists see this utilitarian aspect of folk architecture as a valuable reason for studying it. Warren Roberts noted that “folk architecture is severely functional, and functional patterns that have developed and persisted for long periods of time should not be ignored by building planners.” Finally, the folkloric approach asserts that folk architecture reflects the character and soul of the people who produced it. Buildings of the past, as well as of the present, are considered to be products of the persisting cultural forces, of the builders’ “soul.” Similarities in form over time are viewed as the result and proof of the continuity of those forces (Megas 1942: 41–42). Folkloric or Platonic Regionalism

Some folklorists have suggested using folk architecture as a source for developing national architectural styles to be taught in national universities (Markopoulos 1940: 10; Megas 1942). The result of examining regional vernacular architecture from the folkloric perspective is a regionalism which tries to recapture a certain period of the past, presumed to represent a timeless reality. It is a revivalist regionalism which tried to construct an iconic image of presumed regional archetypes, thus generating a neovernacular architecture,

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parallel to neoclassism. In both neovernacular and neoclassism there is an attempt to re-create the architecture of the past. The quality of buildings attempting to emulate the past can vary. However, what gives legitimacy to the design, according to this approach, is how well it evokes the regional archetype. The use of older materials and building methods is thought to lend more authenticity to new buildings, according to this approach. New technology and materials are used reluctantly and only if old materials are prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, when new technologies and materials is used they are concealed in an effort to deny their presence. Government regulations which attempt to preserve the local character of vernacular settlements most often rely on the folkloric conception of a “type” which is representative of a region. However, the significance of the architecture produced under such guidelines is lost to local inhabitants since it is the detailed and variable surface qualities of architecture which are significant definers of local identity. In actuality, archetypes proposed to represent a region are not socially meaningful to any community within that region. The Modern Architect

Modern architects were the second group of researchers to study regional vernacular architectures. They were interested in justifying the tenets of their new ideology that architecture should be: 1) severely utilitarian in its use of material and technology; 2) functional in its adaptation to climate and site; and 3) beautiful by relying on manipulation of mass and space rather than on surface decoration. Their interest in the vernacular environment dates back to the creation of Modernism in Architecture in the early 20th century. Le Corbusier and Gropius both turned to the vernacular for inspiration, as did many who followed them, “because it [was] felt that the lessons to be learned [were] advantageous to the nature of the architects’ work, an assumption which was not subjected to much scrutiny” (Oliver 1974: 8). The studies of vernacular architecture produced by Modern Architects have a number of common characteristics: 1. In studying vernacular architecture Modern Architects attempt to identify and record the design elements of the environment, whether typical or unique, that are of interest to them because they illustrate the tenets of modernism. The unit of study varies depending on the judgment or interest of the investigator or on the qualities of a particular subject. Architectural elements which have been studied include: details of door hardware; downspouts or chimneys; interior and exterior spaces defined by the features of the enclosing floors, walls, and ceilings; and even streets and house complexes composing the fabric of an entire community. 2. Modern Architects have studied vernacular architecture opportunistically, as Le Corbusier did in his visit to the Orient. What gave coherence to their findings was the discovery of universal and timeless ways of achieving architectural perfection, the confirmation of a new way of doing architecture without

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reference to the historical styles that had dominated Western architecture until that time. 3. The objective of the Modern Architect-researcher was to demonstrate how architectural quality can be generated through the rational use of materials and by responding to climatic concerns. Data was collected to record the functional adaptation of local architectures to climate; the formal qualities of buildings, based on such principles as lack of decoration or repetition of masses; or such stylistic concerns as flat roofs, primary volumes, or white interiors. No reference was ever made to the cultural context of the built environment. Architectural scaled drawings and photographs were combined to record, as extensively as possible, the architecture being studied. Vernacular architecture was studied, not as a diagrammatic abstraction, but as a complex physical existence. The relationship between a building’s architectural form and the landscape, the sun, other buildings, and the public spaces of the street and the square were documented in some detail. The drawings and sketches used included the entire range of graphic representation e.g., plan, section, façade, elevation, isometric, perspectives, and construction details. The text accompanying such studies was often secondary to the visual presentation of the material and was included to highlight or elaborate on the information in the drawings and photographs. In some studies the style of the writing is poetic or even in verse form (Konstantinides 1976). 4. Architects who pioneered the Modern Movement of architectural design studied vernacular architecture because they valued it as a source of inspiration for their own work as well as a corroboration of modernist theories of design. Vernacular architecture was perceived as being successful both aesthetically and functionally. It sets standards of architectural success (Oliver 1974: 9). Indeed, Le Corbusier considered vernacular architecture as having attained perfection in serving human needs and harmonizing with the environment. He attributed moral qualities to the absence of embellishments “whitewash is extremely moral” (Besset 1968: 17, 18). 5. The pioneers of Modern Architecture emphasized the rational aspect of architectural design. Vernacular architecture was assumed to provide superbly rational responses to functional requirements such as available materials, climate, and requirements of use. Adolf Loos in 1913 wrote that the lesson to be learned from the architecture of peasants was not necessarily their form but the way form was a direct response to function. Ideological Regionalism

The regionalism which results from the Modern Architects’ ideological approach to the vernacular can be illustrated with reference to Le Corbusier’s work. His exposure to vernacular architecture can be traced in his work. The refined design of Cap Martin and the details of Ronchamp were influenced by

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the whitewashed, undecorated masses of Santorini houses (Oliver 1974: 7). The section of the apartments at Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles recalls the typical interiors of houses on Skyros (Oliver 1974: 7). Both of these examples are of vernacular architectural features congruent with such modernist principles as asymmetry, repetition, simplicity, and use of primary forms. In addition to vernacular features, materials used regionally have been used by modernist architects when designing in these contexts, thus generating architecture of local character. The wood frame and siding of Gropius’s house in Cambridge has been characterized as a regional design response. This approach to the study of the regional vernacular creates an architecture which is rigorously modern while incorporating qualities or elements found in vernacular architecture. An opportunistic process is used by modernist architects to identify vernacular architectural qualities to emulate. Only elements or qualities which fit through the filter of modernist ideology are selected. The Experiential

In 1964 a seminal book was published which greatly affected the level of interest in vernacular architecture and the emphasis and direction of research. This book was Architecture without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky. It was the first book to attempt a global overview of vernacular architecture. Rudofsky’s book was based on an exhibition of photographs produced in the 1940s and presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964. The exhibition was mounted as a critique of the perceived environmental blandness caused by the wide application of modernist principles to architecture in the fifties and sixties. The stated objective of Rudofsky’s book was to “enrich architecture in the industrial countries and help with their architectural plight” (Rudofsky 1964: 3). This study pointed out that practical and aesthetic lessons can be learned from vernacular architecture, such as the use of natural light, air control, prefabrication, standardization of materials, flexible and moveable partitions, etc. Such suggestions had been made before, in the studies of the modern architects, though not quite as forcefully and only on a limited regional level. However, Rudofsky’s intentions went beyond the obvious picturesqueness and formal aesthetic qualities evident in the material which was presented. Rudofsky introduced the concept of “humanness” as a criterion of what designers can learn from vernacular architectures. He concluded his introduction: “The wisdom to be derived goes beyond economic and aesthetic considerations, for it touches the far tougher and increasingly troublesome problem of how to live and let live, how to keep peace with one’s neighbors, both in the parochial and universal sense” (Rudofsky 1964: 6). Rudofsky’s exhibition and book attracted considerable attention and provoked a new awareness about the value of studying vernacular architectures. By contrast to the folklorists who constructed typologies, and the modern architects who looked for confirmation of ideological positions, Rudofsky’s approach sought to identify and present the experiential qualities of regional vernacular architectures. The qualities sought for study were those that conveyed

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a sense of well-being and heightened the social interaction of the inhabitants, such as human scale, great views, opportunities to gather in small groups, and visual variety. The experiential approach discovers formal properties of the built environment and represents it with the same tools as those used by the modern architects. While the two approaches share photographic and graphic methodologies in studying the regional vernacular, the choice of what is recorded is different. Modernist Architects would select primary forms, simple and repetitive, ignoring the hybrid forms which often are found in vernacular architecture. The experiential approach would look at hybrid forms and would also record features that evoke delight, such as surface decoration, or materials used for their textual qualities. The context of study is the entire world. While the modernist approach would investigate how materials and climate generate locally appropriate responses, the experiential approach would emphasize the great formal diversity of architecture that is generated in response to essentially the same constraints of climate, material, and site. Experiential Regionalism

The regionalism resulting from this “experiential” approach is an extension of modernism. It can be seen in the work of such post-modern architects as Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Christopher Alexander (who heavily footnotes his work with reference to Rudofsky’s books), Dimitri and Susana Antonakaki, Yianni Couneli, and others. They re-create the experiential qualities of the regional vernacular while at the same time maintaining most, if not all, the qualities and principles of modernist architecture such as open plan, non-symmetrical compositions, complex articulation in section, etc. The limited modernist vocabulary of flat roofs, orthogonal geometries, and restrictive uniformity of building materials was vastly expanded as these architects allowed the full range of vernacular vocabulary to influence their work. There is no attempt to evoke the regional vernacular as a symbolic image, but to evoke its experiential qualities. In Couneli’s four houses in Ekali, Greece, it is the actual experi­ence of views and breezes made possible by the large exterior spaces, rather than the iconic evocation of 18th-century Athenian buildings, which informs the design. It provides a livable environment responsive to climate and site in ways that recall the architecture of Greek islands. Modern materials are used for their structural and formal capabilities, not as substitutes for traditional materials. Traditional construction is used, but only when it is also the most economical, practical, and experientially satisfying alternative. Experiential regionalism is based on an interpretation of the vernacular through the poetic sensibility of the architect. While it is more significant than the nostalgic re-creation of folkloric regionalism, and greatly expands the scope of modernist regionalism, experiential regionalism has limitations. As Lefaivre and Tzonis observe: “No new architecture can emerge without new kinds of relationships between design and user, without new kinds of programs” (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1985: 22). The problem of finding ways to design based on

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a more profound understanding of diverse groups of users, is addressed by the anthropological approach to vernacular architecture, which holds the possibility of an anthropological regionalism. Vernacular Architecture in Its Cultural Context

In 1969 two books came out which addressed the issue of “humanness” in vernacular architecture which Rudofsky had tried to examine. Rapoport’s book House, Form and Culture has a global perspective like the earlier book by Rudofsky. It includes a brilliant refutation of all the theories which proposed functionalist explanations for the diversity of vernacular architectural form, by presenting numerous counter-examples where the same materials, technology, climate, and site generated diametrically opposite forms (Rapoport 1969: 27). He suggested sociocultural factors as the primary force in the creation of form in vernacular architecture, and physical forces as secondary and modifying factors (Rapoport 1969: 47). In this view, the form of buildings is to be studied as a direct expression of changing values, perceptions, and ways of life, where physical constraints play only a modifying role (Rapoport 1969: 4). In Rapoport’s work vernacular architecture is therefore studied and valued primarily for its cultural and symbolic content. The same year that Rapoport’s work was published, a book came out about a regional vernacular architecture placed in its social context. It was Architecture in Northern Ghana by Labelle Prussin (1969). Her research established that materials, technology, range of economic activity, social organization, religious and secular ideology, as well as historical factors, all had an influence on architectural form (Prussin 1969: 111–118). Unlike Rapoport, whose research compared a very wide range of examples from around the world, Prussin’s context of study was a small region. The important contribution of her work was its attempt to combine architectural and anthropological methodologies. Extended visits as a participant observer produced rich ethnographic information about the social context in which the architecture functioned. This supplemented the original surveys which identified and recorded architectural form in significant detail. This pioneering work was the most sophisticated presentation, to that time, of the multiplicity of factors generating vernacular architecture. Her addition of a historical dimension was especially valuable. As a result, the architecture of northern Ghana is presented by Prussin as having a dynamic quality, in contrast to earlier static models (Prussin 1969: Goldschmidt, intro). In the foreword of Prussin’s book, Walter Goldschmidt identifies the need for establishing an anthropology of architecture: “A dwelling that satisfies physical comforts may also create social discomfort. If architec­ture — particularly the mass architecture of the future — is to serve the former and avoid the latter, it must take cognizance of the significant social relationships in the lives of those who inhabit the spaces it provides.” Partially as a result of these books, a variety of studies were undertaken on vernacular architecture which tried to relate built environments to their social

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contexts. These studies were also stimulated by the realization that often the quality of life in architect-planned housing developments falls short of that in the vernacular architectures of both traditional and newly constructed squatter settlements (Oliver 1974: 7). The lessons to be derived from vernacular shelter involve identifying the cultural determinants of form, the factors that influence growth, and the values that are placed upon the buildings (Oliver 1974: 9). The way to achieve this, according to Paul Oliver, is to integrate anthropological studies of a community along with examination of a community’s architecture. One theoretical and methodological framework which addresses this issue termed “sociosemiotics” (Pavlides and Hesser 1989: 360), combines the visual sophistication of architecture with the cultural and contextual sensitivity of ethnography. Sociosemiotic theory states that conventionalized form of a vernacular architecture constitutes a language useful to the inhabitants’ social life (Pavlides 1985). The ap­proach is analogous to sociolinguistics, which combines ethnographic fieldwork with a detailed study of the form of sound in its social context. Sociosemiotic methodology requires detailed studies of both the built environment and the population that constructed and inhabited it. To achieve this, architects, art historians, and social scientists may collaborate in lengthy field studies to carry out a four-phase research process. The four-phase research process includes: 1. Photographic documentation to determine the visual variation present in a particular architectural environment. This provides the starting point for subsequent research. The visual (indeed all sensory) qualities of an environment are thoroughly investigated before attempting to identify the social and psychological aspects of that environment. Analysis of the photographic record by the researcher, utilizing the art-historic/archeological methodology of studying visual form through similarity and contrast of proportion, color, decoration, scale, etc. is used to generate an etic reconstruction of the built environment under investigation. 2. Detailed visual documentation through scaled drawing and photogra­phy of a few buildings representing the visual variability of the environment discovered in phase one. 3. Participant observation and informant interviews provide baseline information about use, interpretation, and meaning of the environ­ment under study by various subgroups inhabiting it. 4. Photoelicitation interviews to confirm and expand the findings of phase three and to produce emic interpretation of the researched environment, revealing how various groups of inhabitants view, interpret, and use the visual variability of their environments. Lengthy slide shows are accompanied with open-ended questions such as: “What activity takes place here?” “What can you say about the people using this space?”

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The detailed visual information produced in phases one and two allows the production of research reports with extensive illustrations which become an integral part of the textual presentation. The inclusion of extensive illustration makes the textual material more meaningful to the architectural design process. Anthropological Regionalism

The kind of anthropological research required for the collection of both visual and ethnographic data requires lengthy stays in a community. The collection of etic and emic data is costly and takes a great deal of time and effort. A priori there is no obvious reason for expending the extra energy that is needed to study the visual environment in its social context in this way. However, a purely visual approach to vernacular architecture will never reveal the richness of information that inhabitants read in their visual environment. Coherent patterns of meaning emerge only by understanding the inhabitant’s point of view. Further studies of this nature involving anthropologists as well as architects are essential for our understanding of vernacular environments. They can also provide information relevant for our schools of architecture, which are presently seeking ways to sensitize students to the social aspects of design; for environmental designers, who increasingly are confronted with designing for users who are both geographically and culturally far removed from themselves; for governments interested in passing regulations and laws to help preserve their national architectural heritage. The anthropological approach promises to provide a complexity of programmatic information unavailable to architectural designers today so that they can create what might be termed “anthropological regionalism.” The anthropological approach does not have to be restricted only to smallscale traditional settlements. Sociosemiotic research utilizing the four-step methodology presented above can be applied to any building type or built environment (Pavlides 1991). Conclusion

In regionalism, as a dimension of architecture, the past informs the future. We have discussed four approaches to the study of regional vernacular architectures and the impact which they have upon regionalism, depending on the assumptions they make about the nature of vernacular architecture and methods for studying it. In architectural practice, it is important to note, the four kinds of regionalistic response defined in this paper need not be mutually exclusive of one another. A designer can simultaneously evoke an original archetype, employing elements for their symbolism (folkloric regionalism), utilize principles of modern architecture which have been justified through reference to the vernacular (ideological regionalism), echo the material qualities and the spatial character of the vernacular (experiential regionalism), and respond to the users’ perceptions (anthropological regionalism). Folkloric and ideological regionalisms are insufficient to address the issues of memory in architecture, and may even be counterproductive. Experiential

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and anthropological regionalism, are of far greater value. However, as Frampton states in evaluating the work of Atelier 66 as exemplary, it is not only the conscious cultivation of roots, but also the underlying rationality of the work and the collective process that produced it, which contributed to “its expressive form” (Frampton 1985: 5).

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Chapter 3

Modern Regionalism: Referential Regionalism

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Toward a Southwestern Architecture

David R. Williams

Excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest

Mary Colter

Old Forms for New Buildings

John Gaw Meem

The Myth and Power of Place: Hispanic Revivalism in the American Southwest

David Gebhard

Regionalism and Texas Architecture

Stephen Fox

Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism

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James F. O’Gorman

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The regionalist movement in

clarity of form, and attention to detail

America during the 1920s was

that rivaled, in frugality, the best in

carried along by the rise of regional

construction. He felt strongly that

publications such as the Southwest

these examples should provide the

Review, New Mexico Quarterly,

foundation for the development

and Virginia Quarterly Review.

of a fully modern and regional

Together they served as a forum for

architecture—one attuned to and in

artists, intellectuals, and folklorists,

continuity with the place and culture

among others, who sought the

in which it is built.

cultural reconstruction of American life through the revitalization of

The first task in this regional project

indigenous and regional history,

was the collection of notes, drawings,

culture, art, and land. On the main,

and photographs of pioneer

the movement was progressive and

buildings. Of these research trips,

pluralistic, based not on a return to

O’Neil Ford reported: “We did very

the past, but on learning enough

little architecture . . . we researched the

about a place to provide lessons for

early pioneer buildings and towns.

the future. Nor did it have provincial

German, Polish, Alsatian, Spanish,

or chauvinistic intentions, in which a

Mexican and nineteenth-century

region might promote its attributes

precedents—but the amalgam was

as superior over others; rather,

a distinctively indigenous style with

the veneration of the local was to

great variety.” i Three of the drawings

serve as a source of creativity and

that accompany the following essay

uniqueness—a celebration of the

are the result of these studies.

potential for a good life here.

These pioneer buildings represented the modern regional possibility

During the1920s, influenced by

of functional referentiality—that a

this movement, David Williams and

building can reflect an imported

O’Neil Ford began to explore the

cultural heritage as well as a

possibilities of developing a native

pragmatic rootedness to place.

and regional style for contemporary architecture (see Fox, Chapter 3). As associate editor of the Southwest

David R. Williams (1890–1962) was an architect, a government official, city planner, and the father of Texas regional architecture and theory.

Review, Williams wrote three key pieces that explored this subject, while he and Ford tested their ideas in practice. His central conviction was that within pioneer buildings lay valuable lessons regarding adaptation to local climate, the best use of local materials, and the aesthetic sensibilities of a region’s residents. As a classically trained and well-traveled architect, he was also impressed by the restraint,

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David R. Williams

Toward a Southwestern Architecture Originally published in the Southwest Review 16, no. 3 (April 1931): 301–13. Reprinted by courtesy of the Southwest Review.

Credo— A logical regional architecture has for its origin the simple, early forms of building native to its own locale, and grows by purely functional methods into an indigenous form of art.

The old Southwest of romance, the Southwest of the open range and the hard riding, quick shooting, red-shirted cowboy, of the night herd and the long trail, is gone. It is now legend and tradition, and has taken its place with the buried Spanish treasures, the bold Conquistadores, El Dorado, and the Seven Cities of Cibola. The picture has faded. Barbed-wire fences have cut it up, torn out the colors. The open range has left behind to tell its story only a few old men repeating tales of swift living and sudden death and headless horsemen, singing the old songs of the round-up and the trail and the longhorn steer. But in small towns built long ago as sources of supply on the frontier, founded perhaps before the cattle industry first came to the Southwest, old houses still stand: stone houses with great square chimneys—houses which are articulate and full of meaning, beautiful in their grace of line and softness of color. They tell their story. There is something very much like the country in these old houses. They seem to have been built to blend forever with the color of the land, the native flowers and trees, and the Southwestern sky. Left scattered down the century from 1750 to 1850, from Natchitoches over the Louisiana border through San Antonio twelve hundred miles across Texas to El Paso and into New Mexico, they stand—unnoticed and neglected—with little ornament and no foreign dress, suited to their climate and their locale, frank, functional, and soundly built, showing their structure, fit only for their purpose. They are beautiful. In these neglected houses may be found proof that our ancestors possessed a culture for which lately we have been searching so eagerly abroad. The early settlers of Texas developed a way of life which included an architecture adequate to its purpose and beautiful in its appropriateness; and when we remember our history and our antecedents, the sort of people who founded our permanent colonies, the picture clears. We can trace the creation of the form, its

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slow growth almost into a movement—and then, abandoned for alien, spurious styles of building, it slowly dies away. The history of this Southwestern architecture begins a quarter of a century before the Pilgrim fathers stepped on Plymouth Rock. It extends through two hundred years of Spanish dominion, through the building of the missions from 1650 to 1750, through futile attempts by Anglo-Americans and French from Louisiana to set up unauthorized colonies, through constant trouble with marauding Indians, to the day in 1820 when Moses Austin rode into the Presidio of San Antonio de Bexar to present at the door of the old Governor’s palace an idealist’s scheme of colonization. Later, ill and dying from the hardships of his return journey, Moses Austin handed to his son Stephen his dearly bought charter and the great plan for colonization of the region which was then vaguely known as Texas. After two hundred years of trying, the Spaniards had not yet colonized the region. The land was becoming wilderness again when in 1821 Stephen Fuller Austin came with his first group of “sober and industrious” colonists. These settlers were followed by similar groups who took land for themselves and began to work an empire out of a wilderness left almost unchanged by centuries of Spanish sovereignty. After the security of the Republic of Texas was established, the influx of colonists became even greater; until at the halfway mark of the nineteenth century enthusiastic settlements of Anglo-Americans, Germans, and Frenchmen had risen throughout Texas where rivers forked, where there was ledge stone for building, and where the colonists had found fertile ground. These colonies were made up of free-thinking men and women of many nationalities, most of whom were persons of excellent cultural and educational backgrounds. There were Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Germans—noblemen and artists among them—and romantic gentlemen from the Southern States. As the charter given to Moses Austin in 1820 had provided for the paying of a premium in lands to colonists of education and craftsmanship, there were artisans, stone-carvers, workers in wood and metal, lawyers, doctors, architects, and engineers. These colonists, both before the Revolution and after, came seeking freedom of action and freedom of thought. They did not look back. Various as they were in origin, they became quickly one people, citizens of the Republic of Texas, serving the same flag, following the same ideals, fighting the same fight. Since they came ardently desiring freedom, they were not bound down by tradition; and since they were possessed of a common purpose and spirit, their architecture has the feeling of unity which is the basis of a style. They were not founding a new England, a new France, or a new Spain; they were free to build to the glory of themselves, to suit their own needs, to satisfy as best they could the exactions of a new climate and the limitations of the native materials to be found close at hand. They used these materials in the simplest and most logical manner. The houses they built of the stone and clay and wood from their immediate localities were an expression of a people and a cause, structures natural and appropriate to the landscape. These early Texas houses seem to grow out of the ground on which they stand;

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to be as friendly as the earth out of which they have grown. They are beautiful because they are simple and natural, and because their builders were satisfied with beauty of line resulting from straightforward structure, simplicity of detail, and ornament which had to serve a purpose. The early colonists wanted no tin cornices painted to imitate stone, no fake half-timber, no tin tile roofs. They wanted honest, comfortable houses; and they got them. The Frenchman’s house was a simple Texas house, as was the German’s and the Yankee’s, and that of the Spaniard who preceded them and perhaps showed them the way; for, having free minds, the early Texans built economically of natural materials to suit the climate, to suit themselves and their own comfort. Fortunately, their own comfort demanded a little beauty and a great deal of good taste. There is not in any one of these houses built in the Southwest before 1850 an instance of imitation of foreign styles, of sham, of striving for effect, of any use of unnatural, unnecessary ornament or of material not structural and fit for its purpose. Yet these houses are pleasing, beautiful, picturesque. Why are not modern Texas houses equally sincere and satisfying? It is an interesting problem in anthropology to try to answer this question; for it seems almost incredible that architectural practice could have declined from its early level in Texas to produce some of the monstrosities of the present. Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that Texas has so recently and so suddenly developed from the frontier stage into the technological phase of civilization. The history of frontiers shows typically two extremes. The early frontier is impatient of the effeminate centers of civilization; Kit Carson’s classic “Hell’s filled with greenhorns” may stand as a motto. But the moment the frontier begins to cease being a frontier there is a violent reaction. Pioneer crudity and simplicity, once virtues, become matter for public shame. And the community whose distinction only a few decades before was its complete unlikeness to anything known in the civilized world, falls into an extravagant admiration for the sophisticated arts of other lands. So headlong is this passion that anything alien is by that very fact thought to be desirable. One has only to remember the pseudo-Oriental craze of thirty years ago in America to realize how uncritically such a lust for the exotic may operate. This phenomenon has been reproduced exactly in the Southwest. The early colonists in Texas, for example, were for the most part an independent folk not over-fond of the refinements of genteel society. They looked for other virtues in men and in buildings than minute conformity to tradition. But the third generation has made money, has traveled, has grown ashamed of its ancestors, and has got smart. In the last thirty years we of the Southwest, with a sort of frenzy, have searched through strange lands for culture, and finding it, have dragged it home with us, a nervous unhappy thing on the end of a rope. We have visited Chopin’s tomb in Père Lachaise; and we have spent more money educating our children to play classical European music than we have spent on all the other arts put together. Our children “interpret” Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven; we applaud loudly and unfeelingly. They play again, trying to feel as Paderewski feels when

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he does it; and of course they fail. They can’t feel Chopin as one of Chopin’s own countrymen can feel him, for theirs is a different tradition. The upshot is that most of the money spent teaching our youth to mimic continental masters has been wasted in so far as our own creative art is concerned. They mimic a while—but later they say, “Oh, yes, they used to tell me I played Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle’ quite creatively, but I haven’t touched a piano in years.” There is something wrong. Most of us who have been given the broadest continental musical education have created nothing in music, and never will create anything in music; while along comes a barefoot nigger from the forks of the creek, with a battered guitar and a simple song of his people—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—and we applaud feelingly. He sings again: “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” We feel this, somehow; but our musically educated youth gets nervous. This isn’t Beethoven, this isn’t art, we must not like it. Yet the ignorant negro with his native song has more truly created art in our own country than all of the imitators of the continental masters have done since we first started wasting our money and time teaching our youth to render music native to foreign peoples and other times. This same sterility has prevailed in all of our arts. Our painters, having gone to Paris to study, come back full of French art, go down on the Trinity bottoms, and paint little French landscapes. These don’t feel right. There is nothing wrong with the painting: it must be the landscape. Texas scenery is no good. They keep on painting little French landscapes until they die. They have created nothing. Nor have we done any better in architecture. Pseudo-Spanish, French, Italian, and English buildings (with wrought-iron hinges made of sheet-metal, hand-hewn timbers made of one-by-four scantlings adzed into roughness, and tin chimney pots painted to look like terra cotta)—tumble on us for attention from every street corner. Palladio spins like a top in his Italian tomb. But this mimicry has had its day. We are beginning to notice John Lomax with his cowboy ballads, Frank Dobie with his Southwestern legends, Alexandre Hogue with his Southwestern landscapes, David Guion with his music based on native themes. We are discovering our traditions, our legends, our folk-songs—and our native architecture. We are beginning to see our old houses. These houses are functional, free from improper use of material, unnecessary ornament, imitated details, illogical, imported ideas of plan or style, or inherited bad habit. Their style is modern, for it satisfies all the requirements of modern design and construction. It can be developed in perfect harmony with what is being done in modern architecture: none of our ornate styles have this quality. These early Texas houses come closer to suiting our purposes and our customs than anything that has been built since we left them to our Mexicans and negroes to live in. We have been assuming thoughtlessly that the houses in which the early colonists lived were crude things made of logs and mud, just as some of us still assume that the colonists were themselves illiterate adventurers bent upon trouble. But in truth the best of pioneer homes were solid buildings put up by men who knew what they were doing, were built with squarely cut stone laid

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on its natural bed, and forming thick walls which keep out summer’s heat as well as winter’s cold. They were good houses when they were built, and many of them have been good houses for a century. They have shady places, wide verandahs, and porches along the wings that run off to the rear on the west side, forming shady courts where one may relax and be at ease. They have slatted shutters, closed into deep reveals of thick stone walls to keep out the glare of the sun during the heat of the day. They have great square chimneys, too, for warmth in winter. They are as natural and as native to the Southwest as are our cowboy ballads; they are born of our own labor, our own suffering, our own joy: soil of our soil. We may use them as a source from which to draw a beautiful architecture we can call our own and invite the world to see.

Drawing by David R. Williams, Captain Robert E. Lee’s Drafting Room in 1846, San Antonio, 1830. FIG. 2 Drawing by David R. Williams, An Old House, Built at Castroville, c. 1848. FIG. 1

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The accompanying drawings of small stone houses illustrate the beginning of our native architecture. One was made from a photograph taken at Castroville, a village near San Antonio on the Del Rio road. Castroville was built in the forties by the Count de Castro, a Portuguese nobleman, and by a group of educated German and Alsatian colonists. The houses have been whitewashed so many times the outline of the stones is nearly lost. The result is a texture and creamy color quite impossible to produce in stucco. There is not in the village a bit of unnecessary decoration, any jigsaw thing; nor is an English or Spanish bungalow to be found there. Castroville is calm. There is freedom from the cacophony of false forms and lines and colors that scream from almost any corner of our modern streets; a calm, musical harmony in this village where each house, though interestingly different from its neighbor, is still akin in friendliness of color and material and form. The houses sit quietly in their places, making no noisy clamor for attention. They have done this for ninety years, but they are younger than our ten-year-old bungalows, with decorations already falling off, rusting, and rotting away. We have gone to these old houses as sources, though with no intention of copying more than the general idea of plan and function, the logical use of materials, the meaning, the freedom from habit and style which are to be found in them. Two of these drawings suggest how, in the spirit of this early Texas architecture, we have recently built some houses which we hope speak logically in a modern idiom the traditional language of our region.

Drawing by David R. Williams, Stone House, The Fredericksburg Colony, 1850.

FIG. 3

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Drawing by David R. Williams, F. B. McKie House, built at Corsicana, 1929. FIG. 5 Drawing by David R. Williams, Warner Clark House, Dallas, 1930. FIG. 4

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Introduction to excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of THE INDIAN WATCHTOWER 178

In the 1870s, as the Santa Fe

Despite her respect for Native

Company built a railroad into the

American art, architecture,

West, the Fred Harvey Company—

and culture, by condoning the

for whom Mary Colter would work as

commercial/cultural interchange

an architect over her entire career—

between tourists and native peoples,

built restaurants, hotels, shops,

Colter contributed to the compromise

and visitors’ centers. Her innovative

and exploitation of their local and

designs helped “make the West

regional traditions. Yet her attention to

pleasurably accessible to travelers

accuracy and detail and her honesty

for whom it was starkly but alluringly

in explaining these details confounds

new.” i Her projects are entertaining

the traditional postmodern critique of

and educational because they employ

commercialism. Her writing is striking

references from architecture and ruins

as she does not seek to deny the

of the Southwest with vigor, research,

Desert View Watchtower’s status as

and conviction. Besides many hotels

a modern steel-framed tower or a

along the Santa Fe line, she was

program aimed at lulling the visitor

responsible for much of the early

into a commercial fantasy. She clearly

architecture at the Grand Canyon:

states that visitors should understand

Hopi House, El Navajo, Hermit’s Rest,

that it is not a replica, but rather a

and Lookout Studio.

modern building consistent with context, region, and purpose. As such

The following excerpts are from a

she redefines “function” to include

manual Colter wrote to help park

visual appropriateness to a setting.

guides explain her work, and they address her Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon, arguably the

Mary Jane Colter (1869–1958) was an architect for the Fred Harvey Company; she is best known as the architect of the original buildings at the Grand Canyon.

most mature and representative of her referentially regional approach to design (see Figs. 4–5, Introduction). Built in 1931 to serve as a visitors’ center and a beacon along the East Rim, it also gave visitors views across the canyon to the Painted Desert. Colter felt that a modern building would be too visually disruptive in such a landscape. Her search for more contextual forms and materials led her to regional stone and construction techniques that had stood the test of time in the recently discovered ruins of Hovenweep and Mesa Verde. For the interior she commissioned modern Native American descendants to create equally regional Pueblo and Indian murals.

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Mary Colter

Excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower Excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest (Grand Canyon National Park, AZ: Fred Harvey Company, 1933), 11–18, 20–21, 61. Reprinted courtesy of the Grand Canyon National Park and Charles “Buzz” Buzzard.

THE BUILDING

When it was planned to build a permanent Rest and View House on Navajo Point (now for many years called “Desert View”) two problems had to be solved in deciding on the architecture. First and most important was to design a building that would become a part of its surroundings;—one that would create no discordant note against the time-eroded walls of this promontory. Next in importance was to design a building that would make it possible to enhance the VIEW from this famous VIEW POINT. As its popular name implies, it overlooks the far reaches of the Painted Desert, but it has also the most extensive and spectacular view of the “main” Canyon and of the “River” as it comes down through the Marble Gorge. To all this it was desired to add the sweep of the Great Tusayan Forest and the mountains to the south and southwest. In other words, we wanted a VIEW that would include the entire circle of the distant horizon. The problem was to build a building, not hidden under the rim as at Hermit’s Rest, but just as high above it as possible, and yet make it so much a part of its immediate surroundings that it would not stick up “like a sore thumb.” No conventionalized style of modern architecture built of modern materials would do this. The problem, with its two horns to the dilemma, seemed unsolvable. Then—the idea of the Indian Watchtower was hit upon. The Tower would give the height we needed for the view rooms and telescopes; the character of the prehistoric buildings would make possible the harmonizing of its lines and color with the terrain; its time-worn masonry walls would blend with the eroded stone cliffs of the Canyon walls themselves. In itself a prehistoric Indian building was not inappropriate. One might well have been built on this very finger of rock hundreds of years ago by the ancestors of the Hopi. Looking across Navajo Canyon towards Hopiland, the east wall of the Canyon arrested the eye. Here strong glasses picked out small cave dwellings

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clinging to the sheer Canyon wall a hundred feet below the rim; and on a detached pinnacle of rock, not unlike Desert View point itself, rose a portholed wall of masonry. The rim of the Canyon from The Great Thumb on the west to Comanche Point on the east we knew was dotted with Indian ruins. Three hundred sites have been counted. The ancient Indians had migrated from the Grand Canyon region before they reached their highest building culture and these local ruins do not compare with the great structures they built elsewhere during later periods. Yet there would be nothing inconsistent in building here as they might have built had they not migrated before the Golden Age when the Tower and the Great Kiva were the order of the day. The next step after the decision to use ancient Indian architecture was reached, was to find PROTOTYPES among the many ruins of this same Golden Age that could be best adapted to our own needs. Most of the important ruins we had visited more than once. Before tackling our new problem, it was decided to “check and double check” them again. So the known ruins were revisited and the ruins we did not know were hunted down. Photographs were made and even kodacolor movies taken for further study. These pictures were later used as models for the workmen to follow and proved invaluable. Many of them, enlarged, have been mounted in albums that are kept in the Kiva. A few of the most important are in a wall display case for the more convenient use of visitors who may be interested in the prehistoric prototypes of our Tower. After the careful survey was completed and the material thus secured digested, THE INDIAN WATCHTOWER at Desert View was designed. DESIGN OF THE INDIAN WATCHTOWER

Usually the first question asked by the visitor to the Watchtower is—“Of what prehistoric building is this a copy? And is it exact in every detail?” It is NOT an exact reproduction of any known ruin; but, rather, is based on fine examples of the prehistoric workman, and is built in the Indian spirit. WHAT IT IS NOT AND WHAT IT IS

It follows quite closely in general architectural features its great prototypes among prehistoric towers and kivas. But this building should NOT be called a “copy”; a “replica”; a “reproduction,” or a “restoration.” It is absolutely none of these, especially not the last, as before its erection there was no building on this site to restore. The actual remains of a previous building are necessary to make a restoration. A RE-CREATION

Someone has called it a “RE-CREATION.” That describes best the INTENTION of the design. DEBTS TO VARIOUS RUINS

Various ruins have contributed characteristic features, either of the main architectural design or of minor details. Even these have not always been copied slavishly, but have been carried out in the way that Indians living on Desert View Point and using accessible materials would have worked.

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THE PRIMITIVE ARCHITECT

The PRIMITIVE ARCHITECT never intentionally copied anything but made every building suit its own conditions, and each one differed from every other according to the character of the site, the materials that could be procured, and the purpose for which the building was intended. So, though he was guided by tradition when he built, he did not “copy,” but in every case “CREATED” a new thing. T. Mitchell Prudden says of all prehistoric structures: “The attempt to establish typical architectural forms in the building of these ancient people is beset with practical difficulties, owing to the frequent special adaptation in material and in form to the particular situations as well as to the skillful incorporation of natural objects, such as caves, benches, cliffs, and fallen rocks, into the structure of the building.” So it would have been foolish for us to reproduce exactly at Desert View, a ruin found in another place. Existing examples of prehistoric design that matched our own requirements and conditions were borrowed freely and embodied in our structure. But before using these borrowings, we sought to adapt them to the conditions exacted by our own site,—to incorporate into them any natural peculiarities of the site itself. We studied carefully all our available natural building materials in relation to known examples of Indian masonry; we tried to understand how a building suited to our purpose would have been built by Indians of the best Pueblo period. We adapted and combined. LINES AND PROPORTIONS OF TOWER For instance, the beauty of line of the famous ROUND TOWER of CLIFF PALACE in Mesa Verde suggested the PROPORTIONS and LINES of our Tower. MASONRY AT MESA VERDE

However, the stone available at the Canyon was so unlike that used in this Mesa Verde tower that it was undesirable even to try to copy its MASONRY. The stone of Mesa Verde masonry, to quote A. V. Kidder, is “hewn to shape—carefully coursed and brought to an even surface on the face of the wall by a picking process that results in the characteristic dimpled texture.” In addition to this, an adobe mortar fills all joints and stucco smooths the surfaces still further. So we chose the form and proportions of the famous Round Tower but not its masonry. The rock we had to build with could not be hewn to shape nor the surface “tooled” without losing the weathered surfaces so essential to blend it with the Canyon walls. The stuccoed surface too was out of the question at Desert View. At Mesa Verde, the adobe mortar in this tower was protected through the centuries by the overhanging cave-roof, but it would have been destroyed by the elements on the exposed rim of the Grand Canyon. So we had to look elsewhere for the style of masonry that “belonged” to us. NAVAJO WATCHTOWER AT MESA VERDE

Navajo Watchtower at Mesa Verde, standing exposed on a detached mass of rock

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at the head of Navajo Canyon, came closer to our needs but still did not quite suggest our stone. TOWERS AT HOVENWEEP

The numerous towers and other buildings at HOVENWEEP offered themselves and were at once accepted. The stone at Hovenweep was generally similar in character to the stone available at the Canyon. The exposed position of the Hovenweep Ruins approximating our physical conditions at Desert View afforded the closest parallel for the erosion of rock surfaces and mortar. So the enlarged photographs and kodacolor pictures of details of the Hovenweep ruins were used by our workmen as models for the masonry. VARIETY OF TEXTURE AND COLOR

As most Indian buildings were built over an extended period of time and by different masons and often with a different kind of stone (when the stone close at hand was exhausted, they went farther afield)—it was sought to get the same effect here. Note the difference in color and texture between the Kiva and the Tower, and even the difference between various parts of the same wall. NATIVE ROCK USED THE INDIAN WATCHTOWER and KIVA are built of native surface stone just

as it was picked up from the small surrounding canyons. Probably much of this stone was once a part of some prehistoric habitation. So numerous are the ruins scattered along the Grand Canyon rim and over the sloping walls of the many side-canyons of the Tusayan Forest that it is hardly possible to gather surface rock without encroaching on the sites of some once populous village. The color and texture of this weathered surface rock naturally matched our terrain as none other could, but we were at the necessity of using it in just the shape it was found as any tool mark became a conspicuous scar on the face of our walls. So we were obliged to select carefully for size and shape every unit of stone built into our masonry. FOUNDATION

Perhaps the most difficult matter met with in designing this building was that of TYING it to the terrain. The Indian builder would have joyed in making it hang by its toenails to the very brink of the canyon rim. No height is too dizzy—no pinnacle of rock too crazy, on which to perch one of his towers. Mammoth boulders and the “living rock” are foundation enough for him. And certainly his confidence in himself as an engineer is justified by the hundreds of years through which his structures have defied wind and weather and earthquake shock. The modern engineer lacks his courage. A FOUNDATION OF STEEL AND CONCRETE

A built foundation our building would have to have, and steel and concrete must enter into it. (For that matter the whole building has a steel framework

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hidden away in it that would do credit to a modern office building.) But over this foundation of steel and concrete is built a wall of huge boulders of rim rock to simulate, as nearly as a man-made thing can do, the formation of the canyon wall itself. It is designed to look as though the whole foundation were another natural strata such as appears on the little promontory to the west of the Tower. The rock is the same stained and lichen-colored conglomerate as the rim of Desert View Point, and the boulders are so huge that they seem to preclude the possibility of being placed by man. This foundation extends below the natural canyon rim and forms the wall of the furnace room. From the trail below the building it is almost impossible to distinguish between the built wall of the foundation and the natural wall of the canyon. PURPOSE SERVED BY DESIGN OF FOUNDATION

This massive foundation was made to serve two purposes. Besides weaving the foundation itself into the terrain of the canyon rim, reducing the apparent height of the kiva and making this low round building, as well as the high tower, seem part of the natural formation of the point, it raises the view windows of the Kiva above the heads of people walking on the point and insures an unobstructed view for the guests within. The same green boulders which form the foundation are built into the lower walls of Tower and Kiva. PRECEDENT FOR THE DESIGN OF FOUNDATION

The use of these boulders as a part of the wall structure, as well as its foundation, has a precedent at WUPATKI—only thirty miles in a straight line from Desert View. Here “THE CITADEL” is built on a huge natural terraced foundation of lava boulders and its masonry walls are carried up to a surprising height with the same unwieldy lava units interspersed haphazardly with flat sandstone slabs. DETAILS OF STONEWORK DECORATIVE DETAILS of the STONEWORK required less adaptation to make

them serve our purpose and for the most part they are carefully copied. HAPHAZARD USE OF DECORATION

As such ornamental details are introduced quite haphazardly into his walls by the ancient house builder, lending to them the added charm of the unexpected, the same course was followed here. For instance, the BORDER of triangular stones built into the PARAPET WALL of the TOWER might be expected to extend all around the top of the Tower instead of dying out as it does,—as if the supply of triangular rock had given out! The suggestion for this treatment came from a wall at WUPATKI where it played the same erratic trick. 1 DIAMOND DESIGN NEAR ENTRANCE

The design itself resembles somewhat the delightful detail of the THREE

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JOINING DIAMONDS in our wall NEAR the MAIN ENTRANCE. The latter however is a very close copy of a detail used at PUEBLO BONITO, CHACO CANYON. 2 HORIZONTAL BANDS OF CONTRASTING STONE

The horizontal bands of CONTRASTING STONE “COURSES” which form a feature of our Tower are to be found in many ruins. We would have liked to carry this feature further and copy exactly the beautiful regular horizontal bands used in the best period of Pueblo Bonito architecture. The smooth fine sandstone of Chaco Canyon, with its perfect cleavage breaking into small thin units (some only a quarter of an inch in thickness), made the development of this refined style of “courses” masonry perfectly natural at Pueblo Bonito. With us to have copied blindly this extreme refinement would have been unnatural and forced. GENUINE PETROGLYPHS

At various places,—the main entrance door; in the outside stairway wall; the fireplace on the Kiva roof; and the Tower itself,—are built rocks bearing pecked designs. These are GENUINE PETROGLYPHS dating back no one knows how many hundreds of years. These particular ones come from the vicinity of ASH FORK. The stones built into the interior stairway leading from the Kiva to the Tower came from the vicinity of JOSEPHS CITY near Winslow, Arizona. INCISED SLABS The TWO FLAT STONES bearing designs of INCISED LINES built into the

wall above the outside stairway leading to the Kiva roof, are copied from stones similarly decorated. They are of unusual interest as showing a tendency to add decoration to masonry walls. ... Chapter II THE WATCHTOWER DIMENSIONS OF TOWER

THE TOWER AT DESERT VIEW is larger than any known Indian Tower. It rises from the extreme rim of the Canyon to a height of seventy feet. It is thirty feet in diameter at the base, tapering to twenty-four feet at the roof line. SIZE OF PREHISTORIC TOWERS

Most of the prehistoric towers no longer stand their full height and it is difficult to estimate their original dimensions. The Round Tower of Cliff Palace is about twenty feet high and is supposed to have extended to the overhanging roof of the cave which would have added near fifteen feet to its height. The Square Tower of Square Tower Ruin now stands about thirty feet high. The towers of

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Hovenweep—“the place of towers”—vary greatly in height. The Square Tower at Hovenweep is now four stories high and the stone scattered at its base would seem to indicate two or three stories more. This tower is only about fourteen feet square at the base, and it was certainly an accomplishment for primitive man to build so high and slender a shaft. 3 Other towers at Hovenweep are from twenty to twenty-five feet in diameter at the base and while no longer skyscrapers, the indications are that they were as tall in proportion as the slender Square Tower. So perhaps if these towers were standing as originally built, they would approach the height of our Tower. HEIGHT—DESERT VIEW TOWER

The reason for the greater height of the Tower at Desert View, is because the purpose of this Tower was to extend the view from its top to include the southern distant horizon. The height necessary to accomplish this was calculated to a nicety and the Tower was designed accordingly. As you recall, an experimental tower of timbers was built on the site before the building was designed. We naturally wished to keep the Tower as low as possible and yet obtain the views from its top. SIZE INFLUENCES TEXTURE OF MASONRY

It was noted in studying the subject of tower masonry that the walls of the smaller towers were usually smoother and more refined in texture. The Desert View Tower is larger, especially taller, than any known prehistoric towers. Reasoning along the lines that the texture of the masonry should vary with the extent of the plain wall area, the surface of our Tower is more broken than the known Indian examples,—this in order to create shadows and give more vigor to the walls. “T” SHAPED DOORS

For the same reason, some large “T” shaped doors adapted from prehistoric examples,—the best of which are at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon—were let into the walls of the Tower and later filled with a cruder form of stonework as if done in haste in the fear of the attack of an enemy. This, also, frequently is found not only at Pueblo Bonito but in many other ruins. 4 WINDOWS

There are more and larger windows in our Tower than in its ancient prototypes. The reason is obvious. It is a view Tower and windows are necessary. The windows of the Tower taper slightly toward the top. Most ruins afford examples of this form of window. It was a welcome solution of one of our most difficult architectural problems. Happily, these lines conformed to the lines of the Tower itself. It made possible the row of absolutely neces­sary windows in the ‘‘Eagles Nest” or Telescope Room. ...

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PART FOUR RUINS WEST OF WATCHTOWER

The RUINS built to the west of the Watchtower are supposed to be the remains of an abandoned older structure built by earlier dwellers on Desert View Point. It is frequently found that one generation appropriates not only the site of former builders but their carefully gathered and prepared materials as well; so it is in keeping with established usage that the rock from the fallen walls, as well as the laboriously worked timbers, of this earlier structure should have been utilized by the builders of the Watchtower. This would account for the little loose stone found in the vicinity of what seems to have been a considerable village. The purpose in building this ruin is to show the condition in which many ruins are found today. These fallen or partly standing walls, out of which large pinon and cedar trees are growing or standing dead, give a fair idea of what is to be found scattered over the Southwest. Of course many ruins are in much better condition than these and yet others are mere piles of stone. It was impractical to design the Watchtower in as ruinous a condition as usually prevails, and the adjacent broken down walls to the west add to the desired atmosphere.

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John Gaw Meem came to the

In 1934 he wrote the following

Southwest, settling in Santa Fe in

article for American Architect, in

1920, to recover from tuberculosis.

which he proposes a theory that

Trained as an engineer, he became

links functionalist architectural form

an architect during the following

with the traditional forms found in

decade during a burgeoning regional

southwest architecture. Although

preservation movement and at the

his conflation of these two formal

beginning of the controversy over the

schemas is opportunistic, Meem

definition of “modern” architecture. He

sensed in it a compatibility between

felt the eclecticism and picturesque

modern technology, modern materials,

tendencies of the preservationists did

and traditional forms found in any

not resonate with the historic heritage

region. Further, he found in the

of the region and its psychical

Southwest a pragmatic tradition

realities and therefore robbed people

of accepting and absorbing new

of the ability to develop deeper

technologies while maintaining local

connections to their local physical

expression (see Fig. 7, Introduction).

environment. His work from the

His primary argument was that

1930s to the late 1950s addresses

traditional forms add a richness

these concerns, as he formulated

to American architecture that is

and practiced a combination of

unavailable in derivatives of European

modernism and regionalism. During

modernism; his was a referential

that period he published articles and

modern regionalism. As he saw it, the

built homes, churches, and much of

International Style was intrinsically

the campus of the University of New

linked to modern art and was

Mexico in Albuquerque.

therefore inadequate in relation to the regional cultural heritage of, or

In 1931, at the convention of the

modern building in, the Southwest.

American Institute of Architects, Meem gave a lecture entitled “The Monuments of New Mexico,” in which he characteristically paid homage

John Gaw Meem (1894–1983) was a prolific southwest American architect and founder of the Committee for the Preservation and Restoration of the New Mexican Mission Churches.

to the rich heritage of southwest architecture and the scientific basis of modern architecture. At that same conference, he was impressed with the words of Eliel Saarinen, who spoke of “the fundamental forms of the time.” i Saarinen praised the practicality of the emerging modern movement, but suggested it lacked an adequate concern for beauty and tradition. He suggested that architects should “take the forms of our forefathers and mold them so that they fit our time,” ii comments that galvanized Meem.

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Old Forms for New Buildings Originally published in American Architect 145 (November 1934): 10–20; and republished in Mass 1, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 8–9. Reprinted courtesy of Nancy Meem Wirth.

Throughout a vast area in the Southwest, comprising roughly the drainage area of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and extending far into Arizona, one sees evidences of an extraordinarily vital and well-adapted type of architecture. It started centuries before the Europeans invaded America, and in modified forms persists to this day. Its origin is rooted deep in American soil and aboriginal traditions. Its form and substance are as inevitably related to the earth and the landscape as are the surrounding deserts and mesas. Given this rich heritage of traditional forms, what should be the architect’s approach to modern design problems in this particular region? It is a problem that faces not only the architect in the American Southwest, but in any region or country possessing still vital and highly individual forms of its own,—Japan for instance. Is the effort to retain these characteristic qualities incompatible with the modern spirit; or is it merely a sentimental attempt to preserve picturesqueness or “scenery”? The answer partly depends on what one’s concept of the “modern” movement in architecture is. My own thoughts on the subject were clarified by an address delivered by Eliel Saarinen at the Institute’s convention in 1931. He felt that great epochs in architecture were developed by an intuitive feeling for what he called “the fundamental form of the time.” This fundamental form is a composite of everything in a people’s culture, in their way of thinking and living. It is the real leader of the movement rather than a product of it. According to this view, it is apparent that the contemporary movement in architecture marks the beginning of an epoch, or style, in architecture, because it undoubtedly reflects contemporary Western civilization, especially our devotion to the ideal of scientific truth. I like to think that the reason a good modern building is so logical, so clean, and so honest is because it could not be otherwise in view of the high standards of uncompromising truth which science has set for itself—standards which constitute one of the great spiritual concepts of our day. It would seem, then, that old traditional forms are to be retained and used only if they still fit in with the fundamental form of the time. This form may vary among different peoples, climates, and customs, while still preserving

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common ideals and principles. The world is filled with traditional forms. But measured by modern ideals most of them are outworn; and their retention in contemporary practice is, in reality, the practice of archaeology. Here and there, however, one finds the opposite. Some old forms are so honest, so completely logical and native to the environment that one finds—to one’s delight and surprise—that modern problems can be solved, and are best solved, by use of forms based on tradition. The value of this use may be questioned by some; but to me it seems to add a richness and actually to enhance a series of values. In a world tending more and more toward inevitable standardization— welcomed from the practical point of view, but spiritually repugnant to us—it is truly refreshing to feel that in our contemporary architectural movement is still an opportunity for the expression of ancient values. Proof of these contentions exist in abundance. The architecture of the Southwest—the so-called Spanish Pueblo architecture of New Mexico, for example—contains elements of traditional forms that have been, in the writer’s opinion, successfully used to solve a variety of modern problems. Admittedly the forms are distinctly of a regional character. But a brief description of their origin, their relation to contemporary problems can well apply, in principle, to traditional forms of any region. Many types of shelter were developed by the North American Indian before the time of Columbus. But in nearly all cases they were of a perishable nature, due to the nomadic character of the Indian way of life. In the Southwest, however, the Pueblo Indians and their remote ancestors developed a sedentary civilization. It was based on agriculture and through necessity produced permanent dwellings. These structures—of adobe, stone, and wood—still exist and may be studied in their original forms in various parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. They are unique in that they are truly aboriginal American buildings, uninfluenced by any other culture, except possibly the allied ones of Central America. For that reason, if for no other, they deserve the attention of American architects. Unquestionably they are the earliest expression of an American Fundamental Form. For those who are interested in detailed descriptions of these buildings there are available several reference works. In general the design of the structure is characterized by the utmost directness and simplicity in the choice and use of locally available materials. Plans range from individual one-room dwellings to complicated community houses, reflecting in every case the social needs of the people and providing shelter from weather, defense from enemies, and gathering places for religious purposes. Walls were of stone or of adobe; floors and roofs of tamped earth. The latter were supported on wooden beams which carried a ceiling made of smaller poles or split saplings over which was packed cedar bark, twigs or dried grass to keep the earth from sifting through. In some instances walls were carried up to form several stories often set back to form terraces, the roof of the room below becoming the floor of the one above. Doors rarely existed on the first floor, access being through trap doors. Windows were merely small vents to admit air and give access to smoke.

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The essential characteristics derived from these elements were flat-topped rectangular masses devoid of ornament, the aesthetic effect depending almost entirely on the relative proportions of the masses. When adobe was used instead of stone, an added charm resulted from the softening effect of erosion. Bilateral symmetry was rarely resorted to, but balance was usually achieved. The result was an almost automatic harmony with surroundings. With the advent of the Spaniard, changes necessarily occurred. Great churches had to be erected in the pueblos, requiring greater clear spans than had before been necessary. Adobe was laid up in brick forms, instead of being puddled in place by hand. Spanish ornament appeared in wood bolsters over supporting posts and in elaborate altar decorations. Doors, windows, and grilles came into use. Domestic architecture reflected Spanish plans. Nevertheless old forms remained, essentially unchanged. They were still a part of the earth, as dignified in their simplicity as the land itself. It might possibly be observed that the slight change wrought upon the old forms by the centuries of Spanish occupation was inevitable. The Spaniards were also agriculturists; and their method of life in a new country was akin to that of the natives. The fundamental forms of their time, therefore, were almost the same as those of the aboriginal inhabitants with whom they came to live. This is perfectly true. But the significant point is this: The Spaniards were fresh from the Renaissance in Europe where the thought and form of the time were vastly different from those of the New World. It would have been at least understandable had they tried to maintain that form intact. Instead, from sheer necessity and possibly through intuition, the buildings of the Spanish invaders adhered to a new fundamental form more in sympathy with the land wherein they now lived. The transition marked by the American occupation in the middle of the last century was at first gradual. The old rectangular forms and basic materials were unconsciously adopted, but millwork and paint and protecting brick copings were introduced. Essentially, however, the buildings were still regional. They were still of the Southwest; and one felt they could not have been erected anywhere else. But even prior to the advent of the railroad the old forms had begun to disappear. The frontier of the middle-west had pushed out. New buildings were of clapboard, and of red brick. They had tin roofs. They looked utterly out of place, even though they were honest insofar as they reflected an invading population not yet sensitive to its environment. In the contemporary scene the old forms began to emerge with a new vigor. About 1910 the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe was restored to its probable original form. This was followed by the New Mexico State Building at the San Diego Exposition which later was built in Santa Fe as the State Art Museum. These buildings demonstrated better than any verbal argument that the region possessed architectural forms native to it, which constituted not only a rich cultural heritage, but also seemed still to possess the greatest vitality and adaptability. They started a boom in what was termed “the Santa Fe style” which, like all booms, probably did as much harm as good. Masonry forms were

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interpreted in lath and plaster. Incidental erosion features were stylized into deformations of parapet lines. The design madness spread from the “Anglos” (as we are called in the Southwest) to the Spanish-Americans and even to the Pueblo Indians themselves. It looked as if the movement toward rebirth of the fundamental forms was doomed. But some good buildings were erected. They brought an increasing realization of the fundamental soundness of the original tradition. Once more the old forms re-emerge as if to prove that they are so right, so inevitable to the land that nothing could ever really change them—not even the ordeal of adaptation by three such dissimilar cultures as aboriginal American, medieval Spanish, and contemporary American. Again we are led to the original question of this paper. Is the effort of local architects to perpetuate ancient traditional forms associated with their own region a sound one? The answer is, emphatically, yes! Particularly in the Southwest, architects who use old forms need do no violence to the ideals of contemporary architectural thoughts. On the contrary, the fundamental form of the time can best be expressed in a language native to the region. These ancient shapes are modern! Evolved honestly within the limitations of available materials, they are equally as well adapted to the new materials of our own day—steel and glass and reinforced concrete. But though a rich new palette of materials is at hand, the intelligent designer will keep the economic, social, and climatic limitations of the region in mind. His motif will be horizontal rather than vertical, for there is no need for steel skyscrapers when ample land is available. The designer deals with an agricultural life rather than an industrial or urban one. His walls may be areas of glass if he chooses. But he will not choose thus, for his problem is to minimize, rather than emphasize, the glare of brilliant sunlight. He may, if he wishes, use expensive methods of insulation; but experience will teach him that the earth itself is better and cheaper. He will find that the experience of ages reflected in the traditional forms can still be applied and is still a potent influence upon the solution of contemporary problems. Here at hand are forms which lend themselves to the most exacting canons of modern pure design. Whether the designer prefers the rigid lines of machine made building elements or chooses to re-create the past in soft plastic earth shapes to which wind and rain give the final modeling, traditional forms can serve him well. When using them he knows that he is building not only in accordance with the fundamental form of the time, but also in harmony with an ancient fundamental form evolved from the earth itself by its earliest inhabitants. He is linking the science and aspirations of the present with the rich tradition of the past. In so doing he is perpetuating both for a future which will be grateful.

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The following article is a version

have ignored the many environmental

of David Gebhard’s paper from

conditions which brought older solutions

the symposium “Pueblo Style and

about. i

Regional Architecture” held in Albuquerque in 1988. It is unique as

Earlier, in 1957, he stridently opposed,

an analytic piece by an architectural

with J. B. Jackson, among others,

historian who was also directly

the adoption of an ordinance that

involved in the issues and debates

would eventually restrict new

he discussed. In his study of the

architecture built in Santa Fe, to

southwest regionalists, he finds

adhere to “Old Santa Fe Style.” ii He

similarities to the European Arts &

felt that such a restriction would,

Crafts movement’s rediscovery of

under the guise of sensitivity, actually

its “folk” past, setting the American

destroy any real possibility for the

movement within a much longer

kind of living modern regionalism

history and demonstrating a link

he knew was possible. Accordingly

between the European and American

he was highly critical of the work he

search for roots amid increasing

termed “regional eclecticism,” which

modernization, a search he

many associate with architectural

understands as a kind of seduction.

regionalism generally.

It is generally fair to say that Gebhard

Gebhard’s critical stance and focus

was a critic of romanticism in

on the Southwest provides context

regionalist architecture, though he

for the other essays included here. At

was hopeful and supportive of the

the place where referential regionalist

possibility of a modern regionalism.

architecture was most prominent,

While director of the Roswell Museum

he critically appraises the appeal of

and Art Center in New Mexico he

this region’s “exoticism,” indigenous

penned a review of contemporary

peoples, and proliferation of ruins.

work in New Mexico expressing his desire for a middle way between regionalism and modernism:

David Gebhard (1927–1996) was a professor of architectural history at the University of California, an author, and curator of the Architectural Drawing Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Between these two extremes [of regional eclecticism and “the new machine architecture”] lies another small but articulate group, which has sought to produce a regional architecture based upon the historical and environmental aspects of the area and on the acceptance of the machine and mass production....While it is certainly true that a designer may consciously ignore historical aspects of the area in which he is working, it is open to question whether they should at the same time

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David Gebhard

The Myth and Power of Place: Hispanic Revivalism in the American Southwest Originally published in Triglyph 8 (Summer 1989): 3–11. Reprinted courtesy of Pat Gebhard.

In 1910, the California architect-preservationist Arthur B. Benton spoke to a gathering of the First Southwest City Planning Conference in Los Angeles. His subject was “Shall We Plan for a Distinctive Architecture of the Southwest?” 1 In his usual penetrating manner, Benton explored the many complex and at times contradictory reasons underlying intense regional feelings that the Southwest and California should develop their own regional architectural mode. Taking what he considered to be the predilections of his audience, he proceeded from the pragmatic and practical to more subjective arguments. “The railroads, the hotels, the commercial bodies,” he remarked, “all use our old Missions to attract tourists and dollars to themselves. How disappointing for the traveler to stand on our business streets or before our civic buildings and see little to remind him that he is not in Chicago, New York, or Kansas City?...Our Mission architecture teaches the adaptability of the ancient Roman architecture to the most primitive conditions of new countries.” 2 These primitive adaptations of the Hispanic tradition in the Southwest and California held forth, he argued, two distinct possibilities: to let traditional forms “develop naturally” or to use them as a basis for a new “modern architecture.” He concluded by emphasizing the essence of a regional architecture for the Southwest and California: the sense of romance and a deep-set desire to return to that which was natural, rural, and rustic. Reinforcing the strong sense of the rural and rustic in the American Southwest were three added ingredients: the exoticism of its “strange desert” landscape; the presence of non-Anglo peoples, Native Americans and Hispanic; and the existence of something most of America lacked—real, honest-to-goodness ruins. At the California Academy of Science in San Francisco in 1916, the anthropologist George La Mont Cole concluded a discussion of the ancient pueblos of New Mexico with the statement, “Americans need not go abroad for here are ruins and monuments that rank well with any found in the old world.” 3

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The urge to cultivate a Hispanic–Native American regional architectural mode has now existed for well over three-quarters of a century, and it is as potent today as it ever was. Perhaps at this stage of its existence it would be advantageous for us, using Arthur B. Benton’s observations as guideposts, to see this affair in a broad context. What were its general as well as specific antecedents, how was the stage set for its development outside of the Southwest, and finally, how did these “new” forms of regionalism fit into both traditionalism and modernism in the first decades of this century? The cult of the rustic

By the end of the nineteenth century the vernacular, as a symbol of antiurbanism, anti-industrialism, and essentially anti–laissez faire capitalism, had seized hold of much of Europe. England continued to lead the way, and the vernacular image became not only the symbol of a return to a simple, uncluttered rustic life, but also a central element of the Arts and Crafts movement. Charles F. A. Voysey summed up the qualities that should emerge from an honest response to the vernacular tradition beautifully: “Try the effect of a well proportioned room, with whitewashed walls, plain carpets, and simple oak furniture, and nothing in it but necessary articles of use, and one pure ornament in the form of a simple vase of flowers.” 4 This description of an ideal Arts and Crafts room would fit perfectly a room in a New Mexico Pueblo Revival house of the 1920s or 1930s. In Europe the return to the rustic involved the factors: the return to the aura of hand production (Arts and Crafts), the cultivation of a perceived “folk” democracy, the puritanisms of the simple and unaffected, and nationalism. Romantic nationalism surfaced in Scandinavia, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Low Countries, and even far to the east in European Russia. Most of the early International Style modernists had their beginnings in one version or another of the folk vernacular, generally coupled with the Arts and Crafts and the Art Nouveau. Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland, Hendrikus Berlage in Holland, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Olbrich in Austria, Peter Behrens in Germany, and Eliel Saarinen in Finland absorbed and espoused the cause of the rustic, basing many of their major design contributions upon these folk vocabularies. The United States

Americans, in the late decades of the nineteenth century, were keenly aware of and involved with the allure of the rural life and rural image. It could in fact be convincingly argued that the commitment to the rustic had been present on the American scene from the early 1800s. Negatively, it was bound up with the classical Jeffersonian distrust of the city; positively, it was a theme that occupied the attention of a long line of American writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to Walt Whitman. As in Europe, the sentiment of folk nationalism sustained the democratic ideal of returning to the simple and puritanical rural life. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia was not

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simply a celebration of America’s new industrialism and technology, it also set up as an ideal the Jeffersonian preeminence of the virtue of the rural life. The admiration for America’s colonial past was expressed in the nostalgic reaction to Independence Hall, a building that was characterized at the time as expressing “dignity and repose,” and the colonial country house Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park, “a handsome old-time mansion.” 5 The Centennial Exposition took the nonurban, rural colonial theme back one step further by re-creating “the New England log cabin,” that artifact which was to emerge as the classic symbol of early settlement and the frontier. 6 The emergence of America’s Colonial Revival architecture in the late 1870s provided a potent readable artifact to symbolize America’s commitment to the rural, the vernacular, and the rustic. The Shingle Style that emerged in the 1880s was an amalgamation of the imported English Queen Anne and the rural American Colonial. Henry Hobson Richardson and later McKim, Mead, and White, William Ralph Emerson, and others initially looked not to the characteristic mid- to late-eighteenth-century New England or Philadelphia Colonial house, but to the earliest (i.e., the most medieval and primitive) colonial houses of New England, those dating from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. This primitive basis for the early Colonial Revival made it easy for Americans to move over into the medieval-based Arts and Crafts at the end of the century. The urge of nationalism also encouraged Americans to rummage through their own prehistory so that they could equal or even possibly “one-up” Europe. Their own myth of an ancient past began to surface with the revelation of the Pre-Columbian civilizations of Central America and Mexico, of the mysterious world of the Mound Builders of the Mississippi valley, and of the romantic prehistoric ruins of the American Southwest. Nineteenth-century Americans delighted in playing all sorts of games with these prehistoric “primitive” episodes. They could even outdo the classical world and Europe by arguing, as Ignatius Donnelly did in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, that the ancient American civilizations of Central America, Mexico, and North America were the result of colonization by citizens of that ancient lost civilization. 7 It was the American Southwest, though, that became the most vivid exemplar of America’s own ancient folk tradition. For this region, stretching from western Texas to California, possessed features not to be found elsewhere: a landscape of desert and mountains, an indigenous American folk living in their own pueblos, and a Hispanic cultural overlay. Once the Anglo middle and upper middle classes had the means to travel—and the area had been made accessible in the years after the Civil War by the railroads—the Southwest became an internal Mecca for those who wished to experience the primitive and the rustic. Considering its English medieval folk source, it should not be a surprise to find that the American Arts and Crafts (the Craftsman) movement embraced the folk regionalism of the American Southwest and California. The first design for a house by Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Workshops (in 1904) was “a California House Founded on the California Mission Style.” 8 The connection between

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the Craftsman movement and the regionalism of California and the Southwest was caught up in the style term “Mission,” which quickly came to be applied to architecture as well as to the fumed-oak furniture produced by Gustav Stickley, Elbert Hubbard, and many others. Stickley himself noted that the coining of the term “Mission” was “an interesting story” but one devoid of historical fact. 9 The association had to do, as he pointed out, with “commercial cleverness.” “The mingling of novelty and romance instantly pleased the public and the vogue of ‘mission’ furniture was assured.” 10 Initially the image adopted for the rustic regionalism of the Southwest was the mission church of California. This image quickly came to be utilized by the Santa Fe and other railroads for passenger stations throughout New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and in various places elsewhere. Though writers from the late nineteenth century on continually advanced the myth of a semitropical Southern California as a distinct place, the general approach, at least at first, was to look upon the whole of the Southwest as a single wonderfully exotic Hispanic region. The employment of the Mission Style throughout the entire area had decided advantages. It tended to tie the whole together so that one could experience the Hispanic Southwest and California as a single entity. For the railroads, with their interest in tourism, it meant that they could provide the traveler with a series of repeated images that helped to establish their own corporate identity. The Pueblo Revival

The possibility of experiencing the Southwest as something distinct from California was strengthened by two added ingredients—the prehistoric ruins of the region and the very much alive Pueblo villages of the Rio Grande valley and elsewhere. By the 1890s, the distinct potential of this Native American architecture was being discussed in the pages of professional architectural journals. In 1897, the archaeologist Cosmos Mindeleff presented a long series of articles on Pueblo architecture in the Boston-based American Architect and Building News. 11 Certainly the underlying purpose of such articles and their illustrations was to suggest to architects that here was a new image for their repertory. As happened in the case of the Hispanic Mission image and the later Spanish Colonial Revival in California, the first examples of the Pueblo Revival occurred outside the Southwest. In 1894, the San Francisco architect A. C. Schweinfurth designed a “country hotel” that looked to the pueblo rather than to the California mission as its precedent. 12 A few years later, in 1897–98, the two California brothers Samuel Newsom and Joseph Cather Newsom fashioned several designs that, while hardly the purest versions of the Pueblo, nonetheless exhibit the hallmarks of the style, such as stucco, parapeted adobe-looking walls, and rows of projecting vigas. 13 By the early 1900s, the Pueblo image was beginning to be perceived as a distinct style. Charles F. Whittlesey’s grandiose project of 1903 for a sanatorium at Alamagordo, New Mexico, placed the image of the multistoried Pueblo

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within the context of the geometry of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. 14 Mary Colter, with the need to catch the eye of the tourist, was more literal in her 1905 “Hopi House” on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, while in 1908–09, Louis Curtis of Kansas City erected El Ortiz Hotel at Lamy, New Mexico, a romantic introduction to Santa Fe and the pueblos of the Rio Grande. 15 [FIG. 1] None of these early examples in New Mexico or elsewhere were, strictly speaking, archaeologically correct. They were composed of a variety of Hispanic and Native American motifs, though certainly the intent of their architects was to evoke a specific regional atmosphere of the rustic. In the case of the hotel at Lamy, for example, “the architect was commissioned to pattern this house from the early Spanish hacienda,” and the resultant design referred more to Mexico than to New Mexico. 16 Similarly, Charles F. Whittlesey’s Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque (1901–05) was California Mission rather than Pueblo. [FIGS. 2/3] In California, when Charles F. Lummis and A. V. LaMotte wrote about adobes, they were thinking not simply of examples in coastal California but of those to be found throughout the greater southwestern region. 17 The Pueblo Style outside New Mexico

By 1910, when the Pueblo Style was just beginning to establish itself in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, it was also being taken up elsewhere in the country. In New York in 1904, Clinton and Russell included a southwestern “Indian Room” in their mid-Manhattan Hotel Astor. 18 In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Charles F. Whittlesey employed an “Indian Pueblo Style” in the design of a number of his houses, the most insistent being the hillside house for Mrs. Margaret Ward in San Francisco (1911–12), while an earlier example is the Fisher House of 1907. 19 [FIG. 4] It could well be argued that it was the 1915 Panama California International Exposition at San Diego that gave its impressive stamp of approval not only to the then-emerging Spanish Colonial Revival style, but also to the Pueblo Revival. The New Mexico building by Rapp and Rapp based in part on the church at the Pueblo of Acoma evoked, as Eugene Neuhaus commented at the time, “the primitive character of the life of the pioneers of the Southwest, the Franciscan monks.” 20 The primitive possibilities of the Native American pueblo tradition were, in addition, directly presented in another section of the exposition, the “Painted Desert.” Here were erected reproductions of “picturesque Indian dwellings.” “Skillfully and with fine regard for effect of genuineness, the habitations of the cliff dwellers and the ‘Hogans’ of the Navaho and other nomadic tribes are here set up.” 21 In the four or five years preceding the opening of the San Diego Exposition, a sprinkling of archaeologically correct Pueblo Style dwellings was built in California. In Redlands, for example, in 1913, John H. Fisher, with his intense interest in re-creating the life of the Old West, built himself an adobe house authentic in design, construction, and materials. 22 Within its walls Fisher provided rustic furniture, Navajo rugs, Pueblo pottery, and Mission baskets. In an architecturally more sophisticated vein, in 1913 the San Diego

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1

2

3

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Louis Curtis, El Ortiz Hotel, Lamy, New Mexico, 1908–09. That there should be more of Mexico than New Mexico in the design is due to the generalized idea of what was considered “Southwestern” at the time as much as to the fact that the architect’s office was in Kansas City. FIG. 2 Charles F. Whittlesey, Alvarado Hotel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1901–05. Strict regionalism would have dictated the Pueblo Style rather than California Mission. But the first example of the former in New Mexico only appeared (on the University of New Mexico campus) during the year of the completion of the hotel. In California it had been employed by the Bostonian A. C. Schweinfurth as early as 1894. FIG. 3 Charles F. Whittlesey, Alvarado Hotel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1901–05. View of the south patio. FIG. 4 Charles F. Whittlesey, Fisher House, San Francisco, California, 1907. Two years after the completion of his Albuquerque hotel, Whittlesey designed this remarkable house in a free but formal variation of the Pueblo Style, with the arched windows on the ground floor as a minimal concession to its being in California. FIG. 5 Rudolph Schindler, House for T. P. Martin, Taos, New Mexico (project), 1915. In this, and in executed designs in California, Schindler improvised on the Pueblo theme to produce works of originality and power.

4

FIG. 1

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5

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architects Mead and Requa created a beach cottage for another collector of Indian “artifacts,” William J. Bailey. The Bailey Cottage, placed atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific at La Jolla, was referred to as an example of “Hopi Indian architecture.” Its “interior decorations are of Hopi design and various knickknacks of the same tribe lend their picturesque aid to give local color. 23 Modernist witnesses

As in Europe, the return to the primitive, the rustic, and the simple also helped set the stage for a decidedly different architectural direction, that of a refined geometric abstraction. In Europe, this process of abstracting the folk and primitive was seen as one of the basic sources of the new International Style modern. A similar process should perhaps have come about in the United States, but it did not. Modernism, of both the High Art and popular varieties, entered the American scene not internally but via Europe. Two Central European modernist transplants to the United States, R. M. Schindler and Richard J. Neutra, saw that the Hispanic/Native American Pueblo tradition of the Southwest was this country’s equivalent of the folk traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean. Schindler not only visited New Mexico in 1915 and recorded his experience in a group of wonderful drawings, but also used the Pueblo image for one of his most impressive designs, the T. P. Martin House of 1915 at Taos. 24 [FIG. 5] Later he took the Pueblo theme two or three steps further in the abstracting process and produced his own patio-oriented Studio House on Kings Road in Hollywood (1922) and the Pueblo Ribera Court at La Jolla (1923). Richard J. Neutra, who came to the Southwest and California much later (in 1925), was equally impressed. In a letter to his wife, Dione, while he was in New York in 1923, he spoke of his discovery of this primitive source. “I visited the Natural History Museum and came into the room of the Pueblo Indians. These are the people who influenced the modern California building activities.” 25 When Neutra published Wie Baut Amerika? in 1927, he illustrated and discussed the pueblos of the Southwest and examples of twentieth-century architecture that he felt directly carried on this tradition. 26 Among these designs were Lloyd Wright’s 1923 Oasis Hotel at Palm Springs and one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s precast-concrete-block houses, the Storer House in Hollywood (1923). 27 The Pueblo, along with California’s Mission Style, accompanied by frequent glances at the Christian and Moslem Mediterranean world, was recognized at the time as an inspirational source for America’s own “new” architecture. Again, equating it with the contemporary European experience, this catholic interest in the rustic (both past and present) was coupled with modern technology— reinforced concrete and hollow terra-cotta tile. In the East, as early as 1897, Grosvenor Atterbury had designed a group of “Moorish” seaside houses for Henry O. Havemeyer at Bayberry Point, Islip, Long Island. He maneuvered them into the rustic, and localized them with stuccoed walls “made from the sand on the site so as to blend building and setting.” 28 If Atterbury’s 1897 Havemeyer houses were taken up and placed in the Southwest or California, they would be responded to as Mission or Pueblo. They are close in spirit to

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George Washington Smith, House for the Marvilla Land Company, Ojai, California, 1921–22. Though trained as an architect, Smith had a first career as a painter, in Paris, before he became a practicing architect—which explains the emphasis in this drawing by him on picturesque effect, at the expense of the precision and clarity of form that help raise his designs above the level of those of the general run of Spanish Colonial Revivalists.

FIG. 6

the work in southern California of Irving J. Gill, Mead and Requa, Charles F. Whittlesey, Arthur B. Benton, Leslie S. Moore, and others. Their equivalents occurred in the San Francisco region in some of the designs of Birgi Clark and of Rousseau and Rousseau. By the mid-1920s the Cubist overtones of the designs of Gill and others were (to one degree or another) absorbed within California’s Colonial Revival. Of the work of George Washington Smith and others, Sheldon Cheney observed that it was highly successful because the architects, like their primitive forerunners, concentrated on a “fine simplicity of the forms, and the sculptural massing of the house.” 29 [FIG. 6] The Period Revival decades of the 1920s and 1930s were the heyday of the Southwest Adobe tradition as a distinct, recognizable style. Although it was centered in the Rio Grande valley, many of its most impressive examples were built in California, overlooking the Pacific in Santa Barbara or within an oak grove in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. But wherever these Pueblo Revival dwellings were built, they pointedly argued for the rural, the rustic, and the primitive. These were the qualities that attracted architects, writers, and artists before and after the turn of the century, and continue to seduce us to this day.

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Introduction to “Regionalism and Texas Architecture”

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Architectural historian Stephen Fox

buildings were designed by outside

presented a version of this paper

architects who operated with the

at the 1997 Art Libraries Society of

same sort of exotic interpretation

North America Conference in the

present in those stories. They were

panel “Texas Twists: Regionalism

designs based on what architects

in Texas Architecture.” Fox, like

in Boston and New York thought

David Gebhard, finds the origins of

belonged, based on climate and

American regionalism in the Arts

fiction, in places such as San Antonio

& Crafts movement and others

and Austin.

concerned with the celebration of local culture in the midst of increasing

Another influence was social

modernization and industrial

Darwinism, which through the

development. He focused on

seductive rhetoric of Darwinian

architecture in Texas to examine the

evolution (“primitive,” “adaptation,”

varying applications of regionalism

“fitness”) provided regionalist

from the 1880s to the 1950s. Texas is

architects with the conceptual

intriguing because, although it shared

framework that made it seem

similarities with other southwestern

compelling and reasonable to use

states, it lacked consensus on the

preindustrial vernaculars as models

architectural constituents of its

for modern buildings. Many of the

regional identity (or identities).

debates and developments found in Lincoln, Massachusetts, or Santa

Other strands of cultural influence

Fe, New Mexico, that shared the

are also at work. One was the

structure and history of architectural

American “local color” movement

regionalism in America as discourses

that blossomed in the post–Civil

formulated and codified in the 1920s

War years, most prolifically in the

and 1930s were renegotiated in the

South. i The focus of this fictional

1930s and 1940s to accommodate

literary form were the peculiarities

modernism.

of speech, quaint local customs, and modes of thought that were thought to be indigenous to specific regions.

Stephen Fox (b. 1950) is an architectural historian and adjunct lecturer on architecture at the University of Houston and Rice University.

Invented accounts of events and people such as the native peoples of the Southwest and those living in the Deep South or on western frontiers were told for profit and entertainment, but they were often erroneously understood as true to life. Many people gained their first exposure to life in other places through these stories, whose regional exoticism generated a great deal of touristic interest. As Fox demonstrates, in Texas some of the first “regionalist”

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Stephen Fox

Regionalism and Texas Architecture This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America in the session “Texas Twists: Regionalism in Texas Architecture,” chaired by Margaret Culbertson, San Antonio, Texas, 8 April 1997.

When examined through the production of architecture in Texas, regionalism emerges as an ideological instrument for mobilizing difference to assert competitive advantage. An analysis of nine architectural sites in Texas built between the 1880s and the 1950s demonstrates not only how regional identities were constructed as a modernizing cultural enterprise but how regional identities dialectically challenged the architectural status quo to assert cultural superiority. What makes architecture in Texas compelling as a reflection of regionalist practices is that the state’s cities did not experience movements of local cultural exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the exception of San Antonio, the largest city in Texas from the late 1890s until the 1920s, other urban centers where architects concentrated did not have well-developed historical identities. 1 This is apparent in examining the earliest Texas buildings that might retrospectively be categorized as “regional” and the uncertainty they exhibited as to what an architecture of regional identity in Texas might be. The San Antonio National Bank Building in San Antonio of 1886 evoked the Islamic architecture of medieval Spain. [FIG. 1] This affiliated the building with the eighteenth-century Spanish church at Mission San Francisco de la Espada outside San Antonio, which possesses an entrance portal framed by a curiously shaped, almost Mudéjar, arch. 2 The repetition of this distinctive profile on the street front of the bank signified both “Spanish” identity and venerable antiquity, an architectural-cultural claim that no San Antonio architect had yet thought to invoke. The building’s architect, Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz, practiced in New York. The client, George W. Brackenridge, was San Antonio’s most astute financier and progressive philanthropist. 3 The combination of a metropolitan architect, a culturally ambitious client, and a modern building type with no connection to Islamic Spain or Spanish-Mexican San Antonio suggests the social and economic context in which regionalism was introduced to architecture in Texas. Regionalism figured as a sign of cultural distinction. It elevated the building’s stature by suggesting that it was capable of restoring a cultural tradition that had been ruptured. More subtly, it suggested that there was no contradiction between tradition and modernity, and that it was through Americanization that the pre–Anglo-American Hispanic cultural identity of San Antonio was

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being revived. These implicit messages were not confined to San Antonio. A photograph of the San Antonio National Bank Building was published in the first issue of the nationally circulated journal Architectural Record. 4 San Antonio possessed the largest community of artists in any nineteenthcentury Texas city. 5 Artists seem to have been essential to the processes of negotiating difference that made regionalism possible because of their capacity to conceptually transform the old, the derelict, and the “other” into icons of regional identity. “Local color” was the name given to the late-nineteenthcentury literary movement that used American sectional subcultures as source material for popular fiction. 5 It was as the architectural equivalent of local color that architects in San Francisco, Pasadena, and other California cities began to systematically construct a regional architecture, the California Mission style, in the 1890s. 6 Such national publications as the American Architect and Building News facilitated transmission of visual information about the architectural landmarks that sustained Mission practices. In December 1890, the American Architect published a two-page spread of a carved stone window frame at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo outside San Antonio. 7 As Richard Longstreth demonstrated, the San Francisco architect Willis Polk quoted the San José window in a country house he designed in 1893 for the San Francisco photographer Valentine Rey and his wife, also an artist. 8 Encoding identity in iconic images of place, then transmitting these images through the national news media, indicates that regionalism was not simply a reaction to the tensions and contradictions of modernism but a modernizing attempt to synthesize conflicting modern and anti-modern theses. Proponents of regionalism, even in its local color phase, made expert use of national-scale, modern instruments to construct myths of regional difference and distinction. In 1903 the Southern Pacific Company built a passenger station in San Antonio to serve its Sunset Route between New Orleans and Los Angeles. [FIG. 2] The corporation’s San Francisco–based engineer John D. Isaacs wrote that the station was “an adaptation of the Mission style of architecture to modern requirements. The key note of the building is the Alamo, which is one of the historical features of the city, but the building, of course, is treated with much more elaborate ornamentation and, so far as its use is concerned, is modern in all respects.” 9 The station’s shaped gable, echoing the much smaller gable of San Antonio’s most famous mission, the Alamo, was the iconic feature identifying the California Mission style. The confidence with which the Southern Pacific Company’s designers appropriated icons of local identity and transformed them into signs of modern identity reflects the Darwinian evolutionary attitudes that underpinned thought and rhetoric of the turn of the twentieth century. When Patterson used the word “adaptation,” he signaled the social Darwinian stateof-mind that made it seem desirable and practical to appropriate an eighteenthcentury mission church and “develop” it as a twentieth-century railroad station. During the second half of the 1920s new construction in the burgeoning towns of the Texas-Mexican border performed narratives of belonging and cultural continuity through use of Spanish Mediterranean architecture, the

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1

2

3

Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz, First National Bank Building, San Antonio, Texas, 1886. FIG. 2 J. D. Isaacs and D. J. Patterson, Southern Pacific Passenger Station, San Antonio, Texas, 1903. FIG. 3 Paul Cret, Goldsmith Hall, University of Texas at Austin campus, Austin, Texas, 1931. An example of the Italian Mediterranean style that Cret thought to be appropriate to the regional climate of south-central Texas. FIG. 4 Brownsville apartment building. FIG. 5 Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, Administration Building (now Lovett Hall) and the Academic Court, Rice University, Houston, Texas, 1912. FIG. 1

4

5

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interwar successor to the California Mission style. [FIG. 3] The tallest building in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, the eight-story Hotel El Jardín of 1927, designed by a firm of San Antonio architects, the Kelwood Company, was finished with stucco, tile-roofed copings, and ornament that complemented its Spanish name. 10 The contradiction underlying this representation of Spanish identity was that the Hotel El Jardín ignored the region’s Mexican architectural vernacular. Spanish Mediterranean architecture constructed a modern identity affiliating new real estate development with similar architecture in Los Angeles and Miami. [FIG. 4] In the context of conflict between the region’s predominantly Mexican-Texan population and entrepreneurial Anglo-American newcomers, the Hotel El Jardín was, as the Brownsville folklorist Américo Paredes observed of a modern Spanish-style building in his novel George Washington Gómez, “as Mexican as it could be without having any Mexicans around.” 11 Spanish-style architecture asserted difference from and superiority to “others,” not only the prosaic commercial style typical of the early 1920s but the indigenous Mexican architecture of the south Texas borderland. Houston became the largest city in Texas during the 1920s. Less than a hundred years old, it seemed to possess no historical architecture that could be revived and “developed” to serve as the origin of an authentic regional architecture. This was the predicament confronting the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram when he was commissioned in 1909 to design a new university in Houston, the Rice Institute. [FIG. 5] An ardent advocate of tradition, Cram rejected Mission and Spanish architectural models in favor of Byzantine, constructing a Darwinian argument, premised on Southerness, in order “to develop a psychological excuse for it,” as he explained in his autobiography. 12 Cram sought to construct authenticity by appropriating difference (Byzantine architecture for Texas) and infuse the Rice Institute with distinctive identity. 13 He negotiated and naturalized difference in a Houston setting, so that the Rice Institute figured architecturally as both an “other” (unlike anything built in Houston) and as a paragon of superiority, demonstrating the potential for constructing an architecture of place by revealing a rich, profound, historically saturated identity that locals had never imagined existed. Cram’s ascribed regionalism depended on historical models but not on the historical subcultures of the local color movement. His deft dialectical argument, his bold negotiation of contradiction, and above all the rigor with which he shaped an architecture of place that constructed an identity for the Rice Institute as exceptional and superior were vindicated in the extensive publication of Rice’s buildings when the university opened in 1912. During the 1920s, Houston was the setting for a regionalist project advanced by the architect John F. Staub and two remarkable clients, Will C. Hogg and his sister, Ima Hogg. 14 Like the Southern Agrarians, the group of writers who brought regionalism to the fore as a cultural proposition in 1930, the Hoggs were fascinated with Southerness. 15 In 1924 the Hoggs began development of a planned garden suburb in Houston, River Oaks. Staub was one of three architects retained to design a set of demonstration houses. One of the houses

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he produced was based on the model of the Old Absinthe House, an early nineteenth-century Spanish Creole house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Ima Hogg coined the term “Latin Colonial” to describe the style of the River Oaks house. She and Staub amplified its identifying features in Bayou Bend of 1928, the country house Staub designed for the Hogg family in River Oaks. 16 In a polemic written in 1928, Staub described the Latin Colonial as a fusion of the Spanish Mediterranean and Georgian genres, which, he asserted, represented the cultural identity of the Texas Gulf Coast more authentically than either genre did on its own. 17 Staub applied the Latin Colonial genre to a suburban shopping center, the River Oaks Community Center, he designed with the corporation’s staff architect Charles W. Oliver in 1927. 18 [FIG. 6] Based on the model of Benjamin H. Latrobe’s State Bank of Louisiana Building in the French Quarter of 1819, Staub’s Latin Colonial shopping center was an instrument of modernization that negotiated identity and difference to spatialize the mythic claim of Darwinian-style progress: evolution connects past and present in a continuum; there is no contradiction between history and modernity. The instrumental role of regionalism in appearing to assimilate modernity to historical codes of identity, rationally resolve conflicts between new conditions and venerable forms, and manage change and continuity stood out at the River Oaks Community Center. Neither Staub nor Cram felt compelled to adhere to the myths of regional propriety each had constructed. The first Texan architect to engage regionalism as a systematic project was David R. Williams of Dallas, a contemporary of Staub’s. 19 Williams began practice in 1923. By 1926, when he hired an aspiring architect, O’Neil Ford, as a draftsman, Williams had begun to explore the backs streets of San Antonio as well as rural communities near San Antonio and along the Mexican border in search of nineteenth-century buildings that were more emotionally compelling than the wooden house types associated with Anglo-American settlement in nineteenth-century Texas. A number of these locales had been featured in occasional columns by I. T. Frary, published in Architectural Record between 1919 and 1926. 20 The legitimizing intervention of out-of-state experts and nationally circulated journals preceded Williams in identifying these communities and framing their buildings first as “architecture,” then as “Texas architecture.” Williams wrote two polemics, both published in the Southwest Review, the Dallas-based journal whose editors promoted regional cultural initiatives. His first essay, “An Indigenous Texas Architecture: Some Texas Colonial Houses,” of 1928, used a rhetoric of Darwinian naturalization, ethical virtue, industrially induced standardization, and cultural loss to propose a European-Texan pioneer cultural identity that framed the historic stone-and-brick houses that Williams admired—and antithetically identified Victorian and contemporary Texan houses as inauthentic. 21 In Williams’s second essay, “Toward a Southwestern Architecture,” published in 1931, he used the term “regional” and shifted the territorial locus of this region from Texas to the Southwest. 22 Substitution of “regional” for “indigenous” brought this polemic into conformity with the broader discourse on regionalism that took form after 1930. Substitution of

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“Southwest” for “Texas” elided the regionalist criticism that could be mounted against Williams’s houses: they drew on historical models not associated with the cultural historical landscapes of north central Texas where they were built. The title of the second essay also displayed Williams’s awareness of the modern movement and of Le Corbusier’s polemic Towards a New Architecture, published in English translation in 1927. In an essay published in the Southwest Review in January 1932, Williams’s protégé O’Neil Ford used the rhetoric of modern rationalism to denounce historical eclecticism yet characterize the Texan houses Williams had praised as essentially modern because they complied with rationalist precepts. 23 The last house Williams designed before he gave up his practice to enter government service in 1933, the Elbert R. Williams House of 1933, paid homage to the Joseph Carlé House in Castroville, Texas, near San Antonio, two hundred seventy-five miles from Dallas, built about 1850. 25 The Williams House exemplified what Peter Papademetriou described as “formal regionalism,” which he linked dialectically to the “regionalist functionalism” of the emerging practice of O’Neil Ford and his partner A. B. Swank in the early 1930s. 26 Ford & Swank’s Alfred L. Bromberg House in Dallas of 1939 represents the Darwinian “stage” through which the discourse of regionalism in American architecture transited as its relationship to place was redefined in the 1930s as one of phenomenal responsiveness (regionalist functionalism) rather than cultural recovery (formal regionalism) in dialectical reaction to the modernist critique of historical eclecticism. 24 The widely overhanging eaves, big windows, extensive terrace decks, screened, open-air living spaces, and louvered interior partitions of the Bromberg House were treated as materializations of climatic responsiveness rather than reflections of regional identity. The first building independently designed by an architect who would become a collaborator of Ford’s, Richard S. Colley of Corpus Christi, Texas, summarized not only the formal preoccupations but the ethical claims of interwar regionalism. 25 Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Corpus Christi of 1941–42 was the central city’s Spanish-language parish, serving Mexican-American Catholics. [FIG. 7] The Corpus Christi artist Antonio García, whose vivid frescoes fill the interior of the church, recommended Colley for the job. Colley had just completed work for the National Park Service as part of a team that designed and built a replica of the eighteenth-century Spanish mission church of Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga in the nearby town of Goliad, Texas. Sacred Heart is an antisentimental, anti-picturesque rendition of Espíritu Santo. In place of a shaped gable, the parapet capping the front wall of Sacred Heart is blunt and straight. Curvature was condensed in the parabolically profiled entrance portal to signify rationality not romanticism. Sacred Heart used regionalism to reclaim difference for a community that was modern but, because of the attitudes and practices of the city’s Anglo-American majority, relegated to the status of the other. What was modern about Sacred Heart was not just its austerity and deliberate awkwardness but its reversal of conventional regionalist practice: using a Texas-Mexican architectural model to identify a Texas-Mexican clientele.

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6

7

John F. Staub and Charles W. Oliver, River Oaks Community Center, Houston, Texas, 1927 (demolished). FIG. 7 Richard S. Colley, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, 1941. A streamlined version of the Espiritu Santo at the Goliad Mission that was constructed, in the approved Arts and Crafts manner, by its low-income, Mexican-American parishioners. FIG. 6

Demonstrating the resilience of the regionalist discourse in the postwar period is another building on the edge of downtown Corpus Christi, Klee Square, an office and retail center built in 1952–53 and designed by the Harlingen, Texas, architect John G. York and his firm, Cocke, Bowman & York. Constructed of exposed steel pipe columns, bar joists, turn-buckled wind-bracing cables, and roof decking, Klee Square was an example of modern architecture reduced to the essentials of its engineering and construction. Klee Square was the modernist antithesis of the historical models that sustained regionalist practices in Texas architecture before World War II. The interpretation of regionalism that Harwell Hamilton Harris, director of the architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, advanced in an address in 1954 sought to assimilate regionalism to the discourses of modernism. Harris asserted that “regionalism is a state of mind, not a matter of materials nor a way of building...free minds, imagination, a stake in the future—these make up the state of mind; and the climate, the topography, and the materials of the region make up the conditions of any regionalism worth preserving.” 26 Cocke, Bowman & York claimed superior authenticity for Klee Square by virtue of their ability to reconcile modernist practices with environmental responsiveness and regionally resonant spaces—the portales, the ramada, and the patio of Texas-Mexican houses—without resorting to historical models. 27

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What these Texan buildings suggest about regionalism is its contingent nature. Regionalism was negotiable, flexible, and antithetically linked to circumstances that did not pertain primarily to narratives of place or cultural identity. It was a modern phenomenon that criticized modernity by asserting difference from prevailing architectural practices and proposing alternatives that reversed modern contempt for the old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities. It challenged metropolitan cultural authorities by discovering or inventing styles of representation that drew their identity from sources not previously sanctioned by metropolitan institutions, even though the discoverers of these styles might themselves be sophisticated metropolitans. Regionalism sought to negotiate terms for assimilation to modernizing practices rather than simply being absorbed by the process of modernization. This engagement with difference— with uncovering and recovering otherness as a critical practice—enabled regionalism to make the transition from architecture based on the use of historical models to modernism.

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In 1989 the Huntington Library

Gaw Meem, and the romantic,

organized an exhibition on the

scenographic, or eclectic regionalism

California architect Wallace Neff, who

with which they are too easily

is best known for the Mediterranean-

associated. His discussion of George

style houses he designed for

Howe is revealing for his attempts to

movie stars in Hollywood. James

“regionalize the International Style,”

O’Gorman’s exploration of two

while the text overall establishes

California buildings—Neff’s Noble

a fuller picture of the architectural

House and Richard Neutra’s Lovell

scene between the two world wars.

House—was one of the articles included in the exhibition catalogue.

Writing with the intent of revising architectural history, O’Gorman

Neff’s work was unabashedly

commented that the following

stylistically regional, going beyond

essay “grew out of my belief that

referentiality with a modern

modernism is just a small part of

substructure and approaching

the architectural achievement of

eclecticism or romantic regionalism.

the twentieth century. Studies that

This was work meant to appeal to

look at that history solely in terms of

one’s emotional familiarity and sense

modernism are distortions.” ii

of achievement—representing the resident to others and reflecting an invented, evocative, and familiar image. i Like many others at the time,

James F. O’Gorman (b. 1933) is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emeritus of the History of American Art at Wellesley College and a regular visiting professor of the history of architecture at MIT.

Neff employed a broad spectrum of period revival designs to achieve this satisfying blend, including English and French medieval styles, Tuscan villas, Hispanic, Spanish-colonial, and even modern California ranch houses. By contrast, Richard Neutra’s work is subtly regional, relying on a response to climate, topography, and participation in the specific economic and technological systems specific to the region (see Neutra, Chapter 5). O’Gorman’s strategy here is to examine the interaction of regionalism and modernism through consideration of these two linked but visually dissimilar projects. What he reveals is helpful for a clearer understanding of the distinctions between the referential modern regionalism of Mary Colter or John

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James F. O’Gorman

Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism From Wallace Neff, 1895–1982: The Romance of Regional Architecture, Andrea Belloli, editor (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1989), 51–67. Reprinted courtesy of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and the author.

Two substantial houses erected on hilly sites in the Los Angeles area at the same moment exemplify polemical positions in the architectural situation of the 1920s and ’30s. They are Wallace Neff’s house for George O. Noble on Burleigh Drive in Pasadena (1927) [FIG. 1] and Richard Neutra’s house for Gertrude and Philip Lovell on Dundee Drive in Los Feliz (1927–29). [FIG. 2] The latter is the premier early example of International Style modernism; the former, among the finest of Neff’s regional “Californian” works. The dichotomy between them represents in microcosm the spectrum of early-twentieth-century American architecture. 1 The Lovell House is, of course, a “chestnut” of the history of modern design. It was broadly analyzed and generally praised even before its appearance in an exhibition held in 1932 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, an institution dedicated to promoting European modernism in America. The catalogue of that exhibition, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s International Style, became the “blue book” of the modern movement. The house fit perfectly into the “single new style” the authors defined as volumetric rather than massive, regular rather than axial, and devoid of “arbitrary applied decoration” (they left to others the addition of a moral dimension). The first two characteristics were generated by the structural frame, the armature of the new made possible by innovations in technology and materials during the nineteenth century. For Hitchcock and Johnson, as for the designers whom they catalogued, the frame was primary: it was, a priori, the fact of modern architecture to which all other considerations, including use, were secondary. “Thus technically the prime architectural problem of distribution is to adjust the irregular and unequal demands of function to regular construction and the use of standardized parts,” they wrote. 2 In other words, to paraphrase Louis Sullivan’s aphorism, form followed frame. “The frame was the house; the house was the frame,” Thomas Hines has written of Neutra’s Lovell design. “Structurally and aesthetically, it gave the house its meaning.” 3 Neutra later made it sound as if the sloping plot had dictated his design, 4 but in fact, this European-born designer brought the

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1

2

Wallace Neff, George O. Noble House, Pasadena, California, 1927, exterior. FIG. 2 Richard Neutra, Lovell House, Los Angeles, California, 1927–29, exterior. FIG. 1

concept of the frame to the hillside and might have employed it on any piece of land. 5 The house appears to float above, rather than sit upon, its terraced site. This “first completely steel-framed residence in America” was the product of the latest technology, with prefabricated elements bolted together, open web ceiling and floor joists, stock steel casements, and walls of Gunite shot onto wire. 6 The framed box imposes its measure on the patterns of life. Interior spaces are the “leftovers” of a process that began not with use but with concept. 7 The frame created them; 8 they did not result from convenience, comfort, or other creature considerations. For example, the library is a corridor-like space, low, long, and narrow. The flat-ceilinged living area is a larger rectangular tunnel shaped by the three-dimensional grid (the oft-printed early photograph looking from the library into the living area was taken from a low tripod and suggests an interior taller and broader than it is. 9 [FIG. 3] The traditional stone fireplace looks out of place in such a conceptual framework. Everywhere in the Lovell House the dogma of modernism expressed through the medium of the three-dimensional steel structure dominates patterns of use. The house became a paradigmatic emblem of the new by the application of the implacable platonic gridwork of internationalism.

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In Hitchcock and Johnson’s catalogue the Lovell House joined similar buildings of all types from across the Western world to form a coherent style conforming to three simple rules, none of which related to location. Such a universally applied aesthetic stood in direct opposition to a strong current of regionalism that existed in this country during the early twentieth century, a current exemplified in architectural design by the best work of Wallace Neff between 1919 and 1931. Neff’s Noble House is a technically traditional, massively walled structure that molds itself to the contours of its hilltop site and assumes the generic mantle of the Spanish Revival style. The hub of the plan is the circular entrance and stair hall in the angle between the living and dining wings. [FIG. 4] One axis spreads out to the right (through the library) and left (through the living room and loggia) toward the distant San Gabriel Mountains, while a cross-axis leads forward onto an airy, round-arched loggia. Geometric extensions of the building—driveway, gardens, and terraces—as well as the service wing tumble downhill from this central vantage point. Interior spaces are variously shaped in anticipation of human ceremony, convenience, and visual delight. For example, the central, spiraling stair gives access to a broad, vaulted passageway leading to the bedrooms. The master bedroom has two sets of French doors, a quarter-round fireplace that nestles easily into the corner between them, and a ceiling coved so slightly that it is more felt than seen as giving lift and life to the space. All of this is ultimately made possible by flexible planning and the malleability of stuccoed brick walls, round-arched openings, low-pitched red-tile roofs, and a picturesque skyline of variously placed gables and chimneys—the latter part of the vocabulary of what had come to be known as the Californian look. In other words, form followed style. Neff in the Noble House joined a host of designers from California across the Southwest to Florida who had been working since just before the turn of the century in Mission, Mediterranean, Pueblo, or Spanish Revival styles or combinations thereof. From the ’10s through the ’30s Rexford Newcomb defined, chronicled, and illustrated various aspects and examples of this regional architecture. 10 “California, and recently Florida,” he wrote in 1928 about the work of Neff, George Washington Smith, Reginald D. Johnson, and other Southland designers, “capitalized upon her history, romance and lore with the result that her architecture speaks more eloquently of her glorious present and colorful past than does any other phase of her artistic expression.” 11 Newcomb and other writers of the period championed an architectural style or styles based on the idea that Southern California possessed an agreed-upon regional culture descended from Spanish and Mexican roots 12 and promoted the work of architects such as Neff who could provide works that reflected that heritage. The Lovell and Noble houses stemmed from given systems of architectural design. In the 1920s neither was alone of its kind. The preconceptual frame of Neutra’s house and the preconceptual style of Neff’s residence joined domestic works by these and other designers to shape the architectural scene in California. Rudolf M. Schindler’s Newport Beach house for the Lovells (1925–26), “a doctrinaire assertion of the new architecture” 13 by another

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3

4

5

Richard Neutra, Lovell House, Los Angeles, California, 1927–29, view from library into the living room. FIG. 4 Wallace Neff, George O. Noble House, Pasadena 1927, entrance hall. FIG. 5 Wallace Neff, Clark B. Millikan House, 1931, aerial view. FIG. 3

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European-born designer, was conceived as a series of five parallel concrete frames that elevate and shape the enclosed rectangular volumes. Neff’s Clark B. Millikan House of 1931, located in Flintridge, on the other hand, drapes itself over its site on a plan that is formal and flexible at the same time. [FIG. 5] A central, hilltop entrance patio gives access to a service wing to the left, living area ahead, and sleeping rooms to the right, all of which plunge down over the crest of the rise as red- and blue-trimmed, white-walled, tile-roofed, archopened, and chimney-spiked Hispanic forms. From Sheldon Cheney 14 to David Gebhard, 15 critics and historians of California’s domestic architecture of the early twentieth century, while noting the differences, have also remarked on the continuities between modernism and the Hispanic styles that resulted largely from shared simplicity and chromatics; tersely put, both in general favored untextured white walls. Recognition of this superficial continuity must be offset by a perception of such fundamental distinctions as the up-to-date technological symbolism that underlies the one and the traditional handmade aesthetics of the other. This is a distinction between the cerebral, sharp-edged, evenly illuminated, apparently weightless, two-dimensional planes of modernism versus the optical manipulation of light and shadow patterns cast on heavy walls by beam ends, wrought iron, tiled eaves, and “other scenic devices” (to quote Newcomb again) 16 characteristic of Hispanic forms. The one is best revealed by fluorescent lamps, whereas Newcomb happily dubbed the other a “sun-begotten style.” Emphasis on the continuity between works such as these by Neutra and Neff not only obscures the visually obvious; it dilutes the polemic they represented in the era between the two world wars and thereby impoverishes the richness of recent architectural history. A nation of voluntary and forced immigrants is nervous about its identity. The shape of American architecture is a design problem that has concerned American practitioners and critics at least since the Civil War. By the early twentieth century there were those who thought that while a truly national style was probably impossible, given the vastness and diversity of the country, a collection of regional styles might at least identify that characteristic diversity. In a brief note on Neff’s work published in 1926, for example, that leading proponent of regionalism Rexford Newcomb wrote: In a great country like our own it would seem folly to seek an homogeneous architectural expression....[This is] impossible for several reasons among the chiefest of which are: the great varieties of topography, geology and climate...and the wide diversity of historic and ethnic backgrounds of our people. 17

Colonial and Federal revivals in New England and along the Atlantic Coast, picturesque fieldstone farmhouses in Pennsylvania, Prairie School houses in the Midwest, Hispanic, or at least Mediterranean, forms from Florida through the Southwest to California: these and other styles were rooted in local historical or physical characteristics. By the 1920s the Californian was one among many

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established American regional styles; against such indigenous diversity, the International Style must have appeared a homogeneous and foreign usurpation. The coexistence of works such as the International Style Lovell houses on the one hand and the Californian Noble and Millikan houses on the other belied the contested historical ground they occupied. Like the political polemic, the architectural one between “us” and “them” reached a crescendo in the late 1920s and early ’30s, but it had, in fact, begun much earlier and not within the California context. An attempt to define an appropriately American domesticity occurs, for example, in the writing of the architect Joy Wheeler Dow at the beginning of the century. 18 Rejecting the “newly-invented architecture” of the protomodernist midwestern Prairie School as undomestic, rootless, and foreign, Dow championed the revival of Georgian colonial architecture because its “Anglo-Saxon home feeling” suggested landed and familial continuity with the past. This attitude survived into the era between the wars. “The second onslaught of modernism upon America came not from the middle west,” wrote Wells Bennett, “but from abroad, [and that was] quite a different matter you may be sure. . . . Why, by this second and third decade of the twentieth century, doesn’t everyone like modern architecture?” he asked. 19 William Orr Ludlow’s answer echoed Dow. He thought modern design suitable for commercial work, for skyscrapers, but “the sentiment about ‘home’ is not dead yet by any means. . . . The ‘family’ still means something, and as long as it does the design of our homes is not going to be leveled to the utilitarian box....Efficiency and iconoclasm will never wipe out that kind of sentiment that opposed to materialism makes life worth while.” 20 Modernism remained undomestic, rootless, and foreign. But the modernist had his viewpoint, too. In the words of George Howe, a man who had begun his career as a designer of regional works in eastern Pennsylvania and who was to codesign with European-born William Lescaze the first International Style skyscraper, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1929–32), “In Modern Architecture...there is a greater beauty than in stylistic architecture; the beauty of the function and structural strength of character, instead of outward feature, based on true instead of false sentiment, and on the sound tradition of substance instead of the unsound tradition of form.” 21 Howe might have had the Lovell and Noble houses in mind when he wrote elsewhere that “there is more real beauty in one straight line of a well-designed functional country house, standing in bold relief against the irregularities of nature, than in all the soft contours re-created by the romantic in painful imitation of the peasant’s handiwork.” 22 He was in an antiregionalist phase at that moment: “The functional architect,” he wrote, “discarding all pretense at local character, rejoices in his freedom, and frankly brings together...materials from every quarter of the globe.” But Howe, as an American architect between the wars, could not hold this internationalist position for long. When he wrote these words he was associated with the modernist Lescaze; later, on his own at the William Stix Wasserman House in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, he was to seek a compromise between modern forms and traditional local materials. In effect, he

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attempted to have it both ways, to establish a compromise position, to regionalize the International Style. 23 But to return to California. Joy Wheeler Dow wrote for a WASP readership located largely in New England, where the English Colonial Revival had been one of the prevailing domestic architectural styles since the 1870s, but such “frigid, wood-begotten New England [architectural] types were poorly adapted, climatically and historically” to the Southwest, according to Newcomb, where each region was trying “to express itself in its own variant of this versatile sun-loving [Hispanic] style.” 24 Wallace Neff, born and raised in California, studied art in Europe (the soft pencil drawings in his sketchbooks reflect an eye for picturesque rural buildings) and architecture in a program headed by a traditionalist and made at least one documented trip to Havana (late in 1924), where stuccoed walls, ceramic-tiled low-pitched roofs, and irregularly massed buildings sprouting corner chimneys caught his camera and pencil. He seems not to have written theory, permitting his Californian works to speak for his adherence to the prevailing Hispanic cultural definition of Southland regionalism. Neff’s best works of the ’20s adhere to an opposing line of architectural intention, but whether or not he saw them as a polemical challenge to the works of Neutra or Schindler, and to what extent he thought of their work as rootless and foreign, is impossible to say. We suspect that he was too busy in that decade satisfying the requirements of exacting clients to worry about his place in architectural history. That would come later. 25 The history of twentieth-century western architecture includes a range of works from traditionalist to modernist, but rare is the book that includes them all 26 and nonexistent the book that treats them with equal attention. 27 The polemical nature of modern historiography has led to a narrowly selective account of building in our century. That modernism, as a set of buildings and body of theory, is a constituent fact of the present century is indisputable. That it was but one constituent fact is also beyond question although rarely—until recently—admitted. That other buildings and ideas also existed, and in fact far outnumber the modern, has only become an acceptable observation in the postmodern era. 28 That Neff and his like-minded colleagues turned out a distinguished body of work in the 1920s supported by a coherent theory of architectural regionalism can be overlooked only by the ideologue, the advocate, or the polemicist. Visits to the buildings of both camps provide a far more complete, richer picture of architecture between the wars than has existed in print. 29 California architecture of the 1920s and ’30s includes distinguished work by both sides—the California regionalism of Neff and the contemporary internationalism of Neutra—and no meaningful telling of the achievements of the era can neglect either one. Indeed, they are completely explicable only as a pair. Through exhibitions and in publications...the unbalance of past histories is beginning to be redressed, and we are starting to view both the regional and the international styles—and their interrelationship—in a more accurate light.

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Chapter 4

Regionalism and Regional Planning

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An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning

Regional Planning

d ng

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Benton MacKaye



Lewis Mumford

Excerpts from A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander

Regional Development: The Architect’s Role

Albert Mayer

Perspectives on Regional Design

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Paul D. Spreiregen

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In 1919, while working for the U.S.

enthusiastic support led MacKaye to

Department of Labor, Benton

pen the text reprinted here over the

MacKaye first presented the ideas

next few days. ii

that would later frame his proposal for developing the Appalachian Trail. That

The result was a geographically

early document, entitled “Employment

focused plan for a pedestrian

and Natural Resources,” was a

pathway along the ridge of the

proposed community development

Appalachian Mountains, intended to

and employment plan for soldiers

serve as the backbone for regional

returning from World War I.

economic and social redevelopment.

Informed by his experience as a

It would eventually be 2,159 miles

forester and his work under noted

long and pass through thirteen states.

conservationist Gifford Pinchot, it

Behind it lay MacKaye’s determination

included plans for “agricultural and

that this landscape be preserved

timbering communities that could be

as a resource, publicly held and

operated on a cooperative basis...

used in the public’s interest. Further,

whereby trees are ‘farmed’ rather

its structure of living and working

than ‘mined’” that suggested a

settlements (work camps, farms,

revision of the government’s typical

and recreational camps) within a

homestead approach. i MacKaye’s

setting of environmental stewardship

proposal projected a new vision of

can be seen as an expansion of his

resource conservation, rural/urban

earlier concepts. The proposal also

relationships, and work/community

served as a new theme for the RPAA

structures; it was an anti-consumerist

generally by demonstrating how the

resettlement program based on

progressive regional planning they

ecology.

advocated could provide a better and more ecologically sound setting for

The following year he expanded

modern life.

these ideas from policy to regional planning and began to work with Charles Whitaker, editor of the Journal

Benton MacKaye (1879–1975) was a forester with the U.S. Forest Service, a regional planner, and an author; he conceived of the Appalachian Trail.

of the American Institute of Architects, on plans that included the design of productive communities clustered around available raw materials and power sources and connected to consumptive urban centers. In 1921, MacKaye joined Whitaker’s planning group, the Committee on Community Planning, which would later reform as the Regional Planning Association of America. At a chance meeting with Clarence Stein, MacKaye discussed his vision for a trail connecting Maine to Georgia. Stein and Whitaker’s

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Benton MacKaye

An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning Originally published in The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (October 1921): 325–30. Reprinted courtesy of The Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library.

Something has been going on these past few strenuous years which, in the din of war and general upheaval, has been somewhat lost from the public mind. It is the slow quiet development of a special type of community—the recreation camp. It is something neither urban nor rural. It escapes the hecticness of the one, the loneliness of the other. And it escapes also the common curse of both—the high-powered tension of the economic scramble. All communities face an “economic” problem, but in different ways. The camp faces it through co-operation and mutual helpfulness, the others through competition and mutual fleecing. We civilized ones also, whether urban or rural, are potentially as helpless as canaries in a cage. The ability to cope with nature directly—unshielded by the weakening wall of civilization—is one of the admitted needs of modern times. It is the goal of the “scouting” movement. Not that we want to return to the plights of our Paleolithic ancestors. We want the strength of progress without its puniness. We want its conveniences without its fopperies. The ability to sleep and cook in the open is a good step forward. But “scouting” should not stop there. This is but a faint step from our canary bird existence. It should strike far deeper than this. We should seek the ability not only to cook food but to raise food with less aid—and less hindrance—from the complexities of commerce. And this is becoming daily of increasing practical importance. Scouting, then, has its vital connection with the problem of living. A New Approach to the Problem of Living

The problem of living is at bottom an economic one. And this alone is bad enough, even in a period of so-called “normalcy.” But living has been considerably complicated of late in various ways—by war, by questions of personal liberty, and by “menaces” of one kind or another. There have been created bitter antagonisms. We are undergoing also the bad combination of high prices and unemployment. This situation is world wide—the result of a world-wide war. It is no purpose of this little article to indulge in coping with any of these big questions. The nearest we come to such effrontery is to suggest more

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comfortable seats and more fresh air for those who have to consider them. A great professor once said that “optimism is oxygen.” Are we getting all the “oxygen” we might for the big tasks before us? “Let us wait,” we are told, “till we solve this cussed labor problem. Then we’ll have the leisure to do great things.” But suppose that while we wait the chance for doing them is passed? It goes without saying that we should work upon the labor problem. Not just the matter of “capital and labor” but the real labor problem—how to reduce the day’s drudgery. The toil and chore of life should, as labor-saving devices increase, form a diminishing proportion of the average day and year. Leisure and the higher pursuits will thereby come to form an increasing portion of our lives. But will leisure mean something “higher”? Here is a question indeed. The coming of leisure in itself will create its own problem. As the problem of labor “solves,” that of leisure arises. There seems to be no escape from problems. We have neglected to improve the leisure which should be ours as a result of replacing stone and bronze with iron and steam. Very likely we have been cheated out of the bulk of this leisure. The efficiency of modern industry has been placed at 25 percent of its reasonable possibilities. This may be too low or too high. But the leisure that we do succeed in getting—is this developed to an efficiency much higher? The customary approach to the problem of living relates to work rather than play. Can we increase the efficiency of our working time? Can we solve the problem of labor? If so we can widen the opportunities for leisure. The new approach reverses this mental process. Can we increase the efficiency of our spare time? Can we develop opportunities for leisure as an aid in solving the problem of labor? An Undeveloped Power—Our Spare Time

How much spare time have we, and how much power does it represent? The great body of working people—the industrial workers, the farmers, and the housewives—have no allotted spare time or “vacations.” The business clerk usually gets two weeks’ leave, with pay, each year. The U.S. Government clerk gets thirty days. The business man is likely to give himself two weeks or a month. Farmers can get off for a week or more at a time by doubling up on one another’s chores. Housewives might do likewise. As to the industrial worker—in mine or factory—his average “vacation” is all too long. For it is “leave of absence without pay.” According to recent official figures the average industrial worker in the United States, during normal times, is employed about four fifths of the time—say 42 weeks in the year. The other ten weeks he is employed in seeking employment. The proportionate time for true leisure of the average adult American appears, then, to be meagre indeed. But a goodly portion have (or take) about two weeks in the year. The industrial worker during the estimated ten weeks between jobs must of course go on eating and living. His savings may enable him to do this without undue worry. He could, if he felt he could spare the time from job hunting, and if suitable facilities were provided, take two weeks of his ten on a real vacation. In

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one way or another, therefore, the average adult in this country could devote each year a period of about two weeks in doing the things of his own choice. Here is enormous undeveloped power—the spare time of our population. Suppose just one percent of it were focused upon one particular job, such as increasing the facilities for the outdoor community life. This would be more than a million people, representing over two million weeks a year. It would be equivalent to 40,000 persons steadily on the job. A Strategic Camping Base—The Appalachian Skyline

Where might this imposing force lay out its strategic camping ground? Camping grounds, of course, require wild lands. These in America are fortunately still available. They are in every main region of the country. They are the undeveloped or under-developed areas. Except in the Central States the wild lands now remaining are for the most part among the mountain ranges—the Sierras, the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains of the West and the Appalachian Mountains of the East. Extensive national playgrounds have been reserved in various parts of the country for use by the people for camping and various kindred purposes. Most of these are in the West where Uncle Sam’s public lands were located. They are in the Yosemite, the Yellowstone, and many other National Parks—covering about six million acres in all. Splendid work has been accomplished in fitting these Parks for use. The National Forests, covering about 130 million acres— chiefly in the West—are also equipped for public recreation purposes. A great public service has been started in these Parks and Forests in the field of outdoor life. They have been called “playgrounds of the people.” This they are for the Western people—and for those in the East who can afford time and funds for an extended trip in a Pullman car. But camping grounds to be of the most use to the people should be as near as possible to the center of population. And this is in the East. It fortunately happens that we have throughout the most densely populated portions of the United States a fairly continuous belt of under-developed lands. These are contained in the several ranges which form the Appalachian chain of mountains. Several National Forests have been purchased in this belt. These mountains, in several ways rivaling the western scenery, are within a day’s ride from centers containing more than half the population of the United States. The region spans the climate of New England and the cotton belt; it contains the crops and the people of the North and the South. The skyline along the top of the main divides and ridges of the Appalachians would overlook a mighty part of the nation’s activities. The rugged lands of this skyline would form a camping base strategic in the country’s work and play. Seen from the Skyline

Let us assume the existence of a giant standing high on the skyline along these mountain ridges, his head just scraping the floating clouds. What would he see from this skyline as he strode along its length from north to south?

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Starting out from Mt. Washington, the highest point in the Northeast, his horizon takes in one of the original happy hunting grounds of America—the “Northwoods,” a country of pointed firs extending from the lakes and rivers of northern Maine to those of the Adirondacks. Stepping across the Green Mountains and the Berkshires to the Catskills, he gets his first view of the crowded East—a chain of smoky bee-hive cities extending from Boston to Washington and containing a third of the population of the Appalachian drained area. Bridging the Delaware Water Gap and the Susquehanna on the picturesque Allegheny folds across Pennsylvania he notes more smoky columns—the big plants between Scranton and Pittsburgh that get out the basic stuff of modern industry—iron and coal. In relieving contrast he steps across the Potomac near Harpers Ferry and pushes through into the wooded wilderness of the southern Appalachians where he finds preserved much of the primal aspects of the days of Daniel Boone. Here he finds, over on the Monongahela side, the black coal of bituminous and the white coal of water power. He proceeds along the great divide of the upper Ohio and sees flowing to waste, sometimes in terrifying floods, waters capable of generating untold hydroelectric energy and of bringing navigation to many a lower stream. He looks over the Natural Bridge and out across the battle fields around Appomattox. He finds himself finally in the midst of the great Carolina hardwood belt. Resting now on the top of Mt. Mitchell, highest point east of the Rockies, he counts up on his big long fingers the opportunities which yet await development along the skyline he has passed. First he notes the opportunities for recreation. Throughout the southern Appalachians, throughout the Northwoods, and even through the Alleghenies that wind their way among the smoky industrial towns of Pennsylvania, he recollects vast areas of secluded forests, pastoral lands, and water courses, which, with proper facilities and protection, could be made to serve as the breath of a real life for the toilers in the bee-hive cities along the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere. Second, he notes the possibilities for health and recuperation. The oxygen in the mountain air along the Appalachian skyline is a natural resource (and a national resource) that radiates to the heavens its enormous health-giving powers with only a fraction of a percent utilized for human rehabilitation. Here is a resource that could save thousands of lives. The sufferers of tuberculosis, anemia and insanity go through the whole strata of human society. Most of them are helpless, even those economically well off. They occur in the cities and right in the skyline belt. For the farmers, and especially the wives of farmers, are by no means escaping the grinding-down process of our modern life. Most sanitariums now established are perfectly useless to those afflicted with mental disease—the most terrible, usually, of any disease. Many of these sufferers could be cured. But not merely by “treatment.” They need comprehensive provision made for them. They need acres not medicine. Thousands of acres of this mountain land should be devoted to them with whole communities planned and equipped for their cure.

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Next after the opportunities for recreation and recuperation our giant counts off, as a third big resource, the opportunities in the Appalachian belt for employment on the land. This brings up a need that is becoming urgent—the redistribution of our population, which grows more and more top heavy. The rural population of the United States, and of the eastern States adjacent to the Appalachians, has now dipped below the urban. For the whole country has fallen from 60 percent of the total in 1900 to 49 percent in 1920: for the eastern States it has fallen, during this period, from 55 percent to 45 percent. Meantime the per capita area of improved farmland has dropped, in the eastern States, from 3.35 acres to 2.43 acres. This is a shrinkage of nearly 18 percent in 20 years; in the States from Maine to Pennsylvania the shrinkage has been 40 percent. There are in the Appalachian belt probably 25 million acres of grazing and agricultural land awaiting development. Here is room for a whole new rural population. Here is an opportunity—if only the way can be found—for that counter migration from city to country that has so long been prayed for. But our giant in pondering on this resource is discerning enough to know that its utilization is going to depend upon some new deal in our agricultural system. This he knows if he has ever stooped down and gazed in the sunken eyes either of the Carolina “cracker” or of the Green Mountain “hayseed.” Forest land as well as agricultural might prove an opportunity for steady employment in the open. But this again depends upon a new deal. Forestry must replace timber devastation and its consequent haphazard employment. And this the giant knows if he has looked into the rugged face of the homeless “don’t care a damn” lumberjack of the Northwoods. Such are the outlooks—such the opportunities—seen by a discerning spirit from the Appalachian skyline. Possibilities in the New Approach

Let’s put up now to the wise and trained observer the particular question before us. What are the possibilities in the new approach to the problem of living? Would the development of the outdoor community life—as an offset and relief from the various shackles of commercial civilization—be practicable and worth while? From the experience of observations and thoughts along the skyline here is a possible answer: There are several possible gains from such an approach. First there would be the “oxygen” that makes for a sensible optimism. Two weeks spent in the real open—right now, this year and next—would be a little real living for thousands of people which they would be sure of getting before they died. They would get a little fun as they went along regardless of problems being “solved.” This would not damage the problems and it would help the folks. Next there would be perspective. Life for two weeks on the mountain top would show up many things about life during the other fifty weeks down below. The latter could be viewed as a whole—away from its heat, and sweat, and irritations. There would be a chance to catch a breath, to study the dynamic forces of nature and the possibilities of shifting to them the burdens now carried

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on the backs of men. The reposeful study of these forces should provide a broadgauged enlightened approach to the problems of industry. Industry would come to be seen in its true perspective—as a means in life and not as an end in itself. The actual partaking of the recreative and non-industrial life—systematically by the people and not spasmodically by a few—should emphasize the distinction between it and the industrial life. It should stimulate the quest for enlarging the one and reducing the other. It should put new zest in the labor movement. Life and study of this kind should emphasize the need of going to the roots of industrial questions and of avoiding superficial thinking and rash action. The problems of the farmer, the coal miner, and the lumberjack could be studied intimately and with minimum partiality. Such an approach should bring the poise that goes with understanding. Finally these would be new clews to constructive solutions. The organization of the cooperative camping life would tend to draw people out of the cities. Coming as visitors they would be loath to return. They would become desirous of settling down in the country—to work in the open as well as play. The various camps would require food. Why not raise food, as well as consume it, on the cooperative plan? Food and farm camps chould come about as a natural sequence. Timber also is required. Permanent small-scale operations could be encouraged in the various Appalachian National Forests. The government now claims this as a part of its forest policy. The camping life would stimulate forestry as well as a better agriculture. Employment in both would tend to become enlarged. How far these tendencies would go the wisest observer of course can not tell. They would have to be worked out step by step. But the tendencies at least would be established. They would be cutting channels leading to constructive achievement in the problem of living: they would be cutting across those now leading to destructive blindness. A Project for Development

It looks, then, as if it might be worth while to devote some energy at least to working out a better utilization of our spare time. The spare time for one percent of our population would be equivalent, as above reckoned, to the continuous activity of some 40,000 persons. If these people were on the skyline, and kept their eyes open, they would see the things that the giant could see. Indeed this force of 40,000 would be a giant in itself. It could walk the skyline and develop its various opportunities. And this is the job that we propose: a project to develop the opportunities—for recreation, recuperation, and employment—in the region of the Appalachian skyline. [FIG. 1] The project is one for a series of recreational communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail. Its purpose is to establish a base for a more extensive and systematic development of outdoor community life. It is a project in housing and community architecture. No scheme is proposed in this particular article for organizing or financing

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Benton MacKaye, suggested location of Appalachian Trail. Main line from Mt. Washington to Mt. Mitchell. Large cities are tapped through branch lines and certain railways. Area shown contains more than half the population of the United States and over one third the population of Canada. Cities shown comprise all metropolitan centers over 100,000, relative population being indicated by size of dot. Thirty-six of these centers, including a third of the area’s population, are from one to eight hours’ ride from the trail system. Centers named are those of more than 400,000.

FIG. 1

this project. Organizing is a matter of detail to be carefully worked out. Financing depends on local public interest in the various localities affected. Features of Project

There are four chief features of the Appalachian project: 1. The Trail— The beginnings of an Appalachian trail already exist. They have been established for several years—in various localities along the line. Specially good work in trail building has been accomplished by the Appalachian Mountain Club in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and by the Green Mountain Club in Vermont. The latter association has built the “Long Trail” for 210 miles thorough the Green Mountains—four fifths of the distance from

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the Massachusetts line to the Canadian. Here is a project that will logically be extended. What the Green Mountains are to Vermont the Appalachians are to eastern United States. What is suggested, therefore, is a “long trail” over the full length of the Appalachian skyline, from the highest peak in the north to the highest peak in the south—from Mt. Washington to Mt. Mitchell. The trail should be divided into sections, each consisting preferably of the portion lying in a given State, or subdivision thereof. Each section should be in the immediate charge of a local group of people. Difficulties might arise over the use of private property—especially that amid agricultural lands on the crossovers between ranges. It might sometimes be necessary to obtain a State franchise for the use of rights of way. These matters could readily be adjusted, provided there is sufficient local public interest in the project as a whole. The various sections should be under some sort of general federated control, but no suggestions regarding this form are made in this article. Not all of the trail within a section could, of course, be built all at once. It would be a matter of several years. As far as possible the work undertaken for any one season should complete some definite usable link—as up or across one peak. Once completed it should be immediately opened for local use and not wait on the completion of other portions. Each portion built should, of course, be rigorously maintained and not allowed to revert to disuse. A trail is as serviceable as its poorest link. The trail could be made, at each stage of its construction, of immediate strategic value in preventing and fighting forest fires. Lookout stations could be located at intervals along the way. A forest fire service could be organized in each section which should tie in with the services of the Federal and State Governments. The trail would immediately become a battle line against fire. A suggestion for the location of the trail and its main branches is shown on the accompanying map. 2. Shelter Camps— These are the usual accompaniments of the trails which have been built in the White and Green Mountains. They are the trail’s equipment for use. They should be located at convenient distances so as to allow a comfortable day’s walk between each. They should be equipped always for sleeping and certain of them for serving meals—after the fashion of the Swiss chalets. Strict regulation is essential to provide that equipment is used and not abused. As far as possible the blazing and constructing of the trail and building of camps should be done by volunteer workers. For volunteer “work” is really “play.” The spirit of cooperation, as usual in such enterprises, should be stimulated throughout. The enterprise should, of course, be conducted without profit. The trail must be well guarded—against the yegg-man and against the profiteer. 3. Community Camps— These would grow naturally out of the shelter camps and inns. Each would consist of a little community on or near the trail (perhaps on a neighboring lake)

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where people could live in private domiciles. Such a community might occupy a substantial area—perhaps a hundred acres or more. This should be bought and owned as a part of the project. No separate lots should be sold therefrom. Each camp should be a self-owning community and not a real-estate venture. The use of the separate domiciles, like all other features of the project, should be available without profit. These community camps should be carefully planned in advance. They should not be allowed to become too populous and thereby defeat the very purpose for which they are created. Greater numbers should be accommodated by more communities, not larger ones. There is room, without crowding, in the Appalachian region for a very large camping population. The location of these community camps would form a main part of the regional planning and architecture. These communities would be used for various kinds of non-industrial activity. They might eventually be organized for special purposes—for recreation, for recuperation, and for study. Summer schools or seasonal field courses could be established and scientific travel courses organized and accommodated in the different communities along the trail. The community camp should become something more than a mere “playground”; it should stimulate every line of outdoor non-industrial endeavor. 4. Food and Farm Camps— These might not be organized at first. They would come as a later development. The farm camp is the natural supplement of the community camp. Here in the same spirit of cooperation and well-ordered action the food and crops consumed in the outdoor living would as far as practicable be sown and harvested. Food and farm camps could be established as special communities in adjoining valleys. Or they might be combined with the community camps with the inclusion of surrounding farm lands. Their development would provide tangible opportunity for working out by actual experiment a fundamental matter in the problem of living. It would provide one definite avenue of experiment in getting “back to the land.” It would provide an opportunity for those anxious to settle down in the country; it would open up a possible source for new, and needed, employment. Communities of this type are illustrated by the Hudson Guild Farm in New Jersey. Fuelwood, logs, and lumber are other basic needs of the camps and communities along the trail. These also might be grown and forested as part of the camp activity, rather than bought in the lumber market. The nucleus of such an enterprise has already been started at Camp Tamiment, Pennsylvania, on a lake not far from the proposed route of the Appalachian trail. The camp has been established by a labor group in New York City. They have erected a sawmill on their tract of 2,000 acres and have built the bungalows of their community from their own timber. Farm camps might ultimately be supplemented by permanent forest camps through the acquisition (or lease) of wood and timber tracts. These of course

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should be handled under a system of forestry so as to have a continuously growing crop of material. The object sought might be accomplished through long-term timber sale contracts with the Federal Government on some of the Appalachian National Forests. Here would be another opportunity for permanent, steady, healthy employment in the open. Elements of Dramatic Appeal

The results achievable in the camp and scouting life are common knowledge to all who have passed beyond the tenderfoot stage therein. The camp community is a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life. It is in essence a retreat from profit. Cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, emulation replaces competition. An Appalachian trail, with its camps, communities, and spheres of influence along the skyline, should, with reasonably good management, accomplish these achievements. And they possess within them the elements of a deep dramatic appeal. Indeed the lure of the scouting life can be made the most formidable enemy of the lure of militarism (a thing with which this country is menaced along with all others). It comes the nearest perhaps, of things thus far projected, to supplying what Professor James once called a “moral equivalent of war.” It appeals to the primal instincts of a fighting heroism, of volunteer service, and of work in a common cause. These instincts are pent-up forces in every human and they demand their outlet. This is the avowed object of the boy scout and girl scout movement, but it should not be limited to juveniles. The building and protection of an Appalachian trail, with its various communities, interests, and possibilities, would form at least one outlet. Here is a job for 40,000 souls. This trail could be made to be, in a very literal sense, a battle line against fire and flood—and even against disease. Such battles—against the common enemies of man—still lack, it is true, “the punch” of man vs. man. There is but one reason—publicity. Militarism has been made colorful in a world of drab. But the care of the country side, which the scouting life instills, is vital in any real protection of “home and country.” Already basic, it can be made spectacular. Here is something to be dramatized.

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In the penultimate year of the

the Tennessee Valley Authority. iv

Regional Planning Association

One important lasting effect it had

of America’s (RPAA) existence,

was on Mumford himself: the address

it sponsored a “Round Table on

gave him the opportunity to develop

Regionalism” at the University of

the ideas that formed the basis of

Virginia’s Institute for Public Affairs, at

his most fully developed book on

which this address by Lewis Mumford

regional planning, The Culture of

was given. As Carl Sussman reports,

Cities. v Mumford would devote fully

the Round Table “had real importance

a third of his book to projecting the

for regionalists at the time. Besides

vision of the regional city he only

the public exposition of the RPAA’s

begins to explore here. In its final

ideas, [it] brought many regionalists

form, his ideal city was similar to

together for the first time, including

Radburn, New Jersey, with modern,

southern regionalists like J. G. Fletcher

terraced multi-unit houses clustered

and H. W. Odum.” i These figures

around greenways, schools, and

had been seminal in developing a

nearby places of manufacture and

strong undercurrent of regionalist

work, and linked to other similar cities

thought in American arts, literature,

via a network of townless highways.

folklore studies, and politics between

Mumford strove to develop “a new

the two world wars. Their primary

biological and social environment,

impetus, with which Mumford was

in which the highest possibilities of

allied, was “the creation of a cultural

human existence will be realized.” vi

order appropriate to America, with its centrifugal diversity, its cultural immensity.” ii It was not to be a single order but a set of differential regional orders linked to history and geography that would nurture creativity and fulfillment. Primarily, it was, as Robert Dorman puts it, a “revolt of the provinces” against the hegemony of corporatism and culture as dictated from the eastern metropolis of New York. iii More individually, it was a reaction by many intellectuals against the seeming monotony and anomie fostered by modern cities and modernization. Further, with the likes of pre–New Deal Franklin Roosevelt in attendance, and because it occurred just after the stock market crash, the Round Table on Regionalism likely had a effect on policies that were to follow, such as

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Lewis Mumford

Regional Planning From Address to Round Table on Regionalism (8 July 1931), Institute of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Avery Library, Columbia University. Reprinted courtesy of The Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright 1931 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss.

Regional planning is a name that covers, at present, a variety of different activities. It is important, at an early stage of the movement, that we should arrive at a common meaning. It differs in the extent of the unit covered from city planning, and since it includes urban areas as well as rural ones, it is another matter from country planning. At the same time, it differs essentially, as I shall show, from metropolitan planning, a type of planning which has at the moment taken over this useful word for its own special work. Perhaps the best way to define regional planning is to establish what is meant today by the “region.” The eighteenth century saw the decay and the final destruction of many types of corporate organization that had flourished in the Middle Ages. To the progressive minds of the eighteenth century, humanity was an undifferentiated mass of individuals: if they had any special historical and political identity in groups, it was that which they achieved as members of the state. The city and the region ceased to have, politically, their separate identity; they became in theory creatures of the state; and for purposes of state these natural groupings were often completely ignored. As a result of the revolution of 1789 in France, for example, the historic regions were broken up arbitrarily into a series of administrative departments, which ignored the historic boundaries and affiliations. In the colonization of America beyond the eastern seaboard this habit of creating artificial boundaries, drawn on the map with the aid of the ruler, without regard for the actual possibilities of settlement and development, was driven to absurd lengths, partly by sheer haste, partly by ignorance of actual resources, and partly by political theories which sought to override the facts of nature. The new states, with their subdivisions defined by the section and the quarter-section, were drawn up without the slightest respect for actualities. Many of our states are even “defined” by river boundaries despite the fact, which the geographers of the nineteenth century were to establish, that the river is a highway and a means of intercourse, not a barrier; so that, except for temporary military purposes—an exception which the airplane has wiped out—it is the worst of all possible boundaries. The great states of the world, still more their minor administrative districts, are the products of political forces and events which have only accidental relations to the underlying geographic, economic, and social realities. Their boundaries, their subdivisions, antedate for the most part our present scientific knowledge; they also antedate and ignore the instruments of communication

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and traffic that have made the world as a whole, for many fundamental purposes, a single unit. Now, the human region existed as a fact, long before the political state as we know it came into existence. The region continued to exist, even though it was ignored and to no small degree frustrated by the prevailing theories of politics. But it needed the development of human geography to establish the region on a scientific basis. This was something that has taken place in almost less than a hundred years, thanks to a succession of able minds, Humboldt in Germany, Buyot in France, George Perkins Marsh in the United States, followed by Ritter, Reclus, Vidal de la Blache, Le Play, Herbertson, and Geddes—to say nothing of our own contempo­raries in America like Fenneman, Mark Jefferson, and J. Russell Smith. The geographer points out that mankind has not spread out in a formless undifferentiated mass, if only for the reason that the surface of the globe prevents this kind of diffusion. The major land masses divide naturally into smaller units, with special characteristics in the underlying geological structure, in the climate, and consequently in the soils and the vegetation and animal life and available mineral deposits. In each of these natural regions, certain modes of life have arisen in adaptation to the fundamental conditions: these modes have been modified by previous cultural accumulations and by contacts with other peoples, since no region is completely isolated from even distant neighbors, nor can it be, even in the most primitive stages of culture, self-sufficient: did not flint and jade and salt, even in the earliest dawn of history, travel thousands of miles and pass through many hands before they were finally used? But the geographic environment sets a limit to the types of work that can be economically done, and predisposes favorably certain lines of activity; and this in turn profoundly modifies the social habits and institutions of the inhabitants. There may be mines without miners, just as there may be mulberry trees without the culture of silkworms; hunters may attempt to get a meager living out of an area that will yield a handsome living only to a high state of culture by irrigation and social effort: all these facts, which the ethnologist is quick to point out are indisputable; but in regions that have been settled over a considerable period, the underlying possibilities of the environment have been explored, and its uses are more fully exploited. Apart from its selective influence upon occupations, the region provides a common background: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the landscape we see, the accumulation of experience and custom peculiar to the setting, tend to unify the inhabitants and to differentiate them from the members of other regions. These regional differentiations do not deny the facts of individuality or the facts of universality. As for the first, Marcel Proust, in the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past, has put the relationship with great clarity and intelligence. Last of all, and even more general than the family heritage, was the rich layer imposed by the native province from which they derived their voices and of which indeed their intonations

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smacked. Between that province and the temperament of the little girl who dictated these inflexions, I caught a charming dialogue. A Dialogue, not in any sense a discord. It would not have been possible to separate the girl herself and her native place. She was herself; she was it also. Moreover, this reaction of locally procured materials on the genius who utilises them and whose work their reaction imparts an added freshness, does not make the work any less individual, and whether it be that of an architect, a cabinet-maker or a composer, it reflects no less minutely the most subtle shades of the artist’s personality, because he has been compelled to work in the millstone of Senlis or the red sandstone of Strasbourg, has respected the knots peculiar to the ashtree, has born in mind, when writing his score, the resources, the limitations, the volume of sound, the possibilities of flute or alto voice.

There are forces in existence, universal ones, which work in precisely the opposite way; these, too, are not excluded in the concept of the region. The lanes of international travel and trade, the spread of a universal religion like Mohammedanism or Christianity, or of a universal technique, like that of Western science and mechanical invention, the existence of a common fund of ideas and interests tends to break down regional differentiations and to establish a universal basis for the common life. A regionalism that affected to ignore these forces would be absurd and stultifying for the presence of universal agencies does not wipe out the realities of regional life: it merely unites them to a greater whole. One must create an identity, a center of one’s own, before one can have fruitful intercourse with other personalities. This holds true, too, for the relations between regions. It is only in the dangerous theory of the allpowerful and all-sufficing National State that self-sufficiency within political boundaries can be treated, as it now is, as a possibility; and it is only in war time that this mischievous notion can be even momentarily effectuated—albeit with great suffering to the underlying population. While the recognition of the region as a fundamental reality is part of the achievement of modern human geography, the recognition of a closely knit inter-regional life is no less so: indeed, geography wipes away the notion of definite boundary lines as anything but a coarse practical expedient; since such political lines forget not merely one nature of the region itself, but the natural zones of transition and the highways of movement, which tend to break up such formal definitions. During the last thirty years, there has gone on a steady attempt to define the major natural regions of the world and to study in more detail their human subdivisions; for, with the addition of man to the scene, the facts of history must be superimposed on those of geography, and along with the conditions of climate and topography and natural resources must be included those alterations in the environment which are recorded on our maps under the name of “culture”—to say nothing of these non-material transformations and accumulations which cannot easily be projected onto a map. There is still much work to be done in regional geography; but already its results are far enough advanced to show that our present political divisions ignore a good part of the major realities with which we have to deal. It is not an accident that in France,

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for instance, one of the early proposals to reapportion the political administrative departments came from the eminent geographer Vidal de la Blache. The region then, as it is disclosed by the modern geographer, has a natural basis, and is a social fact. The term cannot, without deliberately passing by all the work that the geographer has done, be applied to any large area. A city is not just a city when it is bounded by a circle with a five-mile radius, and a region when it is bounded by another circle with a fifty-mile radius. We obviously need some name to cover our large urban agglomerations, actual or possible; but “region” is not a happy one. Professor Geddes long ago suggested the name conurbation for a collection of cities forming a more or less continuous growth: but the term has not caught on, and until a better one can be coined, it would be as well to call such a collection a metropolitan area. Planning such an area, though its radius were twice as great, would still be metropolitan planning, not regional planning: it would be city planning on a large scale, and not regional development. Does this suggest that there are factors in regional planning which do not exist in metropolitan planning? That is exactly what I mean. Let us examine these factors. The first different factor in regional planning is that it includes cities, villages, and permanent rural areas, considered as part of the regional complex. While metropolitan planning regards the surrounding open country as doomed to be swallowed up in the inevitable spread and increase of population, the regional planner seeks to preserve the balance between the agricultural and primeval background and the urban environment. Easy access on the part of the city resident to the country, equally easy access on the part of the country dweller to the city, are necessary to their culture and education. A type of metropolitan development which makes such intercourse difficult, tiresome, unfruitful, must, the regionalist thinks, be deliberately overcome. Metropolitanism is in fact another form of land-skinning. In the interests of urban growth, rising land values, opportunities for financial killings, it ignores the natural capacities of site and soil, and continues to spread a uniform urban layer over the countryside. This urban layer lacks for the most part the cultural and commercial advantages of the central district of the metropolis quite as much as would a destitute rural area the same distance from the center: but the massing of population it creates tends to increase and bolster up financial values at the center. Regional planning, on the other hand, begins not with the city as a unit in itself: it begins with the region as a whole and it seeks to bring every capacity of the region up to its fullest state of cultivation or use. This does not mean filling up the land with an undifferentiated urban mass; nor does it necessarily mean, on the other hand, decentralization. But it may mean weeding out, by transplanting to more favorably situated centers, part of the population of the congested metropolises of today, since the assumption that they are bound to grow continually on the lines they have followed in the past is fundamentally an assumption that planning is impotent, except to facilitate results which would take place anyway without planning.

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The second important factor in regional planning is its respect of balanced environment and a settled mode of life. The city growth and land colonization of the last century ignored both these factors of balance and settlement. We created the coal-agglomeration and the financial metropolis, seeking quickly to extract coal and iron from the soil, and to organize industry so as to produce a maximum profit to the investors; in the act of paying attention only to these limited ends, we forgot to create orderly, healthy, hygienic, and esthetically decent environments. While our cities produced pig-iron, textiles, coal, chemicals, money, in quantities the world had never seen before, they also produced an appalling amount of human misery, degradation, sordidness, which mocked all our fine pretensions to progress and enlightenment. We produced an environment that in part—its inefficiencies were so great that one must stress this phrase—in part was good for machines and moneymaking: but it was not good for men. It was not a lively and educative and recreative environment. Art, culture, education, recreation—all these things came as an afterthought if they came at all, after our one-sided preoccupation with industry had ruined a great many of their potentialities, both in the life of the individual, whose health and intelligence had been sacrificed to material gain, and in the life of the community. When the pioneer had skinned the soil, he moved on; when the miner had exhausted his mine, he moved on; when the timber cutter had gutted out the forests of the Appalachians, he moved on. All these social types left rack and ruin behind them. The regional planner points out that no civilization can exist on this unstable and nomadic basis: it requires a settled life, based on the possibility of continuously cultivating the environment, replacing in one form what one takes away in another. Regional planning is concerned with provisions for the settlement of the country; and this settlement in turn implies a balanced use of resources and a balanced social life. Both these conditions are impossible in an unbalanced environment. This brings us to the next important conception of the new regionalism: namely the regional city. 1 What is the proper size of the city? That is a question that never occurred to anyone, apparently, except a few utopians, in the nineteenth century, although Aristotle and Plato both thought it of great importance, and the people of the Middle Ages, by their continuous schemes of urban colonization, certainly had definite notions on the subject, even if they did not pass into learned literature. It was Sir Ebenezer Howard who first suggested in Tomorrow, published in 1898, that the city had a natural limit of growth: that beyond this point it became inefficient, and that further growth must be taken care of as the beehive does—by swarming off, by colonization. We have not yet sufficient knowledge to say how many different types of city and satellite and village are appropriate to our life today, and what the limits of population in those various types are: but we can at least put the question to ourselves and suggest in what direction an answer lies. The size of a city cannot, plainly, be defined by its actual or potential boundary lines; for anyone, with sufficient hardihood and a sufficiently large compass, could merely carry the method of metropolitan planning to a logical

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conclusion by describing a circle with a radius a thousand miles around Chicago and say that this was all potential Chicago territory, to be filled up by continuous growth from the Loop outward within, say, a thousand years. No: the size of a city cannot be determined by a superficial area to be filled: it is related to the institutions and functions to be served. Primarily, the city differentiates itself from the rural area, from the market center by itself, and from the industrial unit, by the institutions which serve the cultural and educational life of the inhabitants. Farms, markets, industries are the basis of its existence: but its end, as Aristotle would have said, is the cultivation of the good life. A definite relationship can be established between the population and its civic institutions. Twelve hundred families, for example, can support a modern public school: if one doubles the number of families, one must double the number of schools. A still larger population is necessary for a high school, and one must draw on something beyond the immediate local area for a college or university. Similarly with other functions: fifty thousand people might support a well-equipped maternity hospital; but it would require many times this number to supply a sufficient number of cases for a cancer hospital. There is no reason whatever that, with modern transportation and communication, any one city should attempt to provide for every possible human function. Even New York does not succeed in doing that: there are certain types of operations for which one must go to Rochester, Minn., or to Johns Hopkins, if one wants the highest degree of skill, just as there are certain works of art for which one must still go to Florence or Madrid or Amsterdam. Now, the major common functions of a community can plainly be taken care of in towns of from five thousand to a hundred thousand population quite as well—frequently much better than they can in a vast megalopolis. But there are special institutions which require a large basis of population, and it would be futile to duplicate these in small communities and unfortunate to do without them: they must be produced on a regional scale. This suggests that the new regional pattern will be a constellation of related cities, separated by parks and permanent agricultural areas, and united for common projects by a regional authority. Each city would have all the local institutions necessary to its own effective life, local shops, schools, auditoriums, theaters, churches, clubs; and in addition each center would perhaps tend to specialize on some one institution of culture or social life, a museum of natural history in one center, a radio broadcasting station in another, a university in a third. Modern transportation and communication remove the necessity for the continuous urban agglomeration; they make this new pattern of cities possible. Each city would perhaps be a regional center for at least one function; but no city would attempt to be the regional center for everything. Without such a pattern as this, it is impossible to do away with the congestion of the central districts and our present waste of resources in providing temporary palliatives for this congestion—palliatives whose effect is speedily ruined by the further congestion that must follow in order to pay for the costs. The undoubted advantages that come with the massing of a great population in the metropolis would be even

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more available in a well-wrought network of regional cities. In contrast to the metropolitan planner, the regional planner seeks to establish new norms of city growth and to create a fresh pattern of regional and civic activities. To discover these various norms, to relate them to civic functions, and to embody them in communities is one of the major functions of the regional planner. Finally, regional planning differentiates itself from metropolitan planning by its respect for new and emergent elements in our civilization. The metropolis is a large and unwieldy unit: it represents an enormous vested interest of capital, and it necessarily will take no steps that are likely to displace the real and imaginary values that have been created. As the metropolis increases in magnitude, it becomes more and more committed to the mistakes of the past, and these mistakes are more and more costly to rectify, even when they have become unbearable. This reason alone would be sufficient, if no others were important, to justify the regional planner’s interest in small-scale communities: flexibility, ease of adjustment to a new situation, the speedy utilization of new mechanical and scientific advantages, all these things are more easy in a small community than a great one, provided that the intelligence is there to take command. Do we need to widen an avenue? It is easier if the buildings are four stories high than forty. Do we need an aviation field? In New York the distance of the landing field from the center of the city nullifies the greater speed of the airplane over the railroad train on short journeys. Do we wish to take advantage of the auto or the autogiro? Once we have escaped the congestion of the metropolis it is far easier. The small industrial town may have its housing congestions, its slum area, as well as the metropolis: on a small scale; conditions may be even worse, for lack of any public conscience or remedial measures. But in the small town there are not, as in the metropolis, tremendous physical and financial obstacles to solving it. The radio, the moving picture, the airplane, the telephone, electric power, the automobile—all these modern utilities have only increased the potential advantages of the region-as-a-whole over the congested metropolis: for with these instruments, the unique superiority of the more congested areas is removed and their benefits are equalized and distributed. Regional planning can help to realize positively all the important achievements of the new age: metropolitan planning exhausts itself in temporarily alleviating the disastrous results of its own elephantine and unregulated growth. Once the region becomes again the center of organized intelligence, as it was in the Middle Ages, as it is today in certain parts of Germany and France and Spain, the superiorities of region over the merely metropolitan area will become manifest. The region as a natural and human grouping is a fact. Regional cities and regional development are possibilities: regional planning itself is an attempt not to ignore these possibilities, in the interest of finance or abstract growth of population, but to make the fullest use of them. Regionalism is only an instrument: its aim is the best life possible.

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Introduction to excerpts from A Pattern Language

These two excerpts from

good design. This reputation was not

A Pattern Language are the first of

helped by architects who followed

the 253 “patterns” developed by

them as a series of rules with no

Christopher Alexander for use by

elegant geometry and no guiding

architects, planners, and the lay

process, resulting in environments

public in the design of beautiful and

and buildings that fostered neither

complete environments. The patterns

beauty nor comfort. Neither of

themselves are structural descriptions

these was Alexander’s intention; he

of environmental situations, such as

had hoped the book would guide

no. 159: “When they have a choice,

someone who wished to restructure

people will always gravitate to those

their environment to do so based on

rooms which have light on two sides,

experiential realities and comfort,

and leave the rooms which are lit

and not on abstractions and inherited

only from one side unused and

principles. In 2002 he released a

empty.” i These patterns were laid

new series aimed at the same goal

out to function similarly to words

entitled The Nature of Order.

in a grammar. Large-scale patterns are combined with smaller patterns creating a “pattern language”—

Christopher Alexander (b. 1936) is a professor in the Graduate School and professor emeritus of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

an initial description of a potential environment. Some of the patterns emphasize desirable physical arrangements; others promote qualities, such as a preference for natural over artificial light. Roughly the first third of the patterns deal with the large-scale structures of the environment. The two included here have much in common with the goals of Lewis Mumford and the RPAA (see Mumford, this chapter). For both Alexander and Mumford, thinking and planning at the scale of a region is key to making it possible for towns, neighborhoods, and individual buildings to support a full, democratic, diverse, and ecologically balanced life. A Pattern Language is a fascinating document that has been both revered and despised since drafts of it began to circulate in the 1960s. Some derided it as a cookbook of sorts that described a formula for

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Excerpts from A Pattern Language From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, copyright 1977 by Christopher Alexander. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.

1. Independent Regions

Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture. There are four separate arguments which have led us to this conclusion: 1. The nature and limits of human government. 2. Equity among regions in a world community. 3. Regional planning considerations. 4. Support for the intensity and diversity of human cultures. 1. There are natural limits to the size of groups that can govern themselves in a human way. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane has remarked on this in his paper, “On Being the Right Size”: ...just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. 1

It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes. And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States. We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the largescale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people.

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But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen. 2. Unless a region has at least several million people in it, it will not be large enough to have a seat in a world government, and will therefore not be able to supplant the power and authority of present nation-states. We found this point expressed by Lord Weymouth of Warminster, England, in a letter to the New York Times, March 15, 1973: WORLD FEDERATION: A THOUSAND STATES ...the essential foundation stone for world federation on a democratic basis consists of regionalization within centralized government....This argument rests on the idea that world government is lacking in moral authority unless each delegate represents an approximately equal portion of the world’s population. Working backward from an estimate of the global population in the year 2000, which is anticipated to rise to the 10,000 million mark, I suggest that we should be thinking in terms of an ideal regional state at something around ten million, or between five and fifteen million, to give greater flexibility. This would furnish the U.N. with an assembly of equals of 1,000 regional representatives: a body that would be justified in claiming to be truly representative of the world’s population.

Weymouth believes that Western Europe could take some of the initiative for triggering this conception of world government. He looks for the movement for regional autonomy to take hold in the European Parliament at Strasbourg; and hopes that power can gradually be transferred from Westminister, Paris, Bonn, etc., to regional councils, federated in Strasbourg. I am suggesting that in the Europe of the future we shall see England split down into Kent, Wessex, Mercia, Anglia and Northumbria, with an independent Scotland, Wales and Ireland, of course. Other European examples will include Brittany, Bavaria and Calabria. The national identities of our contemporary Europe will have lost their political significance.

3. Unless the regions have the power to be self-governing, they will not be able to solve their own environmental problems. The arbitrary lines of states and countries, which often cut across natural regional boundaries, make it all but impossible for people to solve regional problems in a direct and humanly efficient way. An extensive and detailed analysis of this idea has been given by the French economist Gravier, who has proposed, in a series of books and papers, the concept of a Europe of the Regions, a Europe decentralized and reorganized around regions which cross present national and subnational boundaries. (For example, the Basel-Strasbourg Region includes parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Liverpool Region includes parts of England and parts

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.

of Wales). See Jean-François Gravier, “L’Europe des regions,” in 1965 Internationale Regio Planertagung, Schriften der Regio 3, Regio, Basel, 1965, pp. 211–22; and in the same volume see also Emrys Jones, “The Conflict of City Regions and Administrative Units in Britain,” pp. 223–35. 4. Finally, unless the present-day great nations have their power greatly decentralized, the beautiful and differentiated languages, cultures, customs, and ways of life of the earth’s people, vital to the health of the planet, will vanish. In short, we believe that independent regions are the natural receptacles for language, culture, customs, economy, and laws and that each region should be separate and independent enough to maintain the strength and vigor of its culture. The fact that human cultures within a city can only flourish when they are at least partly separated from neighboring cultures is discussed in great detail in MOSAIC OF SUBCULTURES (8). We are suggesting here that the same argument also applies to regions—that the regions of the earth must also keep their distance and their dignity in order to survive as cultures. In the best of medieval times, the cities performed this function. They provided permanent and intense spheres of cultural influence, variety, and economic exchange; they were great communes, whose citizens were co-members, each with some say in the city’s destiny. We believe that the independent region can become the modern polis—the new commune—that human entity which provides the sphere of culture, language, laws, services, economic exchange, variety, which the old walled city or the polis provided for its members. Therefore: Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions in the world; each with a population between 2 and 10 million; each with its own natural and geographic boundaries; each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing; each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power of larger states or countries.

Within each region encourage the population to distribute itself as widely as possible across the region—THE DISTRIBUTION OF TOWNS (2)....

...

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2. The Distribution of Towns

. . . consider now the character of settlements within the region: what balance of villages, towns, and cities is in keeping with the independence of the region—INDEPENDENT REGIONS (1)? If the population of a region is weighted too far toward small villages, modern civilization can never emerge; but if the population is weighted too far toward big cities, the earth will go to ruin because the population isn’t where it needs to be, to take care of it. Two different necessities govern the distribution of population in a region. On the one hand, people are drawn to cities: they are drawn by the growth of civilization, jobs, education, economic growth, information. On the other hand, the region as a social and ecological whole will not be properly maintained unless the people of the region are fairly well spread out across it, living in many different kinds of settlements—farms, villages, towns, and cities—with each settlement taking care of the land around it. Industrial society has so far been following only the first of these necessities. People leave the farms and towns and villages and pack into the cities, leaving vast parts of the region depopulated and undermaintained. In order to establish a reasonable distribution of population within a region, we must fix two separate features of the distribution: its statistical character and its spatial character. First, we must be sure that the statistical distribution of towns, by size, is appropriate: we must be sure that there are many small towns and few large ones. Second, we must then be sure that the spatial distribution of towns within the region is appropriate: we must be sure that the towns in any given size category are evenly spread out across the region, not highly concentrated. In practice, the statistical distribution will take care of itself. A large number of studies has shown that the natural demographic and political and economic processes at work in city growth and population movement will create a distribution of towns with many small towns and few large ones; and indeed, the nature of this distribution does correspond, roughly, to the logarithmic distribution that we propose in this pattern. Various explanations have been given by Christaller, Zipf, Herbert Simon, and others; they are summarized in Brian Berry and William Garrison, “Alternate Explanations of Urban Rank-Size Relationships,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 48, March 1958, No. I, pp. 83–91. Let us assume, then, that towns will have the right distribution of sizes. But are they adjacent to one another, or are they spread out? If all the towns in a region, large, medium, and small, were crammed together in one continuous urban area, the fact that some are large and some are small, though interesting politically, would have no ecological meaning whatsoever. As far as the ecology of the region is concerned, it is the spatial distribution of the towns which matters, not the statistics of political boundaries within the urban sprawl.

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Christopher Alexander

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Two arguments have led us to propose that the towns in any one size category should be uniformly distributed across the region: an economic argument and an ecological argument. Economic. All over the world, underdeveloped areas are facing economic ruin because the jobs, and then the people, move toward the largest cities, under the influence of their economic gravity. Sweden, Scotland, Israel, and Mexico are all examples. The population moves toward Stockholm, Glasgow, Tel Aviv, Mexico City—as it does so, new jobs get created in the city, and then even more people have to come to the city in search of jobs. Gradually the imbalance between city and country becomes severe. The city becomes richer, the outlying areas continuously poorer. In the end the region may have the highest standard of living in the world at its center, yet only a few miles away, at its periphery, people may be starving. This can only be halted by policies which guarantee an equal sharing of resources, and economic development, across the entire region. In Israel, for example, there has been some attempt to pour the limited resources with which the government can subsidize economic growth into those areas which are most backward economically. (See “Urban Growth Policies in Six European Countries,” Urban Growth Policy Study Group, Office of International Affairs, HUD, Washington, D.C., 1972.) Ecological. An overconcentrated population, in space, puts a huge burden on the region’s overall ecosystem. As the big cities grow, the population movement overburdens these areas with air pollution, strangled transportation, water shortages, housing shortages, and living densities which go beyond the realm of human reasonableness. In some metropolitan centers, the ecology is perilously close to cracking. By contrast, a population that is spread more evenly over its region minimizes its impact on the ecology of the environment, and finds that it can take care of itself and the land more prudently, with less waste and more humanity: This is because the actual urban superstructure required per inhabitant goes up radically as the size of the town increases beyond a certain point. For example, the per capita cost of high-rise flats is much greater than that of ordinary houses; and the cost of roads and other transportation routes increases with the number of commuters carried. Similarly, the per capita expenditure on other facilities such as those for distributing food and removing wastes is much higher in cities than in small towns and villages. Thus, if everybody lived in villages the need for sewage treatment plants would be somewhat reduced, while in an entirely urban society they are essential, and the cost of treatment is high. Broadly speaking, it is only by decentralization that we can increase self-sufficiency—and self-sufficiency is vital if we are to minimize the burden of social systems on the ecosystems that support them. (The Ecologist, Blueprint for Survival, England: Penguin, 1972, pp. 52–53.)

Therefore: Encourage a birth and death process for towns within the region, which gradually has these effects:

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1. The population is evenly distributed in terms of different sizes—for example, one town with 1,000,000 people, 10 towns with 100,000 people each, 100 towns with 10,000 people each, and 1,000 towns with 100 people each. 2. These towns are distributed in space in such a way that within each size category the towns are homogeneously distributed all across the region. This process can be implemented by regional zoning policies, land grants, and incentives which encourage industries to locate according to the dictates of the distribution.

As the distribution evolves, protect the prime agricultural land for farming— AGRICULTURAL VALLEYS (4); protect the smaller outlying towns, by establishing belts of countryside around them and by decentralizing industry, so that the towns are economically stable—COUNTRY TOWNS (6). In the larger, more central urban areas work toward land policies which maintain open belts of countryside between the belts of city—CITY COUNTRY FINGERS (3)...

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Introduction to “Regional Development”

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As an architect, Albert Mayer was

co-opted many of Mayer’s regional

primarily concerned with social

planning concepts for the city.

issues—particularly the fostering of community life—in modern housing.

In 1971, fifty years after the AIA

His work contributed to the creation

Journal published Benton MacKaye’s

of the U.S. Housing Authority in

essay on the Appalachian Trail, the

1937 under Franklin Roosevelt. His

journal revisited regional planning

interests dovetailed with the RPAA’s

and the legacy of the Regional

regional planning efforts of the 1930s,

Planning Association of America.

and he vigorously promoted the

Mayer opened that anniversary issue

decentralized regional framework

with this essay, which strove to re-

envisioned by the RPAA both in

establish a role for architects in

practice and writing throughout his

regional planning issues and practice.

career. During the interwar period

His key concern was linking the

he was one of the professionals,

measure of excellence in architectural

like Lewis Mumford, associated with

practice to the architect’s ability to

the American regionalist movement

deal with the wider constraints and

and known for fostering connections

concerns for the quality of life at

between architecture and regional

the scale of the region. His was an

planning, having been trained in both.

expansive view of the practice, one

He lamented the separation of the

that has come more into vogue of late

two fields throughout his career.

with architects’ renewed attention to landscape, urbanism, and sustainable

Mayer is best known for his

design.

association with Chandigarh and India; he was the original architect/ planner of the Punjab capital city with

Albert Mayer (1897–1983) was an architect, planner, author, and professor of urban planning at Columbia University.

noted regionalists Matthew Nowicki and Clarence Stein. His aim was “a city in the Indian idiom.” i Their scheme, as described by Liane Lefaivre, consisted of a fan-shaped city with a curvilinear street layout according to contour, filled with mixed-use “superblocks,” three of which formed a self-sufficient district. ii Within those blocks space for business, sales, production, parks, and housing were arranged to foster the pre-existing patterns of life and climate in the region, which Mayer came to know while serving in India and North Africa during the Second World War. Upon Nowicki’s death the project was taken over by Le Corbusier, who compromised and

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Albert Mayer

Regional Development: The Architect’s Role Originally published in AIA Journal 60, no. 10 (October 1971): 17–19. Reprinted courtesy of VNU Business Media, © 2005.

What is regionalism? It’s both a continuum and a set of related entities, says a pioneering thinker, who bids architects to influence its quality.

From the title of this article, one might expect that a compact dictionary kind of definition will be forthcoming. But to pin down the subject of regionalism by an attempt at such definition seems to me, at this point in time, a futile exercise. The concept of “region” is valid, necessary, illuminating and useful. It is, however, a multiple concept of various possible scales and boundaries, depending upon the criterion or set of purposes principally sought to be served. Some examples of this range of character may be cited. There is the metropolitan region or city/region that most of us, 80 percent of us, live and work in. In the United States, it generally is desperately fragmented in viewpoint and jurisdictions, operating far short of its potential. The symphony of common or complementary action or two-tier federation, such as has been working fruitfully for years in metropolitan Toronto and in the Greater London Council, waits to be brought to life in this country because of the fragmentation. There are some partial cases here, in Miami and Nashville, for example. In most metropolitan areas, there are approaches more or less influential. There are the private/public Regional Plan Association of the New York City region, the Metropolitan Council of Governments in the Washington, D.C., area, and the Northeast Illinois Planning Commission in Chicago. Fear and fears expressed in the form of suburban zoning and the slogan of home rule stand in the way of realization. The gut issue is admission of low-cost housing. The only case I know of where this has been squarely and humanely dealt with is in the metropolitan area of Dayton, Ohio, where the regional body, with the concurrence of all the individual communities, has assigned equitable numbers to each. Sursum corda. There is the natural resource region, most frequently the river valley area, which contains a whole watershed or drainage basin where navigation and power, erosion control, opportunities for conservation, and ecologically

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harmonious development are the basic raisons d’être. Sometimes, as in the Tennessee Valley region, it contains sizeable metropolitan areas within itself, e.g., the metropolitan areas of Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga. Interstate river basin commissions mark regions with common problems and opportunities of water supply and distribution. The vast Appalachian region set up boldly by Congress in 1965 is the recognition of a relatively continuous community of economic and social depression and backwardness. Again, this is a very different kind of region, of which several more have been created since. Students of the subject predict that in a very few years there will be administrative regions, a new level of government intermediate from the remote federal zone, which will follow boundaries “based on unifying socioeconomic factors in a plausible geographic area.” The New England region is unique in its consciousness, heritage, feeling of regionality and common destiny. Development of the Connecticut River Valley, now being earnestly adumbrated, would further flesh it out: a physiographic resource, economic and recreational spine and magnet. The feeling of identification in the New England region of common allegiance without aggressive provincialism is an intangible ingredient of great appeal and satisfaction. It might well be nurtured and grow in the Tennessee Valley area and in the Northwest. Depending upon such different criteria, there are regional overlaps. Western Connecticut is part of New England and is also counted by the Regional Plan Association as part of the New York metropolitan area. Roughly two-thirds of the Tennessee Valley Authority has been included in the Appalachian region. Georgia and the Carolinas are members of two regions: Appalachia and the newly established Coastal Plains region. I have noted this multiplicity not to discredit regionalism but, to the contrary, to show that it is a powerful magnetic con­ception whose time has not yet fully come and which we must help bring to potent life. Also, I want to underline why I am steering clear of definition. In order to justify this view still further, I quote John Friedmann, an authority on regions and a prolific writer on the subject. He says, “Regional planning is a rather ill-defined combination of physical, economic human resource, and natural resource concerns.” And elsewhere he remarks that it is “the ordering of human activities in supra-urban space.” Not very illuminating! Question: What, then, with so much indeterminancy, has regionalism to say to us as individuals and as architects? Answer: Regionalism is a way of thinking and of feeling and of looking at things. Regionalism is a necessary and organic extension beyond daily reaction and observation, attachment and creative work. It is a sense of responsibility to something much larger. It is there pervasively, often in the background, underlying and affecting the obvious and the immediate. It is trite, but quite valid, to attribute the conscious deepening of the feeling for and appreciation of the larger scale of regionalism, first to the railroad, and now to the automobile and the bus. Daily by way of commutation, or on

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weekends, they underline and expand the personal habitual orbit of many or most of us to, say, a 100-mile or more radius. This means a personal region of home/work and recreational/cultural experiences of some 30,000 square miles. More recently, we are forced to be actively conscious of an enlarged daily or personal region or horizon by way of air, water, and thermal pollution, of wastes, which for control and for creative diminution, wherever we live and work, require regional view and extent and control. The Regional Plan Association places the New York region at 13,000 square miles. The orbit of TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] is 41,000 square miles. In the design of even a single building we have the solemn obligation to be sensitive to the waves and impulses we send into the region. This is not only a question of sensitivity and extended awareness, but it also has specific applications. Here is an example. The determination of design of the façades of an office building is no longer just a question of the architect’s preference for materials such as all-glass, of relation to exposures and the degree of the client’s willingness for whatever reasons, such as prestige, to pay an operational premium in air-conditioning and heating load. It involves ecological/regional considerations in terms of the greater energy input required by higher air-conditioning and heating requirements. The accepted curve extrapolation for total energy requirements in this country is a 300 to 400 percent increase by the year 2000! Not only will this finally be a question of exhausted fuel resources, and more immediately an increase in various forms of pollution, but it too may be impossible to find acceptable sites for the hundreds of large new plants that will be required, each one of which is a casus belli and casus delay by conservationists who also emphasize thermal pollution and scenic impairment. Meantime, too, there are occasional blackouts and brownouts and sweaty standing in subways because of power failures. We are going to have to cut or bend down the upward energy curve. The energy input into buildings is, to an appreciable extent, controllable by means of materials, exposures, and orientation. Perhaps one might say that the region and regional environmental quality are now also the invisible client, which should enter into and possibly modify the thinking and inspiration that produce the ultimate design. Building codes might even have something to say about allowable limits. Why, you ask, such a fuss about an office building? Answer: When you consider that in the New York City area alone it is predicted that there will be 50 million more square feet of office buildings, full-fledged regional scale is involved. To say nothing of luxury apartment houses, where builders can get the higher prestige rents or cooperative sales prices for ecological and regional transgressions. I frankly do not know quantitatively what the total impact on the total energy demand would be of more effective consciousness in design of individual or groups of buildings. I use it as an illustration of a number of new and larger equations and total impacts that we must have in mind. In the ambit of its new enlarging outlook, the American Institute of Architects should consider undertaking research to assay these elements.

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Let us consider a case on a different plane. In repeated conferences on transportation and in any discussion of the subject, the big talk is on the best means or combination of means of meeting what is considered to be, inevitably, a geometrically increasing demand. Should it be rapid transit, rail, bus, automobile, people movers, more roads and mechanized highways, or what ingenious combination can be devised of all these and others as well? But the real crux, being missed, is emphasis on fundamentals. We can minimize the amount of transportation expansion and expensive solutions required and bend the up-curve, drastically reducing the extrapolated need, by re-forming place relationships among residence, work, recreation, and open space through a much closer degree of self-containment and less of commuting and intertravel. What we require are substantially self-contained new towns and cities and a restructuring within cities by the subcity concept, as for example, the newtown-in-town of Cedar Riverside in Minneapolis. This last example leads into a way of thinking and feeling that should be peculiarly characteristic of the architect. His dominant impulse is toward the creation of form and order, and he should recognize that his maximum fulfillment is in form as created by him within the larger ambient regional form and order. Does his production contribute to and enhance the excellencevitality-organic order of the larger form in which he works, or is it detrimental to it? Is it a part of a cumulative dissonance? Does the architect fail to recognize and to make impact? Can he assume or be granted a role that can directly influence the quality or destiny of the region? I am convinced that he can. Let us now look briefly at some of the levels at which the architect and landscape architect play or should play a role in regional form and activity. Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot are the two great figures of the 19th century who pioneered in regional scale with central city, suburb, and outer metropolitan development. Recently, architects have become involved in regional planning by way of interdisciplinary design teams for interstate highways. 1 Back in 1926, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright developed a seminal plan for the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning which was recently revived by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. I was heavily involved in formulating and mobilizing an interdisciplinary team and in working out the Delhi–New Delhi regional plan. Ian McHarg and David Wallace’s Plan for the Valleys in the Baltimore metropolitan area is a brilliant marriage for meeting population pressure with sensitive and imaginative topographic and ecologic design, land use and control, economic and political analysis, and new institutional recommendations for execution. 2 There is another role for the architect as a member of the regional commission and of the body of staff professionals and technicians actually in charge of projects. Originally, large-scale planning was by architects, with a possible peak for that time in Daniel Burnham’s Chicago plan. Since then, planning has rightly broadened its content to such major participants as the planner, of course, and the businessman, the sociologist, public health and education specialist, transportation specialist, and ecologist. More than ever,

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with this multifarious and complex input and leadership, the architectonic quality—the sense and form of dynamic order—needs to be distilled and expressed, and related closely with the ecological input. The TVA is a striking and specific instance of a multipurpose and multidisciplinary regional enterprise. The substance and constituent pieces were evolved, deployed, and carried through by a group of men who had the necessary diverse qualifications and imagination. A gifted architect, Roland Wank, gave them moving visual synthesis, form, and symbolism in terms of dams, spillways, locks, roads, and powerhouses which challenged and enhanced nature. He joined the team and worked closely for years with it in order to absorb full understanding of the aims and means of his co-workers and to gain a feeling for the natural environment. His achievement is perhaps the most notable regional form-giving contribution and enhancement that has ever occurred in the U.S., or indeed the world. Note that he lived and conceived his plans on the site and in intimate contact with his co-workers and co-creators and not by occasional visits from his office in a distant city. Emphasis in discussion of the region has been on extending the vision and concern of the citizen and of the professional. Senator Harrison Williams has described it, “from the edge of the lot to the edge of the horizon.” But in regionalism the reverse is also true. One must think of “region” as not just the large continuum which it is, a magna as it were, but as a set of discrete related entities; a tapestry of many figures, each distinct with its own color and character but woven into a total interrelated excellence. The danger is of each running over and spilling into the other in a blurred noncrystalline mass, with no “open water” or green land between the entities. This has taken place and unfortunately is taking place acceleratingly in our old regional areas. There is danger in the newer ones, too, unless development with new towns and cities is alert to this two-faced character: the extent and scale of the region and the responsibility of the discrete constituents to regional meaning and fulfillment if the unit itself is to survive and, on the other side, the reciprocal importance of not ignoring or underestimating the significance and validity of the unit. One final matter flows from what I have said. I have advocated and in design have contributed to what I call the “decentralization of excellence.” Typically now, we have concentration of excellence (or pretentiousness) and expenditure in centers of larger cities where wealth and prestige compete to impress each other or to establish a coveted image. But there is little in the way of jeweled excellence in the districts or communities of the city or in the less obvious entities of the region. What we must value and create extends from making magnetic and significant, and with its own fresh character, the small scale close at hand—all the way to the most conspicious regional complex.

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Introduction to “Perspectives On Regional Design”

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Paul D. Spreiregen’s essay, published

...

in the same issue of AIA Journal

The methods we will need to manage

celebrating the 50th anniversary of

our cities...are not the methods we use

MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail proposal

now [which] are inadequate, too narrowly

as Albert Mayer’s, provides a historical

conceived, and the results extremely

cross-section of regional planning

vulnerable. We need a more responsible

efforts in the U.S. His purpose was

view, a view of cities, whatever size,

to demonstrate the importance

as participatory and integral guests in

and proliferation of thinking on the

nature. I think we may have a couple of

regional scale in the development

decades to reformulate our methods. In

of the United States, including its

doing so we will serve ourselves well by

successes and failures. He hoped to

recalling the better lessons of experience.

instill in architects the importance of

And we will necessarily practice them at

communication between disciplines

the scale of regions. i

when building better places to live—a process that would include collaboration with planners and landscape architects. Historically, a

Paul Spreiregen (b. 1931) is a practicing architect, planner, author, and lecturer in Washington, D.C., and was the first director of architectural and planning at the National Endowment for the Arts.

region was the only reasonable scale to consider as settlers had to rely on their own immediate needs—the production of food and harvesting of resources. Once interregional commerce became commonplace, direct physical ties to regions were severed and they survived primarily as political jurisdictions and familiar geographies. Primary among Spreiregen’s concerns was that this process has also fostered neglect of the ecological well-being of those regions. Considering recent developments in planning relative to the same neglect, Spreiregen commented in 2005: A mentor, Hans Blumenfeld, has observed that “planners are always late”—that they perceive phenomena only after they have occurred, and then make formulations to deal with, correct, or redirect the same phenomena. Such is the nature of most of the ideas that can be drawn upon in making a more humane and workable habitat.

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Paul D. Spreiregen

Perspectives on Regional Design This is a revised version of an essay originally published in AIA Journal 60, no. 10 (October 1971): 20–22. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

This nation’s earliest environmental design experience was regional in scale. But for lapses in effort and changes in objective, it can be regarded as somewhat of a tradition. At present, a regional perspective would be a most helpful method for addressing environmental issues. Going back to the origins of European colonization, the first settlers, the Spanish, were regionalists out of necessity. Within half a century after Columbus’s discovery of America, the “Law of the Indies” was in effect. This doctrine amounted to a comprehensive methodology, embodied as a set of rules for land development and management, and it operated at regional scale. The scale was not arbitrary. Early settlements had to be self-sustaining social, economic, political and productive entities. All natural resources had to be husbanded to maintain such settlements, the critical resource being water, since the areas colonized by the Spanish were generally in places with arid climates. The Spanish were comprehensive land- and water-resource planners, as can be seen still today in the original settlement system of San Antonio, Texas. There a string of “missions”—in essence, small towns—tapped the river to form a basin-wide irrigation system for farm fields. Each mission was also a defensive stronghold, each was a productive unit, and each furnished a surplus that enabled exploitative probes into unknown territories. As the Spanish had come for gold, so the French came for beaver fur. Their view was, necessarily, regional as well. They explored and charted most of the major river systems of America, these being the chief arteries of access within North America. But it was the British colonists—no less exploitative than their rivals—who established the political, social and land planning institutions that became the basis for “designing” the early United States. Their methods were derived from centuries of contention regarding land ownership and land use rights, including a series of laws called “Acts of Enclosure” beginning in the 12th and continuing through the 17th century. Their American settlements were “chartered,” regional land entities. They were in fact territories for resource extraction, often inhabited by the indigent or marginal of their own citizens. These chartered regions, as colonies, were one day to become our 13 first states. With advantageous transoceanic shipping, with a market economy, and with a breadth of resources—fur, timber, crops—the English colonies had a

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strong economic foundation. In specifying the geographic boundaries for the individual charter companies, precise knowledge of terrain and maps being uncertain, natural boundaries such as rivers were sometimes designated, but as often longitudinal or latitudinal references were also employed. The boundaries between the individual colonies were mainly set running from east to west. They were often arbitrary; their western terminations were generally not specified— instead, the charter lands were to extend “from sea to sea.” Settler migration across the Appalachians was prohibited for purposes of control as well as tax collection. But after the Revolution eastern population pressure to settle the west could not be constrained. This resulted in four major actions on the part of the newly formed American government. First, and after much controversy between the new states—formerly the individual colonies—regarding the inevitably overlapping western “reserves,” it was decided that the federal government would assume possession of the western lands. The new states would forego their western territorial claims. In return, the government assumed the Revolutionary War debts. Selling the western lands to settlers would pay these debts. A significant effect of this was to strengthen the federal government. Second, a plan for the orderly regional development of the western territories was adopted. This was accomplished through the Land Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, one of the few significant and far-reaching accomplishments of the Continental Congress. More than a half century later the Land Ordinances were augmented by the Homestead Act. But the Land Ordinances, perhaps more than anything in the realm of regional planning in the United States, did more to establish the nation’s physical and political settlement structure. This system became the basis for settling the west through the orderly creation of new governable states. The Land Ordinances imprinted the ubiquitous grid pattern on the entire American landscape west of the Appalachians, interrupted only by mountainous terrain or where a previous land pattern existed, such as earlier landdivision systems—the French patterns along the Mississippi, the Spanish patterns in the southwest and west. A third significant action at regional scale occurred during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the drafting and adaptation of a national highway and waterways plan to facilitate long-distance transportation, hence regional commerce and development. The fourth regional action was the Louisiana Purchase, also under Jefferson, to acquire the Mississippi Basin and the Port of New Orleans, thus securing free commerce on the Mississippi and so the development of the west—the central part of the country. This major land purchase was to be the first of many, and the predominant system through which much of the nation’s expanded territory was acquired. The role of regionalism in our nation’s early development is clear. But it was not to end with that. A regional development attitude can be seen in the nation’s early industrial development. The Merrimac River development serves as an example. The Merrimac had many small rapids which were readily harnessed

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1

2

The San Antonio mission settlement system, organized around the supply of water: rivers and acequias. This map identifies the land ownership patterns established by Mexico. Key: 1. Acequias; 2. Center—Cathedral and Plaza; 3. Dams; 4. Missions. FIG. 2 Colonial Highway and Canal Plan. Key: 1. Coastal Highway; 2. Appalachian crossings; 3. Great River Road; 4. Canals. FIG. 1

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for their waterpower. Along this river, as it coursed through Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire, and through Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts, America’s earliest mills were established—powered by water. Farm girls tended the machines and were housed in company dormitories. As regional as the enterprise was industrially, so was it regional socially. The motive was production efficiency, the use of available resources, in this case power and labor. Far vaster in regional scale was the building of the American rail net, the industrial extension of Jefferson’s road and waterways plan, indeed the progenitor of our current highway and air transport systems. Another chapter in regionalism is the role of the military in western territorial occupation and development. One can also add one area of design in which we take special pride, the American park movement. Championed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it had its origins in Manhattan with the design for Central Park, conceived as a relief to oppressive urban conditions. Central Park was respite for both toiling workers and for the genteel. It was an island of nature surrounded by a grid of crowded and extensive urban blocks. On the one hand there is the oppressive city, on the other the relieving park. But Olmsted’s urban vision was larger and more generous. That was demonstrated in his later park designs, specifically in the design of the Boston Metropolitan Park system. Boston’s regional park system had its roots in the extension of the old Boston Common, at the center of the city, westward. The beginning was an urban landfill program for an area still known as the “Back Bay,” and centered on one of America’s most elegant streets, Commonwealth Avenue. It also stands as a splendid example of public-private development. This idea was extended at a metropolitan scale to connect outlying reservoirs, scenic hills, stream parks and shoreline. The larger design was the work of a disciple of Olmsted’s, Charles Eliot. The metropolitan park system functioned as a regional green framework. Its multiple purposes included combating water-born diseases and epidemics, flood control, providing outdoor recreation, ensuring water quality, and providing sites for public and institutional buildings. The metropolitan park concept was widely utilized in whole or part in Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, San Francisco, Dallas, Baltimore, and many more cities. The corollary to the publicly developed park was the privately developed garden suburb. They are frequently seen in those cities that had metropolitan park programs: the Country Club District in Kansas City, Roland Park in Baltimore, Turtle Creek in Dallas, Brookline and Newton in Boston. The city park programs had to go well beyond city borders to be effective, reaching to the sources of streams and the rims of drainage basins. Thus a new regionalism came into view, based on the city as a focus, its tributary hinterlands as setting. In its larger portent, the philosophy, events and meaning of this experience— regionalism, new towns, the use of technology for social benefit—had its champions in a small group of socially minded reformers that called itself the Regional Planning Association of America. Its members included Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright and Benton MacKaye—names that

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Paul D. Spreiregen

FIG. 3

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Boston Park System

should be familiar to anyone committed to environmental design at its most ambitious level. Inspired by the success of the World War I publicly built “garden cities” built for war shipyard workers, by the park movement, by the systematic and scientific understanding of the American land—the group formulated what may fairly be regarded as a culminating decade of regionalscaled planning and design, the 1920s. Their town-planning experiments culminated in Radburn, New Jersey, still a model. In Radburn vehicular and pedestrian traffic were properly separated. Neighborhood groupings were articulated physically. Such new garden cities were to be regarded as component parts of a much larger regional development system. Members of the group, principally Henry Wright and Clarence Stein, drafted the classic “Regional Plan for the State of New York.” It stands still today as a model of clarity, perception, good sense, and vision. Three drawings explain the thrust of this plan. The first summarized the makeup of pre-industrial, agricultural New York State with many small farm

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towns distributed throughout. The second drawing characterized the effects of industrialization—the growth of small manufacturing cities along the river valleys, where transportation was convenient and water power available, and the relative decline of farming and farm town. The third drawing showed the future in which anticipatory public action would improve statewide circulation so as to achieve an equitable, manageable and distributed urban pattern throughout, where the viability of the farms and the older small towns could be sustained by their linkage to the larger system. In addition, upland forests would be cultivated to retain water and prevent downstream floods, to supply lumber, to host wildlife and to furnish outdoor recreation places. Slopes would be grazed or planted as orchards to prevent water run-off. In all, the pattern would interweave the three environmental domains—city, rural and wilderness. The health of any one was dependent on the health of the others. They were interdependent. Regionalism had its finest decade, conceptually and politically, in the 1930s through the National Resources Planning Board. It existed from 1933 to 1943, sponsored by the federal government. No more thorough analysis of the American landscape has been compiled. NRPB probed the condition of cities, farms, natural resources, climate, population migration, storm patterns, mapping progress, public works and public health. It saw these phenomena always in a regional context. The base maps used to depict these conditions emphasized, interestingly, the nation’s river basins. NRPB was a conceptual heir to the New York State Regional Plan. A practical embodiment of its principles was the Tennessee Valley Authority, studies for which preceded NRPB. At national level, NRPB was a data-gathering and interpretation operation; at state level, it operated through groups of citizens. In the mid 1960s I had the personal privilege of listening to Ben Kizer of Spokane, a man rich in years and spirit, recall how his NRPB group had conceived the idea of Washington State’s junior college system; the idea behind it was to extend college education to farm families. It was one of the many practical products of NRPB. NRPB offered a new and more viable framework for our system of individual commerce and enterprise, proactively conserving wealth and energy for promoting greater national wealth. World War II and its postwar rush obliterated the promise of NRPB. Instead, public (i.e., federal) efforts narrowed to serve specific and much needed programs—aviation and auto transport, underwriting the creation of sprawled and segregated suburbs rather than more wholesome communities such as Radburn, and then the attempt to remake the outworn central city through urban renewal programs. Lacking a regionalist perspective, the net effect was to further overburden the city in its metropolitan form as the nearly sole receptacle of population growth. The small and middle-sized rural towns declined, save where they might serve as collection or distribution points for processing, recreation, or retirement. The history of American planning, at the many scales it has been practiced, is a history of action and inaction, and of action before the fact and as much of

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4

5

The Regional Plan for New York as delineated by Henry Wright for the New York Commission of Housing and Regional Planning. FIG. 5 Little Calumet River Plan: An early regional-ecological planning scheme. Key: 1. Siphon Tunnels; 2. Urban Development; 3. Reserved Open Space. FIG. 4

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CRITICAL REGIONALISM

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action after. It has never entirely vanished, because the issues it must address do not vanish. Our history is one of reoccurring needs and new needs, and so new opportunities. There is also an increased technology for the analysis and synthesis of the complex conditions that confront us. And there are many helpful examples to cite. Among them is the plan for the state of Wisconsin, developed in the 1960s. It is a combination of an ecological approach applied to an understanding of Wisconsin’s urbanization patterns and characteristics. The author, landscape architect Philip H. Lewis, Jr., drafted the plan under then Governor Gaylord Nelson. He showed how the “nature systems” of Wisconsin related intimately to the “settlement systems.” The former took the form of water corridors and their drainage basins. By protecting them eighty percent of the major outdoor recreation places of Wisconsin would be protected—fish, wildlife and water— not to mention the dairy industry that depends on a healthful surface water system. All were placed under legal protection through restriction, easement or acquisition. Carried a step further, one could discern the most propitious areas for new urbanization, as well as the retirement of obsolescent urban areas. One then imagines a public development/redevelopment instrumentality which could take interim possession of land, compensate and aid those displaced, set up public service infrastructures and then invite individual or consortia of private developers to create the infilling urban components on the basis of performance specification programs. These “instrumentalities” could be financed through public savings-and-loan investment, insurance and pension funds and tax-favored bonds. Imagine, too, the market created for systematized building. The Wisconsin plan did not go that far, but at a smaller scale these principles were applied in many proposals for developing new suburban lands. The principles are that one should start by studying the terrain from an ecological standpoint and from that derive a building-location pattern. The entrepreneurial mechanism suggested above would then be applied. One must have a mechanism that respects nature’s needs, social objectives and financial development realities simultaneously. At present, several of the pioneer new towns in America are attempting to do this—Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland. A noteworthy example of an ecologically based suburban development plan is that for the Green Springs Worthington Valleys, near Baltimore. Its authors are Ian McHarg and David Wallace. These are counterparts to yesterday’s Radburn, but like Radburn, they need a regional context. A special category of examples is river basins. The Potomac River plan is one. A rather imaginative example of river-basin planning was developed for the Little Calumet River Basin south of Chicago, spanning Indiana and Illinois. In this plan, large underground siphons would be used to evacuate excess water from the streams in times of flood. During draught, water flow in the siphons could be reversed to augment stream flow. In so doing, streambeds would have to be linked with reserve overflow basins, the effect being a regional stream-park system, a green armature to complement the urban settlement pattern. One can

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readily imagine a public/private development instrumentality for facilitating the creation of the new and remade components within this overall structure. The rationale of a regional scale is that it is the one at which natural processes and human settlements coincide in their most comprehensive aspects. Our city, county and state boundaries are, in general, poorly related to our nature-based regional boundaries, even less to the fundamental river basins. Those should be the basic units of planning. Our development mechanisms are inadequately attuned. Our technology, as applied to cities, has not been fully used. It should be employed to tell us where and how to build, and sometimes where not to build—depending on local climate, soils, and land capabilities. Our land development financing systems should underwrite communities, not their components in isolation. The public would do well to institute ecologically, socially and financially responsible development systems as a starting point, so that there are no ensuing public correction costs. The national wealth can be far better spent. Through a regional approach to land planning and environmental management the three domains—wilderness, rural, and urban—would find their richest diversities and juxtapositions. Man and nature could be one in their richest forms.

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Chapter 5

Regional Modernism: Conflict and Maturation

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Excerpts from Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning

Le Corbusier

Regionalism in Architecture

Richard J. Neutra

After the International Style—What?

Hugh S. Morrison

The Sky Line: Status Quo

Lewis Mumford

What is Happening to Modern Architecture?

Museum of Modern Art

The New Regionalism

Sigfried Giedion

The Meaning of Regionalism in Architecture

Pietro Belluschi

Regionalism and Modern Architecture

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James Stirling

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Introduction to excerpts from Precisions

These two excerpts from a series of

Le Corbusier’s respect for vernacular

eight lectures Le Corbusier delivered

culture and history were fundamental

in Buenos Aires in 1929 present a

to his work. While remaining critical of

subtle antinomy within his thoughts

the superficial use of folk motifs, he

on regional influence in architecture.

found “folk culture to be a magnificent

He celebrates the sublime energy that

creation.” ii What he respected and

is released when regional cultures

sought in his travels was the energy

are threatened and destroyed by

that emerges between the necessity

modernization and industrialization

and expression captured in those

while acknowledging the inevitable

arts. This, in turn, suggested his

conditioning effect that a region exerts

motivation toward creating “a new

on architecture. He derived energy and

folk culture of modernism [that]

creativity from the tension between the

would reflect the precision of the

new technologies and universal values

machine.” iii In fact, Le Corbusier

associated with modernism and his

was not troubled at all by regional

interest in primitivism, folk culture, and

influences, for he saw in vernacular

local, regional considerations. William

buildings a profound causality,

Curtis suggests that Le Corbusier’s

a thoroughly rational process of

work was a solution to “the problem

construction, detailing, scale, and

of sensitizing modernism to the

materiality that was specific to a

requirements of different regions and

region and its history. iv

climates.”

i

It is also important to understand these excerpts historically. Written

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) was a Swiss-born architect, urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer, and furniture designer who was fundamental in the development of modern architecture.

in 1929, they document a time of transition in his work—from the strict white, cubic, International Style work exemplified in Villa Savoye of that same year to the locally referential and rustic Maison Errazuris of 1930. Earlier houses had been primarily exercises within his 1926 “Five Points of a New Architecture” and consisted of specific elements—pilotis, roof garden, free plan, ribbon window, and free façade—aspects of buildings derived from technological possibility. The later houses, such as Mandrot, Petite Maison de Weekend, and Monol, move away from flat roofs, embrace the use of local materials and craftsmanship, and are often designed in concert with the topography and flora of the specific site.

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Le Corbusier

Excerpts from Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning From Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, translated by Edith S. Aujame (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 25–29, 218–19. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press and Fondation Le Corbusier. Copyright 2005 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC.

To Free Oneself Entirely of Academic Thinking

... Mechanization has overwhelmed everything. Communications: in the past, men organized their undertakings at the scale of their legs: time had a different duration. The idea of the world was its great size, without limits. The flowers of mankind (I mean by that the cultural flowers created by the mind) were varied, multiple: customs, habits, the manner of acting and thinking, of dressing were ordered by innumerable administrative centers similar to the little clouds of this morning, centers that express the primitive form of aggregation, of administration: one rules what one sees, what one can reach, what one can control. Interpenetration: one day Stephenson invented the locomotive. They laughed. And as businessmen—the first captains of industry, who will be the new conquistadors—take it seriously, ask for rights-of-way, Mr. Thiers, the statesman who was leading France, intervenes immediately in Parliament, begging the deputies to keep to serious things. “A railroad” (interpret the phrase literally: a road made of iron) “could never connect two cities....” Came the telegraph, the telephone, steamships, airplanes, the radio, and now television. A word said in Paris is with you in a fraction of a second! The long intercontinental transfers that were based on an annual rhythm now obey hourly schedules. Crowds of emigrants cross the seas, new states are born, made of a mixture of all races and peoples: the USA or your country. One generation is enough for this lightning alchemy. Airplanes go everywhere; their eagle eyes have searched the deserts and penetrated the rain forest. Hastening

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interpenetration, the railway, the telephone unceasingly run the country into the city, the city into the country.... The destruction of regional cultures: what was held most sacred has fallen: tradition, the legacy of ancestors, local thinking, the honest expression of that first administrative unit; all is destroyed, annihilated. The printing press is really only generalized in the nineteenth century. Everything is seen and known with frightening speed. Newspapers date from the nineteenth century. Photography is nineteenth-century, cinema also. And sound films are recent. So you read everything that happens. At noon every day, you have known the palpitations of the whole world. Here in your movie houses, you hear the sound of the North American sea, the waves breaking against the rocks; you hear the cries of the crowd at the boxing match at the other end of the world. You hear and see on the screens of all the movie houses of Buenos Aires the voice of Mr. Hoover addressing his citizens, and you will learn English. You hear the melodious and fascinating songs of Hawaii, and you see the fishermen dive to the bottom of the sea, seize the oyster that gives them their daily bread, you even see in a flash the frightful shark passing. You see how the Chinese, the Yankees, the Germans, the French practice seduction. All landscapes are familiar to you. An extraordinary knowledge of the world has developed. The earth is small; you know how it is made: it has no more mystery, you have seen the blocks of ice of the North Pole close up. And the locomotive has brought you the suits of London and the fashions of Paris. You are wearing bowlers! A phenomenal blending together, more hurried every day, soon to be complete. Only events beyond the power of mechanization seem to resist: the blacks stay black and the Indians red. And even then! Everywhere black blood creeps into white, and red into black or white. Whiners curse the disturbing machine. Intelligent active persons think: Let us record while there is still time, in photos, films, or tapes, in books, magazines, the sublime evidence of age-old cultures. It is in studying them that we shall find tomorrow’s lessons; these are the yardsticks of human greatness. We must forge a new greatness for the machine age, the new face of the new soul of modern times. And in the course of this rushing interpenetration, pollution invades everything, brutalizing, devastating, annihilating. A sort of death dance grimacing at all that is pure and noble. A thirst for gold had seized these migrating populations. Who will explain some day why ugliness, horror, falseness were the delicate nurture of our fathers? South or North America, and you, all those European cities of the robber barons, and that fa­mous culture that we have brought to the Chinese, the Hindus, the Arabs, the Japanese, all under the wiggling sign of swagger, of showing off, of appearance, of brazen pretension, of the most notable abdication of dignity. I think that going after gold debases the soul and that one has no reason to live unless animated by a high purpose. Without a high purpose, base powers dominate, produce, pollute, and they have ravaged the world. Nevertheless, I say that the nineteenth century, destructive of all civilizations, was sublime....

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Le Corbusier

273

A sudden, intense mobility in families and cities: work is not dealt out as before: the father of a family is no longer the key of a hierarchical system. The family was annihilated. The sons and daughters, father and mother, each went every morning to a different workshop or factory. They made all sorts of contacts, good or bad. They rubbed against those new social tendencies that day after day transformed the molecular state of the world. The ancestral home has lost its soul; the home remains, it is overwhelmed with disorder; each member brings to it his parcel of belief, of ideals, of fetishism. These different fetishes in the old home create a terrible noise and everywhere the family has split up. The city? It is the sum of these local cataclysms. It is the addition of inappropriate things; it is equivocal. Sadness weighs it down. And what an admirable machine man is who, among so many ruins, in so much precariousness, obstinately seeks a new equilibrium. The city suddenly has become gigantic: trolleys, suburban trains, buses, the metro create a frenzied daily mixture. What an expense of energy, what waste, what nonsense! And because the restaurant business is as powerful as the transports, at noon this cruel misadventure is repeated; except in a few countries the working day of the industrial revolution has not yet been created. And because I called for it once in writing, 1 a senator attacked me violently: “What are you interfering with? Stick to city planning!” A brutal, rapid break with age-old usages, with habits of thinking. Everything is false, no longer resounds, needs to be adjusted: the moral concepts, the social concepts.

What I affirm here is implied in what I have already said. But I pause to go into this adjustment of moral and social concepts. I have the right to, for I am concerned by individual man and by that man living in society; and that is the very foundation of architecture and planning. ... The World City and Some Perhaps Untimely Considerations

... Here is the war, then the postwar, the evidence of the end of a world. On all sides, associations are formed, giving themselves the task of solving such or such a problem. Then the League of Nations is born. Actually the League is political, to tell the truth a lighthouse keeper on duty, a policeman who regulates circulation, a judge who takes into account. The watchman sees what is apparent. The policeman orders the circulation depending on the state

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of the street; the judge orders according to a code. Who will give the state of the world—the profound state in birth—and who will give the code? The watchman? No! The policeman? No! The judge? No! The world lives, is agitated, moves, reacts. Every cause has its consequences, every effect its cause. At certain moments, the world expresses itself; on certain occasions, solutions appear to visionary or practical minds. From the colossal mass of forces present, in conflict, propositions appear. To unite these propositions, to classify them, to coordinate them, make them known, have them discussed, a place is needed, a headquarters, and tools for work; in this case, buildings. The World City is also the marshalling yard of the ideas of the world; historical documents, contemporary statistics, propositions come to it. A place is needed for this; in this case, buildings. Thus, after the efforts of practical adaptation by the International Labor Office and the League of Nations, it was felt necessary to go back to essentials: to go to what dominates the equilibrium of the world, to pure idea, to pure thought. Such was the conception of Paul Otlet of Brussels, the magnificent advocate of the World City. Thus, a new spiritual renewal appeals to architecture. The idea is general; once given out, there are no more obstacles, nor mountains, nor seas; neither iron nor glass cages, nor Institutes, nor Academies. It touches wherever there is an antenna. Architecture is the result of the state of mind of its time. We are facing an event in contemporary thought; an international event, which we didn’t realize ten years ago; the techniques, the problems raised, like the scientific means to solve them, are universal. Nevertheless, there will be no confusion of regions; for climatic, geographic, topographic conditions, the currents of race and thousands of things still today unknown, will always guide solutions toward forms conditioned by them. But the work itself, the spiritual creation that architecture can incarnate so strongly, will never be anything but the product of a man, as writing is the product of a hand, of a heart or a mind. The entire responsibility rests on each of us. At the hours of decision, at dangerous turning points the individual arises, more strongly than ever. Today the individual is nourished by the work of the world. We have the task of organizing a new harmony with the risk of the unknown, but also in the great joy of creation. Architecture magnifies ideas, for architecture is an undeniable event that arises in that instant of creation when the mind, preoccupied with assuring the solidity of a construction, with desires for comfort, finds itself raised by a higher intention than that of simply being useful, and tends to show the poetic powers that animate us and give us joy.

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276

This brief essay from Richard Neutra

yielded a psychological and physically

is a unique and penetrating text.

healthier environment—one that

Writing relatively early in the mounting

enhanced “the experience of everyday

debate between modernism and

living...constituting the cause of

regionalism, between the machine

architecture.” ii As William Jordy has

and nature, Neutra succeeds in

so succinctly put it: “From 1937 on,

establishing a vision that unites the

[Neutra] became less concerned

two concepts. His substantial history

with advanced technology (with the

of employing technology to improve

metal house, for example), and more

specific human environments,

concerned in both theory and practice

which has been misunderstood as

with the psychic values of regionalism,

a kind of functionalism, coupled

of natural materials, of the intimate

with his awareness of site, place,

relation of the building to its site.” iii

and circumstance, allowed him to balance the use of machines with

This essay appeared in the December

the actuality of nature. In this he

1939 issue of the Architectural

was quintessentially a modernist,

Forum in an insert called Plus,

playing out the emancipatory themes

a progressive and ultra-modern

of environmental and psychological

department of the magazine, which

health through the technological and

was separately edited. Appearing

stylistic means of architecture. His

alongside architectural features such

awareness of region is essentially

as Neutra’s were pieces discussing

infrastructural and social; living

philosophy and modern art (about

standards, legislation, banking

Calder, by Léger), which set an

policy, and material specifications

interdisciplinary and avant-garde

join consumer psychology in the

tone to the whole segment. Neutra’s

concern for “dwelling.” Moreover,

piece was in part meant to serve as a

his experience in practice lends

provocation.

him the insight for a pragmatic and penetrating criticism of “international architecture”: regional differentiation

Richard Neutra (1892–1970) was a Viennese-born modernist architect and theorist who studied under Adolf Loos and worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright.

in which the differences do not arise from vernacular reference or local history but are the result of the very down-to-earth realities of a region’s economic opportunity, expectations of quality, and available local labor, the financial and practical mechanics of our building activity that make work in each region distinctive. i Like Le Corbusier, then, Neutra sought to sensitize modernism to climate and region, not for emotive and creative power, but because it

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Richard J. Neutra

Regionalism in Architecture From Plus 1, no. 2 (February 1939): 22–23. Reprinted courtesy of Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

An “international architecture” has existed at various periods in history. Hellenistic and Roman formulas seemed to apply from the West-European islands well into the Asiatic continent. Again, two thousand years later, government buildings in Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and Washington were in a similar way dominated by a common “classicism.” Derivatives of the Louvre and the Place de Carrousel are found from Bucharest to Buenos Aires. In all these cases formal treatment was largely independent of technology; colonnades, cornices, porticos were constructed without much pretense of being derived from material specifications. There was no claim that local determinants guided the designer to layout and appearance. In contrast with this, contemporary architectural theory has argued the importance of adequate adjustment between the apparent form, the carefully fitted layout, and the structural system chosen. The beginnings of “Modern Architecture,” according to indications and researches of Adolf Loos and Sigfried Giedion, reach back into the nineteenth century. In this way they coincide with the growth of a world-wide commerce which in that period was assuming cosmopolitan color. It is characteristic that the first broad attention was reaped by the movement for modern building design twenty years ago, just at the time a League of Nations and the founding of an International Labor Bureau seemed thoroughly feasible schemes. The whole period was colored by such ideal conceptions. But, as a matter of cold fact, our own time distinguishes itself by an often painful inequality of regional living standards, and wage levels which are embarrassingly varied in different parts. In different places and on different levels there is a most irksome gradation of economic capacity—or perhaps better, incapacity—to absorb technological and industrial advance. This is especially true in the case of Housing. And what is more, there exists today wide and troublesome variety of governmental policies chopping up the civilized world into patches separated from one another by strict moral and political boundary lines. Militant segregation interferes with the exchange of ideas as well as the exchange of commodities and especially those half-finished products which constitute the output of the building supply industry in the different countries.

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Even in the United States the present Federal Marketing Laws Survey, a Federal research project, shows that the individual States tend to use every conceivable means, even unconstitutional ones, to barricade themselves against one another and against what they consider upsetting imports. Widely varying and often prejudiced local building legislation, sometimes based on tradition, sometimes on the whims of the consumer—of loan institutions, or of the contractors—produces, even within the same country, a variety of building routines. The greater part of the components of such laws is indefensible in the light of contemporary technology. Technology may or may not be the common denominator of building advance. However, the regional variation in the consumer’s psychology, and in his economic opportunity to reap its benefits, gives the true color to this transitory situation, especially in the design of private dwellings. The acceptable minimum in a region is always related to, and reflects, the common average in the same region. The consumer’s idea of a probable and desirable obsolescence rate, his peculiarly graded anticipation of durability of structure, finishes, and accessories, his routine pre-estimate of maintenance and utility costs, and the standard of hygienic cleanliness—all this is quite varied even between different sections of the United States. The customary requirements of dwelling and furnishing, in the way of “necessary” rooms, of acoustic and of visual privacy, may have been more similar to that of Los Angeles of today in a scattered, decentralized Williamsburg, Virginia, of 1700 than they are in contemporary San Francisco. A costly permanence of material and construction may be favored in certain localities and there willingly balanced by extended amortization periods. The same permanence is however dreaded in a metropolitan region of quickly shifting employment markets and recurrent insecurity. For after all, even the most modest rental depends on continuance of wage income. What in practice may be called Modern Architecture is far from being international. In fact it is much farther from it than was classical design since the so-called “Modern Architecture” professes to be conscious of all these factors and to use them as inspirational stimuli as well as programmatic items. A modern attitude in building design may well have the rational tendency to arrive at an optimum standard for projects, which are determined by almost identical circumstances; it may be opposed to arbitrary diversification. We may hope that the inequality of habitational standards will be reduced in some not too distant future. However, today building programs are geographically diversified due to the most irregular rise and fall of the economico-technological tide in various parts of the earth. One factor that causes building possibilities in certain European countries, Japan, Mexico, and the United States, to vary so widely is the cost of labor on the premises. The lower this is, the more prohibitive it makes the use of shopfabricated parts. Thus what is a logical design conception, let us say in Southern California, may become a futuristic extravaganza in Mexico City.

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Richard J. Neutra

279

Building design is a creative integration of the architectural details which are the products of the architect’s inventiveness. In one place the local economic conditions may call on his ability to devise building specialties and structural ingredients to be made up “ad hoc”; in another, his role will be that of arranging and coordinating standard articles obtainable in the open market. The combinations and mutations of these two cases within the realm of the eighteen or twenty interlocking trades employed in constructing a simple dwelling, are manifold. A complex mosaic of most consequential cost-information characterizes each geographical region. Cost-information may be divided on the basis of field-labor and shop work; it may concern itself with standard or specially built units. The economy, even feasibility, of a floor plan is governed by conditions of plumbing-labor in the field, or by the local tradition in heating devices and by fuel prices. In one place the additional cost of fabricated steel joists may be balanced successfully by the possibility of shortened runs of plumbing pipes. In another case this feature might prove totally non-determinant. A few significant material selections, a few basic details, enforced by local economics may change the entire appearance and layout. Each set of fundamental details and specifications demands a genuine esthetic digestion of its own particular combination of economic, technical circumstances. Certain optimum combinations (and therefore esthetic types) will develop into standards. But these may quickly change again at any shift of balance in matters of the intricate technical economies in that particular region. Architectural appreciation in purely handicraft periods of the past was indeed decidedly simpler than it is today. Now building designers base their work and concepts in part on industry and in part on individual skill. The proportion changes from place to place and some times from year to year. Some future day perhaps the gap may be closed again. Industrialism may actually produce a generic unity of procedures and qualities; economic and political separatism may be reabsorbed into a cosmopolitan system of broad distribution and consumption. But for the time being architecture can scarcely be called “International.” The planner is faced by intricate local problems. The artisan on the premises is always trying to adopt his skill to the ever changing requirements. It is not strange that the consumer is bewildered. Some fear that the world is coming to dreadful uniformity and monotony. If so, this day is yet far off. At present we may rather shudder at the terrific, often senseless, variety of it all.

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Introduction to “After the International Style—What?”

280

From an address given before the

American modernism could be built.

New Hampshire Society of Architects

In this he allies himself with the

on March 5, 1940, this essay speaks

notion of “a usable past”—a phrase

to the waning influence of the

first used by Van Wyck Brooks and

International Style, just eight years

popularized by Lewis Mumford. i

after the controversial Museum

Morrison’s polemic is distinguished

of Modern Art exhibition of 1932.

by the fact that it manages to

In that short time, Le Corbusier’s

bridge two traditions in American

work had already begun to shift

regionalism in 1940, a realization

away from the International Style.

that didn’t become commonplace

Gropius and Breuer had each built

until the early 1950s. The first is the

houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts,

referential tradition, which considered

that took local material and siting

historically regional styles as the

traditions into consideration. Alvar

primary constituents of regionality.

Aalto’s culturally and topographically

The second views regionalism as an

sensitive modernism was receiving

adaptive force, where styles change

more praise and more press.

in response to local conditions such as climate and use of materials.

The American regionalist movement

Morrison suggests it is possible to

was reaching its zenith along with

have it both ways.

concurrent movements in France, Germany, and Spain. To many it was already apparent that modernism was maturing under regional and local influences. Morrison was not the first to question the future direction of the International Style in the U.S.; a

Hugh Morrison (1905–1978) was professor of art history at Dartmouth College from 1932 until his death in 1978. He graduated from Dartmouth, did graduate work at Princeton University and became an instructor of art history at the University of Chicago in 1929. He was one of the pioneering scholars in the field of modern American architectural history. Among his books are Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (1952) and Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935).

running debate had been under way for a few years in the pages of Pencil Points magazine in the writing of Talbot Hamlin and Ralph Walker. Morrison’s comments here address the increasing dissatisfaction with the influence of European modernism on American architecture and participate in righting this, not through a revision of that history, but rather in projection of a reasonable future. A historian, he had written the first definitive study of Louis Sullivan a few years before and was in the process of researching a book on colonial-era architecture. He saw colonial architecture as a living tradition upon which an indigenous

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After the International Style— What? Reprinted from The Architectural Forum 72, no. 4 (May 1940): 345–47. Reprinted courtesy VNU Business Media, (C) 2005.

My theme is Modernism. Being an historian, perhaps I should trace the history of its development and end up with the International Style, but being rash, I am going to begin with the International Style and give my guesses as to what comes next. I am going to concentrate my attention on the American architecture of the future...and I am going to present the thesis that the International Style in this country is on its way out and that our future American architecture will be one of various regional modernisms....Remember that whatever I say should be prefaced by the phrase “In my opinion” or “So far as I can see.” You all know what the International Style looks like....Its essential characteristics: the loose plan vs. the formal plan; the open space vs. the closed space; volume vs. mass; and a general horizontality and abstention from ornament. The details of the picture you can fill out for yourselves. This style was developed in France and Germany during the decade of the Twenties. It was appropriate to the Twenties, and it was appropriate to the highly civilized and industrialized countries of the Continent which were undergoing profound social changes. Although by no means unheralded, it was in quantity and effect a revolutionary movement at the time. It represented not only new planning, new materials, and new methods of construction, but new thinking and new feeling. It became self-conscious and in time doctrinaire. However, it was the most vital thing happening in architecture, and as has happened before with architectural styles, it proved itself an international influence: Holland, Scandinavia, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, England, Turkey, Japan, America. During the decade from 1922 to 1932 it seemed to become apparent that it was a style and that it was international— and we had a taste for it. Leaving out of account earlier American modernism, which was not quantitatively important, the first large-scale phase of American modernism has been dominated by this International Style, and this phase has lasted throughout the decade of the Thirties and is still going strong. Perhaps as in Europe it blossomed in an era of social change. ...From 1934, when the admen took it up,

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“functionalism” became the magic word, and it sold everything from teapots to evening dresses, as well as architecture. Now, is this style the future of American modernism? To me it has grave lacks: 1) It is not as “functional” as is often alleged. 2) It does not suit the American topography and landscape—or if it does in one region it cannot in all others. 3) Its forms are too harsh, its details too tricky, and its use of materials too consciously esthetic. 4) It is not American, because of the foregoing facts, and because it in no way expresses the American tradition in architecture.

Because it is revolutionary it is self-conscious, doctrinaire, and artificial. But also because of this, it is far more vital, far more pregnant, than any or all of our eclectic imitations of historic styles. I state, and I insist, that much of what has gone into it must also go into our future architecture. Specifically: 1) Its planning for use rather than for axes. 2) Its insistence on orienting to the sun and to the view rather than to the street and lot lines. 3) Its free and extensive fenestration. 4) Its attention to new materials, new methods of construction, and new mechanical gadgets—though the latter can easily go too far. 5) Its liberating effect on design. While it has not in general resulted in a great style, it has freed architects to such an extent that they may create one in the future.

What may this future be? Let me cite a parallel in the development of Gothic. Gothic, a style dominated by an elaborate new method of construction first developed in Normandy and the Ile de France, was the “Modern” style of its day and also the most vital....This style drove into Germany in the mid-thirteenth century....At first the French Gothic style was adopted almost verbatim. But see what happens....Within a few generations the style begins to coalesce with the earlier style tradition, to develop along new lines in accordance with different conditions and needs and in expression of the German temperament, and it ends up not as French Gothic at all but as German Gothic—and regional German Gothic at that. Similarly in Spain, León follows St. Denis, but by the time of Barcelona and Seville, the style is Spanish Gothic, not French Gothic. Italy’s first Gothic, the abbey of San Galgano near Siena, is strongly French, but a little later no one will confuse Arnolfo’s work with that of Pierre de Montreuil. In short, for a space of time French Gothic was the International Style of its day, but as time passed and its seeds were spread abroad, they grew up in new soils and produced new plants: national, regional, Gothic styles. They were all Gothic, which is to say that they were all modern and creative expressions of their lands and their cultures, but they were not, praise God, all the same kind of Gothic.

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Much the same story might be told of the Renaissance, except that philosophic notions of style come in to befog the issue. What might we expect, accordingly, in the development of modernism in America? 1) The first phase might be the verbatim adoption of the French and German “International Style.” 2) The second phase might be a longer process of mingling with existing architectural traditions, adaptation to national and regional conditions, and the evolution of American regional modernisms. 3) The third phase might be the development of an ornamental vocabulary expressive of the national and local viewpoints and temperaments.

During a trip to Europe in 1937, I noticed distinct signs of a trend away from International Style Modern toward national modern styles in Sweden, Germany (the real or proscribed modern, I mean), and Holland. To a lesser extent in England. Not at all in Russia, which has turned away from modernism altogether. A trip across this country in 1939 leads me to think that the same thing is beginning to happen here. Our great size and the great range of climate, materials, topography, and past architectural traditions lead me to believe that American architecture will develop into Regional Modernisms. What signs of this are there? The most distinct evidences of such a regional style to date are to be found in California. California Modern seems to be composed of the following ingredients, varying in individual buildings and places: 1) International Style—a strong influence throughout. 2) “Monterey Colonial”—i.e., Spanish Colonial domestic architecture. 3) The “ranch house” tradition. 4) The adobe houses of the Indian pueblos.

Note that the most highly developed style, the provincial Spanish Renaissance of the big missions, has had little influence. It has, of course, been imitated in modern houses, stores, and movie theaters, where it is awful, but I do not mean that. As material for modern, I suspect that even in the clumsy work of the missions it is as a style too highly developed, too explicit, with too fixed a decorative vocabulary and too formal a layout. I think it will be found in the development of regional modernisms that those styles which had a highly developed esthetic will be least useful; those which approach most nearly to plain common ordinary peasant building will be most useful. In other words, vernacular styles rather than literary styles. In California the various ingredients of local tradition are extremely well blended, and it is to be emphasized that the result is not a mere imitation of any one of these past styles, but a re-creation of the qualities and spirit of all of them. The result is Modern. California Modern is the most highly developed regional style we have to date, and I believe the general average of California

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building is today the highest in the country. I do not mean the occasional works of genius—though there are these. I mean the average small house of the average untutored citizen or real estate developer. The great Midwest is a region: a region with a distinctive geographic, economic, and social character. I should expect it ultimately to have a regional architectural style. But here we have an unusual historical circumstance, and one which makes prophecy about a future style hazardous. The Midwest has no native, genuine, long-time architectural tradition: nothing comparable to the Colonial tradition in other regions, for example. The region was settled, in general, after even the Greek Revival—the last gasp of what might be called a real tradition— had run its course. Its building from 1850 on was in the spurious fashions of the late nineteenth century. There was no style. Nonetheless, in traveling through the Midwest, looking at the mass of buildings done during the past several years, one senses a dominant trend, a community of feeling in all the better work, and that feeling is, more than any other one thing, Frank Lloyd Wright.... This Wright tradition is based on his work of a generation ago—the “prairie style” houses of 1900–1910. It takes a generation or so for the quality and feel of a style to permeate a sufficiently large number of people to become evident in mass building. Wright himself has continued in this same tradition in the Willey and Jacobs houses of recent years, but his more dramatic recent achievements such as “Falling Water” and the Johnson Wax Company Building do not enter, I think, into this particular picture. But it seems likely that Wright’s earlier work may have established a tradition in a region which had no tradition. If this guess turns out to be correct, it will be an almost unique historical instance of the social force of a single individual in architecture. There are two other regions of the country which have strong and genuine architectural traditions, local peculiarities of climate, people, and materials which we would expect to result in other regional modernisms. I have not found a sufficient number of examples of recent work to indicate certainly that these exist at present, and would not have time to discuss them if I had. But I have a hunch that the next regional tendencies to become evident will be: 1) The South—based on Spanish, French, and Modern. 2) Pennsylvania—based on Pennsylvania Colonial and Modern. 3) New England—based on New England Colonial and Modern. 4) Virginia and Atlantic seaboard—based on the Colonial of this region and Modern.

And I would guess that they might develop in that order: Virginia last because its early Colonial is more or less obscured by the highly developed style and expert restoration of its eighteenth century, the charm of which will be a hindrance rather than a help toward the development of a real Modern Virginia— and partly because the inherent conservatism of Virginia society makes the phrase “Modern Virginia” seem at the present time a little laughable....

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I believe we face a difficult situation in New England. It is going to be hard work to create a distinctively New England and distinctively modern style. I think there are three reasons for this difficulty: 1) The region and its people are naturally conservative. 2) As in Virginia, we have a highly developed, sophisticated, and elegant eighteenth-century style, the dignity and graces of which are only too likely to beguile us away from the simpler realities of our vernacular tradition. 3) The International Style is much less applicable to New England than it is to some other regions and we will have to abandon many of it characteristic features.

Specifically, it seems to me that the New England climate calls for: 1) A fairly compact plan and form. 2) Controlled fenestration—at least until better and cheaper insulating windows are devised. 3) Short driveways and walks on account of snow. 4) I have a feeling that the New England climate, plants, and foliage call for textured surfaces and a sparing use of color, though this may be an esthetic prejudice and not a climatic condition.

In any event, it is certain that the International Style is a much less useful jumping-off point here than it is in California, where the climate calls out loud for open planning, wings, projections, large glass areas, and all the rest. But because there are difficulties does not mean that we should evade them. Conservatism and climate do not mean that we cannot have a modern architecture. They only mean that it will be a different kind of modern. And that kind, when we have it, will be our own. I think that the dominant architectural traditions contributing to New England Modern will be the seventeenth-century Colonial and that last phase of the Greek Revival when it had forgotten most of its classic orders, simplified itself to the point of abstraction, and become a widespread vernacular style used by farmers and carpenters all over the hinterland. It will not be Georgian. I am convinced that eighteenth-century Georgian is too highly developed a style, too explicit in detail, too formal in layout, too consciously esthetic, to be useful in the development of that free, unconscious, flexible manner of plain building which must be the basis of a real modern style. If you try to “adapt” Georgian by leaving off its classic details, you will still have a stiff formal façade pattern; and if you try and loosen up the façade pattern you will have to revolutionize the Georgian plan—and by that time it won’t be Georgian at all. By the same token, it will not, of course, be Dutch Colonial or Pennsylvania Colonial because these are not our own traditions. Neither will it be “Cape Cod.” This style has been used to such success by some of our leading eclecticists that it bids fair to become a regional rash of neat little, sweet little, picket-fence and spinning-wheel numbers, good

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because they are simple but dangerous because they represent no work, no thinking, no creation. When I say “New England Colonial tradition,” I mean the whole congeries of local styles evolved in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—Massachusetts Bay Colonial, Rhode Island Colonial, Connecticut Colonial, Cape Cod Colonial, Maine Coast fishing-village Colonial, and many other local variations. It will be no use to try to “adapt” any one of them. If you do, you will be explicit and imitative. But if you look at them all, and get their feel for materials and mass, adaptation to site, simplicity, informality, and all their other great qualities, you will have a sound basis for being creatively modern. You will note that in my guesses as to tradition in future regional modernisms, I have almost always skipped the early twentieth and nineteenth centuries and gone back to the earlier traditions. This is not a natural or normal situation. I believe that in all great styles of the past there was a continuous evolution of modernism out of tradition. The strength of medieval modernism, for instance, was due to that fact that it evolved slowly and steadily, building plainly and patiently, and yet progressively. Son followed father, and son kept up with the times, making this change here and that improvement there. Architecture was always traditional, yet always modern. The development of style was slow, to be sure, because the development of the civilization and culture of the Middle Ages was slow; but it was also solid, because it was natural and unself-conscious and genuine. The normal evolution of an architectural style is based on tradition, but the tradition followed is that of the immediately preceding generation, not that of two or three generations— or two or three centuries—ago. This keeps it alive. We find ourselves in a different and abnormal situation. For several generations there has been no real architectural tradition. The nineteenth century produced a blank, a hiatus, in architectural evolution. We find ourselves in a difficult architectural vacuum; we want to be creative but we have no roots on which to grow, and if we merely try, deliberately and consciously, to “go modern” we produce artificial results, or at the best, revolutionary results. I see no other way out but to seek a living tradition by reverting to that point in our architectural history at which style was genuine, and to build on that. This point was, in general, I believe, the Colonial. This may explain my conception of tradition. It may not explain my conception of the use of tradition. A thesis such as I am presenting is a dangerous one to hand to an architect who calls himself a traditionalist and who in is in reality an out-and-out eclecticist. He will delight in my attack on the International Style and my defense of tradition in architecture, and will beam with complacent pride. “I was right all along,” he will say. “I knew they’d get over these hare-brained modernistic notions and get back to solid stuff. And anyway, I never imitate a past style, I always adapt it to local conditions.”

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This is an unthinking attitude. Including a bathroom and an oil-burner is not adapting a style to modern conditions, it is merely changing the building without changing its expression. Beware of that word “adapt.” It is so easy to take a Cape Cod house and by making a few changes in it delude ourselves into thinking we are “adapting it to modern conditions” when in reality we are making none but superficial changes. Do not adapt a past style; create a new one. The conception of Tradition which I am trying to convey is one which is so thoroughly grounded in the architectural feel of our genuine past that it can forget its specific forms and details. It is a conception which calls for constant change and progress, even if this is slow. It is a conception which calls for as rigid and exacting a study of modern needs and methods of fulfilling them as the International Style, to their everlasting credit, have attempted. It is not a substitute for new thinking and new creation, it is a demand for it. “Tradition,” as Walter Curt Behrendt has said, “is of value only when it is behind us, pushing forward.” Gentlemen, it is brash for anyone to make prophecies, and more than brash for a layman to tell architects what to do in their own field. I know that what I have said sounds dogmatic and positive, when it is really more the music than the words that I feel sure of. Most of all I know that it is easier to criticize than to create, and that stringing words together is one thing and creating forms is another. I only wish that I could do what I feel, but I wish more that you could feel what you do, for you are the men who must create a modern architecture for New England.

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Introduction to excerpts from the “The Sky line: Status Quo”

288

Lewis Mumford inherited the Sky Line

its basis and applications were

column of the New Yorker in 1931

misunderstood.” He would go on to

and used it as a national forum for

clarify his point this way:

architectural criticism for thirty-two years, becoming a major American

What I was calling attention to, in the

architectural critic. His critiques

work of the Bay Region school, was

respected technological advances

the fact that, though it was thoroughly

in art and architecture but were also

modern, it was not tied to the tags and

tempered by a respect for the dignity

clichés of the so-called International

of human life: the machine should

Style; that it made no fetish of the flat roof

never take priority over the quality and

and did not deliberately avoid projections

character of life in symbol or form.

and overhangs; that it made no effort to symbolize the machine, through a narrow

In this essay, Mumford expressed

choice of materials and forms:...that it

his disaffection with the then-

was a steady organic growth, producing

widespread critical embrace of

modern forms accepted as natural and

European modernism. He believed

appropriate by both client and architect. iii

that it fostered a superficial attachment to the symbolism, rather

More importantly, the Bay Region

than the emancipatory possibilities,

school exemplified his sense of

of technology, replacing the historical

architectural regionalism. It “absorbed

revivalist architecture that preceded it

the universal lessons of science and

with an equally empty anti-humanist

the machine . . . reconciled them with

aesthetic based on those symbols. Its

human wants and human desires,

kind of “covert imperialism,” in which

with full regard for the setting of

the few decide for the many what

nature, the climate and topography

kinds of expression are appropriate,

and vegetation. . . . [It] both belongs

unsettled him, as did the lack of

to the region and transcends the

respect for local, independent, and

region: it embraces the machine and

regional expressions, which he felt

it transcends the machine. It does

were supported by the emancipatory

not ignore particular needs, customs,

social project of modernity. i It was an

conditions, but translates them into

overly restrictive, and not inclusive,

the common form of our civilization.” iv

definition of modern architecture

ii

The Sky Line column sparked the first major reassessment of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition, later dubbed “The International Style.” The meeting convened to criticize Mumford’s views is included below (see MoMA, this chapter). In 1949, Mumford would refer to this column as an “unfortunate slip” that “conjured up the proverbial (tea-withlemon) tempest: chiefly because

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The Sky Line: Status Quo From the New Yorker 23, 11 October 1947, 106–9. Reprinted courtesy of The Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright 1947 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss.

The reconstructing of the sky lines of our cities, a very nearly continuous process since the early years of the century, came to a halt about fifteen years ago, and except in the boomtowns of the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast there has been no real revival of the movement. In New York, to cite the example closest to hand, in the period between 1908, when the Singer Building went up, and 1930, when a great rocket burst of almost immediately bankrupt skyscrapers accented the end of the boom, the outline of Manhattan was changing every year—indeed, every month. ... There is nothing controversial in what I have been saying. All it points to is the fact that most of our tall office buildings and hotels belong to another generation. We in New York don’t really know, for instance, what a modern hotel looks like, since the last of our hotels went up in the early thirties. I was struck by this last year in England, when I found that the bedrooms in even such dreary old structures as the Great Western Hotel at Paddington Station had been done over during the thirties and provided with handsome furniture and fittings; this, plus the benefit of the generous Victorian ideas of space, made our New York hotels of the same class, even those built as late as 1930, look decidedly crummy. What I had been thinking about hotels came to mind again the other day in Washington, when, instead of staying at my usual hotel, I stopped at the Statler. Now, there’s a modern hotel, and a very fine one, too. Remembering that it was finished during the war, when shortages were hitting right and left, one wonders at the sober perfection of the job. The Statler was designed by architects—the firm of Holabird & Root, in association with A. R. Clas—who apparently convinced their client that the art of profitable hotel-building does not rest on the premise that every square foot of the plot must be used. This hotel, which is completely air-conditioned, has a series of shallow wings, seven stories high, jutting out from a taller central mass. As a result, there is a maximum of usable interior space, with a sense of external light and airiness, and a minimum of dead interior space. There are no dark air shafts or courts so constrained that, as Mark Twain said, you can hear the young lady in the opposite room change

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her mind, or, to carry the thought further, watch her change everything else, if she forgets to pull down the shade. No one, by the way, has yet devised a noise absorber for the ventilating shafts that connect interior bathrooms. As a result of this intelligent plan, my room, instead of being the usual narrow corridor of the twenties, was far less constrained; it gave, in fact, the impression of being broader than it was deep, and the breadth was occupied by a handsome expanse of window. Since the room was air-conditioned, the Venetian blinds and the window curtains enabled one to ensure complete darkness for a late-morning nap without having to pay for one’s extra sleep by suffocating. The sense of space in such a room is comparable to what Adler & Sullivan achieved in the old Auditorium Hotel in Chicago by the use of much more ample dimensions. ... Perhaps the most miraculous thing about the new Statler is the fact that it is possible to eat one’s breakfast not in a dim dungeon but in a spacious, handsome room with great windows that look out upon the strip of green grass and foliage bordering the hotel. I have a perpetual desire to know what the weather is like in the morning, to have some idea of how the day is beginning. Hotel men seem to think that people like me are peculiar, for during the last generation they did their best to make their dining rooms look like the interior of a stuffy drugstore on a dark morning. They were unwilling to give any light or street frontage to their public rooms; they tried to dedicate every foot of that space to shop windows. The Statler has a plentiful supply of shops, too, but on one street front it also has a spacious corridor and lounge, a grand entrance, and one of its four dining rooms. All this contributes to the feeling that this hotel is the Great Good Place that Henry James dreamed of in one of his short stories—a story that, by the bye, is both a premonition and a justification of modern architecture. ... Meanwhile, new winds are beginning to blow, and presently they may hit even backward old New York. The very critics, such as Mr. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who twenty years ago were identifying the “modern” in architecture with Cubism in painting and with a general glorification of the mechanical and the impersonal and aesthetically puritanic, have become advocates of the personalism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Certainly Le Corbusier’s dictum of the twenties—that the modern house is a machine for living in—has become old hat; the modern accent is on living, not on the machine. (This change must hit hardest those academic American modernists who imitated Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, as their fathers imitated the reigning lights of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.) Mr. Sigfried Giedion, once a leader of the mechanical rigorists, has come out for the monumental and the symbolic, and among the younger people an inclination to play with the “feeling” elements in design—with color, texture, even painting and sculpture—has become insuppressible. “Functionalism,” writes a rather pained critic in a recent issue of

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the Architectural Review of London, “the only real aesthetic faith to which the modern architect could lay claim in the inter-war years, is now, if not repudiated, certainly called into question...by those who were formerly its most illustrious supporters.” We are bound to hear more of this development during the next decade, but I am not alarmed by the prospect. What was called functionalism was a one-sided interpretation of function, and it was an interpretation that Louis Sullivan, who popularized the slogan “Form follows function,” never subscribed to. The rigorists placed the mechanical functions of a building above its human functions; they neglected the feelings, the sentiments, and the interests of the person who was to occupy it. Instead of regarding engineering as a foundation for form, they treated it as an end. This kind of architectural onesidedness was not confined to the more arid practitioners. Frank Lloyd Wright, it is said, once turned upon a client—let’s call him John Smith—who had added a few pleasant rugs and comfortable Aalto chairs to Mr. Wright’s furnishings, and exclaimed, “You have ruined this place completely, and you have disgraced me. This is no longer a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It is a John Smith house now.” Well, it was time that some of our architects remembered the nonmechanical and non-formal elements in architecture, and that they remembered what a building says as well as what it does. A house, as the Uruguayan architect Julio Vilamajó has put it, should be as personal as one’s clothes and should fit the family life just as well. This is not a new doctrine in the United States. People like Bernard Maybeck and William Wilson Wurster, in California, always practiced it, and they took good care that their houses did not resemble factories or museums. So I don’t propose to join the solemn gentlemen who, aware of this natural reaction against a sterile and abstract modernism, are predicting a return to the graceful stereotypes of the eighteenth century. Rather, I look for the continued spread, to every part of the country, of that native and humane form of modernism which one might call the Bay Region style, a free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life on the Coast. That style took root about fifty years ago in Berkeley, California, in the early work of John Galen Howard and Maybeck, and by now, on the Coast, it is simply taken for granted; no one out there is foolish enough to imagine that there is any other proper way of building in our time. The style is actually a product of the meeting of Oriental and Occidental architectural traditions, and it is far more truly a universal style than the so-called international style of the nineteen-thirties, since it permits regional adaptations and modifications. Some of the best examples of this at once native and universal tradition are being built in New England. The change that is now going on in both Europe and America means only that modern architecture is past its adolescent period, with its quixotic purities, its awkward self-consciousness, its assertive dogmatism. The good young architects today are familiar enough with the machine and its products and processes to take them for granted, and so they are ready to relax and enjoy themselves a little. That will be better for all of us.

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Introduction to “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”

292

Lewis Mumford’s 1947 “The Sky Line:

the “closed forms and cool austerities

Status Quo” article struck a nerve

of the Europeans.” v Her argument was

in the architectural establishment

almost identical to Mumford’s and

by questioning the hegemony of the

was built upon years of regionalist

International Style and praising a

sympathies at MoMA, which reflected

little-known movement he dubbed

a kind of hidden center in American

the “Bay Region style.” He called

architecture, what Keith Eggener has

it “a native and humane form of

referred to as “a growing chorus . . .

modernism...a free yet unobtrusive

of a new kind of localized modern

expression of the terrain, the climate,

architecture.” vi In 1951, Hitchcock and

and the way of life” in California.

Johnson, authors and curators of the

The criticism prompted MoMA to

original International Style exhibition,

sponsor a symposium challenging

attempted do what had not been

Mumford’s claims, and the subtext

accomplished at the 1948 MoMA

of the discussion that emerged was

symposium; they organized a new

a growing acceptance of regionalist

exhibition which revisited the original

concerns as early modernism

twenty years later and pronounced

matured. Many critics suggested

anew the triumph of modern

that early modernism had always

architecture in America. vii

addressed the humanist concerns Mumford had attributed to the Bay Region style (see Figs. 8–11,

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has since 1929 held many architectural exhibitions, released many catalogues, and influenced the course of architectural theory.

Introduction). But Mumford’s column was not the only sign of change. Hugh Morrison had already suggested in 1940 that the International Style had passed and predicted a future of “various regional modernisms” ii (see Morrison, this chapter). In 1944, Elizabeth Mock curated a show at MoMA that documented American architecture since 1932. iii She included and openly praised the “important regional developments” “suddenly discovered in California,” including the work of William Wurster, Mumford’s prime example. iv Her introduction identifies the new trends in American architecture: the “suspicion of the romanticization of the machine,” “a new interest in traditional vernacular building,” and more or less the full assimilation of and evolution beyond

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The Museum of Modern Art

What is Happening to Modern Architecture? From The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, XV, no. 3 (Spring 1948). Reprinted by permission from The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A symposium for architects was held in the auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of February 11, 1948. The discussion was based on an excerpt from The Sky Line by Lewis Mumford in the New Yorker, October 11, 1947, which follows: Those who came to the Museum of Modern Art’s symposium on “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” heard no easy answers to a hard question. As a formal symposium, the evening failed. No conclusion was reached; the question remained unsolved. However, the meeting succeeded in presenting a significant cross-section of current architectural thought, diverse, conflicting, often stimulating, as much a part of the process of architecture as plans and specifications. Two points of view dominated the discussion. They were not the points originally planned. The talk was expected to balance neatly between two groups: the originators of the term “International Style,” and the upholders of the English-invented reaction to it, called the “New Empiricism,” with its American counterpart, the new humanism of the “Bay Region” school. The controversy was soon reduced to something much more basic: those who spoke in terms of style and standards, and those who denounced all labels and “isms” as secondary to the problem of production. In the first group, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Henry-Russell Hitchcock redefined the International Style. Gerhard Kallmann, English architect, defended the New Empiricism, and at the end of the meeting Lewis Mumford came to the rescue of his much misinterpreted definition of “Bay Region” architecture. Christopher Tunnard pointed out the need for the reconciliation of public taste and good architectural performance, suggesting the study of the monuments of the past as a possible corrective prescription. Frederick Gutheim upheld the language of style as essential to the qualitative judgment of the critic. Those who took exception to the historical approach were Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ralph Walker, Peter Blake, Eero Saarinen, George Nelson, and Carl Koch. Nelson, Blake, and Koch laid the greatest stress on the immediate, practical aims of architecture: the need for increased production and industrialized building.

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The following text is a summary of the talk of the evening. Some changes have been necessary. The entire question period at the end of the symposium, with its interesting contributions by Serge Chermayeff, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., John McAndrew, Isamu Noguchi, Matthew Nowicki, Eero Saarinen, Vincent Scully and others has been eliminated only because of the lack of space. Carl Koch’s undelivered speech and the post mortem correspondence between Mr. Mumford and Mr. Barr have been added in the interest of a more complete record. Mr. Mumford, acting as moderator, opened the meeting and introduced the first speaker. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: It gives me special pleasure to have Lewis Mumford here as

our Chairman. Many of you will remember that sixteen years ago he contributed an important article on housing to the Museum’s exhibition of modern architecture, which Philip Johnson organized. I recall, too, that he spoke at the first symposium on architecture ever held by the Museum. I have read with care Mr. Mumford’s piece in the New Yorker, which is the basis of tonight’s discussion. If we differ this evening, lay it to the fact that it is hard for two old soldiers to remember a campaign in exactly the same way. Yet, I believe, at least at this stage of the evening, that we are still fundamentally on the same side. We are on the side of architecture as an art rather than on the side of mere building, however structurally efficient, commercially successful, sentimentally effective, humanistically plausible, or domestically agreeable that building may be. I am not an architect nor a critic nor an historian of architecture. Please consider me a kind of “kibitzer” or back-seat driver. Believe me, if I were not an irresponsible amateur, I would never have the courage to speak at all in this highly professional gathering. It is almost impossible in a few minutes to present a point of view about so complicated and confused a matter as the history of recent architecture. Let me go back to the year 1932. That was the year the Museum put on its first show of modern architecture, and the year that Hitchcock and Johnson published their book, The International Style. I have read through this book again during the past few days and have marked a few passages to read to you, first from the preface, which the authors asked me to write in my usual function of back-seat driver: Mr. Hitchcock and Mr. Johnson have studied contemporary architecture with something of the scholarly care and critical exactness customarily expended upon Classical or Mediaeval periods. This book presents their conclusions, which seem to me of extraordinary importance. For they have proven beyond any reasonable doubt, I believe, that there exists today a modern style as original, as consistent, as logical, and as widely distributed as any in the past. The authors have called it the International Style. To many, this assertion of a new style will seem arbitrary and dogmatic, for it has become almost customary to say that we are in a “period of gestation,” that we have “not yet arrived at a consistent style.”

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This uncertainty of direction is clearly demonstrated by two recent magazine articles.

These articles were written, as I remember it, at the end of 1931 and early in 1932, one of them on European, and one on American architecture. The first, called New Building for the New Age, is illustrated by photographs of six buildings supposedly representative of “what is happening in architecture on the continent of Europe.” They include Saarinen’s prewar—that is, pre-1914—railway station at Helsingfors; the bizarre Expressionist Einstein Tower of 1920 at Potsdam, and a ponderous department store, both by Mendelsohn; Tengbom’s Concert Hall at Stockholm with its portico of tall decagonal columns surmounted by Corinthian capitals; a school by Dudok, one of the more advanced members of the conservative Amsterdam group; and a theatrical Danish church façade derived from Hanseatic Gothic prototypes.

The second article—I think it was in the Times magazine—is called “Poets in Steel.” It is a characteristic essay on modern American architecture, primarily concerning itself with skyscrapers, although one of Mr. Cram’s churches is illustrated, and Frank Lloyd Wright is mentioned only to be dismissed as a mere theorist. But skyscrapers are accepted as “one of the most magnificent developments of our times”—Romanesque, Mayan, Assyrian, Renaissance, Aztec, Gothic, and especially Modernistic—everything from the stainless steel gargoyles of the Chrysler Building to the fantastic mooring mast on top of the Empire State. No wonder that some of us who have been appalled by this chaos turn with the utmost interest and expectancy to the International Style.

We realized at the time that this announcement of a new style would seem arbitrary and even dogmatic and that it would meet with resistance from many quarters—from the general public, which is usually reluctant to accept anything new in the arts; from academic conservatists, of course; from the half modern designers of the buildings just listed; and from the very architects who had themselves laid the foundations of the new style. For the progressive architect of the second quarter of the twentieth century has distrusted the idea of style. Style smacked of the Beaux Arts, of the academic, superficial, and introspective. Style was somehow felt to be a menace to the individual freedom of the architect and to the free development of architecture itself. We were aware of this in 1932; in fact, Hitchcock and Johnson were at times reluctant to use “International Style” at all. But it was obvious that the style had been born and needed a name. We wanted to emphasize this fact in the name, and because the style had developed in several countries at once we felt “international” would be a reasonable and neutral adjective. Since then, architects and critics alike have questioned the term, often referring to it as the “so-called” International Style; yet, no one since that time has thought of a better term, nor, I believe, a term more widely used. Perhaps I

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should say “misused,” for in spite of every effort on our part, the term has often been used interchangeably with the word “functionalism.” Now, it is true, of course, that the principle of functionalism helped generate the new architectural forms of the 1920s and thereby contributed to the International Style, but functionalism was and still is a principle of building design which stops short of architecture. To us, in 1932, the cold, mechanical, utilitarianism preached by Giedion and Hannes Meyer seemed a denial of architecture as an art. By the same token, we felt that the cynical parody of functionalism which we found among certain American architects was equally debasing. I refer to the theory that architecture is not an art, but a business or an industry in which design is simply a commodity to be furnished as a superficial afterthought. I find that much of this book was devoted to defending architecture against these scientific functionalists on the one hand and commercial functionalists on the other. We even considered using the term “post-functionalism,” to make absolutely clear that the new style was superseding functionalism. Another misconception current today is that International Style was conceived as a kind of rigid strait-jacket requiring architects to design cubistic, white stucco boxes on Lally columns, with flat roofs and glass walls. In 1932, Hitchcock and Johnson put the matter differently: The idea of style as the frame of potential growth, rather than as a fixed and crushing mould, has developed with the recognition of underlying principles such as archeologists discern in the great styles of the past. The principles are few and broad. They are not mere formulas of proportion such as distinguish the Doric from the Ionic order; they are fundamental, like the organic verticality of the Gothic or the rhythmical symmetry of the Baroque. There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass. Secondly, regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design. These two principles, with a third proscribing arbitrary applied decoration, mark the productions of the International Style. This new style is not international in the sense that the production of one country is just like that of another. Nor is it so rigid that the work of various leaders is not clearly distinguishable. The International Style has become evident and definable only gradually as different innovators throughout the world have successfully carried out parallel experiments.

On rereading this book, I find, too, that the authors did not dogmatize about materials. They praised Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier for their then recent desertion of flat stucco for fieldstone and marble. About wood, which was generally neglected by the modern architects of the twenties, they wrote: “In many regions, wood, for example, is economically the most satisfactory material. For certain types of building, its relative impermanence is not a disadvantage. Nor is there anything in wooden construction which makes it unsuitable to the esthetic or the functional disciplines of the contemporary style.” Nor did they ignore the human needs of the clients. On the contrary, they made fun of the doctrinaire functionalists who designed housing for “some

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proletarian superman of the future,” and insisted that “there should be a balance between evolving houses for scientific living and providing comfortable houses for ordinary living.” They welcomed the idea of national and personal variants of the style. They paid honor to Frank Lloyd Wright, not only as the most important single source of the style, but also as the magnificent living example of romantic individualism. They concluded their book with these words: The International Style is broad and elastic enough for many varying talents and for many decades of development. We have, as the Egyptians had or the Chinese, as the Greeks and our own ancestors in the Middle Ages before us, a style which orders the visible manifestation of a certain close relationship between structure and function. Regardless of specific types of structure or of function, the style has a definable esthetic. That esthetic, like modern technics, will develop and change; it will hardly cease to exist. It is found in the humblest buildings, as well as in monuments, fully architectural. Those who have buried architecture, whether from a thwarted desire to continue the past or from an overanxiety to modify and hurry on the future, have been premature: We have an architecture still.

What has happened to the International Style since 1932, particularly in this country? That it has been very widely influential, I think no one will deny. One has only to study our architectural magazines, the real estate pages of our newspapers, the work done in our architectural schools to see that the Style has largely transformed architecture in this country. Of course, Frank Lloyd Wright would deny that he has been influenced himself, but I invite you to draw your own conclusions after you have compared his designs made before 1932 with his more recent work. Of course the Style has developed and changed and mellowed. It has even generated reactions and created new opponents here and abroad. We may mention in passing the bitter hostility of Hitler and his National Socialist architects to the International Style. Fortunately, this is now a matter of history. But parallel to the German reaction has been the Soviet revival of the stylistic chaos and pomposities of the nineteenth century in the name of proletarian taste and socialist realism. In this country at the present moment, I would say that our best architects take the style for granted so far as large buildings are concerned, whether they be office buildings, apartment houses, schools, stores, airports, or, most appropriately the new buildings for the United Nations. We have among us, however, some old-line functionalists, some orthodox social realists and, lastly, the designers of houses, in the style which Mr. Mumford has proposed might called the “Bay Region Style.” That there has developed during the past ten years an informal and ingratiating kind of wooden domestic building cannot be denied, but if one studies British, Swiss, and Scandinavian architectural magazines, it is clear that this style, too, is international. Indeed, I think we might call this kind of building the International Cottage Style, for it appears to be a kind of domestication of the International Style itself, a kind of neue Gemütlichkeit with which to

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supersede the neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s. It would seem to fulfill Hitchcock and Johnson’s suggestion made in 1932 that more wood be used in modern architecture. At the same time, it answers their criticism of the doctrinaire functionalists for not providing “comfortable houses for ordinary living.” It is significant, however, that when such a master of the Cottage Style as William Wurster is faced with a problem of designing an office building or a great project for the United Nations, he falls back upon a pretty orthodox version of the International Style. Now, in deference to our Chairman, I should like to end my remarks with a quotation from his essay on housing written for the Museum catalog in 1932. Apropos of the great International Style housing projects around Cologne and Frankfort, he writes: In these experiments, one witnesses the growing integration of modern architecture, an integration with the land itself, with human beings and their needs. Those who cling to the ideal of the romantic cottage, however that ideal is betrayed and soiled by present-day actualities, are doubtless incapable of appreciating the esthetic achievement of these new housing projects. It is as if they rejected the automobile because it does not resemble a sedan chair. But the romantic cottage is not a universal form.

And he concludes: “The eye is gratified by the new architecture, not alone because its order and composure is the essence of all sound architecture; the eye is likewise happy because every other function of the mind and body is in effective rhythm.” Henry-Russell Hitchcock: Mr. Barr has made it almost unnecessary for me to

speak, having quoted so freely from what Mr. Johnson and I wrote more than fifteen years ago. He had more courage than I. I couldn’t bring myself to reread it. I was gratified to see that Mr. Johnson and I had provided, as it were, so many emergency exits. However, considering some of the things that have happened since, to which he made reference, I would like to point out that at the time we wrote the book, Le Corbusier had already designed the Errazuris house in South America, and that certainly shows some of the essential characteristics of the new Cottage Style. And he himself referred to the use of rubble walls in Madame de Mandrot’s house at Le Pradet, as well as the Swiss Pavilion. As we look around today, a great deal of what is happening was presaged by things that happened quite a long time ago and was, if I may say so, apparently provided for in the loose frame that Mr. Johnson and I drew around the concept of an international style. Mr. Barr thinks it a little bold to assume a victory, but it has seemed to me almost as if we could now consider International Style to be synonymous with the phrase “Modern Architecture”; so long as we put the emphasis on architecture and do not thereby imply just any building of the present period.

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But our subject this evening is “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” One thing that is happening, it seems to me, is the fact, not only that there are so many of us on the platform this evening, but that there are so many of you in the audience. The subject of architecture in the broadest and the deepest sense is on the carpet once more. The criticism—for it is a criticism—that is implicit not so much in the work of the Bay Region as in the work of certain Swedish and Swiss architects (not to speak of Dutch architects whose work has lately been described and illustrated in the foreign magazines) is a criticism of the International Style conceived in a limited sense, as if it were literally true that Le Corbusier’s houses had been merely machines in which to live. It seems to me, however, that this criticism and the steps that have been taken are to be subsumed in a more general problem: that is, the problem of expression in architecture. Parallel with the critical interest in the Cottage Style has been a critical interest manifested curiously enough by Mr. Giedion in the question of monumentality. The Cottage Style is concerned apparently with giving a more domestic, a looser and an easier expression, to domestic architecture, or—as the nineteenth century would call it—the individual, detached villa residence. That, it seems to me, is one of the difficulties about that particular new phase of expression—that its activities are centered on what is frankly not one of the important problems of the architecture of the present day. The individual, detached residence is always a good field for experiment but it is of very little statistical consequence today, and in the housing field it is mass and group housing and various kinds of production of housing components which are of serious importance. In the field of monumentality, we have the United Nations buildings, by their size and scale a monument. Whether, under the circumstances (which amount to a sort of committee design), they will have a strong, symbolic expression of their significance, I should doubt. The circumstances make it difficult. Monumental expression is the most difficult expression to obtain. Pseudomonumental expression is easy to obtain. Pseudo-monumental expression has, perhaps, in the United Nations buildings been rejected, but that a new monumentality will find its expression there, I doubt. However, the more we build of large housing projects the sooner the time will come when we will need focal monuments, even if those focal monuments are only small “pubs,” public houses which many English architects dream about being allowed to build when their hundred thousand dwellings are completed. There are, of course, other kinds of expression besides monumentality and domesticity or that particular expression which interests English intellectuals so much—the expression of the village “pub.” There are expressions of gaiety, such as was once achieved so superbly within the frame of the International Style by Asplund in the Stockholm Exposition of 1930, and which later expositions have so signally failed to achieve. There is also the sort of expression which is

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concerned with places of amusement. There is the expression of commercial life, which I think we are now inclined to agree is not adequately brought out by the spike on the Chrysler Building or the mast on the Empire State Building. It actually was intended for mooring Zeppelins. There is also the interesting problem of expression for “atomic” architecture, for the housing of cyclotrons, and for scientific buildings in general. It may be said that our International Style in its most obvious and lowest common denominator is most successful at expressing industrial life—factories, dams, powerhouses, such as those of the TVA. They are esthetically viable. It is hard, unless we turn to that extraordinary man, Frank Lloyd Wright, to find much wealth or variety or range of expression in modern architecture at the present time. Tremendous opportunities lie ahead—I am now talking not about something that has happened, but something which I hope is going to happen. Now, with Mr. Wright there is a danger, for he is obviously the Michelangelo of the twentieth century. Michelangelo was not good for his contemporaries and, least of all, for his students. But Michelangelo, in a period of considerable confusion, was a master who looked forward, not to what was going to happen in ten years, but to what was going to happen in fifty years. I would like to believe, therefore, that Mr. Wright is aimed way beyond any simple “humanization” which may be desirable in the immediate present. We can read off Mr. Wright and only hope that he has another ten or twenty years of production, for, frankly, I do not see anybody in the world who has his capacity for variety of expression. A range of expression sufficient for several centuries seems to be concentrated in that man’s last few years’ projects, as shown in the January number of the Forum. We cannot learn from Mr. Wright, but he can indicate to us, as Mr. Barr has suggested, that he is less of an enemy of the International Style than he claims to be, and that there are many possibilities of expression within the frame of reference of modern architecture. We are not, therefore, ready for a reaction, as some of the more articulate defenders of the new Cottage Style believe. Walter Gropius: As our topic for tonight, part of an article of Mr. Lewis

Mumford’s was sent around to the speakers, and I must start by apologizing to Mr. Mumford for disagreeing on some basic points, but I will try to behave. I quote: “The modern accent on living is on the machine.” But didn’t the initiators of the movement in modern architecture preach just that? We thought, of course, man should be the focus, but the machine was part of his life so we cannot exclude it. I might mention some personal experiences we had in the Bauhaus. There was an endless violent fight in the Bauhaus over our attempt at a new way of life, which penetrated all our doings. Kandinsky for example had a very good formula, saying, “Let’s not say ‘either/or,’ any more but ‘and’; let’s not exclude anything but include everything.” In an exhibition in 1923, under the title, “Art and Technics in New Unity,” the problems of humanizing the machine were discussed to a great extent, and

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functionalism for us meant embracing the psychological problems, as well as the material ones. The word “functionalism” has been taken too materially. This is evident from my own writings, from writings by Le Corbusier and others of the period. The elements of the new approach were then apparent, but we felt that the new generation was facing the task of refining this approach and making it more subtle, more palatable to the people, and that is exactly what happened. Today, we are more articulate, more mellow, but the principles have not changed very much. Is the machine for living really “old hat” if we see its meaning without taking the slogan out of context? At the time when it was written, emphasis was not so much on the machine itself as on the greater use of the machine in service for human life. I was interested, as early as 1910, in prefabrication and wrote my first essay about it. Looking back I think that we dealt not too much with the machine but too little. We are still enslaved by the machine and its possibilities for business instead of making it our obedient slave for the good life. In the same book in which Le Corbusier wrote “the machine for living,” there is on a prominent page, “Architecture reaches beyond utilitarian problems. Here, human passion creates a drama out of inert materials”—which does not sound like machine worship—or does it? Does the coining of styles help us? Don’t we talk too much about styles and “isms”? What we have looked for in architecture today is a new approach, not yet a style. A style is a successive repetition of an expression which has become settled, as a common denominator. The emphasis on the “isms” and the intellectual interpretation of present movements as styles obscures the creative men behind the new doings. Our life is not yet settled, so modern architecture is not yet settled. It is in the making. Instead, the flow of continuous growth, the change in expression in accordance with the change in life, should be underlined. As to the rigorists, they are not limited to the modern school. They are a part of the Beaux Arts as well as the modernists, and I should like to underline the fact that Sigfried Giedion in all his writings fought violently against Swiss rigorists. The life functions in a building are too often violated by preconceived formalism and too often the design of a building appears precocious, when it is not sufficiently backed up by the designer’s knowledge of the realities involved in the problem or by sufficient experience in the crafts and industrial processes. It is often still too much an end in itself instead being an integrated part of a new contemporary conception of a better community life, which is our basic aim. Instead, we are concerned with “isms” and styles. Styles, in my opinion, should be named and outlined by the historian for past periods only. In the present, we still lack the distance necessary for proper impersonal judgment, because we are all jealous. Why don’t we leave to the future historians the settlement of the history of today’s growth in architecture? I was struck by the definition of the Bay Region Style as something new, characterized by an expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life,

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for that was almost precisely, in the same words, the initial aim of the leading modernists in the world twenty-five years back. The difference, in my opinion, is only that we have proceeded to greater freedom, and we find suppleness of design, but the leaders as well as the newcomers have also advanced, and the principles are still the same. Do we really want a truly universal style to be a meeting of the Oriental and Occidental? I am afraid of it. Do we want to have Chicken à la King with FerroConcrete Sauce everywhere in our country, or a regional cuisine for everybody? The International Style is neither international nor a style. The real International Style consists of those borrowed Greek buildings, like the museums and banks and ministries throughout the world, from Leningrad to Washington, but the idea of the so-called International Style was regional in character, developing out of the surrounding conditions. I would like to suggest that in a period when the leading spirits of mankind try to see human problems on earth as an interdependent entity, any chauvinistic sentimental national prejudice regarding the development of architecture must result in narrowing limitations. The emphasis should be on, “Let us do it together,” with each nation, each individual giving his share without giving up regional expression, the emphasis being on teams rather than on individuals. I dare say that we are today much more influenced by each other than in former centuries, because of the rapid development of interchange and intercommunication. This must be welcome, as it enriches us and promotes a common denominator of understanding, so badly needed. George Nelson: The problems facing modern architecture have nothing to do with labels. The talk about Bay Style, or any other style, is irrelevant. It is usually necessary, today, to use old materials and handicraft techniques in houses. That the results should express these limiting circumstances is scarcely remarkable. There is no contradiction, as suggested here tonight, between the “machine look” and “living.” This argument was disposed of twenty years ago. It is possible to create a work of art at any technical level. Most of what happens to architecture is out of the hands of the architects. No architect alive has produced a church or government building that evokes a deep emotional response from the beholder. Faith in the institutions no longer exists, and even genius is powerless in face of this fact. The only expressions of communal activity that show architectural validity today are factories, commercial structures, and projects like TVA. The UN designs show an attractive arrangement of rentable space, but no monument to a great ideal. The ideal exists, but the politicians are no longer its carriers. To discover the social forces that are shaping modern architecture, one has only to look for the building types that currently generate the greatest excitement. For other forces one must look to the world of science and advanced technology. The difference between the Tugendhat house and a dwelling in the “Bay Region Style” is almost invisible by comparison with the gap between the

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Tugendhat house and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house. It is here that we will find the No Man’s Land of future professional battles. What is happening to modern architecture is that it is just barely beginning to feel the impact of the social attitudes and technical facts of a new world in the making. The “New Empiricism” that has the architectural word-peddlers so excited is a natural, ostrich-like, and historically insignificant reaction to the impact. The effect on “modern architecture” of structures now possible will be as catastrophic as the effect of the pioneering work of the early 1900s on the production of the academies. Our problem has nothing whatever to do with the meaningless differences between “Bay Region,” “International,” or any other styles. It is to free ourselves for creative activity on a whole series of new levels. Ralph T. Walker: I think, as a profession, we are very weak because we

resent criticism. We are very weak because we become enthusiastic about photographs without adequate knowledge of what photographs mount up to. I disagree about this idea of the international architecture, the architecture of the Greek column. I have been around South America recently and I have just come back from Europe, and I find everywhere that modern architecture means a slab on pillars. It means the same thing in the United States because you pick up the architectural magazines and practically every issue has as its leading number a slab on pillars. I think it is about time that architects began very definitely to look at this problem and say, “What does it mean in terms of human needs and occupancy?” Functionalism of materials has blazed our thinking around the world because you will find that the building in Rio for the Education Ministry looks exactly like a building that was designed for a giraffe in the London Zoo, and it looks exactly like the building that has been designed for the United Nations. In other words, you have a cover of unthinking uncritical acceptance of things. A critical sense of architecture considers the fact that humanism is its basis. Humanism is the basis of all art, in my estimation. Art is not an abstraction. We can know what affects our bodies, we can know what affects our minds, through our eyes and through our senses, and apply it to our architecture. What we are trying to do first of all is to develop surroundings for people to live in, that will give them the greatest amount of the happiness and warmth of life. ... Marcel Breuer: I don’t feel too much impulse to set “human” (in the best

sense of the word) against “formal.” If “human” is considered identical with redwood all over the place, or if it is considered identical with imperfection and imprecision, I am against it; also, if it is considered identical with camouflaging architecture with planting, with nature, with romantic subsidies. If International Style is considered identical with mechanical and impersonal rigorism, down with International Style! Anyway, the word is an unhappy one, just as unhappy as “functionalism.” However, all this

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controversy was in order, I am afraid, about twenty-five years ago. Since then, many things have happened. For instance, just as Sullivan did not eat his functionalism as hot as he cooked it, Le Corbusier did not build his machine for living! His houses are much less machines for living than, for instance, the three-thousand-family housing developments of the West Coast, the same pseudo-prefabricated houses, hill up, hill down, in rigid rows or in rigid curves—though quite redwoody. Many things happened, as I see it, which some prefer not to see, because they want to prove or, better, to create, a fifty-year-old original, native and modern California style full of humanity. “Human” seems to me more than just a pleasant forgiving of imperfection and an easy-goingness as to precision of thinking, as to the quality of planning, as to consequences of materials, details, and construction. God knows, I am all for informal living and for architecture in support of and as background for this, but we won’t sidestep the instinct towards achievement—a human instinct indeed. The most contrasting elements of our nature should be brought to happiness at the same time, in the same work, and in the most definite way. The drive toward experiment is there, together with and in contrast to the warm joy of security at the fireplace. The crystallic quality of an unbroken white, flat slab is there, together with and in contrast to the rough, texture-y quality of natural wood or broken stone. The perfection of construction and detail is there, together with and in contrast to simplicity, broadmindedness of form and use. The courage of conception is there, together with and in contrast to humble responsibility towards the client. The sensation of man-made space, geometry, and architecture is there, together with and in contrast to organic forms of nature and of man. “Sol y sombra,” as the Spanish say; sun and shadow, not sun or shadow. Peter Blake: I plan to make one point in connection with Mr. Mumford’s article.

In his attack on what he calls the “mechanical rigorists,” I think he presupposes that one aspect of the new architecture, one part of that battle, has already been won, and I do not think that that is the case. The part of the battle to which I am referring is the one concerning a very prosaic thing, the question of a building industry. I think that all of you have probably heard that around the year 1910, an automobile cost about the same as a one-family house. A one-family house costs about ten times that much today, and the automobile is a great deal larger and the one-family house a great deal smaller. I think the reasons for that are very obvious, and I think they were very obvious to the inventors of the International Style, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think they were just trying to be unpleasant. I think they were trying to make a very definite point, and that is, that the Industrial Revolution in building has not yet occurred. It had not occurred around 1910 and it has not occurred yet, and I think that those who today are going in for a new romanticism, who are going in for the new holy trinity of fieldstone, flagstone, and the kidney shape, are delaying that Industrial Revolution in building.

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Now, I think that the Bay Region Style is a valid attempt to bring about a more human architecture, because such attempts are valid. But what, after all, is more human than a roof over a man’s head? And although we do have more roofs over more men’s heads in this country than probably anywhere else, the quality of those roofs leaves a great deal to be desired, and I think that that quality will not be improved until we have done something to the techniques which we use to produce the roofs over men’s heads. I think that the Bay Region Style is lots of fun, and I think that this holy trinity is pleasant and it lends itself to very attractive illustration, but I don’t think it has got very much to do with what we should be trying to do today. Gerhard Kallmann: Much as I would like to give a competent description of the

current European trend in architecture identified as the “New Empiricism,” these can be only a few chance remarks of my own, by no means representative of the viewpoint of British architects or of the publication with which I was connected and which carried an article recently on this matter. I do not believe that anything can be gained from lending the stigma of a fully fledged architectural theory to what in my opinion is only a paraphrase, an elaboration of the theories of the modern movement. In England, at least in the work of the younger generation, we can observe a deviation away from the formalistic trends of the late thirties, which by the way were followed more by the rank and file than the great protagonists of the movement. Today we have both a stricter discipline, in the return to the functional core, through emphasis on social and individual psychology, and greater freedom in a widening of the expressive range and the evolution of a more humanistic form language. Symptomatic perhaps is the yearly English pilgrimage to Sweden, my own to Switzerland, where the buildings we would have liked to build ourselves can be seen in the realities of achievement and failure. It was most instructive for me to see here, when I had the honor to attend one of Professor Gropius’ juries at Harvard, that an ap­proach not so very different from ours was encouraged, that stress was laid on the social and technical realities, on expression of innate character as against imposition of form, on the human scale, on refinement of detail. It is my opinion, that far from condemning as heresy what so soberly is called the New Empiricism (but what all too often in appearance resembles a sentimental eclecticism), we should try to understand it as a variation on the main theme, and enjoy the concomitant enrichment of our architectural idiom. We should condemn it as reactionary, where it leads, for instance, the eminent Swiss art historian Peter Meyer to advocate a return to historicism for important buildings, and others to indulge in folkloristic revivalism. I prefer to think of the more likeable traits of the New Empiricism such as are shown in the Municipal Hospital at Zurich, where the architectural conception at all times is subordinated to the psychological requirements of the patients. At the same time efforts are made through detail, interesting surface patterning, landscaping to meet the legitimate demands for richness, intricacy, dignity, which were often

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left unsatisfied by the over-schematic and blatant solutions in earlier phases of modern architecture. There are admittedly weaknesses here, inasmuch as some Swiss designers representative of this trend have voluntarily stopped short of “architecture,” and some of the Scandinavians have produced no more than a collage of nice bits. Eventually this kind of architecture must be infused with an intensity of feeling, which will mould each part to such a degree that total architectural character can be achieved to replace the grand formal conception, which is regarded as too confining for the life content of the building. Thus I also believe that the practitioners of the New Empiricism will find a greater meaning in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto than in the form world of Le Corbusier and his South American disciples. For in “expressive architecture” lies the key to the vitality of this particular trend and the strength of its contribution to the modern movement. ... Lewis Mumford: It is my business to bring this meeting to a close, and I have a very relevant question addressed to all the people on the platform. What is happening to modern architecture? None of us has yet found out. Just now, at eleven o’clock, I am sure the members on this platform are about to come to grips with the real subject that we came here to discuss tonight. There were too many ancient quarrels and ancient stands and ancient attitudes to be resolved before we really got down to it. I contributed to this confusion, I confess. I never wrote an article that was worse understood than this little attempt at reporting what was happening in the world outside. Giedion, a few years ago, had written an article on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Company building and had gone out of his way to say that this kind of excess, this luxury, this monumentality is perhaps something we should look for now. I was not attacking Giedion when I called attention to the development of this point of view because I don’t think that anything more serious is happening to modern architecture at the present moment than that it is growing up. You do not expect an adolescent to wear the same clothes as he did in babyhood. There will be a time when even whiskers may be appropriate. I am not talking about you, Mr. Hitchcock, at this moment. This natural development towards richness, towards exuberance—and certainly Frank Lloyd Wright was exuberant in the Johnson Wax Company’s offices when he took a very simple problem and gave it a very elaborate answer—this sort of thing certainly is not reprehensible unless it is done badly. At all events, modern architecture is necessarily in the course of growth. What is the Bay Region Style? Nothing but an example of a form of modern architecture which came into existence with our growth and which is so native that people, when they ask for a building, do not ask for it in any style. That is the healthy state that we should have in every part of the world. To me, that is a sample of internationalism, not a sample of localism and limited effort. Any local effort, if worth anything, is worth reproducing elsewhere; and any

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universal formula that is worth anything must always be susceptible of being brought home—otherwise it lacks true universality. To read into that any form of chauvinism seems to me sublimely funny. I cannot take it very seriously, I confess. Now, as I say, we have reached the point of asking ourselves what is happening in modern architecture. Many things are happening. Some things are still to happen. Mr. Gropius well said that the original exponents of the movement in the twenties had a rich conception of human nature. They did not think of it as limited purely to the mechanical environment. Our conception of human nature has been undergoing many modifications, sometimes sad enrichments, during the last ten years. But there are ways in which things should be done, that have been forgotten on account of formulas. One of the most shocking experiences I had about ten years ago came from a psychologist, who said, looking through a book of modern architecture, “This is very interesting architecture. It is completely extroverted. I can imagine a great many of my patients being happy in these homes. But what are you going to do for the man who has an inner life, who wants to close himself away from the world? Don’t the architects recognize that this is also an attribute of the human personality?” I think that one of the things that must come in due time is such a flexibility in approaching the problem of any particular building that both sides of human nature—the introvert and the extrovert—will be thoroughly recognized. But I am not here to preach a sermon on the future in modern architecture. I am not competent to do so, in the first place. The fate of modern architecture rests in the hands of the living, who will create it, and of the society of which they are a part. That society is now in the process of a very profound transformation. It may either commit suicide on an inconceivably large scale, or it may develop the foundations of a new civilization. If we continue to develop the foundations of a new civilization, the first efforts of the modern style will be seen as indications of that greater humanism and universalism which can be achieved. And on those words, ladies and gentlemen, I bid you good night! The following additions have been made to the report of the meeting:... correspondence between Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Lewis Mumford, after the discussion, in which they further defined and clarified the ideas they had presented during the meeting.

Amenia, New York. 20 February 1948 Dear Alfred Barr: I have been reflecting on the symposium last week, and on the many issues that were raised, if not answered there; indeed, if I find I have the time, I shall go back to some of those issues

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in print. In many respects I find myself in disagreement with the position taken in the Exhibition book of 1932, although Hitchcock’s 1929 volume—or was it 1930?—still seems to me remarkably sound and even prescient. But one point between us I’d like to clear up in advance. I hope you don’t think that I have in any way changed my attitude, as expressed in the housing article, on the individual free-standing house as a universal solution? Your quotation, in its particular context, made me think that you did. Nothing could be further from the truth; in my introduction to the new edition of Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1946 I upheld a density for urban planning which makes the free-standing house impossible: I am still for the row house in cities. As for the “Bay Region style,” I am utterly bewildered at the general extent and depth of misunderstanding of what I thought I had very plainly expressed in the New Yorker. For the point about the Bay Region Style, in which it very definitely departs from your restricted definition of an International Architecture, is that it cannot be characterized by any single mode of building; and it certainly can’t be reduced to redwood cottage architecture, as you almost said in so many words. It is precisely the variety and range and universality of it that I was stressing: so wide that it includes Maybeck at one end and Gardner Dailey at the other....If I get a chance, dear Alfred, I shall certainly challenge your 1932 formula for modern architecture; not in the name of something parochial and restricted but in the name of that continued development of the modern, which began long before the post–World War I moment at which you so confidently date it, and which is still in process of development. With warm respects, Ever yours, Lewis Mumford

February 27, 1948 Dear Lewis: Many thanks for your letter. It is difficult to avoid mis­understanding and misinterpretation when we have so little chance to talk together. As an illustration, let me assure you in all honesty that I did not intend to imply that you yourself had changed in your belief that row houses or apartments are a better solution to housing than the free-standing house. I quoted from your 1932 remarks about the romantic cottage because I thought they threw an interesting light on the current discussion. Concerning the Bay Region subject, while you put Maybeck at one end and Gardner Dailey at the other—surely evidence of a range of period and style—the fact remains that both these architects were concerned primarily with the private detached suburban or country house, whereas when the best-known master of the Bay Region, Bill Wurster, builds an office building or designs a United Nations project he uses the International Style. That was my point. Germane to this is a paragraph which I left out of my speech calling attention to my impression that architects today tend to think of architecture, and incidentally argue about it, in

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terms of the private detached house or in terms of the monumental public building whereas, if I recall correctly, 18 or 20 years ago European archi­tects and the more advanced designers here had housing very much in mind while the most conspicuous Ameri­can architects focused upon the skyscraper and commercial building. You speak of my 1932 formula. As I have tried to make clear whenever writing about it and certainly in speaking about it at our symposium, it is not my formula at all but one arrived at by Hitchcock and Johnson, principally Hitchcock who was teacher and theorist for both Johnson and myself. I was, however, chiefly responsible for applying the phrase International Style to architecture which Hitchcock in his earlier book called the work of the New Pioneers. Please let me say again, at the risk of endless repeti­tion, that we do not deny that practically all of the principles and even many of the stylistic elements of the architects of the ’20s were anticipated by various pioneers of the preceding 10 to 50 years. At the same time it is equally evident that the style which we saw developing during the ’20s and early ’30s has changed and matured subsequently. It still remains, I believe, the central tradition in modern architecture. The last thing I want to do is to advocate a rigid definition of or a dogmatic adherence to a style. We were trying to describe something that happened and because we thought it was good we advocated its study and emulation, but we didn’t advocate its preservation without change. As I tried to make clear we anticipated, prophesied and recommended change. I am glad you wrote. I wish we could talk about this further. My very best to you. Sincerely, A. H. B., Jr.

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In this essay, a revision of “The

expression of a unified sprit-of-

Regional Approach” of 1954 that

the-age—as a synthesis of the

signaled a public and prominent shift

schizophrenia that had prevailed in

in thinking, Sigfried Giedion belatedly

the nineteenth century between the

establishes the role that regionalism

logic of engineering and superficial

had been playing in mid-century

eclecticism.

modern architecture. i He recognizes the variety of “regional contributions

Giedion’s rhetoric uses familiar

to a universal architectural

themes. First is that of the primacy

conception” and strives to revise

of art as a lens through which

the reader’s understanding of the

a constantly renewing modern

modernists he had championed

architecture should be understood

through the years—Theo van

and developed. Second, in a subtle

Doesburg, Le Corbusier, and Richard

revision of his long-standing

Neutra—as having worked under

elevation of engineering savvy

cosmic (universal) and territorial

(functionalism) over the eclectic

(regional) influences. Moreover, this

styling of architects, he now states

article is notable for containing a

that Le Corbusier’s conception of

repudiation of the term “International

the Maison Dom-ino emerged out

Style,” calling it “bloodless” and a

of a French tendency to experiment

“misnomer.”

with new forms of structure. It is no longer rationality alone that gives

Ironically, Giedion had played an

modernism its significance, but

important role in the establishment

rather territorial or regional influence.

of the mythology of International

Lastly, in promoting the regional

Style modernism through his

approach, Giedion appears to be

writings as a historian and critic

yielding to the emerging zeitgeist—

in books such as Space, Time and

that adaptation to the requirements

Architecture. ii As the secretary of

of soil and climate is “the image of

CIAM, the Congrés Internationaux

this emerging civilization.”

d’Architecture Moderne, he honed his skills in rhetoric and revisionism.

Sigfried Giedion (1883–1968) was a Swiss historian of architecture and author who taught at MIT and Harvard.

The primary intention of CIAM was to serve as “an instrument of propaganda to advance the cause of a new architecture that was developing in Europe in the 1920s; specifically the modernism of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and his close friend, Walter Gropius.” iii Through his background in mechanical engineering and art history, coupled with Hegelian historical determinism, he saw modernism as the architectural

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Sigfried Giedion

The New Regionalism Originally published in Architectural Record as “The State of Contemporary Architecture I: The Regional Approach,” January 1954, 132–37. This slightly revised version is from Architecture You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 138–51. Reprinted courtesy of Andres Giedion and VNU Business Media © 2005.

The state of contemporary architecture is such that a historian is compelled to refer back to points that, one would have thought, had been made abundantly clear many years ago. But, during recent years the origins of contemporary architecture, and indeed its very nature, have again become clouded and confused. No single country, no single movement, no single personality can be claimed as the originator of contemporary architecture. Trends shuttle to and fro, from one country, one movement, one personality, to another, and become woven into a subtle pattern that portrays the emotional expression of the period. When one seeks to isolate a single movement or personality, or a single country, and there to trace back the sources of all developments—such as the birth of contemporary architecture—the proportions of this subtle pattern become distorted. There is a word that we refrain from using to describe contemporary art. This is the word “style.” In a primitive sense the word “stylus” was used even in Roman times to describe different manners of writing, but “style” did not come into general use to describe specific periods until the nineteenth century, when different periods of architecture were analyzed according to a materialistic description of details of form. Today, the moment we fence architecture in within a notion of “style” we open the door to a purely formalistic approach. Purely formalist comparisons have about the same effect on the history of art as a bulldozer upon a flower garden. Everything becomes flattened into nothingness, and the underlying roots are destroyed. Today we are concerned with something other than merely tangible form; for we know that this is inextricably interwoven with the whole shaping of the environment. The architect of today regards himself not merely as the builder of an edifice, but also as a builder of contemporary life. In other words, the architect of today refuses to consider himself a mere confiseur [pastry cook] employed to attach some trimmings within and without after the structure has been delivered to him by the engineer. No, the architect himself must conceive it as an integrated whole. Like all real artists, he has to realize in advance the main emotional needs of his fellow citizens, long before they themselves are aware of them. A wholeness, a togetherness of approach, has become a “must” for any creative spirit.

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This forecasting of future development has become the noblest task of the contemporary development. Its cause is not hard to find. It is more than a century since a stable and secure way of life vanished from the scene. The powers that earlier stood behind it and gave environment its stability now decline more and more. In earlier times the architect and planner had merely to provide the container for an accepted way of life—whether it was the way of life of a Versailles or of the bourgeois houses and squares of Bloomsbury. Today the planner has to discover for himself how the human habitat, the outlying suburb, the changing structure of the city, can be shaped so as to avoid utter chaos. To accomplish this, the architect-planner or urban designer must possess within himself the sort of social imagination which formerly resided in society. This can lead to dangerous results. Such architect-planners have everyone against them: their most powerful clients—city and state—on whom they are economically dependent, the bankers, and perhaps even the majority of their colleagues, who hold another view of the duties of an architect. In the final resort, this means that the urban designer’s functions include a moral attitude. This is now very evident among architects and planners, but can also be found among today’s scientists, who are no longer able to limit themselves to pure research. Their consciences have become troubled. They have begun to feel responsible for the results of their researches. The historian too has been drawn into this process. He refuses merely to submit a series of bald facts, for history is not something dead. We are its product. It is human fate. The historian, like the architect, is closely bound up with contemporary life. All this is involved in the reason why we today abstain from labeling the contemporary movement with the word “style.” It is no “style” in the nineteenth century meaning of form characterization. It is an approach to life that slumbers unconsciously within our contemporaries. The word “style” when used for contemporary architecture is often combined with another password label. This is the epithet “international.” It is quite true that, for a short period in the twenties, the term “international” was used, especially in Germany, as a kind of protest to differentiate contemporary architecture from Blut und Boden advocates who were trying to strangle at birth anything and everything imbued with a contemporary spirit. But the use of the word “international” quickly became harmful and constantly shot back like a boomerang. International architecture—the international style—so went the argument, is something that hovers in midair, with no roots anywhere. All contemporary architecture worthy of the name is constantly seeking to interpret a way of life that expresses our period. If history teaches us anything it is that man has had to pass through different spiritual phases of development, just as, in prehistoric times, he had to pass through different physical stages. There are some signs that go to show that a certain cultural standard is now slowly encompassing the entire world. In historic periods cultural areas have usually been more limited in extent; but in the prehistoric era—the hundreds of thousands of years of dark ages—we find everywhere the hand axe, the coup de poing. This hand axe is a universal, triangular, pear-shaped tool whose sides slope to a fine

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edge. It has been found in China, in Africa, in the gravel bed of the Somme in the heart of France, in the Ohio Valley. Everywhere this flint implement was shaped the same, as though the wide-flung continents were but neighboring villages. Never again has a single culture spread universally over the whole earth nor lasted for such an unimaginably long period. Since then the establishment of great states has resulted in national boundaries, in spheres of influence, and in cycles of culture, which still remain with us. The way of life that is now in formation is the product of Western man. Again today, as in the time of Neanderthal man, it is passing round the whole world, only now its tempo has become vastly accelerated, and its speed excessive. Since the beginning of his all-powerful urge for conquest at the time of the Renaissance, Western man has committed acts, in ever-growing numbers, against primitive peoples and in the face of cultures far more ancient than his own, which now leave feelings of shame. Every Western man feels himself somehow guilty. When I recently had to write a short foreword for a Japanese edition of Space, Time and Architecture I felt it in some way my duty to explain that Western man has now, very slowly, become aware of the harm he has inflicted by his interference with the way of life of other civilizations—whether this has been interference with those natural rhythms in the lives of primitive peoples, which have been the cause of their bodily and mental persistence since prehistoric times; or whether it has been an injection of rational Western mentality into the oldest existing civilizations, without simultaneously presenting some worthy antidote. But, even while writing this, I was obliged to add that Western civilization is itself actually in a stage of transition. Experience is slowly showing us that the rationalist and exclusively materialist attitude, upon which the latest phase of Western civilization has been grounded, is insufficient. Full realization of this fact can lead us slowly toward a new hybrid development—a cross between Western and Eastern civilizations. Now that we no longer adhere to a creed of production for production’s sake, the civilization that is now in the making draws closer to the mental outlook that is shared by primitive man and Eastern man. We in the West are again becoming conscious of something that they never forgot: that continuity of human experience always exists alongside and in contrast to our day-to-day existence. A dangerous urge to mimic drags both the primitive and the ancient civilizations helplessly toward a low level of achievement. Japan is today torn between two heterogeneous ways of life: the codes of conduct evolved through a thousand years of isolated development, and the flooding power of mechanization. In Syria a Swiss photographer had his camera confiscated because he took pictures of camels instead of their “progressive” trucks. In many African cities a bicycle is the most prized personal possession. In Baghdad, the city of a Thousand and One Nights, one shop after another sells electric gadgets and parts for motor bicycles. In the village of Babylon we wanted to have a cup of coffee. It was unobtainable; one could only get Coca-Cola. Even here, this soft drink, the hallmark of Americanism, in its world-conquering mission has

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ousted ancient, almost legendary customs. All these are straws that indicate the direction of a tremendous danger. Just at the moment when we ourselves are ready to set these things in their proper proportion in relation to our lives, they have become the heart’s desire of the “technically less developed countries.” This may be enough to indicate that the image of this emerging civilization, especially our particular interest—the form of contemporary architecture—cannot be described by so drained and bloodless a term as an “International Style.” What is the new regionalism?

Every period has had its own emotional structure and its own particular attitude of mind. This was true for the Renaissance; and it is true for us today. It is true for each period. The all-embracing factor—insofar as our subject is concerned— is the Space Conception of each period, and not the individual, separable forms which have been developed. The space conception of the Renaissance—linear perspective—radiated out from a single point of vision. For almost half a millennium this aspect dominated the composition of every picture, every building, every urban design. Present-day art, architecture, and city planning have as a basis a space conception that was developed by the painters between 1910 and 1914. Instead of the outgoing “pyramid of vision” emanating from the eye, as Leon Battista Alberti named it at the start of the Early Renaissance in Italy: instead of this rigid and static viewpoint, the concept of time has been incorporated, which, with the concept of space, is one of the constituent elements of our period. This space-time conception embraces all artistic manifestations, and is becoming ever more dominant. One can tell, through observation of any project (irrespective of “modernistic” details), whether its author is still spiritually within the space conception of the Renaissance, or whether he is creating in the spirit of the space consciousness of today. It seems—and this cannot be too often repeated—that all creative efforts in contemporary art have, as their common denominator, this new conception of space. This is true no matter how different the movements themselves may appear from one another, or in what country they originate. It has been stated over and over again—indeed, I have said it myself—that the plane surface, which earlier had lacked any emotional content, has become the constituent element of our new representation. Furthermore there is no doubt that the use of the plane as a means of expression was evolved from cubism between 1910 and 1914. On two facing pages of Space, Time and Architecture I tried to show how the same spirit emerged in several different countries, by presenting a visual comparison of a collage by Braque, a painting by Mondrian, an architectural study by Malevitch, a country house by van Doesburg and van Eesteren, and Gropius’ Bauhaus. 1 Art magazines have recently been stressing that the right angle and primary colors used with black, white, and gray, disposed in an asymmetrical arrangement were the basic elements of “de Stijl.” This factual analysis is perfectly correct as far as it goes, but it does not touch the reason behind the

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use of these simple elements—the essential heart of the matter, which “de Stijl” shared in common with the whole contemporary movement. This was the introduction of the plane as a constituent element to express the new antiRenaissance space conception. The right angle, the vertical, and—to a certain extent—the primary colors are by-products and not essential features of the modern conception. It is well known that the “de Stijl” people around van Doesburg never organized themselves into a formal group, as for example the Futurists did. “De Stijl” consisted of various individualists working in different places. There was sometimes a certain amount of collaboration—as at one time between Doesburg and Oud, and, in the twenties, between Doesburg, the young van Eesteren, and Rietveld. But, on the whole, they remained individualists. J. J. P. Oud (whose early accomplishments will always form part of the history of architecture) is typical of these individualists. When I met him for the first time in 1926 he even then emphasized “I was never a member of ‘de Stijl.’” And, in his own way, Piet Mondrian (who called his work “neo-plasticism”) expressed a similar standpoint. It was indeed just this free cooperation of strong individualists, often in dissension with one another, that gave the Dutch movement its undeniable intellectual strength. All contemporary architecture and painting is permeated with the spirit of our period, but there are a number of different movements. All share the new space conception, but each connects it in some way with the region in which he operates. This does not mean that the modern architect should strive to produce an external appearance in conformity with traditional buildings. Sometimes the new buildings will conform to a certain extent, sometimes they will be basically different. This difference may be due to two reasons: sometimes it will be because of new production methods and the use of new materials; sometimes, more importantly, it will be caused by the new aesthetic, the new emotional expression, that the builder is giving to the habitat of man. There is one other thing that the modern architect has learnt: that first and foremost, before making any plans, he must make a careful—one might almost say a reverent—study of the way of life (the climate of living) of the place and the people for whom he is going to build. This new regionalism has as its motivating force a respect for individuality and a desire to satisfy the emotional and material needs of each area. As the outlook changes, our attitude toward our environment—the region or country in which our structures are rising—also changes. Contemporary architecture and painting are embraced by a pervading mentality—the spirit of this period. But, from out of the innumerable possibilities of each region, each period selects just those which correspond with, or help to express, its own specific emotional needs. Now that we are separated by several decades from the birth period of the early twenties, we are able to discern that certain regional habits and regional traditions lay concealed within the germinal nuclei of the various contemporary movements. Two examples, one from Holland, the other from France, may serve to make this point clear. First, Holland. When we look at a painting by Mondrian or at

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one of van Doesburg’s architectural schemes, their abstract forms (Mondrian called them “neutral forms”) seem very far removed from any specific regional influence. They seem so, but they are not. At the Congress of Art Critics in Amsterdam in 1951, for which the “de Stijl” exhibition was first assembled, I was asked to speak on this movement. Rietveld, who was in the audience, sprang to his feet and sharply protested when I tried to show the inner ties that exist between Dutch tradition and these socalled “neutral forms”: how, in fact, these forms are rooted in the Dutch region and in the Dutch mentality. In the seventeenth century—the great age of Dutch painting—and perhaps even later, no other people laid such stress on the plane surfaces of interior walls, or of the careful organization of the position of doors and windows (Pieter de Hooch). Similarly one can note today the careful manner in which the Dutch gardener lays out his fields of red, white, and yellow tulips. Certainly I would never wish this interpreted as though I were claiming Mondrian’s paintings to be reproductions of tulip fields! But I do maintain that the organized plane surface is in no other country so prevalent as here, in the region of the polders. It is not mere chance that neither the Russians, nor the Germans, nor the French, made such use of the plane surface, framing it and extracting from it innumerable details. The plane surface, for reasons which do not need to be reiterated, is a constituent element of contemporary art; and it seems to me that van Doesburg and van Eesteren’s simple drawings of the transparent interior of one of their projected houses, 1922–23, is one of the most elucidating achievements of “de Stijl.” The house was shown in this “x-ray” drawing as a superimposition of horizontal and vertical planes that could somehow be made transparent or translucent. It was a radical departure from the usual structural massivity. Today there can be no doubt that this simple model was of tremendous assistance in clearing the minds of contemporaries in other countries. This was made evident in two plans of Mies van der Rohe for country houses, which were never built. They show how he had grasped the intentions of the Dutchmen and developed them further. France’s contribution comes from another source. Ever since her daring experiments in Gothic cathedrals, France has shown a great facility and a great eagerness to experiment with new forms of structure. We have only to recall the Halle des Machines or the Eiffel Tower of 1889; and here it is interesting to note that the painter Delaunay (a representative of the so-called “orphic cubism”) was first inspired by Gothic churches and later by the structure of the Eiffel Tower whose poetic content was first revealed by him and by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. France’s early and extensive use of ferroconcrete as a means of architectural conception is but one more link in the same chain. Already around 1900 Tony Garnier, in his Prix de Rome project, used the new construction methods of ferroconcrete in his Cité Industrielle for all kinds of buildings. Perret soon followed with his Paris houses, garages, theaters; and one of Le Corbusier’s

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first sketches of the ferroconcrete skeleton construction for the Dom-ino House (1915) with its intersecting planes is as revealing as van Doesburg’s sketch. These are but two examples of regional contributions to a universal architectural conception. But one thing more: it has not been necessary for the architect to be a native of the country in which he is working in order to be able to express its specific conditions. We all know how Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916) has withstood earthquakes better than Japanese structures. The reason is that the modern approach encompasses both cosmic and terrestrial considerations. It deals with eternal facts. This is no international phantom that is appearing everywhere today. It is evident that the interior of a seventeenth-century house is quite different from a picture by Mondrian and also quite different from contemporary Dutch interiors, and that Gothic cross-rib vaulting is quite different from a concrete construction by Freysinnet. Even so, a current flows through them that binds them together in time and from which the forms of our period have been drawn. It has been mentioned already that the aspect of the new structures may be very different from the traditional appearance of the buildings of a certain region. There is also a great apparent difference between a wide-open redwood and ferroconcrete house built in the kindly homogeneous climate of California and a weekend house built for the tropical conditions of Brazil. In form these two houses, built by Richard J. Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer, have practically nothing in common, yet both are imbued with the same contemporary spirit. Formalistic analysis will not help us here. I would like to give a name to the method of approach employed by the best contemporary architects when they have to solve a specific regional problem—such as a building for the tropics or for the West Coast, for India or for South America—whether it is for a house, a government center, or a problem in urbanism. This name is the New Regional Approach. This new regionalism meets its greatest problem in the so-called “technically underdeveloped areas.” Innumerable new city plans are in the making. Sometimes these are made without insight, but sometimes they indicate a positive way forward. A few are in the far north (Canada) but most are in tropical countries. This leads to an exceedingly difficult problem of the greatest urgency: the urban pattern in tropical and subtropical countries. This has been neglected for far too long. Now, suddenly, great masses of their populations, who up till now have been living in shacks made up from old packing cases or flattened gasoline cans, are having dwellings erected for them. Yet these dwellings must be related to the basic customs of their inhabitants, and not be facile copies of European or American rental houses, which cannot meet the emotional or the material needs of the particular region. We can only refer here to a very few examples: the work done in Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, India, under the guidance of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew; important projects on the Gold Coast of Africa also carried out by the last two; and successful experiments in Latin America (Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba) initiated by José Luis Sert and Paul

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Lester Wiener . [See illustrated] some row houses built in Cuba for the betterpaid workers. No glass is used; instead a modern version of the lattice-like openings common around the Caribbean has been employed. Each dwelling has two bedrooms and a living room wide open to a private enclosed patio. In Morocco, under Michel Ecochard, and later Georges Candilis and S. Woods, concrete walk-up apartments have been built for a very poor population. In this case the problem was the erection of several thousand dwellings very rapidly and very cheaply and employing only the simplest techniques. Each dwelling has two bedrooms that open onto a patio living room surrounded by a six-foot wall that ensures privacy for the family. Great care is taken to see that every corner of the dwelling is at some time penetrated by the bacteriadestroying rays of the sun. The use of the patio as the central motif has also been employed by the young Swiss architect André Studer to create a new solution for the many-celled block of dwellings. The regional approach that satisfies both cosmic and terrestrial conditions is a developing trend, but there is another symptom that is emerging, and giving evidence of the many-sided face of contemporary architecture. Many of the problems of contemporary painting can also be discerned in the earliest beginnings of art. Architecture is different from painting; it is not so intimately related to man’s direct projection of what flows in the subconscious mind. Yet we cannot leave unnoticed a certain symptom which has been appearing in architecture, above all in the recent work of Frank Lloyd Wright (especially since 1940). We can now follow the exciting path which the human mind had to travel before man came to standardize (if we may call it this) upon the rectangular house with its square or rectangular rooms. We are all born to this rectangular house and are so accustomed to live with it that it seems it could never have been otherwise. Yet it is important to note that an artist like Frank Lloyd Wright is plunging deeply into problems that concerned the human spirit during the period when mankind was contemplating the effects of transition from the life of a nomadic herdsman to that of a settled agriculturalist. At the very beginning of architecture the paramount type was not the square house, but the curvilinear house—sometimes round, sometimes oval, sometimes freely curving. Today this is attempting a reappearance. Sometimes the round form is dictated by purely mechanistic reasons, such as the mast houses of Buckminster Fuller (the shape dictated by his means of construction) and other houses which are built around a central mechanical core. Such examples, which are not fully thought through, do not concern us here. Suffice to say that, from the standpoint of urban design, or close grouping in an architectural composition, the round house is undoubtedly bad. But Frank Lloyd Wright follows exclusively the line of his artistic vision, maybe adapted to a particular site, maybe adapted to the particular man who is to inhabit the house, maybe under the compulsion of expressing that which slumbers in himself. Each of us carries in his mind the results of five thousand years of tradition: a room is a space bounded by four rectangular planes. Whether we can feel at

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ease in a Cretan oval house of about 1500 B.C. with its curved outer walls and irregular three-sided or four-sided rooms, or in Frank Lloyd Wright’s circular house with its remarkable similarity to this Minoan farmhouse, is a question that does not permit logical discussion. What interests us at the moment is the symptom that, together with the desire to use the means of expression at our disposal to give form to the requirements of the soil and the climate, there comes also a desire to free ourselves from the tyranny of the right angle and to search for a greater interior flexibility. It is not my intention to discuss the pros and cons of this kind of contemporary architecture, but it seems a duty not to ignore it. What we need more today than anything else is imagination.

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When “The Meaning of Regionalism

what was appropriate for each region;

in Architecture” was published,

what kind of guidance should we

Pietro Belluschi was best known for

give to the architects in designing a

his iconically modernist work, the

building for, say, Taiwan, or a building

Equitable Savings & Loan Association

in Jeddah.” v The essay reprinted here

Building (1948) in Portland, Oregon.

is his summary of lessons learned

His career there would continue to

working for the FBO.

be framed by regional modernist concerns. Meredith Clausen describes that work as “based on regionalist

Pietro Belluschi (1899–1994) was an architect, the dean of Architecture and Planning at MIT, and recipient of the AIA Gold Medal in 1972.

values—humanistic scale, simple reticent forms, careful craftsmanship especially in the handling of materials and detailing.” i In 1954, based on his credentials as a talented modernist and regionalist architect, he was appointed to the Architecture Advisory Committee of the Foreign Building Operations (FBO), the department responsible for the design, maintenance and construction of federal government projects abroad, specifically embassies. ii At the first meeting, he penned a memo that became the guide for future FBO projects. iii In it his affinity for regionalism is clear: To the sensitive and imaginative designer it will be an invitation to give serious study to local conditions of climate and site, to understand and sympathize with local customs and people, and to grasp the historical meaning of the particular environment in which the new building must be set....It is hoped that the selected architects will think of style not in its narrower meaning but as a quality to be imparted to the building, a quality reflecting deep understanding of conditions and people. iv

During his first year, he traveled to review potential sites “to find out

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The Meaning of Regionalism in Architecture From Architectural Record, December 1955, 131–39. Reprinted courtesy of VNU Business Media, © 2005 and Marjorie Belluschi.

In America we often think and speak of “regionalism” as a naïve and rather soft-headed variation of our architectural mainstream. Modern architects believe that the regionalists indulge in their practice at their own risk since it runs counter to the contemporary production-line philosophy of architecture. I have often wondered myself about “regionalism,” what its real meaning might be and whether it could still be practiced in the matter-of-fact world of the machine. I have thought of it with particularly deep feelings during my frequent trips in foreign lands where examples of regional architecture are more obvious against the very drab and standardized background of the straight, no-nonsense type of architecture which is being built with appalling sameness from Baghdad to Rovaniemi. No one who has traveled abroad can fail to speculate on the causes which had given such unity and beauty and a sense of fitness to almost all the old cities and on the reasons why modern man seemed to have lost this ability to impart character and meaning to his environment. But first, what do we mean by “regional architecture?” I find it difficult to give a short answer to this question, because as one thinks beyond the obvious relationship of buildings to a certain region, the meaning of the term seems to spread and touch on all that man is and believes in, as a creature of his own environment. Architecture, as a reflection of man’s longing for order and for adjustment to his natural surroundings, has always been (or at least until not long ago) regional in its essence and character. In the past it has been mostly a communal art, not produced by a few intellectuals or specialists, but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage acting under a community of experience. The awareness of man’s physical world evolved through uncounted millennia of close contact with nature. At first, as his legs set the range and speed of his mobility, the meadows, the streams, and the trees gained emotional meaning on a scale which was his own to comprehend; as mobility increased, nature lost some of its intimate reality. Locomotion by machine brought in a restless age; man can now cover the earth at great speeds, but his comprehension has lost in depth what it has gained in breadth. He can now see enormous

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landscapes, whole ranges of mountains and rivers by day, and beautiful patterns of city lights by night; but none of these sights can give him the direct response which his heart so fondly desires when he is at rest. One may well speculate on the relationship between the unfolding of this era of human civilization, and the shortcomings which many people feel in our architectural forms and certainly in our squalid environment. The old forms which constitute what we call regionalism express the more serene times of the past. It is certain that in our tumultuous times it cannot be revived. It would be impossible for us to retreat or escape from a world in evolution, but somehow we must believe that a society of men may gain in wisdom by seeking again the things man can understand and love, and conversely by learning to love all that lives near him. These were my Utopian thoughts as I was revisiting recently the exquisite little villages of the Aegean and Tyrrhenian Sea islands, of Brittany and the Tyrol, and remembered how my generation was once somewhat ashamed to admit the delight in their simple spontaneous architecture lest it be tagged as romantic. This point of evaluating the architectural characteristics of a region became more than an academic question when the State Department through its Foreign Buildings Operations asked Henry Shepley and me to go to India, Pakistan, and Iraq to discover the elements of a style which would be appropriate for the embassies soon to be built in those regions. It so happened that the design which Ed Stone had conceived for the New Delhi Embassy had been looked upon with disfavor by the Department because it did not look sufficiently “Indian.” This was a very interesting point because it touched the very essence of our architectural dilemma. Could an “Indian” architecture be defined; and if it could, should it also do it for all other countries where new buildings were to be erected; and how would one go about measuring the regional content of architecture? These were the challenging questions, and it was not only appropriate to think about them in regard to the foreign buildings program but it seemed to me to touch upon a very sensitive segment of the architectural thinking of our generation—not that such a thinking can be easily described. In fact, if one should have the patience and fortitude to read all that has been written by critics, kibitzers, social moralists, and by the professional geniuses with a gift for arrogance, one would be thoroughly confused. We have functionalism versus estheticism, eclecticism versus purism, technology versus humanism, and organic architecture versus package architecture. If one can resist the temptation of giving simple answers to a very complicated business, or of placing things into neat pigeonholes, he will find it wiser to accept the complications of modern life and will try to analyze the motives which impel civilized man’s actions in order to discover what architecture means to him now. It is not easy to abstract ourselves from our time, but few will disagree with the general statement previously made that man’s present environment is a far cry from that of older societies when men seemed to know how to build in serene response to the land and its people. Was there a conscious and willful sense of the beautiful in the builders of these old villages

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and towns, or was it rather the rhythm of their happy lives which was simply and inevitably expressed in their construction? Our world now has undergone enormous changes; the traditions slowly developed through the centuries, the old allegiances and restraints have largely disappeared; the community living which was the pattern of old societies no longer exists, at least in the same form. Today it seems almost impossible for us to act with the unity and dedication of older times. There are too many forces in our social fabric, too many demands, too many disrupting influences. We have suddenly become conscious that this is one world, and the problems of other lands and other people have become our problems; but for all that we have succeeded rather in losing touch with our own people, our own small, close-athand world whence our deepest emotions spring. We know so much but feel so little. Our emotions are second hand; they come through books, movies, radios, television, in world-wide uniformity. We have gotten more and more away from nature and from the discipline which nature requires. A rain or snow storm or a strike leaves us stranded and helpless. We no longer stop to listen or to hear or to see, but travel at 50 or 200 miles per hour through an impersonal landscape in unhappy restlessness. Our knowing so much and seeing so many unfelt images has drowned our sense of the appropriate. Our elegant magazines will sell pretty pictures to entice people in Maine or Florida or Oregon or Pakistan. Under those conditions it is difficult to achieve convincing and heartfelt unity. Some people think that the architect should be less concerned with being original and more intent on satisfying more basic human values. Yet besides being an artist capable of choosing between the superficial and the real and of feeling himself a part of his society, he must also be a good technician; and I believe that architectural forms which are not born of the peculiar demands of the job to be performed, but which come out of preconceived esthetic theories alone, will be in constant danger of becoming artificial, tricky, and fashionable, and their transitory quality will be even more evident after they have gone out of fashion. This means that not only the emotions but also mind and logic must be satisfied before lasting values may emerge. That is also why there is never real Beauty in the lie, in the fake, or in the blind copying—and why forms will shine when they reflect a sense of reality, and reality cannot easily be contrived. Thus it would be impossible to ignore all the techniques which science has placed at our disposal; not only would it be impossible but it would be silly, so that again the architect must use his judgment and common sense if confronted with problems which only advanced techniques can solve. It would be foolish of him, for instance, to tackle the design of a skyscraper as he would the design of a house. He can only ask himself if other means can be found rather than skyscrapers to house offices, but this is not for him to decide; similarly in modern factories the human requirements are becoming as important as structural and functional requirements, but the architect will not necessarily design a romantic environment to satisfy them, nor would it make sense to carve out the Rocky Mountains as a New Egyptian Valley of the Kings to house the Air Academy so as to give it the flavor of the region. On this particular project

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one may question the appropriateness of using vast amounts of glass, but the juxtaposition of crisp, clean, business-like structures on a mountain landscape can be justified by sound esthetics—but more so by the strictly disciplined around-the-clock life which 2,500 cadets must live while being educated and trained in the waging of aerial warfare. It seems impossible for us to draw laws and conclusions which cannot be challenged on some point. We crave change even if we fear it. The creative artist feels that emotions can be communicated with more eloquence if he can forge his own expressive symbols, if he can use his own language; but even language or the words which the poet uses in moving and significant ways did not grow in a vacuum nor were they invented at a stroke. They had roots and grew slowly into meanings, which in turn became both stimuli and limitations to the user but which were never detached from some human connotation, some habit of thought, which was the point of departure of the poet’s language. Similarly, an architect’s creative powers need not act in a vacuum; they are nourished by the world he lives in, by the people he knows and with whom he must deal, by the things he sees and the things he has learned, and also by old symbols and forms. Thus the greater his understanding the greater scope will his creative powers have, and within such sphere his contributions will have lasting significance. Believing this, we should not attempt to formulate a rigid intellectual program for architecture. In a way we must accept the enormous variety of situations which our age has created and try to find solace in the thought that nature has evolved the weed and the orchid, the whale and the mouse, the eagle and the humming bird, from a wonderfully complex but orderly set of things. We may find reasons to hope for an improved set of social values for mankind, but our creative struggle will never come to an end because the human mind, which reflects and re-creates, feeds what it touches and in turn is nourished by what it sees, will always make architecture a dynamic, expressive force which should be allowed to grow, to flourish, even to decay when need be. As an Art it will strive for roots and continuity but will not deny to the man of genius the right to innovate if that is his moment and if his voice rings true. So it is well for us to admit that it is no longer easy to achieve beauty by the same way in which old societies did, because there is no longer a scale of unity which will allow for it. Now we have a larger and more difficult order to achieve, and our spirit will shine through only if we are true to ourselves and never forget that it is man that we must serve. There are cases when regionalism can still be obtained by thoughtful selfimposed discipline, by a submission to certain traditional ways, by a humility of approach, and in rejecting show and change and experiment unless for a good cause. But regionalism at its best cannot be measured or imposed, is not a school of thought but simply a recognition within its own sphere of what architecture is to human beings, a deep regard for their emotional demands, and this need not be forfeited even in the most practical demands of a project. For instance, José Luis Sert by his plans for the Embassy in Iraq has shown us how a great modern

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artist can use his gifts toward a sensitive version of a regional architecture which is both creative and appropriate. It was also with a deep thrill that we perceived how sensitively had Stone understood the real essence of India, how subtly had he incorporated in his design for the Embassy the things which really belong to the region—details and features developed through the centuries, through the demands of a hot climate, the habits and love of a people. He did not copy but brought his sympathy and understanding to bear upon his creative powers. Finely perforated grilles, roof overhangs, water pools, serene proportions, exquisite materials upon which the shades and shadows could play, were to be seen in many humble places and in great monuments in the hundreds of miles Mr. Shepley and I traveled by car. Indeed we could report back that the Stone design was really suitable for India, even if it did not conform to the style called “Indian” which was imposed by that gifted architect Lutyens, who early in this century attempted to graft Muslim externals onto a thoroughly monumental Western style loaded with all the large-scale symbols of power which a Colonial empire could bring to bear on a subject people. The “Indian” style may have been politically appropriate when it was introduced and had scale and beauty of a kind, but it had little to do with Indian climate or tradition. It took an artist like Stone to express with a sure hand a renewed sense of the region. I felt great elation to think of the possible influence which such design may have on the local architects. I met with many of them and with the students of the school in Delhi. I saw their works and heard their words and felt that they were too anxious to find native expressions, but Western influences were too strong and too disrupting, and few had the wisdom or the maturity to break through with work which would reflect their new status as an independent nation, a synthesis of their old culture and of all that they had so far learned of new ways and techniques. Unfortunately, throughout the Eastern countries we visited, architecture is a superficial imitation of the more obvious Western forms. Local conditions of labor, climate, and site are largely disregarded, and the solutions are sad indeed. In Baghdad, a city with romantic connotations to the average American, we saw the most atrocious building of the juke-box style being erected in the main street. It was done in cheap materials, with unbelievably bad and unworkmanlike details—a most disheartening proof of what can happen when old traditions are discarded for standards which are neither understood nor loved. And this is happening not only in Baghdad or in Agra or in Karachi but in Italy, in France, and even in Finland, wherever reconstruction of bombed-out areas has taken place. The plea which we can make then is not that we go back to what once was, not that we become romantic, but that we face creatively as free spirits and in deep honesty the complexities of our modern world, yet never forgetting that man is the measure of all values.

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The following critical essay by James

something he felt was impossible. iv

Stirling is the third in a series. In

The other response taken up by

the others, Stirling addresses his

Stirling is an attempt to suggest how

discomfort with the evolution of

architecture influenced by local and

Le Corbusier’s work. ii In particular,

regional factors, culture, climate, and

he is critical of Le Corbusier’s

topography might be acceptable if

straying from the modernist tenet

treated with intelligence gained from

of structural rationalism and

the experience of modernism. It is

experimentation, suggesting that no

a call for a regional modernism, not

advance beyond “medieval building”

unlike the desire that would later

was demonstrated in the Maisons

drive Frampton to develop his critical

Jaoul or Ronchamp. While certainly

regionalism, and an argument against

an exaggeration, these projects do

what he feared was more likely,

represent the height of his primitivist

a descent into historical allusion

work and a continuation of his

and architecture based on surface

regionalist work (i.e., Mandrot and

appearance rather than structural or

Monol) of the 1930s. In referring

material possibility.

i

to this criticism he would later say: “Since I had been drawing on Le Corbusier’s work of the 1920s and

James Stirling (1926–1992) was one of Britain’s most prominent architects; he was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1981.

1930s...I was disoriented by his new direction, though it soon became important in my work.” iii The text included here is Stirling’s account of that new direction, which includes Alvar Aalto as a proponent. Stirling lays out what he understands to be its criteria and sketches a trajectory for the future. In this way it is a transitional piece that marks a point in time when modernists had to either contend with the reiteration of modernism outside of its originating historical setting or move on to something unprecedented and more relevant to mid-century and postwar issues such as housing, suburbanization, and corporate imperialism. Kenneth Frampton has characterized the first of these responses as “a qualified restoration of the creative vigor of a movement which had become formally and programmatically compromised,”

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Regionalism and Modern Architecture From Architects’ Year Book 7 (1957): 62–68. Reprinted courtesy of Lady Mary Stirling.

In post-war Britain, two styles or minor movements have emerged from the schools of architecture in addition to the eclecticism that is normal to them. The first style, which probably reached its peak about 1950–54, has been termed “neo-Palladian” in deference to Professor Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, published in 1949. The usual asymmetry of modern architecture was reconsidered and axially conceived schemes became more common. Various proportional systems were applied, in part due to the influence of Le Corbusier’s publication Le Modulor. The expression of this style is closely related to the “use of materials,” and designs in steel or brick are frequently derivative of Mies van der Rohe, those in concrete or stone of Le Corbusier. It would appear that this style is in decline in some of the schools, although it is to be expected that the students of these post-war years may eventually build in this manner. This trend finds a parallel in the U.S.A. where the interval between qualifying and building is apparently shorter. The work of Johnson, Rudolph, and others might loosely be considered neo-Palladian. The more recent trend in many ways is a reaction from the former and could be considered approximately a reassessment of indigenous and usually anonymous building and a revaluation of the experience embodied in the use of traditional methods and materials. 1 Le Corbusier’s assimilation of Mediterranean domestic and native Indian architecture into his most recent buildings is symptomatic of this new manner. The most visually stimulating chapters of Kidder Smith’s recent book Italy Builds were not those on Italian Modern and Italian Renaissance but that on the anonymous architecture of Italy. Today Stonehenge is more significant than the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren. Whereas the former movement was primarily an aesthetic one, the latter can advance considerable arguments with respect to economy, practicability, and policy, not least of which is the assumption that authorities will be more inclined to grant aesthetic approval to such design rather than to “modern.” The MARS Group’s contribution to CIAM X 2 was a most consistent example of this indigenous trend, but it is significant that this group was entirely concerned with low-cost housing. Immediately after the war, much of the thinking about and some of the attempts at solving the problems of housing were in terms of prefabrication and mass production. This rational approach no longer appears acceptable either at

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an aesthetic or at a practical level, and creative thinking is now mainly directed toward the utilization of existing building methods and labor forces. This exploitation of local materials and methods is perhaps the only alternative to the conventional or the “contemporary” which is left open to the European architect when he is confronted with a minimum budget. The building industry of this country cannot subscribe to “modernism” in the design of a “one-off” house. It is significant that the new traditionalism is mainly confined to Europe, except Germany, and finds little response in America where technology and aesthetics have kept more evenly apace, and the schism between designer and constructor is less apparent. An American middle-income family can afford a house built by new methods and materials, the vital aspect of progressive architecture. In this country, the decline of technology, particularly in building and civil engineering, is forcing architects away from the radical or science fiction outlook. One only has to compare the Crystal Palace to the Festival of Britain, or the Victorian railway stations to recent airport terminals to appreciate the desperate situation of our technical inventiveness in comparison to the supreme position which we held in the last century. Whereas the Hertfordshire schools might be considered our best post-war effort, they do not set a standard either in conception or style, though at least they were initially motivated by a will to modernity. The appearance of regionalism amongst our younger architects is but a reflection of the spread of this style in post-war Europe where, significantly, the only major architects who are not now resident in the U.S.A.—Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto—are, of course, the innovators. Swedish architecture has surprisingly little influence on this new movement whose prime manifestations appear to be: a) the plastique of folk and anonymous architecture: Initially stimulated by Mediterranean building, recently this interest has moved nearer home, with the examination of such anonymous buildings as Martello towers, oasthouses, brick-kilns, etc.; and also including aspects of the nineteenth century, warehouses, office buildings, etc.; in fact, anything of any period which is unselfconscious and usually anonymous. It should be noted that the outside appearance of these buildings is an efficient expression of their specific functions whereas today they may be appreciated picturesquely and possibly utilized arbitrarily. The method of design to a modern mind can only be understood in the scientific, or in the engineer’s sense, as a definite analysis of possibilities—not as a vague poetic dealing with poetic matters, with derivative ideas of what looks domestic, or looks farmlike, or looks ecclesiastical—the dealing with a multitude of flavors—that is what architects have been doing in the last hundred years. They have been trying to deal with a set of flavors—things that look like things but that were not the things themselves. Old farmhouses and cottages are things themselves—cottages and farmhouses. 3

b) The application of orthogonal proportion and the obvious use of basic geometrical elements appears to be diminishing, and instead something of

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the variability found in nature is attempted. “Dynamic cellularism” is an architecture comprising several elements, repetitive or varied. The assemblage of units is more in terms of growth and change than of mere addition, more akin to patterns of crystal formations or biological divisions than to the static rigidity of a structural grid. This form of assemblage is in contrast to the definitive architecture and the containing periphery of, for example, a building such as Unité. It is significant that in large single-cell and usually symmetrical structures, e.g., a stadium and auditorium, that an aspect of neo-Palladianism is most relevant, particularly in the work of Catalano, Candela, and the North Carolina school. c) A return to the last significant period of English architecture: a revaluation of Voysey, Mackintosh, and the turn of the century when we last held the initiative in Europe. It is obvious that the architecture of this period is still the most modern that we possess, but in returning to the point of departure we may be implying that the Continental innovations of the twenties and thirties are incapable of development, presumably because they were foreign to our own experience and today they are academic and no longer valid in our present situation. “The New Movement is anti-intellectual, anti-posh, and anti-official minded...,” 4 so commences a description of “The Movement” in post-war English literature to which the new architectural trends have some obvious affinities. At both the Third Programme and the Elvis Presley levels there is a revival of interest in folk art. The metropolitanism of Sartre and Moravia is being replaced on one hand by “Lucky Jim” provincialism and, on the other, the “mythissmus” of Dylan Thomas and Bert Brecht. It appears that the recent trends are nationalistic and more the reflection of a “cottage” culture than the expression of supposedly undesirable ad-mass society. The number of book references in this article is considerable, and indeed one of our vices is an over-literary approach to architecture. It would appear that theories of building are more important than realization. The influence of the camera must also have affected our observation. The range of the camera lens is a small angle focusing attention on the particular and distorting the overall. These media of communication have been useful in the last fifty years when programmatic architecture has almost entirely been built outside this country but their effectiveness is limited, and the transference from picture to reality— picturesque. A good aspect of the recent trend is the ability to be stimulated by actual contact with a local object even though its author may be unknown and theories appertaining to its appearance unwritten. By the end of the twenties, the strength of modern architecture lay in the closeness of its extremes. At about the time of the Bauhaus, a common synthesis of the recent past and a definite attitude toward the future was, in fact, if not international, at least universal in Europe. The works of Gropius and Aalto at this period, for instance, had a more or less common appearance. From the public’s viewpoint this was an asset, and the new architecture convinced by its logic and style a small but influential part of that public. By the late thirties, modern architecture had percolated into remote corners of the world,

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encountering the infinite idiosyncrasies of locality, and, at the same time, architects, feeling the limitations of their style and becoming intent upon extending their vocabulary, embarked upon a process of diffusion, assimilation, and personalization. This process is still going on with the result that today it can in no way be said that there is any similarity in the recent work of Gropius and Aalto. If this period of dispersal is coming to an end, attempts may again be made to achieve a synthesis, with the possible revelation that modern architecture has divided into two, approximately one for either side of the Atlantic. The Old World exploiting, and contorting, traditional ways and means, and the New World inventing techniques and developing the appropriate expression of the modern attitude. As a nation we will probably get the architecture we deserve and, at this stage, we might reconsider these new trends which may ultimately be recognized as standing apart from the mainstream of modern architecture. Thirty years ago there was something called “modern” poetry. Go back to the Waste Land, and, if it is any length of time since you read it, I guarantee that one of the things you will notice is how much more modern it is than anything being written now; I mean “modern” in the sense that Bauhaus architecture, Cubist painting, etc., are modern. This quality, this modernity, which was supposed to represent the twentieth century and set it apart from the nineteenth, had many absurd features, and the reaction away from it was quite justifiable; but it is becoming obvious by this time that the baby has been emptied away with the bathwater. 5

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Chapter 6

Bioregionalism

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Reinhabiting California

Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann

Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice

Jim Dodge

Biotechnology and Regional Integration

Gary J. Coates

Desert Bloom

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Berg and Dasmann’s “Reinhabiting

he submit to the prestigious journal

California” was published just a

The Ecologist. ii Ultimately they would

decade into the coalescence of

collaborate, producing this text, which

the bioregional movement and is

not only demonstrates a balance

widely considered the first classic

of Berg’s activism and Dasmann’s

bioregional polemic. The majority

rigor, but because of that balance,

of the text was originally written by

helped to establish the bioregional

Berg under the title “Strategies for

vision as more than just a reactionary

Reinhabiting the northern California

movement. The central metaphors

Bioregion” and appeared in the

they employ, “living-in-place” and

short-lived journal Seriatim: Journal

“reinhabitation,” have since become

of Ecotopia, which promoted the

central tenets of the movement.

realignment of political jurisdictions along bioregional or ecological lines in order to protect and preserve ecosystemic health. i In effect, it called for the secession of the northern California region from federal and

Peter Berg (b. 1937) is an activist and director of the Planet Drum Foundation, an organization he cofounded in 1973 to advance bioregional ideas. Raymond Dasmann (1919–2002) was professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an author, field biologist, and international conservation activist.

state control—a classic decentralist tenet of bioregionalist thought— along the lines portrayed in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia. Berg was a well-known environmental activist and cofounder of the Planet Drum Society, a nonprofit devoted to the promotion of bioregional ideas, attitudes, and strategies through publication, education, and the staging of educational or political events. Raymond Dasmann, a field biologist and ecologist, had been active in environmental conservation issues since the mid-1950s. His studies of various ecological habitats had fostered a unique local-global perspective on environmental issues that led to his books Environmental Conservation, The Destruction of California, and a United Nations report that mapped the world in terms of bioregion, which was also published in 1977. Dasmann had read Berg’s “Strategies” paper and suggested

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Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann

Reinhabiting California Originally published in the Ecologist 7, no. 10 (1977): 399–401. Reprinted with the permission of the Planet Drum Foundation and Peter Berg.

A change is taking place in California. It cannot be easily quantified or evaluated since many who are involved do not want to be counted or publicized. But the direction is becoming clear. The change involves the spread of communities of people who are trying a new approach to living on and with the land. We call this phenomenon reinhabitation, a process that involves learning to live-in-place. Living-in-Place

Living-in-place means following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site. A society which practices living-in-place keeps a balance with its region of support through links between human lives, other living things, and the processes of the planet—seasons, weather, water cycles—as revealed by the place itself. It is the opposite of a society which “makes a living” through short-term destructive exploitation of land and life. Living-in-place is an age-old way of existence, disrupted in some parts of the world a few millennia ago by the rise of exploitative civilization, and more generally during the past two centuries by the spread of industrial civilization. It is not, however, to be thought of as antagonistic to civilization, in the more humane sense of that word, but may be the only way in which a truly civilized existence can be maintained. In nearly every region of North America, including most of California, natural life-support systems have been severely weakened. The original wealth of biotic diversity has been largely spent and altered toward a narrow range of mostly non-native crops and stock. Chronic misuse has ruined huge areas of once-rich farms, forest, and range land. Wastes from absurdly dense industrial concentrations have left some places almost unlivable. But, regardless of the “endless frontier” delusion and invader mentality that came to dominate in North America, removing one species or native people after another to makea-living for the invaders, we now know that human life depends ultimately on the continuation of other life. Living-in-place provides for such continuation. It has become a necessity if people intend to stay in any region without further changing it in ever more dangerous directions. Once all California was inhabited by people who used the land lightly and seldom did lasting harm to its life-sustaining capacity. Most of them have gone.

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But if the life-destructive path of technological society is to be diverted into life-sustaining directions, the land must be reinhabited. Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means undertaking activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated, it involves becoming fully alive in and with a place. It involves applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter. Useful information for reinhabitants can come from a wide range of sources. Studies of local native inhabitants, in particular the experiences of those who have lived there before, both those who tried to make a living and those who lived-in-place, can contribute. Reinhabitants can apply this information toward shaping their own life patterns and establishing relationships with the land and life around them. This will help determine the nature of the bioregion within which they are learning to live-in-place. Reinhabitation involves developing a bioregional identity, something most North Americans have lost, or have never possessed. We define bioregion in a sense different from the biotic province of Dasmann (1973) or the biogeographical province of Udvardy (1975). The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place. Within a bioregion the conditions that influence life are similar and these in turn have influenced human occupancy. A bioregion can he determined initially by use of climatology, physiography, animal and plant geography, natural history and other descriptive natural sciences. The final boundaries of a bioregion are best described by the people who have long lived within it, through human recognition of the realities of living-in-place. All life on the planet is interconnected in a few obvious ways, and in many more that remain barely explored. But there is a distinct resonance among living things and factors which influence them that occurs specifically within each separate place on the planet. Discovering and describing that resonance is a way to describe a bioregion. The realities of a bioregion are obvious in a gross sense. Nobody would confuse the Mojave desert with the fertile valley of central California, nor the Great Basin semi-arid land with the California coast. Between the major bioregions the differences are sufficiently marked that people do not usually attempt to practice the Sonoran desert way of life in the Oregonian coastal area. But there are many intergradations. The chaparral-covered foothills of southern California are not markedly distinct from those of the coast ranges of northern California. But the attitudes of people and the centers to which they relate (San Francisco and Los Angeles) are different and these can lead to different approaches to living on the land. The northern California bioregion is ringed by mountains on the north, east, and south and extends some distance into the Pacific Ocean on the west.

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Since the boundaries depend in part on human attitudes they cannot be clearly mapped. These attitudes, however, have been persistent since prehistoric times. The region is separated from southern California by the barrier of the Tehachapi Mountains and their extension through the Transverse Ranges to Point Conception on the seaward side. Flora and fauna change to some extent on either side of this boundary, but human attitudes are more important in the separation. Eastward, the region is enclosed by the Sierra Nevada which stops the rain and defines the dry Nevadan bioregion. Northward the volcanic Cascade Range and the geologically ancient Klamath Mountains separate the Oregonian bioregion. Along the coast the boundaries are fuzzy, but one could draw a line at the northern limit of the coastal redwood forests at Oregon’s Chetco River. Within the bioregion is one major watershed, that of the Sacramento–San Joaquin river system which drains from all of the Sierra Nevada, Cascade, and interior Coast Ranges and flows through the broad plain of the Central Valley. Coastally, smaller watersheds are significant, those of the Salinas, Russian, Eel, Mad, Klamath and Smith rivers. The Klamath River is anomalous in that it drains from an area that belongs to a different bioregion. So too does the Pit River which joins the Sacramento. Otherwise the drainage systems help to define and tie together the life of the bioregion, and the characteristics of watersheds point out the necessities which those who would live-in-place must recognize. Biologically the California biotic province, which forms the heart of the bioregion, is not only unique but somewhat incredible—a West Coast refuge for obscure species, full of endemic forms of plants and animals. It is a Mediterranean climatic region unlike any other in North America. It is a place of survival for once widespread species as well as a place where other distinct forms evolved. Anthropologically it is also unique, a refuge for a great variety of non-agricultural peoples on a continent where agriculture had become dominant. During the century and a half that invader society has occupied northern California, a primary sense of location has been provided by surveyors dividing up the land. We know more about property lines than we do about the life that moves under, over, and through them. People are bombarded with information about the prices of things, but seldom learn their real biospheric costs. They are encouraged to measure the dimensions of things without ever learning their places in the continuity of bioregional life. Our real “period of discovery” has just begun. The bioregion is only barely recognized in terms of how life systems relate to each other within it. It is still an anxious mystery whether we will be able to continue living here. How many people can the bioregion carry without destroying it further? What kinds of activities should be encouraged? Which ones are too ruinous to continue? How can people find out about bioregional criteria in a way that they will feel these exist for their mutual benefit rather than as an imposed set of regulations? Natural watersheds could receive prominent recognition as the frameworks within which communities are organized. The network of springs, creeks, and rivers flowing together in a specific area exerts a dominant influence on all

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non-human life there; it is the basic designer of local life. Floods and droughts in northern California remind us that watersheds affect human lives as well, but their full importance is more subtle and pervasive. Native communities were developed expressly around local water supplies, and tribal boundaries were often set by the limits of watersheds. Pioneer settlements followed the same pattern, often displacing native groups with the intention of securing their water. Defining the local watershed, restricting growth and development to fit the limits of water supplies, planning to maintain these and restore the free-flowing condition of tributaries that are blocked or the purity of any which have been polluted, and exploring relationships with the larger water systems connecting to it could become primary directions for reinhabitory communities. They could view themselves as centered on and responsible for the watershed. The Central Valley has become one of the planet’s food centers. The current scale of agriculture there is huge: thousands of square miles under constant cultivation to produce multiple annual crops. Fossil-fuel-dependent heavy equipment appears at every stage of farming operations, and there is a steadily rising rate of artificial fertilizer use. Most of the land is owned or leased by absentee agribusiness corporations. It is a naturally productive place. Northern California has a temperate climate, a steady supply of water, and the topsoil is some of the richest in North America. But the current scale of agriculture is untenable in the long term. Fossil fuel and chemical fertilizer can only become more expensive, and the soil is simultaneously being ruined and blown away. There needs to be massive redistribution of land to create smaller farms. They would concentrate on growing a wider range of food species (including native food plants), increasing the nutritional value of crops, maintaining the soil, employing alternatives to fossil fuels, and developing small-scale marketing systems. More people would be involved, thereby creating jobs and lightening the population load on the cities. Forests have to be allowed to rebuild themselves. Clearcutting ruins their capability to provide a long-term renewable resource. Watershed-based reforestation and stream restoration projects are necessary everywhere that logging has been done. Cut trees are currently being processed wastefully: tops, stumps, and branches are left behind, and whole logs are shipped away to be processed elsewhere and sold back in the region. Crafts that use every part of the tree should be employed to make maximum use of the materials while employing a greater number of regional people. Fisheries have to be carefully protected. They provide a long-term life-support of rich protein, if used correctly, or a quickly emptied biological niche, if mishandled. Catching fish and maintaining the fisheries have to be seen as parts of the same concern. Reinhabitory consciousness can multiply the opportunities for employment within the bioregion. New reinhabitory livelihoods based on exchanging information, cooperative planning, administering exchanges of labor and tools, intra- and inter-regional networking, and watershed media emphasizing bioregional rather than city-consumer information could replace a few centralized positions with many decentralized ones. The goals of restoring and maintaining

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watersheds, topsoil, and native species invite the creation of many jobs to simply undo the bioregional damage that invader society has already done. Politics

Beginning with the Spanish Occupation, the distinctiveness of northern California’s ongoing bioregional life has been obscured by a succession of alien super-identities. The place to fit into simply wasn’t recognized. First, it was part of “New Spain,” a designation that tells nothing of this specific place and lumps it with a dozen barely related bioregions radiating out from the Caribbean. “California” was a fictional island created by a 16th-century Spanish novelist, and it became the next rough label pasted over the bioregion when it was adopted for the Pacific side of New Spain. “Alta California” actually approximated the bioregion by accident; its real use was simply to acknowledge further Spanish explorations above the “baja.” Mexico held it (along with half the western U.S.) in the early 19th century, but since the middle of last century almost the whole bioregion has been included in the annexed portion of Mexican territory that was sliced out as the State of California along with totally foreign pieces of the Great Basin desert and similarly dry stretches below the Tehachapi Mountains. The bioregion that exists largely in what is now called northern California has now become visible as a separate whole, and, for purposes of reinhabiting the place, it should have a political identity of its own. It is predictable that as long as it belongs to a larger state it will be subject to southern California’s demands on its watersheds. Its rivers already run through pipes to Los Angeles. Its control over use of the Central Valley is pre-empted by policies tailored for southern mono­cultures. From a reinhabitory point of view, both are bioregional death threats. Elections over the last decade have shown a distinct difference in voting sentiments between northern and southern California. It is likely that this difference will continue and increase on vital bioregional issues on which the population weight of southern California will prevail. The bioregion cannot be treated with regard for its own life-continuities while it is part of and administered by a larger state government. It should be a separate state. As a separate state, the bioregion could redistrict its counties to create watershed governments appropriate to maintaining local life-places. Citycountry divisions could be resolved on bioregional grounds. Perhaps the greatest advantage of separate statehood would be the opportunity to declare a space for addressing each other as members of a species sharing the planet together and with all the other species.

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By the time this article was published, Jim Dodge had spent a decade in northern California as a sheep farmer, laborer with the Cazadero Forest Workers Cooperative, writer, and activist in the bioregional community. Through his association with Planet Drum, the organization founded by Peter Berg (see Berg and Dasmann, this chapter), he was caught up in the attempts to clarify the means, meaning, and purpose of the stillfledgling movement. i His essay, as he makes clear, does not seek to define bioregionalism as much as provide a sketch of its animating principles and history. His place in the bioregionalist movement is reminiscent of that held by Lewis Mumford with regard to the Regional Planning Association of America. Dodge, like Mumford, placed the actions and dispersed rhetoric of his colleagues within a reasonably coherent framework, thereby allowing the movement to continue to grow. Disparaging the key role his clear writing played in the discourse, Dodge stated in 2005: “As it turned out, there wasn’t much to say about bioregionalism, but much to do, much more than is possible in a lifetime. Between theory and practice proved less a leap than an endless circular walk: looking at this, figuring out its relation to that.” ii In this, Dodge reiterates what many consider his most important contribution to the bioregional discourse, the elevation of practice and engagement over theorization and debate. Jim Dodge (b. 1945) is assistant professor and director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at Humboldt State University.

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Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice Originally published in CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1981): 6–12. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I’m not all that sure what bioregionalism is. To my understanding, bioregionalism is an idea still in loose and amorphous formulation, and presently is more hopeful declaration than actual practice. In fact, “idea” may be too generous: bioregionalism is more properly a notion, which is variously defined as a general idea, a belief, an opinion, an intuition, an inclination, an urge. Furthermore, as I think will prove apparent, bioregionalism is hardly a new notion; it has been the animating cultural principle through 99 percent of human history, and is at least as old as consciousness. Thus, no doubt, the urge. My purpose here is not really to define bioregionalism—that will take care of itself in the course of things—but to mention some of the elements that I see composing the notion, and some possibilities for practice. I speak with no special privilege on the matter other than my longstanding and fairly studious regard for the subject, a regard enriched by my teachers and numerous bioregional friends. My only true qualification is that I’m fool enough to try. “Bioregionalism” is from the Greek bios (life) and the French région (region), itself from the Latin regia (territory), and earlier, regere (to rule or govern). Etymologically, then, bioregionalism means life territory, place of life, or perhaps by reckless extension, government by life. If you can’t imagine that government by life would be at least 40 billion times better than government by the Reagan administration, or Mobil Oil, or any other distant powerful monolith, then your heart is probably no bigger than a prune pit and you won’t have much sympathy for what follows. A central element of bioregionalism—and one that distinguishes it from similar politics of place—is the importance given to natural systems, both as the source of physical nutrition and as the body of metaphors from which our spirits draw sustenance. A natural system is a community of interdependent life, a mutual biological integration on the order of an ecosystem, for example. What constitutes this community is uncertain beyond the obvious—that it includes all interacting life forms, from the tiniest fleck of algae to human beings, as well as their biological processes. To this bare minimum, already impenetrably

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complex, bioregionalism adds the influences of cultural behavior, such as subsistence techniques and ceremonies. Many people further insist—sensibly, I think—that this community/ecosystem must also include the planetary processes and the larger figures of regulation: solar income, magnetism, gravity, and so forth. Bioregionalism is simply biological realism; in natural systems we find the physical truth of our being, the real obvious stuff like the need for oxygen as well as the more subtle need for moonlight, and perhaps other truths beyond those. Not surprisingly, then, bioregionalism holds that the health of natural systems is directly connected to our own physical/psychic health as individuals and as a species, and for that reason natural systems and their informing integrations deserve, if not utter veneration, at least our clearest attention and deepest respect. No matter how great our laws, technologies, or armies, we can’t make the sun rise every morning nor the rain dance on the goldenback ferns. To understand natural systems is to begin an understanding of the self, its common and particular essences—literal self-interest in its barest terms. “As above, so below,” according to the old-tradition alchemists; natural systems as models of consciousness. When we destroy a river, we increase our thirst, ruin the beauty of free-flowing water, forsake the meat and spirit of the salmon, and lose a little bit of our souls. Unfortunately, human society has also developed technologies that make it possible to lose big chunks all at once. If we make just one serious mistake with nuclear energy, for instance, our grandchildren may be born with bones like overcooked spaghetti, or torn apart by mutant rats. Global nuclear war is suicide: the “losers” die instantly; the “winners” inherit slow radiation death and twisted chromosomes. By any sensible measure of self-interest, by any regard for life, nuclear war is abhorrent, unthinkable, and loathsomely stupid, and yet the United States and other nations spend billions to provide that possibility. It is the same mentality that pooh-poohs the growing concentration of poisons in the biosphere. It’s like the farmer who was showing off his prize mule to a stranger one day when the mule suddenly fell over sideways and died. The farmer looked at the body in bewildered disbelief: “Damn,” he said, “I’ve had this mule for 27 years and it’s the first time he’s ever done this.” To which the stranger, being a biological realist, undoubtedly replied, “No shit.” While I find an amazing depth of agreement among bioregionalists on what constitutes bios, and on what general responsibilities attend our place in the skein of things, there is some disagreement—friendly but passionate—on what actually constitutes a distinct biological region (as opposed to arbitrary entities, like states and counties, where boundaries are established without the dimmest ecological perception, and therefore make for cultural incoherence and piecemeal environmental management). Since the very gut of bioregional thought is the integrity of natural systems and culture, with the function of culture being the mediation of the self and the ecosystem, one might think “bioregion” would be fairly tightly defined. But I think it must be kept in mind that, to paraphrase Poe and Jack Spicer, we’re dealing with the grand concord of what does not

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stoop to definition. There are, however, a number of ideas floating around regarding the biological criteria for a region. I’ll mention some of them below, limiting the examples to northern California. One criterion for determining a biological region is biotic shift, a percentage change in plant/animal species composition from one place to another—that is, if 15 to 25 percent of the species where I live are different from those where you live, we occupy different biological regions. We probably also experience different climates and walk on different soils, since those differences are reflected in species composition. Nearly everyone I’ve talked with agrees that biotic shift is a fairly slick and accurate way to make bioregional distinctions; the argument is over the percentage, which invariably seems arbitrary. Since the change in biotic composition is usually gradual, the biotic shift criterion permits vague and permeable boundaries between regions, which I personally favor. The idea, after all, is not to replace one set of lines with another, but simply to recognize inherent biological integrities for the purpose of sensible planning and management. Another way to biologically consider regions is by watershed. This method is generally straightforward, since drainages are clearly apparent on topographical maps. Watershed is usually taken to mean river drainage, so if you live on Cottonwood Creek you are part of the Sacramento River drainage. The problem with watersheds as bioregional criteria is that if you live in San Francisco you are also part of the Sacramento (and San Joaquin) River drainage, and that’s a long way from Cottonwood Creek. Since any long drainage presents similar problems, most people who advance the watershed criterion make intradrainage distinctions (in the case of the Sacramento: headwaters, Central Valley, west-slope Sierra, east-slope Coast Range, and delta/bay). The west slope of the Coast Range, with its short-running rivers and strong Pacific influence, is often considered as a whole biological area, at least from the Gualala River to the Mattole River or, depending on who you’re talking to, from the Russian River to the Eel River, though they aren’t strictly west-slope Coast Range rivers. The Klamath, Smith, and Trinity drainages are often considered a single drainage system, with the arguable inclusion of the Chetco and the Rogue. A similar method of bioregional distinction is based upon land form. Roughly, northern California breaks down into the Sierra, the Coast Range, the Central Valley, the Klamath Range, the southern part of the Cascade Range, and the Modoc Plateau. Considering the relationship between topography and water, it is not surprising that land-form distinctions closely follow watersheds. A different criterion for making bioregional distinctions is, awkwardly put, cultural/phenomenological: you are where you perceive you are; your turf is what you think it is, individually and collectively. Although the human sense of territory is deeply evolved, and cultural/perceptual behavior certainly influences the sense of place, this view seems to me a bit anthropocentric. And though it is difficult not to view things in terms of human experience and values, it does seem wise to remember that human perception is notoriously prey to distortion

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and the strange delights of perversity. Our species hasn’t done too well lately working essentially from this view; because we’re ecological dominants doesn’t necessarily mean we’re ecological determinants. (In fairness, I should note that many friends think I’m unduly cranky on this subject.) One of the more provocative ideas to delineate bioregions is in terms of “spirit places” or psyche-tuning power-presences, such as Mount Shasta and the Pacific Ocean. By this criterion, a bioregion is defined by the predominant psychophysical influence where you live. You have to live in its pres­ence long enough to truly feel its force within you and that it’s not mere descriptive geography. Also provocative is the notion that bioregion is a vertical phenomenon having more to do with elevation than horizontal deployment—thus a distinction between hill people and flatlanders, which in Northern California also tends to mean country and city. A person living at 2,000 feet in the Coast Range would have more in cultural common with a Sierra dweller at a similar altitude than with someone at sea level 20 miles away. To briefly recapitulate, the criteria most often advanced for making bioregional distinctions are biotic shift, watershed, land form, cultural/phenomenological, spirit presences, and elevation. Taken together, as I think they should be, they give us a strong sense of where we’re at and the life that enmeshes our own. Nobody I know is pushing for a quick definition anyway. Bioregionalism, whatever it is, occupies that point in development (more properly, renewal) where definition is unnecessary and perhaps dangerous. Better now to let definitions emerge from practice than impose them dogmatically from the git-go. A second element of bioregionalism is anarchy. I hesitate using that fine word because it’s been so distorted by reactionary shitheads to scare people that its connotative associations have become bloody chaos and fiends amok, rather than political decentralization, self-determination, and a commitment to social equity. Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control; it means out of their control. Anarchy is based upon a sense of interdependent self-reliance, the conviction that we as a community, or a tight, small-scale federation of communities, can mind our own business, and can make decisions regarding our individual and communal lives and gladly accept the responsibilities and consequences of those decisions. Further, by consolidating decision making at a local, face-to-face level without having to constantly push information through insane bureaucratic hierarchies, we can act more quickly in relation to natural systems and, since we live there, hopefully with more knowledge and care. The United States is simply too large and complex to be responsibly governed by a decision-making body of perhaps 1,000 people representing 220,000,000 Americans and a large chunk of the biosphere, especially when those 1,000 decision makers can only survive by compromise and generally are forced to front for heavy economic interests (media campaigns for national office are expensive). A government where one person represents the interests of 220,000 others is absurd, considering that not all the people voted for the winning representative (or even voted), and especially considering that most of those 220,000 people are

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capable of representing themselves. I think people do much better, express their deeper qualities, when their actions matter. Obviously one way to make government more meaningful and responsible is to involve people directly day by day in the processes of decision, which only seems possible if we reduce the scale of government. A bioregion seems about the right size: say close to a small state, or along the lines of the Swiss canton system or American Indian tribes. If nothing else, bioregional government—which theoretically would express the biological and cultural realities of people-in-place—would promote the diversity of biosocial experimentation; and in diversity is stability. The present system of national government seems about to collapse on the weight of its own emptiness. Our economy is dissolving like wet sugar. Violence is epidemic. The quality of our workmanship—always the hallmark of a proud people—has deteriorated so badly that we’re ashamed to classify our products as durable goods. Our minds have been homogenized by television, which keeps our egos in perpetual infancy while substituting them for a sense of the self. Our information comes from progressively fewer sources, none of them notably reliable. We spend more time posturing than we do getting it on. In short, American culture has become increasingly gutless and barren in our lifetimes, and the political system little more than a cover for an economics that ravages the planet and its people for the financial gain of very few. It seems almost a social obligation to explore alternatives. Our much-heralded standard of living hasn’t done much for the quality of our daily lives; the glut of commodities, endlessly hurled at us out of the vast commodity spectacle, is just more shit on the windshield. I don’t want to imply that bioregionalism is the latest sectarian addition to the American Left, which historically has been more concerned with doctrinal purity and shafting each other than with effective practice. It’s not a question of working within the system or outside the system, but simply of working, somewhere, to pull it off. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I’m not so sure bioregionalism even has a doctrine to be pure about—it’s more a sense of direction (uphill, it seems) than the usual leftist highway to Utopia...or Ecotopia for that matter. Just for the record, and to give some credence to the diversity of thought informing bioregionalism, I want to note some of the spirits I see at work in the early formulation of the notion: pantheists, Wobs, Reformed Marxists (that is, those who see the sun as the means of production), Diggers, libertarians, Kropotkinites (mutual aid and coevolution), animists, alchemists (especially the old school), lefty Buddhists, Situationists (con­summate analysts of the commodity spectacle), syndicalists, Provos, born-again Taoists, general outlaws, and others drawn to the decentralist banner by raw empathy. A third element composing the bioregional notion is spirit. Since I can’t claim any spiritual wisdom, and must admit to being virtually ignorant on the subject, I’m reluctant to offer more than the most tentative perceptions. What I think most bioregionalists hold in spiritual common is a profound regard for life—all

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life, not just white Americans, or humankind entire, but frogs, roses, mayflies, coyotes, lichens: all of it: the gopher snake and the gopher. For instance, we don’t want to save the whales for the sweetsie-poo, lily-romantic reasons attributed to us by those who profit from their slaughter; we don’t want them saved merely because they are magnificent creatures, so awesome that when you see one close from an open boat your heart roars; we want to save them for the most selfish of reasons: without them we are diminished. In the bioregional spirit-view we’re all one creation, and it may seem almost simple-minded to add that there is a connection—even a necessary unity—between the natural world and the human mind (which may be just a fancy way of saying there is a connection between life and existence). Different people and groups have their own paths and practices and may describe this connection differently— profound, amusing, ineluctable, mysterious—but they all acknowledge the importance of the connection. The connection is archaic, primitive, and so obvious that it hasn’t received much attention since the rise of Christian dominion and fossil-fuel industrialism. If it is a quality of archaic thought to dispute the culturally enforced dichotomy between the spiritual and the practical, I decidedly prefer the archaic view. What could possibly be of more practical concern than our spiritual well-being as individuals, as a species, and as members of a larger community of life? The Moral Majority certainly isn’t going to take us in that direction; they’re interested in business as usual, as their golden boy, James Watt, has demonstrated. We need fewer sermons and more prayers. This sense of bioregional spirit isn’t fixed to a single religious form or practice. Generally it isn’t Christian-based or noticeably monotheistic, though such views aren’t excluded. I think the main influences are the primitive animist/Great Spirit tradition, various Eastern and esoteric religious practices, and plain ol’ paying attention. I may be stretching the accord, but I also see a shared awareness that the map is not the journey, and for that reason it is best to be alert and to respond to the opportunities presented rather than waste away wishing life would offer some worthy spiritual challenge (which it does, constantly, anyway). Call it whatever seems appropriate—enlightenment, fulfillment, spiritual maturity, happiness, selfrealization—it has to be earned, and to be earned it has to be lived, and that means bringing it into our daily lives and working on it. Instant gratifications are not the deepest gratifications, I suspect, though Lord knows they certainly have their charms. The emphasis is definitely on the practice, not the doctrine, and especially on practicing what you preach; there is a general recognition that there are many paths, and that they are a further manifestation of crucial natural diversity. I might also note for serious backsliders that the play is as serious as the work, and there is a great willingness to celebrate; nobody is interested in a spirit whose holiness is constantly announced with sour piety and narrow self-righteousness. Combining the three elements gives a loose idea of what I take to be bioregionalism: a decentralized, self-determined mode of social organization; a culture predicated upon biological integrities and acting in respectful accord; and a society which honors and abets the spiritual development of its members. Or so

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the theory goes. However, it’s not mere theory, for there have been many cultures founded essentially upon those principles; for example, it has been the dominant cultural mode of inhabitation on this continent. The point is not to go back, but to take the best forward. Renewal, not some misty retreat into what was. Theories, ideas, notions—they have their generative and reclamative values, and certainly a loveliness, but without the palpable intelligence of practice they remain hovering in the nether regions of nifty entertainments or degrade into more flamboyant fads and diversions like literary movements and hula-hoops. Practice is what puts the heart to work. If theory establishes the game, practice is the gamble, and the first rule of all gambling games has it like this: you can play bad and win; you can play good and lose; but if you play good over the long haul you’re gonna come out alright. Bioregional practice (or applied strategy) can take as many forms as the imagination and nerves, but for purpose of example I’ve hacked it into two broad categories, resistance and renewal. Resistance involves a struggle between the bioregional forces (who represent intelligence, excellence, and care) and the forces of heartlessness (who represent a greed so lifeless and forsaken it can’t even pass as ignorance). In a way, I think it really is that simple, that there is, always, a choice about how we will live our lives, that there is a state of constant opportunity for both spiritual succor and carnal delight, and that the way we choose to live is the deepest expression of who we truly are. If we consistently choose against the richest possibilities of life, against kindness, against beauty, against love and sweet regard, then we aren’t much. Our only claim to dignity is trying our best to do whatever we think is right, to put some heart in it, some soul, flower, and root. We’re going to fall on our asses a lot, founder on our pettiness and covetousness and sloth, but at least there is the effort, and that’s surely better than being just another quivering piece of the national cultural jello. Or so it seems to me. However, the primary focus of resistence is not the homogeneous American supraculture—that can be resisted for the most part simply by refusing to participate, while at the same time trying to live our lives the way we think we should (knowing we’ll get no encouragement whatsoever from the colonial overstructure). Rather, the focus of resistance is against the continuing destruction of natural systems. We can survive the ruthless homogeneity of national culture because there are many holes we can slip through, but we cannot survive if the natural systems that sustain us are destroyed. That has to be stopped if we want to continue living on this planet. That’s not “environmentalism”; it’s ecology with a vengeance. Personally, I think we should develop a Sophoclean appreciation for the laws of nature, and submit. Only within the fractional time frame of fossil-fuel industrialization have we begun to seriously insult the environment and impudently violate the conditions of life. We’ve done a great deal of damage in a very short time, and only because of the amazing flexibility of natural systems have we gotten away with it so far. But I don’t think we’ll destroy the planet; she will destroy us first, which is perhaps only to say we’ll destroy ourselves. The most crucial point of resistance is choosing not to.

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And then we must try to prevent others from doing it for us all, since by allowing monopoly-capital centralized government (which, like monotheism, is not so much putting all your eggs in one basket as dropping your one egg in a blender), we have given them the power to make such remote-control decisions. The way to prevent it is five-fold: by being a model for an alternative; by knowing more than they do; by being politically astute; by protecting what we value; and by any means necessary. (I think it’s important to note that there is nearly complete agreement that nonviolence is the best means available, and that the use of violence is always a sad admission of desperation. Besides, they have all the money, guns, and lawyers. People advocating violent means are probably not very interested in living much longer.) I think political smarts are best applied in the local community and county. Most crucial land-use decisions, for instance, are made at the county level by boards of supervisors. The representative-to-constituent ratio is obviously much better in a county than in a country, and therefore informed and spirited constituents have a far greater influence on decisions and policies. Work to elect sympathetic representatives. Put some money where your heart is. Go to your share of the generally boring meetings and hearings. Challenge faulty information (thus the importance of knowing more than they do). Create alternatives. Stand your ground. Buying land is also a strong political move; “ownership” is the best protection against gross environmental abuse, just as living on the land is the best defense against mass-media gelatin culture, assuming the quality of information influences the quality of thought. Owning land also affords increased political leverage within the present system. Besides, bioregionalism without a tangible land base would be like love without sex; the circuits of association wouldn’t be complete. (Of course, it isn’t necessary to own land to either appreciate it or resist its destruction, and I hope nobody infers that bioregionalism is for land aristocracy.) The growth and strength of the “environmental movement” in the past decade has encouraged awareness about the destruction of natural systems and the consequences of such callous disregard. This is all to the good, and we should continue to stay in their faces on critical issues. But it’s going to be continual crisis ecology unless we come up with a persuasive economic alternative; otherwise, most people will go on choosing progress over maturity, for progress is deeply equated with payroll, and money, to most people, means life. It’s that cold. It’s also basically true, and many friends share my chagrin that it took us so long to grasp that truism. It now seems painfully obvious that the economic system must be transformed if we hope to protect natural systems from destruction in the name of Mammon. Economics seems to baffle everyone, especially me. I have no prescriptions to offer, except to note that it doesn’t have to be one economic system, and that any economics should include a fair measure of value. What’s needed is an economy that takes into true account the cost of biospheric destruction and at the same time feeds the family. People must be convinced that it’s in their best economic interest to maintain healthy biological systems. The best place to meet this challenge is where you live—that is, personally and within the community.

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It’s probably also fairly plain that changing the economic system will involve changing our conception of what constitutes a fulfilled life and cracking the cultural mania for mindless consumption and its attendant waste. To realize what is alive within us, the who of who we are, we have to know what we truly need, and what is enough. As Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, affluence can be attained either through increasing production or reducing needs. Since increased production usually means ravaged natural systems, the best strategy seems the reduction of needs, and hopefully the consequent recognition that enough is plenty. A truly affluent society is one of material sufficiency and spiritual riches. While we’re keeping up this resistance in our daily lives—and I think it is in the quality of daily life rather than the momentary thrills that the heart is proven—we can begin repairing the natural systems that have been damaged. Logged and mined watersheds need to be repaired. Streams have to be cleared. Trees planted. Check dams built to stop gully erosion. Long-term management strategies developed. Tough campaigns waged to secure funding for the work. There’s a strong effort in this direction happening in Northern California now, much of it through worker co-ops and citizens’ groups, with increasingly cooperative help from local and state agencies. This work has really just begun, and the field is wide open. So far it seems to satisfy the two feelings that prompted it: the sense that we have a responsibility to renew what we’ve wasted, and the need to practice “right livelihood,” or work that provides a people a living while promoting the spirit. Natural-system renewal (or rehabilitation, or enhancement, or whatever other names it goes by) could well be our first environmental art. It requires a thorough knowledge of how natural systems work, delicate perceptions of specific sites, the development of appropriate techniques, and hard physical work of the kind that puts you to bed after dinner. What finer work than healing the Earth, where the rewards are both in the doing and the results? It deserves our participation and support. For the irrefutable fact of the matter is that if we want to explore the bioregional possibility, we’ve got to work, got to get dirty—either by sitting on our asses at environmental hearings or by busting them planting trees in the rain. Sniveling don’t make it. The chances of bioregionalism succeeding, like the chances of survival itself, are beside the point. If one person, or a few, or a community of people, live more fulfilling lives from bioregional practice, then it’s successful. This country has a twisted idea of success: it is almost always a quantitative judgment—salary, wins, the number of rooms in the house, the amount of people you command. Since bioregionalism by temperament is qualitative, the basis of judgment should be shifted accordingly. What they call a subculture, we call friends. Most of the people I talk with feel we have a fighting chance to stop environmental destruction within 50 years and to turn the culture around within 800 to 1,000 years. “Fighting chance” translates as long odds but good company, and bioregionalism is obviously directed at people whose hearts put a little gamble in their blood. Since we won’t live to see the results of this hoped-for transformation, we might as well live to start it right, with the finest expressions of spirit and style we can muster, keeping in mind that there’s only a functional difference between the flower and the root, that essentially they are part of the same abiding faith. The Sun still rises every morning. Dig in.

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Introduction to “Biotechnology and Regional Integration”

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The following article is an excerpt

contributors to Coates’s volume—

from Gary Coates’s collection

faced with the wreckage wrought by

Resettling America, which explores

some of those same technologies

the progress made toward the

Mumford had championed, such as

achievement of the postindustrial

the automobile—focus on alternative,

and bioregional pattern of settlement.

small-scale, and “appropriate”

Rather than focus on the clarification

technologies such as solar power,

of terms, Coates presents

graywater recycling, and organic

“expressions” of this process—

food production. The specific excerpt

case studies of actual projects and

reprinted here introduces the systems

proposals under way throughout

with which towns, neighborhoods,

North America.

and individual buildings must be “gracefully and gently” designed to

This call for resettlement was

support the bioregional vision.

predicated in part on the recognition of the neglected vision of Lewis

Reassessing this work in 2005,

Mumford, captured most clearly in

Coates states in a hopeful tone:

his essay “The Fourth Migration.” Mumford provided a historical

In my essay, I focused on questions

analysis, a critique, and a hoped-

of ecological, cultural and economic

for vision of regionally based and

regionalism because that is the

integrated (urban and rural) plan—

necessary basis for any authentic

what he called a “migration”—that

architectural regionalism. (Architects are

was economic, social, environmental,

so prone to become caught up in merely

and technological in scope. Mumford

formalistic debates about style and

spoke of the threat to the quality of

appearance.) Architectural regionalism

life due to metropolitan sprawl and

is the way of the future because the only

industrial pollution. The amplification

sustainable society that can be even

of those crises, along with the

imagined will be one based on an eco-

realization of even more invidious

economy rooted in the living realities of

threats motivated Coates’s call for a

bioregions. Or so it still seems to me. ii

“fifth migration.” i This resettlement echoes Berg and Dasmann’s call for “reinhabitation.”

Gary J. Coates (b. 1947) is associate professor of architecture at Kansas State University and director of the Appropriate Technology program at The University of Man in Manhattan, Kansas.

Both suggest a reinvigorated commitment to a better life “in place” that requires renewal, or getting to know your place, and resistance to its further degradation. Coates and Mumford also rely on technology for the development of a new migration. Mumford’s regional decentralization relied on the telephone, electrical grid, radio, and the automobile, while

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Gary J. Coates

Biotechnology and Regional Integration Originally published in Resettling America: Energy, Ecology, and Community (Andover, MA: Brick House, 1981), 401–14. Reprinted by permission of the author.

If, as has been suggested, the end of the fossil-fuel-based age of industrialism implies the need to redistribute population and restructure human habitat through a process of rural development and urban decentralization, then it is also clear that action toward these ends must occur within some larger, more comprehensive framework. Completely ad hoc and piecemeal change will not produce the kind of balanced and healthy cultural form that is the final aim of a resettled America. There must be a shared vision of possibilities and an appropriately scaled administrative and planning unit that will ensure that short-term change and local action will not undermine long-term viability and broader collective purpose. At a minimum, any future society must be biologically adaptive, that is, it must be able to be sustained indefinitely without disrupting the ecosystems upon which it depends for survival. This suggests that the search for an appropriate organizing framework for the creation of a new society should begin with the commonly experienced fact that the earth is not a single, homogeneous biological unit, but is, rather, a complex web of highly differentiated yet interacting assemblages of life forms and processes. These separate but interdependent systems have been referred to as biogeographic provinces, or more generally as bioregions. 1 Through a combination of geologic structure, topography, soil type, vegetation, animal life, and climate, each bioregion achieves its own unique identity. The systemic whole that is thereby created exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Any change in a part requires some change in the whole. Through this quality of internal coherence the bioregion sets natural limits on human intervention. To be adaptive, human culture must first recognize and then attempt to enhance the innate character and potential of these biogeographic areas. Thus, the bioregion can be viewed as a fundamental biological and social unit and the foundation for planning in the postindustrial age. However, while each bioregion can be differentiated from every other, it is important to recognize that, unlike the surveyor’s lines on a map, there are no clear boundaries between them. As one region shades into another, there tend to be intermediate zones that share the characteristics of two or even more adjacent systems. The bioregion, then, like any other idea, is as much a category of

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thought as it is a reality of nature. So, while the bioregion should be considered as a basic “fact” of nature, it must also be recognized that any such “fact” is also a reflection of human perceptions, goals, and purposes. Rather than eliminating the variety and diversity among naturally occurring bioregions, human culture tends to intensify their differences. This is even true in those cases where modern industrial economies have reduced entire regions to monocultural production units for world markets. While most of Kansas may be devoted solely to the production of wheat, the fact that it is wheat and not corn is directly related to the limits on action set by the ecology of the Great Plains Region. While any sane society would reject the idea and practice of a regional monoculture, any alternative that is based on polycultural farming and the promotion of intraregional stability through diversity would still be limited by the problems and potentials given by the bioregion. In addition to its selective influence upon occupation and economy, the bioregion provides the common context for everyday life. People living within a given bioregion breathe the same air, drink the same water, see the same landscape, and experience the same pattern of weather. Historically, these commonalities, which are rooted in the biology, geology, and climate of the area, have tended to unify the inhabitants and to differentiate them from the members of other regions. 2 Regional planning, then, takes as its starting point the unique mix of resources and the common background provided by the region. Its aim is to reshape the given state of nature into a humanized landscape that more completely fits the physiological, aesthetic, emotional, social, and economic needs of the human inhabitants of a given area. However, within such a humanly managed bioregion there must be room for both the wild and the tame, nature in its primordial state as well as its humanized form. The overall goal, as René Dubos has defined it, is to create a new symbiosis between nature and culture: Symbiotic relationships mean creative partnerships. The earth is to be seen neither as an ecosystem to be preserved unchanged nor as a quarry to be exploited for selfish and shortrange economic reasons, but as a garden to be cultivated for the development of its own potentialities of the human adventure. The goal of this relationship is not the maintenance of the status quo, but the emergence of new phenomena and new values. Millennia of experience show that by entering into a symbiotic relationship with nature, humankind can invent and generate futures not predictable from the deterministic order of things, and thus can engage in a continuous process of creation. 3

While a society that takes the bioregion as a fundamental unit for planning and administration would tend to aim toward a higher degree of economic self-reliance than the overspecialized monocultures of today’s industrial economies, that does not imply that it is either necessary or desirable to seek complete regional self-sufficiency. Rather, it suggests that the social, political, economic, and biological health of a region depends upon the development of all its potentials in a way that ensures its long-term viability. Only if

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basic human needs are met in such a way within the region is it possible for interregional relations to be characterized by the free and open exchange of ideas and goods. A region that survives only by importing cultural values and basic goods and supplies from distant centers exists solely at the pleasure of locally unaccountable decision makers. Such unhealthy dependencies, which now characterize relations within as well as among modern national economies, not only tend to erode the local support capacities of the earth, but they also tend to create the kinds of dependency-based psychological and social conflicts that lead to individual neurosis and blind social revolt. Economic regionalism attempts to provide a solid foundation for the nurturance of personal and cultural independence as well as the development and spread of truly productive, universalizing trends among regions and peoples. Regional planning, because of its concern for the development of the latent human and biological potential of larger-scale areas, is uniquely suited to the task of redistributing population so that human demands are matched to the long-term carrying capacity of the earth. While metropolitan planning and rural new-town planning is necessary to coordinate the growth and development of smaller-scale concentrations of population, regional planning attempts to integrate such centers of population into the larger landscape upon which they depend for survival. This is a theme that was eloquently formulated more than fifty years ago by the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). Unfortunately, the prescient insights of this small and loosely associated group of biologists, architects, planners, and cultural historians were not grasped or implemented by the nation at large. However, the new relevance of the ideas of this group to the enormous future task of resettling America can be seen in the following definition of regional planning by historian and RPAA member Lewis Mumford: Regional planning asks not how wide an area can be brought under the aegis of the metropolis, but how the population and civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid, creative life throughout a whole region—a region being any geographic area that possesses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation, industry, and culture. The regionalist attempts to plan such an area so that all its sites and resources, from forest to city, from highland to water level, may be soundly developed, and so that population will be distributed so as to utilize, rather than nullify or destroy, its natural advantages. It sees people, industry, and the land as a single unit. Instead of trying, by one desperate dodge or another, to make life a little more tolerable in the congested centers, it attempts to determine what sort of equipment will be needed in the new centers. It does not aim at urbanizing automatically the whole available countryside; it aims equally at ruralizing the stony wastes of our cities. 4

Regional planning, as conceived by Mumford and others in the RPAA, is viewed as a process that would integrate the analytical rigor of the sciences with the collective will as expressed through a fully participatory democratic process. The role of the sciences primarily is to discover and describe the rough outline and innate potentials of the bioregion. But, even this task is seen by Mumford as

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an instrument of community education and a means of creating and sustaining a shared sense of local and regional identity. The regional survey, which would include an analysis of soil, climate, geology, biology, industry, agriculture, and the history and present pattern of human settlement and local culture, is seen as the foundation for the education and socialization of the young. It would break down the present segregation of the young from the practical affairs of public life and provide a means of making science relevant to the task of creating life and values. The region as a whole, with its plant and animal life, its people, its landforms and waterways, in short, its total life, is the context within which all the inhabitants of a region, from childhood on, would be able to integrate abstract and specialized bodies of theory and knowledge with the concrete and particular experiences of everyday life. When the landscape as a whole comes to mean to the community and the individual citizen what the single garden does to the individual lover of flowers, the regional survey will not merely be a mode of assimilating scientific knowledge: it will be a dynamic preparation for further activity....Once this more realistic type of education becomes universal, instead of being pieced into the more conventional system, we will create a whole generation that will look upon every aspect of the region, the community, and their personal lives as subject to the same processes: exploration, scientific observation, imaginative reconstruction, and finally, transformation by art, by technical improvement, and by personal discipline. 5

Clearly, any conception of regional planning that does not, as a basic premise, include the idea of community education and full community participation in all phases of planning, from the survey of potentials to their realization in physical, social, and political form, would simply be an expansion of the technocratic regime of experts. However, the kind of regional planning envisioned by Mumford would not only provide a scientifically and politically sound foundation for collective action, but it would also provide a sense of personal and regional identity that would transcend narrow and arbitrary political units such as the state or nation-state. By nurturing the differentiating forces of local identity, the possibility of building a world order based on the universalizing forces of a common humanity would be greatly enhanced. Thus, regionalism at its best is an historically new expression of the movement toward world community rather than a regression to old forms of village and small town parochialism or the violent assertions of complete autonomy claimed by the large-scale, centralized nation-state. The bioregion, then, is an imaginatively constructed collective work of art. But the creation of any work of art requires, in addition to an understanding of the medium of expression, full access to the materials to be shaped into new form. A painter without knowledge of the principles of color, lacking skill in the use of the brush, and only intermittently able to gain access to canvas would be a poor bet to produce a great painting. The same is true in the case of regional planning. In addition to a scientifically informed and participatory planning process, it is necessary to have

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a legally and appropriately constituted administrative unit for implementing the common will. To accomplish this, there needs to be some form of land ownership that guarantees individual security as well as the common good. The current system of private land ownership, which is based on the assumption that land is a commodity that can be divided up, sold, and used as the owner (corporate or individual) sees fit, regardless of effects on the community at large, must be replaced. The idea of regional planning almost requires a new system of land tenure based on the community ownership of land, with individual and groupuse rights guaranteed, within limits established by the regional community. 6 At a minimum, these limits would be aimed at meeting basic human needs while protecting the integrity and long-term health of the regional and local ecology. [As described by Gottschalk], in the case of rural new-town development, community land trusts and regional land “banks” are essential to the success of that form of rural development. 7 Not only would the community ownership of land protect the leaseholders from the loss of access to their land during hard times, but it would ensure that any increases in land values created as a result of social arrangements would accrue to the community that created them rather than to profiteering private landowners. Also, since regional communities are more stable and longer-lived than individuals or corporations, they would be willing and able to make improvements to the land and to regulate its use in such a way that the needs of present and future generations would be adequately provided for. If land was held in common it might be possible, for example, to prevent the short-sighted mining of ground water by competitive private landholders trying to survive in a market economy. The long-term needs of the whole might be judged as more important than the short-term gain of the part. In any case, the common ownership of land would make it possible to make informed and rational decisions about resource development and population distribution that are all but impossible to make at present. But such changes in land ownership, like regional planning itself, are not ends in themselves. The common ownership of land “is merely a means toward creating a system of dressing and keeping the land as it must be dressed and kept for an advanced civilization.” 8 And while it might be possible to maintain the current system of private ownership of land along with a broad program of public education and regulation aimed at ensuring the common good, such a hybrid approach would likely be cumbersome to administer, burdensome to the private owners, and ultimately less effective than the community trusteeship of resources that are inherently limited and vital to the health and survival of everyone. Since the common ownership of land would, if carefully worked out through a system of leasehold possession, guarantee individual use rights and security of tenure as well as protecting collective interests and shared values, the public control of land for the benefit of the region as a whole may well be an idea whose time has come. While it may seem politically impractical, if not impossible, at present, the notion is likely to become more attractive as energy and resource scarcities and escalating costs begin to force us to make a major commitment to population redistribution and careful resource management

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toward the creation of more regionally self-reliant economies based on the efficient use of income energy sources and the wise recycling of capital as well as nutrient and mineral resources. Peter van Dresser, along with Lewis Mumford and other members of the RPAA, has been proposing the idea of regional planning based on the principle of creative stewardship of the land for more than forty years....As van Dresser points out [in his “Goals for Regional Development”], the linked phenomena of “urban hypertrophy” and “rural and provincial disintegration” have accompanied the spread of industrialism throughout the world, leading to the destruction of regional ecologies and the creation of widespread poverty and despair in the ghettoes of megalopolis as well as the wasteland of the abandoned countryside. 9 Rather than trying to regulate and police the worst depredations of this imperial order of industrialism, van Dresser suggests that a radically new approach, based on the development of all the potentials of a region, will be required to remedy the situation. His proposed goals, which include population redistribution toward greater local and regional self-reliance in basic necessities as well as the development of information- and skillintensive production technologies based on income energy sources, provide a comprehensive platform for meaningful change. Anything less will simply be more of the same, and, as the current, and possibly terminal, crisis of urban-industrial civilization demonstrates, more of the same will simply not work. Given the difficulties of overcoming the inherent inertia and resistance to change in our overdeveloped regions, van Dresser suggests that “a social evolution of this general type can best occur in the ‘under-developed’ and provincial areas of the nation, where cities and towns are still of manageable size, populations are still low, and land and biotic resources are still relatively accessible and uncompromised.” 10 Rather than trying to introduce such radically new patterns of development where the knot of industrialism is thickest, van Dresser believes that we should begin at the source of raw-materials supply rather than the “mouth” toward which all resources flow. Change should begin with the simple and move toward the complex. In a remarkable essay, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” published in 1925, Benton MacKaye made essentially the same argument. 11 Viewing the history of “industrial empire” as the progressive transformation of a natural wilderness into an urban one, he described the physiology of industrialism as analogous to the watershed of a river system. To illustrate how his program for recharting the urban wilderness could begin, he took as a case study a small crestline valley in the Berkshire–Green Mountain Range located partly in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and partly in the state of Vermont. He analyzed the history of this exemplary “sphere of origin” and showed how a settled life could be created around the development of the region’s natural resources of timber and water power. Two projects that illustrate van Dresser’s goals for regional development are taking place in approximately this same area of Massachusetts and Vermont.

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The first case study, described by David Pomerantz, is a grass-roots attempt by citizens in Franklin County, Massachusetts, to map out a “soft energy path” for the year 2000. 12 Since energy is the lifeblood of human society, the Franklin County study is focused on the issue of how to sustain valued human activities from the renewable energy sources of sun, wind, flowing water, and green plants and the wise use of small amounts of fossil fuels. In the belief that our energy problems are indicators of larger problems caused and perpetuated by large-scale, centralized, and unresponsive systems, Pomerantz suggests that the issue of energy planning is a political problem to be resolved by the community of those affected, rather than merely a technical problem to be solved by engineers. In his words, it is “a social question with technical parameters.” Besides demonstrating that it would be technically feasible as well as economically, politically, and morally desirable for Franklin County to make a transition to a renewable energy base, the Franklin County energy project is pioneering an implementation strategy that is based on community control rather than corporate and government management. The work that is described illustrates the belief that in this sunset phase of the fossil-fuel age, energy planning is the integrating thread of the growing movement toward decentralization and the restoration of democratic values and processes to our political economy. It clarifies the idea that the realization of an ecologically sound meta-industrial society is simultaneously our best hope for the fulfillment of our most cherished ideals and values. For any policy of regional development to succeed, it is also necessary to link food supply with food demand in a way that minimizes unproductive transportation costs associated with the current system of agribusiness. Resolving this logistical problem, along with the problem of energy supply from local, renewable sources, is the key to any rational policy of population redistribution. Toward this end, George Burrill and Jim Nolfi describe their landmark studies of food self-reliance for Vermont. While they clearly recognize that bioregions, which would be the basis for planning such food systems, do not necessarily follow existing and somewhat arbitrary political boundaries, they have chosen to test and develop their methodology for planning within the reality of existing political decision-making units. Utilizing readily understandable computer-modeling techniques, Burrill and Nolfi have mapped a variety of diets, from existing ones to purely vegetarian, against the physical production potential of the state’s existing farmland. They reached the conclusion that all the food needs of Vermont could be supplied by production within the state with surplus for sale outside the state while affording an equal or better economic situation for the state’s farmers. The Burrill and Nolfi study thus shows that the present energy-intensive and land-exploitive system of agriculture is a creation of political and economic forces which have favored corporate farming for national markets. Once that is recognized, and once the hidden human, ecological, and energy costs of current practices become more evident, the vision of possibilities contained in this paper

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should provide a solid foundation for change toward a richer, more varied and sustainable system of regional food production. 13 The issue of the sustainability of regional agriculture is taken up in detail by Earle Barnhart and Wes Jackson. 14 From an analysis of the inherent flaws in the existing system, which range from the erosion and salinization of topsoil, and the depletion of ground water to the pollution of ground- and surfacewater supplies and the wholesale destruction of delicate ecological processes, Barnhart develops a proposal for an agriculture that is modeled on the principles and functioning of naturally occurring ecosystems. Describing the pioneering experiments of the New Alchemy Institute, of which he is a member, Barnhart describes in some detail the kinds of biotechnologies that would allow both high and sustainable yields from agricultural landscapes designed and managed for permanence rather than short-term profit. Through the creation of an integrated human ecology of information and skill-intensive horticulture, aquaculture, and agricultural forestry, combined with the development of bioshelters and solar villages, it is shown that it is within our power to create a culture and agriculture that restores rather than destroys the earth. As Barnhart observes, such a human ecology would give visible expression to the ancient but all-too-often forgotten wisdom of all the world’s great spiritual and religious traditions. Although the reason for creating such a culture might be, at root, ethical and moral, the results would inevitably prove to be practical as well as economical. Like the New Alchemy Institute, The Land Institute, which is located in Salina, Kansas, is dedicated to a search for alternatives in agriculture, energy, shelter, and waste management as well as to an exploration of the

At the New Alchemy Institute, experiments in biotechnology provide new agricultural forms for the landscape of Cape Cod.

FIG. 1

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alternative world view necessary for the imagination and creation of a radically new culture. In addition to projects involving the design and application of renewable-energy-based technologies aimed at “regional semi-self-sufficiency” (e.g., wind-electric and water-pumping systems, solar collectors and wood stoves for space heating, adobe and rammed-earth blocks for building construction, and organic methods of food production), The Land Institute is also an alternative school which attracts students from many disciplines and all regions of the country. By equally dividing the day between “hand” and “head” work, students attempt to develop a holistic worldview capable of expression in everyday life. While New Alchemy and The Land share many values and are working on the development of many similar technologies and ideas, the work of each group grows out of the unique character of the bioregion in which it is rooted. Located in coastal New England, New Alchemy has focused on the development of integrated systems of food production such as tree cropping, aquaculture, and intensive organic horticulture. Based, as it is, in the grain belt of the vast and open Great Plains region, the concern of The Land Institute has turned quite naturally to the search for a new form of seed-producing agriculture that does not produce dust bowls as its necessary side effect. This point is crucial. Unless the search for an alternative agriculture addresses the question of how to produce, on a sustained-yield basis, the grains which have always been and are likely to continue to be the staples of the diets of “civilized” peoples, the split between nature and culture which was inaugurated by the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago will remain unhealed. While new techniques of ecologically derived food production, e.g., aquaculture, tree culture, and organic horticulture, can provide an important supplement (especially protein) to a cereal-based diet, it is clear that they are not the answer to the present or long-term food needs of the majority of the world’s people. ... According to Wes Jackson, the anti-ecological nature of all agricultural systems to date can be traced to the fact that they have all been based on the monoculture of annuals, which necessarily involves the creation of inherently immature, fragile, simple, and unstable ecosystems which deplete rather than build topsoil. Rather than proposing the usual piecemeal remedies, such as crop rotation, increased labor intensity, and the use of organic fertilizers, Jackson asks what nature will require of us if we are to create a high-yielding and permanent agriculture. Like the New Alchemists, who have asked the same basic question and have begun to forge an ecologically derived approach to the design of integrated agricultural landscapes, Jackson and his students and colleagues at The Land Institute have assumed that the careful examination of nature’s strategy for permanence as revealed in naturally occurring climax ecosystems will provide the clues necessary to reconfigure the present food system into an historically unique and sustainable human ecology. By thoroughly understanding how the native prairie accumulates rather than erodes

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biological capital while furthering the aims of life, Jackson feels that it should be possible to create a domesticated analogue of these natural systems which can be continuously harvested (with agricultural machinery yet to be invented) within the limits of sustainability. Paradoxically, then, Jackson proposes that because of the development of machine harvest and modern science it is now possible for us to think seriously of polyculture harvest in a return to a pattern of life more like the hunting and gathering one within which we evolved as a species. We can escape the ecological destructiveness of historical forms of agriculture because we now have the knowledge and technology as well as the pressing need to do so. ... Rather than continuing to promote a “Green Revolution” whose time has passed, it should be clear that the development of a permanent agriculture based on the cultivation of herbaceous perennial seed-producers is a task whose time has come. We can no longer afford to forsake the “wisdom of nature” for the “cleverness of humans.” If, as Jackson argues, we use “wilderness as the standard against which we judge our agricultural and cultural practices,” we may yet create a civilization worthy of our human potential. We do not lack the knowledge of how to “live lightly on the earth.” We lack only the wisdom necessary to see the need for change and the courage to begin. Unfortunately, should we fail to act soon, we shall also lack the time necessary to succeed. As Peter van Dresser has said, The rethinking and restructuring of our purposes, our institutions, and our private and public policies needed to effect such changes in the direction of our social and economic evolution on the scale that will be necessary is a colossal, dismaying, and fascinating task. As the final and most difficult phase of the ecologic transformation towards which all people are groping, its long-term consequences must, if we succeed, dwarf even those of the industrial revolution in permanence and ultimate meaning. May our vision sustain us over the difficult coming century.15

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Introduction to “Desert Bloom”

362

The following is a review of the

because it enables the practitioner

work of the Center for Maximum

to perceive complex environmental

Potential Building Systems (CMPBS)

relationships in an interactive format.

and is focused on the Advanced

LCA measures the total impact of

Green Builder Demonstration

resource use, including where it

House—an experimental prototype

comes from, how it gets there, how

of a bioregional and sustainable

it is made, used, reused, recycled,

residential architecture built in Austin,

and/or discarded. This information is

Texas (see Fig. 12, Introduction).

woven in the design process so that

CMPBS founder Pliny Fisk studied

all processes required for the function

with Ian McHarg, whose revolutionary

of the project (house, farm, office,

ecological land planning proved

or neighborhood) are brought into

influential to Fisk’s desire to

local, regional and global balance.

produce an ecologically responsive

For CMPBS what distinguishes a

architecture. He began to look at

bioregional project from a traditionally

buildings as part of an interlinked

regional one is the inclusion of inter-

system of resources. The systems

linked ecological criteria beyond,

employed within a single-family

but not exclusive of, regional history,

home, for example, are intricately

aesthetics, materials, climate, and the

connected with distant power plants,

compositional concerns central to

material suppliers, global food

architects. CMPBS’s bioregionalism,

producers, and local watersheds,

then, involves a reconceptualization

as well as the local economies of

of architectural practice: first as a

builders, banks, and businesses that

regional art, then as an ecologically

support the homeowner’s livelihood.

information-rich and experimental

Therefore, any architect striving

one. Their work and results prefigure

for an ecologically sustainable

more recent explorations of the

architecture must address this

relationship between regionalism and

dynamic relationship between

sustainability (see Moore, Chapter 8).

global and local systems. Achieving sustainability became a matter of balancing resources consumed versus those produced in both a

Michael Haslam (b. 1965) is a partner and architect with Solearth Ecological Architecture in Ireland and a professor of architectural design at the Dublin School of Architecture.

building’s construction and in its day-to-day operations, a constantly changing scenario. What was missing was an effective way to quantify these interlinked factors in design practice. Building upon the bioregional movement, CMPBS settled on the region as the most appropriate scale. Further, life-cycle assessment (LCA) was embraced as the heart of its decision-making process

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363

Michael Haslam

Desert Bloom Originally published in Architectural Review, July 1997, 54–56. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Designed to address concerns of flexibility and affordability, this modular house bridges architecture and ecology, man-made and natural systems to create a sustainable model for development. A project on the scrubland fringes of Austin, Texas, could prove to be an important step towards a broader acceptance and wider application of regionally sustainable architecture. The center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (or more simply Max Pot) is co-directed by Pliny Fisk and his partner Gall Vittori. It encompasses an architect’s studio, workshop, research laboratory, teaching center and experimental concrete plant. On the same plot of land is the Advanced Green Builder Demonstration Home and Workplace, a governmentand industry-sponsored project. With its heavy base, light steel roofs and water cisterns, it is designed to be an example for regionally appropriate architecture into the next century. As such, it emphasizes opportunities for recycled and by-product materials, water collection, natural cooling and heating. However, what distinguishes the project, and indeed the work of Max Pot generally, is the breadth of its holistic approach to building. The approach sees built form as a product of an enlightened understanding of the environment in which it is set. This takes the form of a regional mapping which defines the ecological and economical context. Essentially, mapping is used as a tool to identify plant species, soil types, rainfall, wind strength, and insolation. As such it defines the biome or bio-region—an area with a distinct set of climatic, vegetation, and soil characteristics. However, mapping can also be used as a statistical base to identify human resources such as transport networks, manufacturing processes, and job skills. The Demonstration Home is intended to address social concerns of flexibility and affordability. It is based on a modular system consisting of an endoskeleton of steel reinforcing rods (98 per cent locally recycled and recyclable) welded together into a box frame to form simple column and beam elements. These are bolted into position and are light enough to be manually maneuvred. They can be subsequently encased in a precast permanent shuttering and concrete which uses 97 percent recycled content. (Portland cement is avoided because of its contribution to global warming through excessive carbon dioxide release.) These column and beam elements generate a set of basic forms such as triangulated roof modules, porches, arbors, and guttering supports. The ease of construction—which also entails minimal site disturbance, allowing nature to

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quickly recolonize—and its inherent cheapness mean that a family can itself build a starter home without the burden of a mortgage. As the family grows or salaries permit, the building, through its inherent clip-together structure, can be enlarged or reduced to suit respective needs. Infill panels are made from recycled or indigenous materials identified for their suitability through the mapping process. The Demonstration Home uses a variety of techniques, including adobe and rammed-earth walls, straw bales (with hand-stuccoed finish for fire and pest resistance), recycled glass blocks, and caliche blocks. (Caliche, a calcium carbonate deposit, covers some 12 percent of the earth’s crust and is widely available in Texas. It can be mixed with sand, fly ash, and other industrial by-products to form a solid and durable block for a solar-mass wall or for flooring slabs.) In a biome short of virgin timber, windows, door frames, and panels are made from a combination of sawn timber chippings and locally recycled plastics to give a new hybrid product that is both thermally stable and weather-resistant. Framing the entrance to the building are two steel cisterns, designed to hold 13,000 gallons of rainwater collected from the roof. This visually embodies both the project’s sustainable ethos and the average Texan’s demand for water in a dry climate. The on-site rainwater catchment is intended to provide for all of the home’s domestic water needs, with the necessary storage capacity estimated from precipitation mapping, including data on the likelihood and duration of droughts. The landscape surrounding the building similarly demonstrates the importance of water in a dry climate. At the foot of the water cisterns is an artificial wetland of reeds and gravel beds. These filter the gray waste water from the house and a solar-powered water pump provides a low-pressure dosing system across the garden. The galvanized steel roofing and upper stories sit lightly above the building’s mass on the skeletal overstructure, providing ventilated shade below. The galvanized steel is locally manufactured with a roof membrane made of recycled tires. All the south-facing roofs are decked with photovoltaic cells to provide electrical power. A breezeway separates the two halves of the building—on the one side, a workshop/studio, on the other, the living area. The breezeway is a climatically responsive form of shaded, outdoor living space borrowed from traditional Texas housing. In a previous project for a farm and market in Laredo on the Mexican border, biome knowledge sharing allowed Fisk to use the climatically relevant form of a wind-funnel roof, traditionally used in Iran for cooling. A variation on this is used in the Demonstration Home’s clerestory ventilation. The bridging of issues in architecture and ecology with social concerns entails an approach which seeks to restore the co-operative imperative between natural and human systems to ensure their mutual survival. It is a regionalism born out of a rigorous understanding of context; in this respect it is akin to the tradition of a local building knowledge, but using the benefits of the computer age.

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Chapter 7

Critical Regionalism

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Constructive Regionalism

Anthony Alofsin

Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic

Kenneth Frampton

Critical Regionalism in Houston: A Case for the Menil Collection

Richard Ingersoll

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism

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Keith L. Eggener

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Introduction to “Constructive Regionalism”

368

The roots of critical regionalism lie,

that a true constructive regionalism would

in part, in the following previously

respond to local colors, materials, and

unpublished essay by Anthony

customs; it would embrace traditions and

Alofsin. In reconstructing the

transform tradition; it would be wed to its

primogeniture of this most influential

setting, in either rural or urban landscape;

theory, the account usually begins

it would foster craft and push the limits

with an article entitled “The Grid

of technology; it would speak to the

and the Pathway” written in 1981

individual and search for the universal....

by Liane Lafaivre and Alexander

A constructive regionalism would exalt

Tzonis. Through their discussion

the craft of building while at the same

of Greek architectural history, they

time encourage a new consciousness in

theorize a critical regionalism that

the manufacture of machine products. ii

i

is more about direct experience than projected utopias, leading

These ideas would later be

to the possible recovery of a

incorporated into the essay “The

humanist architecture concerned

Question of Regionalism,” co-authored

with the conditions of local life. In

with Alexander Tzonis and Liane

this early account the mechanism

Lefaivre. iii That text, published only

for that recovery is the use of

in German, encapsulates much of

familiar elements found in “popular

the theory of critical regionalism that

architecture” but in modern form—

Tzonis and Lefaivre, sans Alofsin, have

a precursor to their later strategy of

since developed. It begins defining

defamiliarization.

regionalism as “the conscious adoption of the particular and the

This focus on social life, direct

local of design in opposition to

experience, and the use of tectonic

general and universal norms.” iv Alofsin

strategies is reminiscent of the

argues for a “for a concept of

regionalism promoted by Lewis

regionalism . . .‘constructive’ in the

Mumford in The South in Architecture

sense of tectonic expression of

(see Mumford, Chapter 2). It also

construction and in the sense

links to the following text by Anthony

of creating a positive dialogue

Alofsin, which he wrote while a

between culture, buildings, and the

graduate student at Harvard, working

environment . . . served,” he claims,

under Alexander Tzonis. Based, in

“as the precursor to the term ‘critical

part, on his research into Mumford’s

regionalism.’” v

theories, Alofsin argues Anthony Alofsin (b. 1949) is an architect, author, and Roland Roessner Centennial Professor of Architecture, Art, and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Anthony Alofsin

Constructive Regionalism 1980, Revised 2005

Just as we have begun to perceive many meanings of modernism—the good modern, the bad modern, the anti-modern, and varieties of neo-modern—there are many meanings of regionalism. We intend here to discuss the multiplicity of meanings with the intent of creating nuances and distinctions in our understanding of regionalism. Our hope is that an incisive clarity will render regionalism a constructive tool in the production of architecture. What are some of the various domains to which a notion of regionalism has been attached? Folkish architecture, the country counterpart of a legitimizing neo-classicism found in German-speaking lands during the first three decades of the century. There is a regional architecture attached to an English movement of the 1950s involving James Stirling and others. There is a regional architecture associated with developments in the Scandinavian countries. And there is a regional architecture connected with the western United States, particularly in the architectural development of California. An analysis of these varieties of regionalism, however insightful in clarifying blurred notions, does not provide us with a more profound understanding of regionalism. In turning to the work of Lewis Mumford, we may observe a more comprehensive understanding of regionalism, an understanding which has general applications. In a series of lectures entitled The South in Architecture, published in 1941, Mumford equated Thomas Jefferson, American patriot and amateur architect, as a chief exponent of “the ‘International style’ of the eighteenth century.” 1 The first truly American regional architect, however, was Henry Hobson Richardson. There were four attributes that Mumford saw as regional in the work of Richardson. First, Richardson used local materials in his buildings; New England quarries supplied Milford granite, brown sandstone, and Longmeadow stone for New England buildings. Secondly, Richardson transformed the traditional white cottage or farmhouse into a wide-windowed cottage with a new feeling for American requirements and the landscape. Thirdly, Richardson utilized local colors in his work: the richness of sumac, red oak, sweet fern, lichened rock, pine tree, and butternut. Finally, Richardson, in his domestic production, continued the established traditions of working with wood while transforming those traditions. The essence, then, of Richardson’s regional architecture is that it “is composed in such a fashion that it cannot be divorced from its landscape without loosing something of its practical or aesthetic value—or both together.” 2

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But, significantly, Richardson’s architecture went beyond local tradition, color, and material; his work sought an expression of universal form. While Richardson embraced the responsibilities of functional necessities, requirements of program, comfort, the presence of local materials and traditions, Mumford accorded Richardson an extra dimension, a transcendence rooted in Richardson’s romanticism and search for a universal expression of form in the context of a regional architecture. To actually experience one of Richardson’s major works, such as Trinity Church in Boston (1872), is to be in the presence of an architectural search for formal expression, an openended search connected to urban landscape and locale and the traditions of architecture itself. The physical experience of Richardson’s work, then, tends to confirm Mumford’s observations. For Mumford this conception of regionalism had additional implications. Through Richardson, Mumford saw an influence that extended to other American architects. In one domain were such successors as Buffington, Sullivan, and Root; in another, Frank Lloyd Wright; in a third realm, John Galen Howard and the contemporary Bernard Maybeck. To each of these architects Mumford’s ideas of regionalism could be applied as an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them, that employs local materials and colors, and marries itself to the landscape while searching for an architectural expression in universal architecture forms. Furthermore, in the work of Maybeck and other architects of the San Francisco Bay Region Mumford saw a modern, regional architecture that provided a critique to the International Style. After the publication of The Brown Decades in 1931 Mumford began encouraging the inclusion of the Bay Region school into the corpus of American architectural history, a body which had been formed from a European perspective. When Mumford published his advocacy in 1947 of the Bay Region style as “a native and humane form of modernism,” he proposed a corrective to a sterile and abstract modernism. 3 The origins of the Bay Region style existed in the work of John Galen Howard, a transplanted easterner educated in the Beaux Arts tradition, and Bernard Maybeck; their work was contemporaneous with the launching of modernism in Europe, but they had, in effect, been superseded by the proponents of the International Style. Mumford’s article created a furor. Sigfried Giedion suggested that Mumford had made a reactionary attack on the whole of modern architecture. Another response came from the Museum of Modern Art, the institutional sponsor of the International Style. A symposium was organized in New York four months after the publication of Mumford’s article in February 1948, and the title of the meeting, “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” indicated the seriousness with which Mumford’s article was taken. 4 The speakers at the MoMA symposium included those who had introduced the International Style to America: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Talbot Hamlin, Lewis Mumford, and others. The debate ended rather

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inconclusively and consisted of an attempt to redefine “International Style” by its originators and a reaction presented by those supporting the “New Empiricism” that was then allied to “the new humanism of the ‘Bay Region’ school.” 5 The controversy was reduced to those who spoke of standards and styles and those who denounced neologisms as secondary to producing architecture. From our point of view such a debate is instructive because it shows the dilution of Mumford’s regionalism and its relegation to a level of misunderstanding and abstraction. A similar debate occurred later as part of a symposium, “The Decade 1929–1939,” organized by the Society of Architectural Historians in 1965. 6 Some of the key speakers were present at both symposia, including Barr, Hitchcock, and Vincent Scully. With the exception of Catherine Bauer Wurster, the participants, particularly Scully, revealed a disdain for ideas of regionalism. In a rather reductive polemic Scully equated Richard Bennett’s ideal scheme for a New York of the Future (1940), the Bauhaus, the Bay Region school, Mumford, Gropius, and Breuer with “pictorialism.” In contrast to an architecture of thin, sliding planes and lightness Scully advocated an architecture of mass and solidity; his heroes were Mies, Corbu’s Chandigarh, and the “strong, big, masculine and powerful” 7 building of Alvar Aalto’s dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1949). Scully further argued that the Bay Region style was incapable of developing a monumental urban architecture because it was preoccupied with the single-story house. We must ask, however, if the Bay Regional school had the opportunity or need to construct urban monuments and further to inquire about the implications for the necessity and expression of monuments in a regional context. Also, while it was appropriate to critique the limitations of the Bay Region style, it was perhaps unfortunate that Scully and his associates could not see the broader implications of a regional architecture. The significant point for us, however, is the diminution of the promise of regionalism. Nevertheless, Mumford had continued to support the Bay Regional school because he felt its works were “a steady organic growth, producing modern forms accepted as natural and appropriate by both client and architect.” It was an architecture that was not obsessed with the flat roof and did not deliberately avoid projections and overhangs. It was an architecture that “made no effort to symbolize the machine, through a narrow choice of materials and forms: that it had a place for personalities as different as Maybeck and Dailey and Wurster and Kump.” For Mumford the main problem of architecture at the time was the reconciliation of the “universal and the regional, the mechanical and the human, the cosmopolitan and the indigenous.” The Bay Region style “absorbed the universal lessons of science and the machine and have reconciled them with human wants and human desires with full regard for the setting of nature, the climate and topography and vegetation.” From Mumford’s point of view a balance was necessary: “No manner of building that exaggerates the local at the expense of the universal can possibly answer the needs of our time.” And ultimately, “Bay Region architecture both belongs to the region and transcends

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the region: it embraces the machine and transcends the machine. It does not ignore particular needs, customs, conditions, but translates them into the common form of our civilization.” 8 In exploring Mumford’s ideas of regionalism, expressed in his advocacy of the Bay Region style, we do not seek to encourage the spread of this style, but the absorption of its principles. When we summarize these principles we are provided with both criteria for criticism as well as a direction for the production of architecture, in essence a constructive regionalism. A true constructive regionalism would respond to local colors, materials, and customs; it would embrace traditions and transform tradition; it would be wed to its setting, in either rural or urban landscape; it would foster craft and push the limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search for the universal. We may apply these criteria broadly to any work of architecture and to any specific work or architect. When applied to William Wurster, whom Mumford included as a central figure in the Bay Regional school, we indeed see aspects of constructive regionalism—an emphasis on climate, terrain, program, social function—as well as a preoccupation with construction detailing and modernist vocabulary that may exist to the detriment of a more elusive search for architectural form. 9 In effect, then, examining architecture in serious depth may lead us to an observation which is true of the larger movings of modernism itself: that the model of modernist aspirations contains profound contradictions, contradictions which have never been resolved and which have always existed—although sub rosa—in the Werkbund, the Bauhaus, and other generating movements of the avant-garde. What, then, are some of the paradoxes of constructive regionalism? One paradox is that while constructive regionalism conveys universal qualities, it denies universal style. The imposition of style or visual hegemony into a particular environment is contrary to a constructive regionalism. While a constructive regionalism may reveal the personal attributes of a designer or builder, it denies the glorification of the individual; a constructive regional architecture is an art of building that does not create an artistic elite or designer caste. We may admire the artist, the work of his or her hand and eye, but the artist remains one of us. A constructive regionalism would exalt the craft of building while at the same time encourage a new consciousness in the manufacture of machine products. The work of the hand and the skilled use of the machine would achieve new levels of synthesis. In other words, a constructive regionalism would embrace a total vision of design, a vision not foreign to that of William Morris, while at the same time embracing an optimistic belief in the potentialities of technology. A constructive regionalism would embrace native detail and color and at the same time discourage cultural hedonism. A constructive regionalism would encourage bonds between people while providing a focus for the pride and distinction of the individual and his domain through his own production. A successful constructive regionalism will not only celebrate the individual and his social context but reinforce those qualities which provide architecture with its own autonomy and its own cultural life.

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Despite paradox a constructive regionalism would provide an ideal, a direction imbued with optimism. Commodious buildings with proportions appropriate to human use and façades that are faces of architectural tradition and local life will encourage not only the bonding of people, but also elevate architecture into an ennobling product of culture.

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Introduction to “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism”

374

Though critical regionalism was

civilization and local culture through

introduced by Alexander Tzonis and

synthesis, demonstrated by his well-

Liane Lefaivre, Kenneth Frampton’s

known dialectical pairs—space/place,

formulation of it is best known. Of

scenographic/architectonic—which

his many iterations of the theory,

serve as points of consideration

the following essay represents the

pertinent to the successful practice of

fullest development of his ideas. It is

a critically regional architecture.

a response to tectonically vacuous, superficial postmodern architecture

Throughout his writing, he has stuck

and the homogenizing forces of

to the modernist’s emancipatory

modern technology; regions, he

project, developing critical

posits, serve as a resistant medium

regionalism as its architectural

against globalization and other

variant. He has revised his theory,

centralized structures in art or

calling it a “liberative environmental

business. Thinking in terms of regions

practice” and promotes sustainability

brings the tactile immediacy of spatial

and landscape urbanism as key

experience, the necessary response

concerns “upon which a radically

to climate and topography, a sense

democratic environmental discourse

of reality to the cultural meaning of

could be based.” ii Together these

architectural form, and the possibility

developments re-center his theory

of engaging local labor and skill

away from concerns for style and

in architectural production. In the

aesthetic representation and update

same way that all politics are local,

regionalism and architecture to a

Frampton seems to be saying that

subset of environmentalism.

good architecture is also local, but not

In all its forms, Frampton’s critical

only so.

regionalism has been both highly influential and widely criticized.

Frampton’s employment of critical

His influence on the discourse

theory is probably informed by his

of regionalism is on par with and

wariness of the regionalist tendencies

continues that of Lewis Mumford.

toward provincialism and cultural

Many essays in this volume build

chauvinism. It serves as a counter-

upon Frampton’s by critique and

balance to concerns held by many

extension, including those by Alan

of his critics with regard to his

Colquhoun, Richard Ingersoll, Keith

Heideggerian phenomenology while

Eggener, Timothy Cassidy, Barbara

firmly linking him to the “liberative

Allen, and Steven Moore.

modern project.” i He can speak about the need to accommodate local and direct experiences while remaining

Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) is Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University.

critical of sentimentality. He can accept local cultural meaning and autochthonous values as factual but not as universally true. Lastly, as a dialectical social theory, it helps settle the conflict between universal

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Kenneth Frampton

Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic From Center 3: New Regionalism (1987): 20–27. Reprinted courtesy of The Center for American Architecture and Design, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, and the author.

Introduction

One could hardly describe the present moment in architecture as anything less than a period of rapid change. Toffler’s famous Future Shock has some relevance in this regard, particularly where he demonstrates the symptomatic escalating rate of change in the field of art from 1870 to the present. One way of achieving some clarity in a volatile period such as this is to construct a provisional model with which to establish the boundaries of the field. I am reminded at this juncture of Aldo van Eyck, who, by way of attempting to delimit the problem, wrote some years ago: Architects nowadays are pathologically addicted to change, regarded as something one either hinders, runs after or at best keeps up with. This, I suggest, is why they tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike a sentimental antiquarian attitude towards the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one towards the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians and technocrats have in common), so let’s start with the past for a change and discover the unchanging condition of man.

Van Eyck’s trans-historical, almost archaic, existential attitude implies a willingness to confront, in a critical sense, the myths and realities of the present situation. And this he continues to do despite the irrevocable global changes introduced in the past 40 years: above all, fundamental and general transformations in the fields of production, distribution, and information. As far as architecture is concerned, there seems to be little chance today that largescale undertakings will yield works of cultural significance. This is partly due to fundamental changes in the methods of financing. I am alluding to the direct line that exists today between surplus insurance capital and various forms

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of transcontinental and intercontinental development. The vast size of these works tends to create an overall drive towards optimization, that is, towards the reduction of building to the maximizing of economic criteria and to the adoption of normative plans and construction methods reducing architecture to the provision of an aesthetic skin—the packaging, in fact, of nothing more than a large commodity in order to facilitate its marketing. This means that the scope of activity available to the potential “regionalist” is interstitial rather than global in nature, which may be seen by some as a decided advantage. The overdetermined, let us say predetermined, nature of the global condition may be construed from an interview with a senior partner in a large American corporate practice. He concluded on a sobering note, tinged with a certain complacency. “Let’s face it,” he remarked, “this is a hungry machine.” While the hyperconsumptive drives of our hypertechnological civilization have yet to run themselves into the ground, the era of the historical avant-garde seems to be over. We are confronted with the paradoxical situation in which, while modernization continues with unabated voracity at every conceivable technical and structural level, the romance of discovery and invention has lost its popular appeal. Progress is hardly a credible myth in this period of history. The heroics of Lindbergh have been replaced by the hysterics of Rambo, and this substitution indicates a fundamental change in the received conception of our manifest destiny. The failure of the first moon walk to capture the public’s imagination bewildered the authorities, and there has been a tendency of late to sustain the idea of progress by such fallacious and dangerous devices as old-style xenophobia and imperialism—and even a return to early capitalism— rather than maintaining a social-democratic welfare state. The deliberate deconstruction of the New Deal, both here and elsewhere, reduces the scope of architecture. It renders it incapable of contributing in a significant way to the public values of the society. Among the disturbing structural changes taking place is the ever-expanding power of the multinational corporations; we should not deceive ourselves for a moment as to the relative indifference of these conglomerates to the welfare of the society in which they happen to be based. Under their hegemony, patriotism is transformed into an absurdity and regional differentiation is a factor to be eliminated. What they value most is a universal, undifferentiated abacus upon which the ebb and flow of value-free exchange and profit can be facilitated and maintained. Such issues may appear to be remote from the immediate practice of architecture, but massive material and psycho-societal changes such as these have a wide impact. With such changes, as Marx was to put it, “All that is solid melts into air.” The monopolization of the profession and the building industry and the consolidation of transcontinental capital have totally transformed the ground rules underlying large-scale building today. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas is right when he argues that neo-conservatism wishes to mask the true causes for the wide-ranging, sometimes unconscious, societal discontent brought into being by the ever-accelerating cycle of modernization and change. As he

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puts it, this discontent and friction were not brought into being by modernist intellectuals. This is all too evident in England, where the latest cycle of modernization from above has led to a more or less permanent population of four million unemployed. One can hardly take cultural eggheads to task for changes of this magnitude, and no one is capable of foreseeing the social and psychological consequences of such a massive decentering of a large sector of the population. Meanwhile, from a cultural point of view, we are confronted with a situation in which everything seems to have already happened. Everything is touched by a sense of being past; even the most super-heated reinterpretations of avantgardist schemes can hardly escape this underlying sense of déjà-vu. Even the socalled “high-tech” products of our all-too-recent past become rapidly amortized and tarnished in more ways than one. Norman Foster’s brilliant but nonetheless absurdly rhetorical and expensive Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is a case in point—the skyscraper as Cape Canaveral! Whether we like it or not, we are confronted everywhere by the uncanny aging of the “new,” first remarked on by Theodor Adorno in relation to the development of modern music. The history of the last three centuries, when blithely appropriated by the so-called Post-Modern, becomes at once equally jaded. And, notwithstanding the conservative appeal of returning to tradition, one has the sense that the rich seams of our cultural heritage will soon be exhausted, burnt out, particularly when a cannibalized lexicon of eclectic historical references, freely mixed with modernist fragments and formalist banalities, serves as the superficial gilt with which to market architecture, to situate it finally as one more item within an endless field of free-floating commodities and images. Beneath this ever-changing gingerbread charade, we know that the plans and volumetric arrangements of the so-called International Style remain essentially unchanged. The optimizing neo-Miesian planning procedures are fundamentally the same; only the revetment has been transformed to evoke, let us say, the lost glories of Louis XV, or the institutional monumentality of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the romance of the moderne as embodied in our recent nostalgia for the Art Deco— Helmut Jahn’s so-called “populist modernism,” of which one might say (the first time as a poetic if vulgar evocation and the second time as an opportunistic allusion) it is the simulation of a simulation. Is this not the difference between America’s representing itself as a lost El Dorado in the euphoria of the twenties and its trying to recapture the time when it truly possessed the innocence and luxury of being a frontier? What scope still remains, then, for an architecture of dissent, for some other mode of building, not entirely predetermined by forces beyond our control? How may we reground the practice of our admittedly marginal discipline without blindly reiterating a modern syntax, deprived of its original subversive and poetic energy, or without lapsing into an endless proliferation of kitsch historicism devoid of all relevance and sense? Is there, in fact, a middle ground left for another kind of practice, however marginal? What then of the apparent promise of regionalism, and what can we possibly mean by the evocation of this term?

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In response to this question I would like to proffer something one might call a “speculative manifesto” organized around ten points. These points obviously open to a series of issues that require extensive debate, and surely this is necessary, since only through such questioning will we ever arrive at any kind of reliable “ground” upon which a significant, if marginal, practice of architecture might still be pursued. Point 1: Critical Regionalism and Vernacular Form

Regionalism should not be sentimentally identified with the vernacular. By definition, critical regionalism is a recuperative, self-conscious, critical endeavor, and nothing can be further from the vernacular in the initial sense of the term. Adolf Loos surely had the last aphoristic word in this regard more than 70 years ago when he wrote: “The peasant builds a roof. Is it a beautiful roof or an ugly roof? He doesn’t know—it is the roof. It is the roof as his father, grandfather, and great grandfather had built the roof before him.” In other words, the roof and hence the vernacular lies beyond any kind of evaluation in terms of bourgeois aesthetics. In fact, one of the problems with the term regionalism arises out of the affix ism since this patently implies the postulation of a style, that is, of a received set of aesthetic preferences. Critical regionalism should, in my view, lie beyond style. It should devote itself in the last analysis to establishment of bounded domains and tactile presences with which to resist the dissolution of the late-modern world. Point 2: The Modern Movement

There remains a solid and liberative heritage lying within the complex culture that we generally subsume under the term the Modern Movement. It is nothing short of reactionary folly to abandon the liberative, critical, and poetic traditions of this century on the ground of retardataire fashion. The Usonian Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, to cite but a single example, are a case in point. They represent the last serious attempt made in this country (or anywhere else for that matter) to render the suburbs as a place of a liberative universal middle-class culture, as a place of cultivation that would be liberating not only for men, but also for women. To continue to ignore the breadth and relevance of Wright’s work in this regard is surely one more symptom of our pathological philistinism. What he realized in over 200 houses built for the state of Usonia should be rallied to as a point of departure rather than dismissed as a dead end, and I have in mind here the total scope of Wright’s Usonian achievement, from the smallest detail to the sensitivity, economy, and ingenuity of his basic volumetric arrangements. It is of the utmost significance that Wright anchored his Usonian houses into the ground—that he posited a pattern of land settlement far removed from the endless proliferation of free-standing objects to which we are, as a society, so pathetically addicted. It is stupifying how we remain so utterly incapable of restricting the rate at which we consume land. The American suburb built since the end of the Second World War is surely the prelude to the apocalypse.

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FIG. 1

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Alvar Aalto, Saynatsalo Town Hall, Saynatsalo, Finland, 1952.

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These are patently political questions. They are also questions that are rarely discussed in terms of what kind of a future we really envisage for our liberal democracy. Architecture is culture politics. This fact is relevant with respect to any judgment we may make as to the heritage of the Modern Movement for, apart from its reductive functionalism, its cultural legacy remains infinitely rich, and other examples apart from Wright may be cited in this regard. Let me remind you in passing of Richard Neutra, of Eileen Gray, of Alvar Aalto, of Pierre Chareau, of De la Sota, of Jørn Utzon, of Peter Selsing, or Raphael Soriano, of Luis Barragán, of H. H. Harris, of J. A. Coderch, of the little-known Austrian architect Roland Rainer, all of whom have achieved works of delicate sensitivity and critical relevance in the course of the last 50 years. Point 3: The Myth and the Reality of the Region

Critical regionalism begs the question as to what are the true limits of a region and what is its institutional status. It would be foolishly restrictive if we conceived of region only in terms of locality and climate, etc., although these factors are surely critical to the constitution and expressivity of local form. However, two interrelated factors are of ultimate importance when we consider the idea of region from an institutional standpoint. The first of these may be subsumed under the notion of discourse; the second addresses itself to the cultivation of the client in a profound sense. By discourse I mean first and foremost the coming into being of a “school” of local culture, although my use of the term “school” has wider connotations as well. Nonetheless, this idea returns us to the critical importance of the architectural school as a pedagogical and cultural institution. By “client,” I intend only to remind you of the obvious—namely, that a culturally significant work can hardly be achieved without a committed client. I have alluded to the negative conditions of our time, to superannuated notions of inevitable progress that are as destructive as they are fallacious. In this regard I would like to suggest that critically resistant “regions,” like “schools,” have to be created. They are, in this sense, necessary myths, as any self-consciously created culture must be. Far from being merely an illusion, a myth can become a critical and creative force. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it, “It wasn’t but they feed it with a feeling that it might exist and this was of such strength it did confer one horn which grew and came up to a Virgin once all white and was within the mirror and in her.” Innumerable examples of consciously evoked subcultures may be drawn from the distant and recent past, from the recent Ticinese school of Mario Botta et al. to the chain Palladian architecture of the Veneto region; from Wright’s Prairie Style to the second Southern Californian School of Gregory Ain, J. R. Davidson, H. H. Harris, and Raphael Soriano; from the long history of the architectural school in Porto of which Alvaro Siza is the most prominent representative to the young California minimalist-constructivists of today. As I have remarked elsewhere, Harwell Hamilton Harris touched on this, now over 30 years ago, when at the Northwest regional committee meeting of the AIA in Eugene,

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Oregon, he spoke of restrictive versus liberative regionalism. He seems to have seen the East Coast Bauhaus Modernism and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as but two equally restrictive manifestations, as opposed to the liberative regionalism of the Southern Californian school of Wright, which took the forms of European rationalism and constructivism and passed them through filters which had already been laid in place in Los Angeles by Irving Gill and Greene & Greene. Point 4: Information And Experience

In all this it is important to bear in mind that the media are double-edged and that from the point of achieving a sensitive critical practice, they often function as a negative influence. Granted, we are better informed than ever before, not to say over- and even mis-informed, and the “noise” level, to which this paper may be one more contribution, is deafening. It is as though the ever-increasing barbarism of our architecture is to be compensated for by our seemingly endless proclivity for debate and by our obsession with history and the past. It is as though the endless proliferation of books documenting past glories—including the golden age of the avant-garde—helps to compensate for our rapacious, techno-scientific, commodification of the environment. In general, we have begun to lose our capacity for distinguishing between information and experience, not only in architecture, but in everything else as well. Reality and irreality are deliberately confused and fused together. We oscillate between the soap opera and world destruction. We are switched, whether we like it or not, between the blandishments of the commercial and the irreality of terrorism. We are inclined, even urged, to take the representation for the real thing and vice versa. So much for television which, as a recent architectural series has demonstrated, is an ambiguous if not an unsuitable medium with which to convey the experience of architecture—the endlessly panning camera and the placement of the tactile into the “inaccessible” middle ground. As Kenneth Clark put it in one of his more felicitous moments: “I am standing in front of Chartres Cathedral, which you can’t see because I am standing in front of it.” Surely in this he was close to having the last word about the fundamental antipathy that obtains between tourism, photography, film, and architecture. As to the delusions of tourism, Abraham Moles was surely correct when he opined that “the monuments of Europe are being worn out by Kodaks.” And have we not witnessed and are we not still witnessing what a journalist once called “the death of the postcard,” when totally fictitious re-creations of genius loci, close in spirit to rock video, begin to replace the former 19thcentury link between photography and the monument? One thinks of the universal international hotel in which all differences are to be perceived in such a way as they no longer make a difference. Let us take the case of the Wrightian Arizona-Phoenix Hotel which now belongs to the Biltmore chain and is treated as if it were just simply one more hotel, one more garden complex, one more pool, one more buffet, filled with beautiful people. I dwell on the media because of the extent to which we are conditioned by them, consciously or otherwise, so much so that we often read buildings

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as picturesque images of structures, rather than opening ourselves to a direct experience of their corporeal form. Point 5: Space/Place

This opposition has been most clearly formulated by Martin Heidegger in his seminal essay of 1954, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in which he opposed the Latin spatium in extensio, or regularly subdivided, theoretically infinite space, to the Teutonic concept of Raum as a phenomenologically bounded clearing or domain. For Heidegger the boundary is not the line at which something stops, but rather the contour within which something begins its “presencing.” As opposed to this, modern urban development has favored the proliferation of a universal, privatized, placeless domain. I am referring to the universal phenomenon of the Megalopolis, which was first enthusiastically recognized as such by the French geographer Jean Gottman. He saw it as the characteristic pattern of urban development throughout the Northeastern seaboard of the United States and elsewhere. And it was this same phenomenon that led the planner Melvin Webber to coin such terms as “community without propinquity” or “non-place urban realm” as slogans with which to rationalize the total loss of the civic domain in modern society. Point 6: Typology/Topography

Typology is a term that pertains to both civilization and culture. It is clear, for instance, that the building types of the Enlightenment—that is, the types initially propagated by the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des BeauxArts—were relatively universal. They were gridded, rational matrices, capable of admitting a wide range of institutional programs and were applicable to almost any regular site. As opposed to this, the received types of the Arts and Crafts movement were culturally grounded in the real and/or mythic history of a particular place. They were convoluted, additive, and programmatically specific. Nonetheless, these types were typifiable and as the essence of the vernacular they were culturally handed down. Topography, on the other hand, is unequivocally site-specific. It is, so to speak, the concrete appearance of rootedness itself. Nature, even the manipulated man-made nature, is the precondition for its being. This opposition between typology and topography is potentially manifest at every level, from the integration of a new intervention with the existing environment to the ecological, climatological, and symbolic aspects of the resultant place-form. This unavoidable transformation of a given topographic context in every building act is only suppressed where maximizing criteria of either an instrumental or an aesthetic nature are superimposed, such as the ruthless leveling of the contours in a typical American subdivision or, alternatively, the conception of the building as a freestanding aesthetic object from the outset. It is necessary to state that high-rise constructions tend to become disjunctive in this regard, although one may still relate such works to existing topographic features or, alternatively, to other high-rise structures.

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Point 7: Architectonic/Scenographic

The term “architectonic” and, more specifically, the Greek word tekton allude etymologically to the metier of the carpenter and therefore not only to the maker of the primitive Greek temple but also to the primordial role of the frame and the joint in the genesis of construction. It is hardly necessary to add that the term “architect” itself derives from the term architekton, meaning chief constructor. Thus, the generic term “architectonic” refers not only to the technical means of supporting the building but also to the mythic reality of this structural achievement; that is, it should display the way in which the artifice interacts with nature, not only in terms of gravity, but also in terms of its durability with regard to the agencies of climate and time. This applies to architectonic forms, irrespective of whether the element is a frame and hence strictly tectonic or whether it is made of load-bearing mass construction and hence stereotomic. Scenography, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word scena and from frons scenae, meaning scene, and is thus essentially representational in nature. It may be argued that the architectonic and the scenographic have always had quite different affinities, the one arising out of aboriginal building, the other being essentially identified with the Renaissance. In this context, we can easily see how the current tendency to reduce built form to images or scenography only serves to further an imagistic reception and perception of the built form. As Marco Frascari reminds us, the suppression of construction through the elimination of framework or the masking of the joints deprives architecture of its expressiveness, so that the architectonic significance of the work becomes obfuscated and mute. As Frascari puts it, the act of construing—interpreting—presupposes, as its etymology would indicate, the act of constructing in the first place. Point 8: Artificial/Natural

More than any other art form, building and architecture have an interactive relationship with nature. Nature is not only topography and site, but also climate and light to which architecture is ultimately responsive to a far greater degree than any other art. Built form is necessarily susceptible to an intense interaction with these elements and with time, in its cyclical aspects. All of this seems so self-evident as to hardly require stating, and yet we tend to forget how universal technology in the form of modern mechanical services (air conditioning, artificial light, etc.) tends towards the elimination of precisely those features that would otherwise relate the outer membrane of a given fabric to a particular place and a specific culture. Something similar may be claimed for the provision of natural light in relation to diurnal and seasonal change. This point is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated in the case of the totally closed, climatically controlled art gallery. It is well known that ultraviolet light has a deleterious effect on certain forms of art, but between the filtration and reflection of direct natural light and its total exclusion there still remains a certain scope for modulation and control. Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Museum aptly demonstrates how natural lighting levels below a certain safe level may be amply and subtly

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boosted with artificial spotlighting. Without such a mediated approach, the exclusion of natural light deprives art, in experiential terms, of any form of interaction with the place. One needs to mention in this regard the equally negative impact of optimized services. I am alluding not only to excessive energy consumption and the heavy pollution that results, but also to the way in which hermetically sealed, airconditioned structures are incapable of responding to variations in the outside climate. Once again, built form tends to be deprived of its inherently mediatory capacity, such as the provision of natural shade, the admission of natural ventilation, and even the neutralization of seasonal extremes through changes in spatial occupation. Who has not experienced the perversity of being unable to open a window during temperate weather in an air-conditioned, hermetically sealed environment? To this must be added the technological indifference of airconditioned structures to the climatological benefits that accrue to certain forms of layout rather than others. I am thinking of the “climatological-flywheel” effect that is induced by the provision of enclosed courts—warmer in winter, cooler in summer. Rather than being an anti-air-conditioning polemic, this approach indicates the need for balancing the techniques of universal civilization with the rooted forms of climatically inflected culture. Point 9: Visual/Tactile

These alternatives address the way in which the architectural object is open to levels of perception other than the visual. Architecture possesses a marked capacity for being experienced by the entire sensorium; that is to say, senses other than the optic nerve are involved in experiencing architecture. Under most circumstances, materials and surfaces can be as much a part of an overall perception of architecture as the presence of visual form. Air movement, acoustics, ambient temperature and smell—all these factors affect our experience of space. It is a common experience to become suddenly aware of the rake of a stair and the rhythm that this involuntarily imposes on our sense of well-being. Some tread-to-riser relationships will be found awkward and others gracious, thereby affecting the sense of poise experienced by the body. If we include in this percept the materials from which the stair is surfaced, then clearly the overall experience will be a combination of both the surface finish and the going. Such experiences are particularly expressive of hierarchical spatial episodes. A typical example is the architectural promenade created by Alvar Aalto in the sequential approach to the council chamber of Saynatsalo City Hall of 1952. Numerous other examples of the tactile perception of space could be given, from Luchino Visconti’s insistence on solid wood-block flooring in the Altona Mansion in which he filmed The Damned (in order that the actors would be able to assume appropriate postures) to the attention that Jørn Utzon drew in 1962 to cultural differentiations stemming from different forms of “undercroft”; from, say, the suspended timber platform generic to the architecture of the Orient to the solid masonry plateaux that are commonly found in Mesoamerica. Suffice

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it to say that, in each instance, the biological privilege accorded to sight is complemented by strong tactile experiences. What is implied by these examples is the contrary, that is to say, the stress placed upon rationalized sight in the evolution of Renaissance architecture, i.e., perspective. After the 15th century, the triumphant legacy of this intellectual construct would exercise a strong hold over the development of Western space. At its most reductive, this mode of perception tends to place undue stress on the formal representation. This is often achieved, in our time, at the expense of tactility. Here, once again, one looks for a certain complementarity between the two poles, for a critique of the visual in terms of the tactile, and vice-versa. The implication here is that the being as a whole has a greater capacity to resist than the “short circuit,” so to speak, connecting visual stimuli to information rather than experience. Point 10: Post-Modernism and Regionalism: A Summation

The protagonists of Post-Modernity—that is to say, those who are convinced that the heroic period of the Modern Movement has come to an end—seem to fall into two groups: the Neo-Historicists and the Neo-Avant-Gardists. The first, who seem to be the more prominent in the eyes of the popular press, are those who feel that the entire apparatus of the avant-garde has been discredited and that no choice remains but to abandon this ostensibly radical discourse and to return to tradition. The second, while repudiating global utopias, seem to welcome nonetheless the continuing escalation of modernization as an inevitable process. They see this process positively as one which, despite its predominantly technical character, contains within its nature the liberative and “creative” forms of the future. Of the two groups it may be claimed that the second is the more realistic and consistent in that modernization continues in any case. The former, on the other hand, is culturally schizophrenic and politically retrogressive, for it too remains secretly committed to the benefits of universal civilization. Where the Neo-Historicists are anti-modern in every respect, the Neo-Avant-Gardists are perhaps more strictly Post-Modern in that by repudiating the utopian legacy of the Enlightenment they proclaim the end of “master narratives” in all fields, including that of science itself. Regionalism, in my view, constitutes the potential, interstitial middle ground between these two irreconcilable “Post-Modern” positions. It is as critical of the one as it is of the other and while it may as a theoretical position be as full of aporias as the other two, it does nonetheless offer a critical basis from which to evolve a contemporary architecture of resistance—that is, a culture of dissent free from fashionable stylistic conventions, an architecture of place rather than space, and a way of building sensitive to the viscissitudes of time and climate. Above all, it is a concept of the environment where the body as a whole is seen as being essential to the manner in which it is experienced.

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Introduction to “Critical Regionalism In Houston”

386

Richard Ingersoll takes Kenneth

the real possibility of an architecture

Frampton’s particular version of

that employs or satisfies most of

critical regionalism as his starting

the dialectical points described by

point for a case study of the Menil

Frampton, something Frampton failed

Collection in Houston, Texas. The

to demonstrate in his own analytical

aim of this article is two-fold: first,

essays. Further, Ingersoll shows

to present an example of critical

that architecture can root itself, with

regionalism that is often thought

authenticity, within a landscape of

of, mistakenly, as an acontextual

heterogeneous uses and forms.

modernist or high-tech project; and second, to illustrate how the

The essay appeared in the Pomona

theory can help make sense of the

Proceedings, which emerged from the

“landscape of displacement” that

first international seminar dedicated

characterizes Houston and other

to critical regionalism, held in 1989 at

sprawling metropolises.

Cal Poly Pomona.

In dealing with the first of these,

Richard Ingersoll (b. 1949) is a professor of architectural history at Syracuse University in Florence and professor of urban design at Università di Ferrara, Italy.

Ingersoll presents a brief historical account of regional strategies in Houston’s history. From the “romantic regionalism” of Cram at Rice University (see Fox, Chapter 3) to the ineffective deep porches of vernacular houses in Houston’s Fourth Ward to the widespread use of air-conditioning, he finds each to be either theoretically uncritical with regard to local cultural issues or practically ineffective in the still and humid regional climate. His is a clear description of a theory that has more often been misunderstood than not. Most helpful to this end is his analogy between the strategy of defamiliarization and Brechtian theater, in which the audience is made aware of the actor as a character and an actor at the same time, enlivening the meaning of the performance. But it is his analysis of the Menil Collection that is most important. It fills a much needed gap between the rhetoric of critical regionalism and its application. Ingersoll’s analysis demonstrates

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Richard Ingersoll

Critical Regionalism in Houston: A Case for the Menil Collection From “Critical Regionalism”: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, Spyros Amourgis, editor (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991), 233–39. Reprinted courtesy of the author and editor.

The architectural theory of Critical Regionalism is intended as an alternative to both the dehumanizing aspects of modernism and the kitsch of postmodernism. It is a laudable attempt to reverse the trend of placelessness caused by mass culture, and at the same time it resists the simulations, the pseudo-places, of vernacular and historic revivals. As originally defined by Liane Lefaivre and Alex Tzonis in their 1981 article about the work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis—and spelled out more dogmatically by Kenneth Frampton in the final chapter of the second edition of his Modern Architecture, A Critical History (Oxford, 1985)—it is the most serious critique among architects of cultural relativism. Unfortunately, Critical Regionalism is a theory that is not only difficult to understand (because of its dialectical premises) but nearly impossible to visualize. It has neither slogans nor visual mnemonics: Frampton offers seven points, but they do not seem axiomatic in the manner of Le Corbusier’s “five points” or reducible to icons, such as Venturi’s “duck and decorated shed.” Furthermore, buildings that might qualify as examples of Critical Regionalism do not appear cognate to each other, for it is not a style; one cannot unequivocally recognize a Critical Regionalist work. It is a theory that many architects and their clients might approve of...if only they could remember how to define it! To date it has been more valuable to historians and critics for evaluating work than it has to practitioners. While I have yet to think of a marketing brainstorm to promote the theory (and indeed marketing is anathema to the theory’s origin), I think at this point the only thing we can do is describe projects that we believe are good examples of the theory. The city of Houston, Texas, which comprises an area of 525 square miles, is large enough to be considered a region. The work I will present, the Menil Collection (Renzo Piano and Richard Fitzgerald, 1987), is a deeply poetic reaction to the culture, climate, and urbanism of this urban region. Houston is perhaps the most complete landscape of displacement ever produced by man. Nature has bestowed it with almost no topographic features.

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Its unrelieved horizontality speaks of limitless possibilities for expansion. The governmental authorities and lending institutions have allowed development to leapfrog, uninhibited by zoning or planning legislation. As a consequence, Houston’s chief physical characteristic is the gap: the space left after development pulls out and relocates, or the undeveloped space left between projects. Houston’s physical, social, and architectural displacements have occurred through the aegis of two technological dictators, the automobile and airconditioning, both of which have thrived on the abundant supply of fuel. While architecture can successfully be used to modify hostile climates in other parts of the world, buildings in Houston are defenseless against the sweltering heat—for six months of the year, the temperature can range from 90–110 F with close to 100% humidity. Thus universal air-conditioning has become a “regionalist” response that is impossible to argue against. The lack of resistance to the automobile led quite early, in the 1930s, to a “city on wheels.” Dwellings, businesses, retail areas, recreation, and schools are rarely proximate; in this respect Houston is like other American cities in which the car has become indispensable to accomplishing the multiple activities of an urban life—the only difference is that there is usually a place to park in Houston. This lopsided emphasis on automobile transit, however, has obviated the walkable street or public places of assembly. When confronted with the urban form of Houston, one’s first impression is that the buildings do not seem to be where they belong, nor do they have any reason for looking the way they do. High-rises are just as likely to sprout up in the outer regions of the city’s sprawl as they are in the center. Weird juxtapositions in scale occur in the most random fashion, with shacks next to high-rise condos. The air-conditioned box can be as uncommunicative as the reflective surfaced towers of Greenway Plaza, or as chatty as Johnson and Burgee’s University of Houston School of Architecture, cribbed directly from Ledoux. The “wrapping” strategies range from anesthesia to laughing gas. Surprisingly, Houstonians seem undaunted by what others might find to be a disorienting and alienating landscape. Novelist Philip Lopate describes Houston’s good-natured incongruities as being “like a friendly smile with a lot of teeth missing.” One would search in vain for surviving examples of historic regionalist architecture. The vernacular solution of deep porticoes and eaves with broad shaded areas was never very effective as protection against Houston’s stifling heat and humidity. These features have disappeared from the streets during the past three decades. There are a few rotting examples in the district of the Fourth Ward of Southern shotgun-style houses with pronounced porches that were built for ex-slaves as a segregated district known originally as Freedman’s Town. Still inhabited by poor blacks, the Fourth Ward is the only place left in Houston where there is real street life. There have been historicist neovernacular buildings, such as the Spanish-style Isabella Courts (W. D. Bordeaux, 1928), with narrow courtyards and units set up for cross ventilation, or more

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recent examples such as Taft Architects’ Grove Court (1983) and Compendium Architects’ Museums Gate (1986). As pleasant as their use of courtyards might be, however, these are exceptions. The courtyard building has not been adopted as a regionalist type. The strongest vernacular statements in Houston are made by industrial buildings. These address the current “eyes that do not see” as an underlying truth about the region. The city is dotted with the ubiquitous metal warehouses, the pure volumes of rice silos, the stacked fins of air-cooling towers, the gossamer networks of lights at the oil refineries, the thumping swivels of oil pumps, and the snarled features of the rocket motors produced at NASA. Houston has been more conscious of its role as “energy capital” and “space city” than any regional or geographic quality it might have. The acceptance of unrestrained technology has led to the attitude that, if life is possible in outer space, it is also possible in Houston: living in Houston is like being in a space suit. Thus, if Houston astronauts could play golf when they first landed on the moon, football could also be played in a fully air-conditioned arena (Astrodome, 1967). More perversely, streets could also be air-conditioned: in downtown Houston you will find very few pedestrians on the public sidewalks and most of the new buildings have sealed perimeters at street level, while underground there is a lively tunnel system, seven miles in length, that connects most of the major buildings in privately owned, climate-controlled conditions. This desire for internally controlled environments has become the principal organizing criterion of new sections of the city, such as the Galleria–Post Oak area: the elimination of walkable streets has resulted in a widely spaced urban fabric that, as Randall Stout has shown, is closer to the pattern of an airport than of the grid of a traditional American city. The regular planting of indigenous live oak trees is the one unifying element to the city that is both natural and architectural. They have been planted in the oldest quarters such as Main Street, the wealthiest parts such as River Oaks, the newest parts such as the shopping malls, and the poorest areas such as the destitute-housing project at Allen Parkway Village. The oaks create a deep, piled carpet that hides any structure less than four stories tall; when planted in rows, they give form to the city’s character. Air-conditioning and automobiles are not “critical” responses to the region; they are technical additions that redefine the region. Before their introduction, the first truly poetic response to the architectural possibilities of Houston occurred with the creation of the plan and first two buildings for Rice University. Ralph Adams Cram, one of America’s foremost eclectics, mixed his Ruskinian ideology of handcrafted surfaces, polychromy, and ecclesiastical virtue in a historic fantasy that appropriated Venetian and Byzantine motifs while organizing an architectural layout suitable for the great expanse of the Texas prairie. As so often occurs, it is the outsider that introduces the critical response to the environment. The romance of Cram’s new regionalist proposition provided a formula that influenced the architectural approach of many subsequent projects on and off campus. His buildings were humanely scaled,

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with shaded porticoes and narrow, cross-ventilated rooms. The rows of hedges and trees and the bilateral symmetry of the quadrangle create a true sense of place with clearly conceived boundaries. Cram used local brick and limestone (with occasional use of imported marbles and tiles for accents) to create a unique language of surface patterns. The playful use of materials is mixed with historic allusions to pinnacles, parapets, and niches. The style is a syncretic emulation of the grandeur of the past without direct quotation. Cram’s romantic regionalism was so beautifully achieved and has proven so sensible that it has continued to inform modern architects working at Rice. Stirling and Wilford, who designed the addition to Anderson Hall in 1981, and Cesar Pelli, who built Herring Hall and the addition to the Student Center in 1985 and 1987, might have been expected to set themselves apart from the local style as they have done elsewhere, but instead they both produced new highly contextualist variations on Cram’s romantic regionalism. Cram and his modern successors did not produce an architecture based on local vernacular solutions; yet the exalted use of local materials and the accommodation to local climate through the provision of courts and porticoes is true to the region’s pre-air-conditioning needs. Romantic regionalism is critical to the degree that it upsets the expectations of the context without destabilizing the environment. It is not critical, however, with regard to the true dialectical nature of critical theory, as it is an affirmation of its historic or exotic origins rather than a denial of them. This necessarily negative side of critical culture is captured in Nietzsche’s dictum: “A great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.” It accounts for much of the misunderstanding about Critical Regionalism: if it is to be “critical,” it must be both accepted and rejected. The best analogy to explain this difficult and seemingly contradictory condition is the concept of Brechtian theater, in which the actor is constantly reminding the audience that he is both a fictional character and a real actor. This kind of awareness creates critical distance from reality while still remaining a part of reality. The Menil Collection—a museum complex by Renzo Piano and local associate Richard Fitzgerald, opened in 1987—is, I would propose, the fulfillment of a Brechtian architecture. The Critical Regionalist attitude that I shall describe is as much the product of the client as the architect, who are in both cases eminent outsiders. John and Dominique de Menil came from Paris to Texas to oversee the interests of their family’s Schlumberger Company. They upset both the cultural and political life of conservative Houston as early supporters of Modernism and civil rights. They hired Philip Johnson in 1949 to build the first International Style house in Houston, and in 1956 had him hired again to design the campus for the University of St. Thomas, a Modernist version of Jefferson’s University of Virginia, with spindly black catwalks in the place of white-columned porticoes. In 1971, they placed the Rothko Chapel, begun by Johnson and finished by Howard Barnstone, adjacent to the campus. The new museum is contiguous to these sites.

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The first architect for the museum was Louis I. Kahn, who had monumental ideas. Both Kahn and John de Menil died in 1974. In the intervening years, Dominique de Menil slowly acquired most of the single-story bungalow houses in a 10-block area surrounding the eventual site of the museum. Each of the houses was then painted gray with white trim, which creates an uncanny sense of unity. A neighborhood was invented, a pseudo-context amid the bland suburban grid, that quickly acquired the nickname “Doville” from Dominique’s nickname “Do.” Instead of being demolished, the houses have been either adapted as administrative offices of the museum or rented to artists. The entire district has become an art fiefdom. The museum is a long and low building, sheathed in gray wooden slats and framed by white steel members. It is self-effacing and quiet or, as I like to refer to it, “pianissimo.” The module of the building is determined by the 20-foot stretches of gracefully curved louvres, or “leaves,” non-operable fins of ferro-cement attached to a web of duct iron members. These are used like horizontal brises-soleils to filter light in half of the visitable interior spaces. On the exterior, the leaves form a peripteral portico that surrounds the museum with a special light, setting it off like a temenos of a primitive temple. One’s approach to the building from the parking lot, however, is non-axial and the plan is not symmetrical. Monumentality and large scale have been avoided—one is unaware of the second story from the front of the building. The interior is characterized by a 400-foot-long corridor and large loft spaces that in some cases have been subdivided with thick temporary walls. 2

1

FIG. 1 FIG. 2

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The Menil Collection Museum, Houston, Piano & Fitzgerald Architects (west façade & neighborhood context). The Menil Collection Museum, Houston, Piano & Fitzgerald Architects (detail, roof structure).

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The Menil Collection seems predicated on a dialectical version of regionalism. It is an important institution that is treated non-monumentally. Rather than being sited on a major thoroughfare, it is tucked discreetly into the suburban grid. It has created a neighborhood rather than replacing one by radically unifying the banal components of the suburban grid. Bounded space has been created through the characteristic colors. The porticoes that surround the museum offer filtered light rather than the darkness of typical southern eaves. The horizontality, as at Rice, is a thoughtful response to the expanse of the prairie. The wooden slats are reminiscent of the siding of local farm buildings and warehouses but are used as veneer rather than structure. Although the interior demands complete climate control, nature is incorporated into the design through the “leaves” of the ceiling and the ample planes of glass at both ends of the corridor and at the entrances. While the gallery installations are often quite theatrical, the exterior is non-scenographic and non-photogenic, being too broad to fit into a wide lens. The visible steel elements of the frame give an intimation of how the building was made. By rooting itself in a familiar but strangely recontextualized suburban environment, the Menil Collection has resisted the culture of displacement without resorting to pre-industrial kitsch or mystified forms of the vernacular. Each of the 10,000 works in the collection has been acquired according to a spiritual criterion. The Menils value art more for its inspirational function than its exchange value. The architects have done a superb job of providing space without dominating the works. In defending her collection and the way it is shown, Dominique de Menil is fond of quoting Paul Valéry: “The work of the spirit is in the act.” One could use this in defense of the building as well: its beauty is not in its overall appearance nor in its utility—only through use does one become aware of how beautiful it is.

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Introduction to “Placing Resistance”

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The following essay by Keith Eggener

get caught up in oppositions (us/

is an extension of ideas developed in

them) in the search for identity. In

his book Luis Barragán’s Gardens of

Frampton’s dialectical sets—space/

El Pedregal. It is an extended critique

place, architectonic/scenographic,

of Frampton’s use of Barragán as

visual/tactile—neither side of the set

an exemplar of critical regionalism,

has precedence, but each acts to

in which he finds inconsistencies

critique the other. In theory, a balance

and contradictions, leading him to

is achieved in this struggle. Seen

question the theory and its reception

another way, this balance is a kind

by architects. In question is the

of stand-off, resulting in, as Eggener

whether Barragán’s work is “an

puts it, “tension.” It is a process

architecture of resistance” i—a central

more interested in conflict than the

tenet of critical regionalism.

resolution. This suggests that within critical regionalism not only are there

Eggener argues convincingly that

no stable references with which we

Barragán’s work is not, citing his

might construct a culturally relevant

cosmopolitan stature as an architect

architecture, but also that any point

and businessman who participated

of resolution or perception must

purposefully in the global economy

be challenged by its opposite, lest

and architectural media. He further

one fall prey to sentimentality or

argues that Barragán’s evocative

chauvinism. Eggener raises questions

use of color and form in his work

of whether life can be carried on

was an attempt to evoke sentimental

under the constant pricking of one’s

responses and recall an imaginary

consciousness and whether a theory

regal Mexican past. Frampton can

that proposes such a lifestyle is worth

be forgiven for mistaking the raw

employing.

emotional impact of Barragán’s forms for a powerful and indigenous tectonic expression. Without

Keith Eggener (b. 1960) is an author and associate professor of American art and architecture at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

painstaking research like that Eggener conducted, an outsider has little chance of truly understanding those local circumstances or Barragán’s motivations. The real issue is not so much an error of attribution, but whether the theory, as described, is itself outside those cultural and architectural qualities it is designed to preserve. Does critical regionalism produce work that functions as critically regional work for the locals? Eggener points out that critical regionalism is problematic as a postcolonialist strategy as it tends to

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Keith L. Eggener

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism From Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 4 (May 2002): 228–37. Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press and the author.

Critical regionalism emerged as an architectural concept during the early 1980s. For leading theorists such as Kenneth Frampton, critical regionalism was an “architecture of resistance” seeking “to mediate the impact of universal civilization” and “to reflect and serve the limited constituencies” in which it was grounded. This paper examines critical regionalist rhetoric, particularly its emphasis on resistance, as a theoretical construct that inadvertently marginal­ized and conflated the diverse architectural tendencies it championed. The reception of Mexican architect Luis Barragán as a critical regionalist is highlighted to analyze some of critical regionalism’s most problematic assumptions, implications, and effects. Introduction

The term critical regionalism first appeared in print during the early 1980s, in essays by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and, a little later, Kenneth Frampton. These described a type of recent architecture that engaged its particular geographical and cultural circumstances in deliberate, subtle, and vaguely politicized ways. In making this engagement, critical regionalist architecture was said to eschew both the placeless homogeneity of much mainstream modernism and the superficial historicism of so much postmodern work. “The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism,” Frampton wrote, “is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.” Critical regionalism thus aimed “to reflect and serve the limited constituencies” in which it was grounded and “cultivate a contemporary place-oriented culture.” In this role, it was said to mark a form of resistance—a decided reaction to normative, universal standards, practices, forms, and technological and economic conditions. If critical regionalism was found difficult to define much beyond this and to be lacking in stylistic unity, this was because it was a method or process rather than a product, and the process varied widely according to individual situations. 1 Critical regionalism has been an influential architectural concept whose application remains widespread. 2 Yet as an intellectual construct it can be

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highly problematic. When applied, as it has often been, to the architecture of developing, postcolonial nations, the term critical regionalism exemplifies a phenomenon described by the urban historian Jane M. Jacobs: “Just as postcolonialist tendencies have always been produced by colonialism, so colonialist tendencies necessarily inhabit often optimistically designated postcolonial formations.” 3 Critical regionalism is such a formation. Identifying an architecture that purportedly reflects and serves its locality, buttressed by a framework of liberative, empowering rhetoric, critical regionalism is itself a construct most often imposed from outside, from positions of authority. The assumptions and implications it bears have undermined its own constructive message and confounded the architecture it upholds. The case of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán is revealing in this respect. Barragán’s mature work—from the Gardens of El Pedregal, begun in Mexico City in 1945, to late houses such as the Casa Gilardi of 1975–1977—has frequently been upheld as critical regionalist. [FIG. 1] However well intentioned and beneficial to his reputation, this designation of Barragán’s work is an appropriation, a form of colonization along the lines that Jacobs describes. To fit it into the critical regionalist paradigm, writers have neglected or distorted much of the architecture’s primary content and character. This essay, arguably another variety of appropriation, uses the reception of Barragán’s work as a lens through which we might observe some of critical regionalism’s more dubious implications and effects. 4

FIG. 1

Luis Barragán, Gilardi House, Mexico City, 1975–77.

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Defining Critical Regionalism

As an idea, critical regionalism’s roots run deep. When Vitruvius, in the first century B.C.E., discussed regional variations in architecture, he touched on a theme that would occupy countless architects and architectural writers ever since. For Vitruvius, architectural forms—like the physical, intellectual, and behavioral characteristics of the people that made them—were determined and essentially fixed by geography. 5 The “romantic regionalism” and “nationalist romanticism” propounded by architects and theorists worldwide during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew from similarly determinist notions of culture and geography. 6 It was this sort of “blood and soil” regionalism, and its perversion by the Nazis, that Lewis Mumford cautioned against in his book, The South in Architecture (1941). Culture and identity, Mumford realized, were more mutable and conditional than the romanticists and nationalists supposed, and so must be their architectural expression. “Regionalism,” he wrote, “is not a matter of using the most available local material, or of copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for want of anything better, a century or two ago. Regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soil but they reflect the current conditions of culture in the region.” 7 Mumford’s was a modern, selfreflexive regionalism that shunned revivalist pastiche and cheap nostalgia. Forty years later, in 1981, Tzonis and Lefaivre took up this thread in their essay “The Grid and the Pathway.” 8 The term critical regionalism was born here, and its use quickly spread. By 1983, in his first of many articles on the topic, Frampton would argue that critical regionalism offered something well beyond comfort, accommodation, and reflective ex­pression. It was also a powerful medium of resistance. Critical regionalism, in its emphasis on place, “seem[ed] to offer the sole possibility of resisting” the alienating and dehumanizing assault of the placeless, consumption-driven “universal Megalopolis.” 9 No one has written of critical regionalism more often or with greater effect than Frampton. 10 His definition is the best known, the most complex and astute, and the one most often adopted by other writers and architects. Frampton began three of his earliest and most widely read papers on critical regionalism by recalling Paul Ricoeur’s 1955 essay “Universal Civilization and National Cultures.” Ricoeur had warned of the “phenomenon of universalization,” a tendency “constitut[ing] a sort of subtle destruction” of not only “traditional cultures,” but of “the creative nucleus of great cultures...the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.” 11 Following Ricoeur’s lead, Frampton described critical regionalism’s emergence as a self-conscious reaction to the “global modernization [that] continues to undermine, with ever increasing force, all forms of traditional, agrarian-based, autochthonous culture.” 12 The new regionalist architecture—beginning in the late 1940s and continuing into the present—proceeded from an awareness of, and an effort to subvert, the “universal technological norm,” the effects of global capitalism, internationalstyle architecture, and the sense of placelessness that these fostered. As such,

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it should be considered an “architecture of resistance,” fueled by “not only a certain prosperity but also some kind of anti-centrist consensus.” 13 The examples of critical regionalist practice Frampton cited were for the most part limited and localized, small-scale projects (houses, gardens, churches) “consciously bounded” in space and time. Architects identified by him included Jørn Utzon (Denmark), Mario Botta (Ticinese Switzerland), J. A. Coderch (Catalonia), Alvaro Siza (Portugal), Gino Valle (Udine, Italy), Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis (Greece), Tadao Ando (Japan), Oscar Neimeyer (Brazil), and Luis Barragán (Mexico). 14 Their products were both “borderline manifestations” operating in “the interstices of freedom,” and “locally inflected manifestations of ‘world culture.’” 15 Frampton insisted that the critical regionalism of these architects be regarded as not a style—“a received set of aesthetic preferences”—but a process, applicable to a range of situations and more or less independently realized in a variety of locations. And, as a process, critical regionalism was inherently dialectical and contradictory. It depended on, and to some degree sympathized with, universal modernism, even as it worked against it. As Frampton bleakly opined, “no living tradition remains to modern man other than the subtle procedures of synthetic contradiction.” 16 So critical regionalist architecture necessarily, discriminatingly, identified, abstracted, and melded local physical and cultural characteristics with more ubiquitous modern practices, technologies, and economic and material conditions. To be regional and modern involved an ex­tremely delicate balance. If critical regionalism’s relationship with modernism was complex and uneasy, its associations with postmodernism were no less so. Postmodern architecture, Frampton said, had reduced itself to “pure technique or pure scenography,” pure commodity. “The so-called postmodern architects are merely feeding the media-society with gratuitous, quietistic images rather proffering, as they claim, a creative rappel à l’ordre after the supposedly proven bank­ruptcy of the liberative modern project.” 17 Yet despite Frampton’s evident desire for distance, critical regionalism can hardly be understood apart from postmodernism, whether as its antithesis or accompaniment. On the one hand, critical regionalism was reactive, directly rejecting postmodernism’s widely perceived banality, superficiality, and cynicism in favor of a formal rigor and serious, social purpose akin to modern architecture at its best. On the other, it endorsed postmodern pluralism, its recognition of diverse subjectivities, and its assault on modernism’s leveling, global sweep. The 1980s was an era of aggressive foreign intervention by the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and of resurgent nationalism worldwide. Critical regionalism might also be seen in part as a quasi-radical, intellectual reaction to both of these movements. Its proponents opposed the domination of hegemonic power and reactionary populism, rampant globalization and superficial nationalism. 18 Although, or because, “the practice of architecture [was] more global than at any time before,” said Tzonis and Lefaivre, it was important to consider regionalism because it alerted people to “the loss of place

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and community.” Yet, like Frampton, they warned against “counterfeit settings” and the easy “sentimental embracing” of the past. Unlike romantic regionalist works that attempted to arouse “affinity” in the viewer via familiar imagery, critical regionalist works “prick[ed] the conscience” into thought and action through an effect of “defamiliarization,” chal­lenging “not only the established actual world but the legitimacy of the possible world view in the minds of the people.” 19 Both Frampton and Tzonis and Lefaivre supported their assertions of critical regionalism’s criticality, its subversive challenge to the status quo, with references to Jürgen Habermas and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, whose ideas Frampton called “the only valid basis upon which to develop a valid form of (post) modern critical culture.” 20 Although Frampton, Tzonis, and Lefaivre were all careful to indicate architectural regionalism’s historical relation to a broad spectrum of political and cultural agendas (republican, absolutist, totalitarian, antifascist), the new, critical regionalism they outlined—resistant, reformist, conscience-pricking, Frankfurt School–fueled—implied a distinctly progressive, confrontational, even radicalized project. Region and Resistance

What effects have these ideas of critical regionalism had on architectural discourse during the past two decades? Since World War II, a great many architects worldwide have endeavored, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, to situate modernism. They did this to foster a sense of place, to humanize the machine à habiter, to address issues of personal and cultural identity, and to serve local constituencies and political interests. Critical regionalism has provided a powerful tool for studying some aspects of some of these architects’ work. The idea of a “critical regionalism” has raised significant questions about modernity, tradition, cultural identity, and place. It has helped bring much-deserved attention to otherwise neglected architectural activity, and it has provided a sophisticated interpretative apparatus through which to approach this activity. It also has operated as a lens that can flatten, distort, or marginalize the cultural practices it surveys. The major targets of critical regionalism’s critique—universal modernism, placelessness, reactionary populism, the capitalist culture of consumption—have already been identified. But where did critical regionalism stand with regard to the regions it referenced? We might begin by raising a series of questions that are often asked by scholars of nationalism and postcolonialism: What are the constituents of cultural (or regional or national) identity? How are these to be represented and utilized? How and by whom are the answers to these questions decided? What are the implications of these decisions having been made? 21 If socalled critical regionalist designs exemplified an “architecture of resistance,” it is ironic that writers discussing the places where these designs appeared so often emphasized one architect’s interpretation of the region over all others: Tadao Ando for Japan, Oscar Niemeyer for Brazil, Charles Correa for India, and Luis Barragán for Mexico. In other words, a single correct regional style was implied, or imposed, sometimes from inside, more often from outside “the region.” 22

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Barragán’s case provides persuasive evidence of this inclination. By the mid-1970s, Barragán’s work was largely unappreciated, if not actually dismissed, inside Mexico and unknown outside of it. Yet, if his architecture remained suspect in some Mexican circles—on account of its elitism and idiosyncrasy, its aloof distance from the more pragmatic, socially oriented concerns of other prominent architects operating in that nation—it was soon validated internationally for its formal and poetic qualities. In 1976, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened a well-received exhibition of Barragán’s postwar work. The lavishly illustrated, sparely worded catalogue by the Argentine-born, New York–based architect and curator Emilio Ambasz, sold more than fifty thousand copies worldwide and made Barragán famous. 23 Four years later, in Washington, D.C., a jury composed of American, English, and Japanese representatives awarded Barragán the prestigious Pritzker Prize, the “Nobel Prize of architecture.” 24 (He remains the only Mexican to have received this prize.) Internationally, Barragán was now the most celebrated of Mexican architects; for all practical purposes, he was at that time the only Mexican architect recognized outside of Mexico. As much as anything, his work was applauded for appearing so very Mexican, or Mexican at least in a sense that people in places like New York, London, and Tokyo could readily understand and appreciate. Its elegantly minimal cubic forms, roughtextured walls and stark voids, brilliant saturated colors, subtle evocations of Spanish Colonial convents and haciendas, and splashes of water and Mexican handicrafts were swathed in a rhetoric of memory, sensuality, and Roman Catholic mysticism. In the MoMA catalogue Ambasz praised Barragán’s buildings and gardens as essentially modern yet “deeply rooted in [Mexico’s] cultural and religious traditions. It is through the haunting beauty of his hieratic constructions,” wrote Ambasz, “that we have come to conceive of the passions of Mexico’s architecture.” 25 [FIG. 2] Success at home followed success abroad. Soon after the MoMA exhibition Barragán—whose fame had peaked during the early 1950s and languished thereafter—was awarded various Mexican prizes and honors, including the coveted Premio Nacional des Artes and an honorary doctorate from the University of Guadalajara. Mexican authors began discussing his work with renewed frequency and appreciation. Many of these, implicitly or explicitly, utilized critical regionalist language. Echoing Frampton’s essays of the early 1980s, Mexican architect and historian Anibal Figueroa claimed in 1985 that Barragán had “sought an authentic expression of his culture devoid of both the artifice of intentional fashion and of ‘folkloric’ quaintness. He has sought a genuine contemporary expression.” 26 Barragán’s work, which architect Juan O’Gorman once described as “exactly what Mexican architecture shouldn’t be,” now came for many in Mexico to represent that country’s architecture at its best and most distinctive. According to Figueroa, Barragán’s oeuvre offered “a timeless expression of Mexican culture.” 27 For critic Jorge Alberto Manrique, it was an expression without parallel:

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There is no relation between the architecture of Luis Barragán and other [Mexican] architectonic nationalisms. There is nothing within his work of their revivals of traditional forms (nothing of pastiche, nothing of decorative elements), nor of their utilization of characteristic materials nor of their inclusion of forms or figures that transmit a vague prehispanic past....There is instead [in Barragán’s work] the idea that to create architecture is to create an ambience, an atmosphere, to make a place to be....[T]he architecture of Luis Barragán, without nationalistic program, is the most clearly Mexican. 28

The situation of architect Ricardo Legorreta provides further evidence of Barragán’s enduring influence on both national and international perceptions of what Mexican architecture is and should be. If Legorreta is the best-known Mexican architect alive today, this seems due in part to the fact that his widely published museums, libraries, hotels, and office complexes, whether sited in Mexico, the United States, or elsewhere, incorporate all the elements that people have come to expect of Mexican modern architecture. That is to say, his buildings look a great deal like those of his mentor Barragán. 29 [FIG. 3] Meanwhile, the other regionalisms and antiregionalisms of Barragán’s postwar Mexican contemporaries—the pre-Colombian–inspired “plastic integration” of O’Gorman, the “fusion” of “las dos raíces de México” (the European and the American) of Alberto Arai, the fervent antiregionalist modernism of Mauricio Gómez Mayorga—have largely faded from public memory. 30 Barragán’s architecture has been characterized as both highly personal and representative of modern Mexican culture. Can it be both? Should it? As historian Ella Shohat put it, the key questions for any critical analysis of identity, regional or otherwise, should be “who is mobilizing what in the articulation of the past, developing what identities, identifications and representations, and in the name of what political vision and goals?” 31 These questions have yet 2

FIG. 2 FIG. 3

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3

Luis Barragán, Tlalpan Chapel, Mexico City, 1953–60. Ricardo Legorreta, Hotel Camino Real, Mexico City, 1967–68.

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to receive their due in the literature on critical regionalism in general or on Barragán in particular. In 1994, Mexican author and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz went so far as to suggest that “Mexican politicians and educators should follow” in the footsteps of those who, like Barragán, “employ our popular tradition with intelligence.” Barragán’s work, he suggested, made effective and appropriate use of a Mexican “political and moral legacy.” To be truly modern, Paz concluded, we must, like Barragán, “come to terms with our tradition.” 32 Yet we would do well to remember that where one image of a nation’s culture prevails, others have been submerged or suppressed. When one individual’s image of identity is projected onto the nation, it is important to scrutinize the background, beliefs, and aspirations of that individual and his or her advocates. Built form does not simply reflect culture; it shapes it, and therein lies much of its power. If work like Barragán’s began, on some level, as an architecture of resistance, it might very well be seen today as an architecture to resist. Center and Periphery

Revisiting the topic of critical regionalism in 1991, Tzonis and Lefaivre defended it as “a reaction to a global problem...most urgent in superdeveloped parts of the world and not an expression of identity for so-called ‘peripheral’ regions.” 33 The fact, however, is that up until that time much of the writing on critical regionalism involved Western European and North American urbanites discussing architecture from developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or from the less developed regions of their own countries or continents. The major cities of Europe and the United States were for these writers the centers that made possible critical regionalism’s “anti-centrist consensus.” Based in New York, Frampton used the term peripheral nodes when speaking of the sites of critical regionalism’s emergence—Mar del Plata, Mexico City, Udine, Póvoa de Varzim, and Athens among them. 34 Writing from Boston in 1982, the critic and historian William Curtis began his essay, “The Problem of Regional Identity” by calling the “modern movement...the intellectual property of certain countries in Western Europe, of the United States, and of some parts of the Soviet Union....But by around 1960, transformations, deviations and devaluations of modern architecture had found their way to many other areas of the world” [my emphasis]. Curtis then returned directly to Mexico and Barragán’s “vital immediate post-war experiments” there. 35 That which lies beyond the center is by definition peripheral. No matter how vital, the peripheral is other than, deviant from, and lesser than the center, the norm. This kind of center/periphery thinking carries with it some unsavory implications. In July 1947, Architectural Record published an article on recent architectural activity in Mexico City. The New York–based author, Ann Binkley Horn, wrote of the “visual hysteria,” “impulsiveness,” and lack of analysis or reflection that was characteristic of the work she had seen there. 36 Few responsible critics or journals today would use such biased and sweeping terms, but a related, if more circumspect, vocabulary has often been applied to contemporary regionalist architecture. Writing about Barragán’s

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work, for instance, has concentrated on form over polemics or pragmatism, on sensuality and emotion over intellect, on mystery over analysis, and on an implied primitivism, however noble. Frampton characterized Barragán’s as a “sensual and earthbound” architecture, imbued with “feeling for mythic and rooted beginnings.” Curtis emphasized its “sense of ancient values” and “genuinely archetypical mood.” Ambasz wrote of Barragán’s “animistic feeling for matter” and (inaccurately) of his lack of a formal architectural education. 37 While himself romanticizing Mexican village life and appropriating its forms and colors, the well-read, well-traveled, well-heeled, institutionally educated architect Barragán was likewise romanticized by European and North American– based writers. He was made to seem more an innocent or a shaman than the highly successful professional designer and real-estate developer that he was. He remains to this day better known for his other-worldliness and his spicy Latin talk of God and death and beauty than for his cultural sophistication, his shrewd business sense, or his aspirations to participate as an equal in an international avant-garde. 38 “Regional or national cultures,” Frampton wrote in 1985, “must today, more than ever, be ultimately constituted as locally inflected manifestations of ‘world culture.’” 39 The vague universality implied by the phrase world culture makes it sound suspiciously like another phrase that Frampton treated more skeptically: the international style. 40 In fact, both phrases absorb culturally and geographically situated activities within an overarching, EuroAmerican–generated discourse, one bearing relatively little interest in local perspectives on local culture. This kind of absorption has on more than one occasion led to an interpretive flattening of diverse cultural materials, and a misunderstanding or devaluation of their founding intentions and most immediate meanings. 41 The same might be said of critical regionalism. In his writings on the topic, Frampton cautiously emphasized process over product. He pointed to the diversity of forms resulting from an equivalent diversity of circumstances. The term did not, he insisted, imply a style. And yet, in a way it did. Critical regionalism, as Frampton and others described it, denied formal style while presuming a style of thought and approach. Among other things, critical regionalist architects were said to favor “the small rather than the big plan.” They viewed “the realization of architecture as a tectonic fact.” They understood light as “the primary agent by which the volume and the tectonic value of the work are revealed.” Above all, they practiced architecture as a form of resistance, an expression of an “anticentrist consensus,” “critical of modernization” and the placelessness it promoted. 42 That some so-called critical regionalists might understand their work as operating in ways fundamentally different from this was not taken into account. As Argentine architect and theorist Marina Waisman wrote, “the Latin American version [of regionalism] is quite different from that proposed by Kenneth Frampton, or Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre.” Contemporary regionalist architecture in Latin America should be understood, she said, as “divergence,” rather than “resistance.” Such architecture is less a rejection of the West or

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modernity—which was, in any event “never fully achieved in Latin America”— than an affirmation of local culture within “the general movement of history.” 43 In other words, contemporary Latin American architecture of a regionalist character is not primarily a reaction to the West, or to “world culture,” as the word resistance would imply, but a response to local circumstances. It should be seen not as a marginal practice, but as a development parallel to contemporary architecture in the industrialized West. A Reluctant Revolutionary

How did Luis Barragán see his own work operating? Is it apt, given the definition of critical regionalism laid out here, to speak of Barragán as a critical regionalist? The case can certainly be made that Barragán’s best work after World War II, which he described as “placed in and...a part of Mexico,” resisted and critiqued placelessness and globalization. 44 The houses and gardens he built around 1950 at the Gardens of El Pedregal, for instance, emphasized the peculiar vegetation and volcanic rock indigenous to the site, and made discreet references to Mexican vernacular and historic architecture. These references were “defamiliarizing” in relation to by-then mainstream notions of modernist internationalism and ahistoricism. Subtle and austere, Barragán’s Pedregal buildings also stood in marked contrast to more obvious, exuberant, populist notions of modern Mexican architectural identity—the neocolonial, the neoprehispanic, the mural-clad—found elsewhere in Mexico City, especially at the contemporaneous University City complex. [FIG. 4] Yet there is much about Barragán and his work that is strik­ingly discordant with the critical regionalism that Frampton and Tzonis and Lefaivre outlined. First, there is probably no major modern architect of the twentieth century who was more given to “sentimental embracing” than Barragán. He insisted that “the architect must listen and heed his nostalgic revelations.” He called his own architecture “autobiographical” and with the help of several sympathetic critics, he wrapped around it a highly selective and not entirely genuine tissue of memories and lore. Tales of his distant, privileged, pre-Revolutionary boyhood on the Barragán family ranch in Mazamitla (the ancien régime, in effect), and of his youthful voyages around the Mediterranean (a privileged provincial returning reverently to the source), took on an almost fetishistic presence in post-1976 accounts of his mature work. 45 His best-known works would seem to pulse with a bittersweet remembrance of things past. At the same time, Barragán’s architecture was far more international in its scope, and rather less autochthonous, than is generally supposed. Formally and conceptually, it was directly informed by the work of Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other Europeans and North Americans, as much or more than it was by any Mexican vernacular examples. 46 Economically, a project such as El Pedregal was tightly bound, through its elaborate financing and its extensive advertising campaign, to an international web of capital. Even before its first houses were built, El Pedregal was promoted to potential clients in the United States. Here the question emerges as to how much of the project’s

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National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with Main Library (by Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martínez de Velasco) in the foreground and Humanities Tower (by Enrique de la Mora, Manuel de la Colina, and Enrique Landa ) in the background, Mexico City , 1950–53.

FIG. 4

“sense of place” was generated by local concerns and conditions, and how much of it was intended to appeal to foreign (mis)conceptions of Mexico. Finally, in a place with post-Revolutionary Mexico’s staggering social, environmental, and economic problems, what architectural action could be less conscience-pricking, less opposed to hegemonic power, than building exclusionary subdivisions and walled gardens and villas for the rich, that is, Barragán’s very stock in trade? Lending support to his notion of critical regionalism as an essentially radical project, Frampton argued that Barragán “had both the desire and the will to go beyond the elite that he had served throughout his life.” 47 There is little evidence to support this assertion and much to counter it. While Mexican modernist contemporaries such as Juan O’Gorman, José Villagrán García, and Mario Pani built the low-cost, utilitarian schools, housing, hospitals, offices, and factories that were so badly needed in their developing and recently war-torn nation, the aristocratic, elitist, aggressively capitalistic Barragán speculated in real estate. He built private refuges in which privileged people of means and sophistication might share in his Proustian meditations on memory, nostalgia, and loss. While his colleagues advocated architecture’s role in their country’s attainment of economic, political, and cultural autonomy, Barragán made condescending remarks about the colorful lives of Mexico’s poor and the “bad taste” of its middle classes. 48 If indeed Barragán’s projects of the 1950s and 1960s sought to counter an emerging and still ill-defined globalism, they fought more stridently still against

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the erosion of privilege and private life in a technologically driven, popularly oriented (the architect might have said “unappealingly democratized”) modern age. His elegant walled compounds, elite subdivisions, and equestrian enclaves may, as Frampton suggested, mark a kind of critique, but it is worth keeping in mind just what sort of critique this was: hardly radical or progressive, but romantic and reactionary. Resisting Regionalism

Insufficiently recognized is the fact that critical regionalism is, at heart, a postcolonialist concept. This is worth noting because it provides a broader intellectual basis than otherwise exists for understanding critical regionalist language and ideas. Like postcolonialist discourse in general, critical regionalist writing regularly engages in monumental binary oppositions: East/West, traditional/modern, natural/cultural, core/periphery, self/other, space/place. 49 Frampton made evident the postcolonial underpinnings of his work via his frequent references to Ricoeur’s “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” essay. Like the postcolonialist project Ricoeur described, Frampton’s version of critical regionalism revolved around a central paradox, a binary opposition: “how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.” 50 It is the tension arising from this problem—the struggle to resolve it more than its eventual resolution— that fuels critical regionalist discourse. This fact underlies Frampton’s emphasis on issues of resistance and process over product. Critical regionalism’s fault lines stand most clearly exposed in these emphases. “It is,” Jacobs writes, “a revisionary form of imperialist nostalgia that defines the colonized as always engaged in conscious work against the ‘core.’” 51 In stressing place, identity, and resistance over all other architectural and extra-architectural considerations, critical regionalist rhetoric exemplifies the “revisionary form of imperialist nostalgia” described by Jacobs. It makes paramount a struggle where no struggle might otherwise have been said to exist. It routes to the margins an architecture that might not otherwise be imagined standing there. In that ur-text of critical regionalism, The South in Architecture (1941), Lewis Mumford urged readers to be cautious with labels: “People think that a slogan, a catchword, a formula will, if we are lucky enough to find the right one, solve our problems.” 52 This, despite the best intentions of its leading theorists, is how critical regionalism too often came to function: as a fashionable formula, 53 as a catchword to describe a range of difficult and diverse architectures arising from markedly different circumstances. Even so subtle and sophisticated a label as “critical regionalism” could not help but devolve into a relatively facile and misleading mechanism. As architectural historian Anthony King has warned, “these global theories...enable those who produce or adopt them to view the world of others from one particular place, from one point of authority, from one particular social and cultural position. They produce a totalizing vision or overview which is likely to be at odds with the meanings which the

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inhabitants...place on the buildings themselves. In looking for ways in which to think about buildings ‘internationally’ we need to be sure that we’re not creating a new intellectual imperialism.” 54 Although critical regionalism’s conceptual contradictions were openly acknowledged, the case of Luis Barragán raises significant questions about the term’s ultimate value. Has its application to his and others’ work done more harm than good? As an interpretative strategy, how do we weigh its insights versus its distortions? More generally, does a system bearing so many exceptions and contradictory impulses, a system bracketing such a diversity of local examples within such a broad, universal framework, tell us much of anything? Or does it collapse under the weight of its own incongruities? As a concept, critical regionalism sought to be both general and particular. It ended by reinforcing the former at the expense of the latter; that is, it became a general theory of the particular. Perhaps it was but another symptom, or victim, of the inevitable universalizing tendencies it warned against. The North American architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, whom Frampton quoted in his discussions of critical regionalism, wrote in 1958 that regionalism is “a state of mind.” 55 Yet it is attention to this aspect—to the particular intellectual and cultural landscapes from which its sometimes reluctant individual exemplars emerged—that has been most lacking in the literature of critical regionalism. By attending more directly to these “states of mind,” by heeding the voices of those responsible for building particular cultures, architects among many others, rather than imposing formulas upon them, we might come to understand better the richness of internal, local discourses in their full range and complexity. Acknowledgments

For their insightful comments, I would like to thank Luis Carranza, Richard Ingersoll, and an anonymous reader at JAE. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium “Self, Place, and Imagination: CrossCultural Thinking in Architecture,” The Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, Univ. of Adelaide (Australia), Jan. 22, 1999. Thanks to Samer Akkach, Stanislaus Fung, and Peter Scriver, who organized this excellent event and provided many helpful suggestions regarding my original paper. Among the other presenters there were Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre; I am grateful to them for the thoughtful, gracious comments they provided on my work and their own.

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Chapter 8

Regionalisms for the Third Millennium

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Becoming Regional over Time: Toward a Reflexive Regionalism

Timothy J. Cassidy

On Performative Regionalism

Barbara L. Allen

Strong Margins

Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till

Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism

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Initially educated as a landscape architect and planner, Tim Cassidy’s perspective on architecture has always been set within the wider perspective of planning, geography, and landscape. His tendency, therefore, has been to look at architecture and theory from an experiential perspective—informed not by phenomenology but by direct participation with the land and culture, and a close reading of history. His contribution picks up where Keith Eggener’s (see Chapter 7) left off, in a critique of critical regionalism; the step he takes further is to consider the extent to which regional practices, both existing and potential, can serve as the basis for the development of a regional architecture. He builds a case for what he calls a “reflexive regionalism,” an architecture born out of awareness and time, rather than designed and delivered as already regional. It is based on inhabiting and living with a place, more than the critical or uncritical replication of regional forms or use of local materials. This essay is adapted from a doctoral research project Cassidy completed in 2000 that examined the possibility of a reflexive regionalism in the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania, or anywhere. Timothy J. Cassidy (b. 1962) is an architect, landscape architect, planner, teacher, and historic preservationist who lives in Westchester County, Pennsylvania.

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Timothy J. Cassidy

Becoming Regional over Time: Toward a Reflexive Regionalism 2000

...to foster opportunities for the soft voice of the landscape to be heard above the ambient roar created by the instruments of globalized civilization...

Critical regionalism has been advanced and widely accepted as a bona fide postmodern theoretical alternative, an architectural theory of resistance in response to the deficiencies of both regionalist and Modernist 1 architecture. 2 Architectural regionalism has, in many cases, resulted in the commodification of traditional vernacular forms into scenographic façades or, more egregiously, has been associated with repression and chauvinism. In the case of Modernism, its once liberative aspirations were reduced to inane utilitarianism as its utopian urban schemes were co-opted by capitalists, socialists, and communists alike. The dissemination of these universal assumptions throughout the world resulted in a kind of global architectural monotony (International Style) divorced from regional sensibilities by the mid twentieth century. Critical regionalism’s stated strategy of resistance is to establish a dialectic between locally rooted traditions and those of globalized civilization. 3 It is employed to resist and critique the contemporary forces that have enabled the assimilation and commodification of both regionalism and Modernism. The worldview posited by Tzonis, Lefaivre, and Frampton assumes that no authentic cultural processes still exist. It is assumed that everything that contemporary society desires and produces has been influenced by what Adorno describes as the “culture industry.” 4 In its attempt to abate the “apocalyptic thrust of modernization” 5 the genre discounts all regional manifestations that celebrate traditional notions of regional identity. It objectifies the notion of a region by seeing it as a collection of autonomous objects with particular characteristics proximate to one another in time and space. It does not recognize the collective experience of a particular landscape—the sense of regional place.

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Further, critical regionalism misrepresents, as nostalgic, traditional experiential connections to regions/places because it inequitably favors the abstract aesthetics of architectural Modernism and theoretical worldview of postmodern theory. Frampton wants regional cultural groups to develop hybrid expressions derived from both local and alien influences. The possibilities for variation and expression are compressed to such a narrow range that any regional expression, other than that which is possible through the Modernist aesthetic, is negated. Tzonis and Lefaivre’s and Frampton’s goal is to make culturally and physically place-specific architecture without being nostalgic. Their objections to nostalgia appear to be founded on its perceived susceptibility to populist and nationalistic commodification. They focus on the implementation of the same mechanism to remove the stigma of nostalgia from historical and vernacular traditions: defamiliarization and abstraction. That is, to resist commodification by creating forms not visually comprehensible as derived from vernacular or traditional typologies. The problem is that it is an approach that treats the concept of region as a collection of self-referential objects instead of a complex contextual cultural web. Individual works of architecture are reduced to a set of formal relationships that can be freely manipulated without regard to the regional context. Regionalism, critical or otherwise, should be inextricably bounded by context. The context offered by Tzonis and Lefaivre does not rely on any deep-rooted connections between region and the architectural exemplars they examine. Similarly, Frampton seems to acknowledge the need to connect the sphere of architecture to the larger contextual experience of the life-world. The context and subsequent interpretations remain detached from an understanding of architecture as a thread within a complex regional tapestry. These critiques offer little hope for the notion of architectural regionalism in the postmodern era because the dialectical mechanisms that are used to attack the legitimacy of the culture industry deny the possibility of recognizing the richness in regional identity. Framing the notion of regionalism this way precludes any hope of authentically experiencing the patterns and practices from which a region’s identity is derived and declares any attempt to do so as nostalgic. Therefore any attempt to uncover meaning inscribed in the landscape negates the traditional and familiar regional characteristics that lend themselves to postmodernism’s dimensional flattening and result in nostalgic commodification. This sense of finality and resignation is what Albert Borgmann characterizes as the sullen tone of postmodern theory—sullenness that emanates from the fact that this genre of critique has become a product of the condition it criticizes. 6 Namely, that the critics themselves now accept the surfaces they theorized as standing for contemporary reality. As with other postmodern scholars, Borgmann’s critique of postmodern culture is that it has lost its experiential grounding with the concrete contextual world. 7 The world Borgmann describes is not composed exclusively of

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consumerist iconography and “nature” is not “gone for good.” 8 Beneath the surfaces of postmodern commodification and the veil of postmodern theorization he recognizes the intrinsic value of those traditional, everyday, and meaningful things appropriated and packaged by the mechanics of the postmodern world. As the process of commodification has become more advanced in the postmodern era, it has become possible to increase the experiential distance between people and the world of things. Modern technological processes and postmodern social systems overlay the surface of real things such that access to them is increasingly difficult. Borgmann describes this phenomenon as a “device paradigm.” 9 Thus, in contrast to the contextual engagement provided by a thing, in the Heideggerian sense as described by Borgmann above, the experience rendered via a device is the direct delivery of commodity without any engaging intermediate process or means. Consider how few of us understand the process and situation by which many of the “things” we own are made. Besides a subtle alienation, this detachment between means and ends also eliminates the need to develop specialized skills (physical and interpretive) and knowledge about the world. In a commodified society, all that appears necessary is money. Access to things is bought and constituted by ownership and consumption. Participation is flattened into choosing among limited options made available by the logic within the global marketplace. However, as Borgmann helps us to realize and most everyday experience confirms, the existence of the device paradigm does not mark the end of the world of “eloquent things.” 10 Contrary to the positions forwarded by postmodern scholars such as Frampton and Jameson et al., Borgmann points out that beneath the mask of postmodern hyperreality—in which the world is apprehended primarily through media with all their bandwidth, speed of transmission, repetitiveness, and unreal reality—it is still possible to experience the rooted world that lies beneath it. If we are to understand premodern reality as entirely natural and traditional, locally bounded, cosmically centered, and possibly divinely constituted, then postmodern hyperreality can appear natural and traditional only in the places where the hyperreal conditions and the supporting technological apparatus have left openings. On closer inspection, the line between hyperreality and eloquent reality turns out to be nothing more than a thickened network that overlies and obscures the underlying natural and traditional reality. 11 Like so much stuff piled up in front of us, it has not replaced but only slowed down our access to the real world beyond. Thus, following Borgmann’s argument, the possibility of regaining the ability to authentically experience the regional identity that exists beneath the postmodern mask resides not in the avoidance of those traditional regional characteristics that have been, all too often, appropriated and packaged by the postmodern instruments of globalized civilization, but in regaining a firm hold on the concrete world through what Borgmann refers to as “postmodern realism” and its constituent elements: “focal realism,” “patient vigor,” and “communal celebration.” 12

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The notion of focal realism is grounded in the very idea that beyond the sphere of superficial commodities there are “eloquent things” in the world, which command our attention. 13 Borgmann points out that an “approximate and familiar appellation for ‘eloquent’ is ‘natural’ or ‘traditional.’” 14 Accordingly, the “term ‘focal reality’ is simply a placeholder for the encounters each of us has with things that of themselves have engaged mind and body and centered our lives.” 15 In other words, focal realism connotes the engagement of eloquent things. Thus, in this general sense, eloquent things can be thought of as “focal things,” and those practices that enable us to engage such things can be referred to as “focal practices.” Borgmann’s concept of “patient vigor” is literally composed of patience and vigor. Patience, in the sense intended here, relates to the acceptance of, or coming to terms with, the harsh realities that are characteristic of the postmodern condition: namely, that we live in a finite world where it is necessary to recognize and accept that the ceaseless exploitation of our planet to satisfy our voracious desire for instantaneously gratifying commodities is a destructive entropic process that further reduces the precious openings that remain in the postmodern mask. 16 Alternatively, by forgoing such consumption and taking the time (being patient) to develop the skills and knowledge that enable us to engage the concrete world, we will become more centered, thus, more vigorous. 17 But patient vigor is of limited influence when exercised by an individual; therefore, it is necessary to patiently develop a collective sense of community. 18 Borgmann’s thoughts on communal celebration echo the popular ecological slogan (that has unfortunately become a cliché instead of a reality) “think global, act local” and are grounded in the general theoretical contexts of sustainability and social justice. 19 But beyond the general notions of economic, ecologic, and political reforms posited by Borgmann is the notion of encouraging and safeguarding forums and practices that strengthen a sense of community. 20 The most general examples given by Borgmann are centered around abating globalized civilization’s (in the postmodern guise of suburban development delivering the mythical commodity of the American dream) endless siege against both our rural and urban communities. Regional Identity and Architectural Regionalism

The complex tapestry of physical patterns that are inscribed in the landscape, in concert with political, cultural, technological, and economic epochs and defining historic events, form the collective basis for regional identity. In the midst of this myriad of interconnected phenomena is architecture. The traditional notion of architectural regionalism typically refers to stylistic attributes indicative of the vernacular architecture of a particular region. The quintessential example of this conception of regionalism would be that of a premodern autochthonous regional culture such as the Batammaliba people of Togo and Benin in West Africa. 21 The architecture created by such cultural groups is seamlessly woven into a broader set of cultural practices that are bounded by a strong common belief system, i.e.,

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religion, cosmology, geomancy, et cetera. As a result, the architecture created by such people is typically very homogenous and has distinct characteristics that are regional. This narrow definition of architectural regionalism is the root of many of the problems that have been discussed in the course of this investigation relative to critical regionalism. This is because most regions throughout the world are not composed of homogenous cultural groups. Through conquest and trade, most regions have been shaped architecturally by the confluence of several cultures, belief systems, and stylistic periods. The varied architectural characteristics of such culturally heterogeneous regions remove the absoluteness from the interpretive process and open the door to a barrage of postmodern critiques attempting to disclaim the sovereignty of any particular historic period or style. Thus, the architectural critique that follows becomes lost in a sea of historic relativism which cannot see the forest for the trees, or, in this case, the region for the buildings. Conversely, the notion of architectural regionalism that I am trying to point toward is not limited to the formal characteristics of a particular period or style. Instead, my notion of architectural regionalism attempts to look beyond the formal categories and classifications specific to an individual building in order to comprehend the collective whole. Once we have adjusted our focus to this shift in scale, individual period/style designations fade into the overall texture of the landscape. At the scale of the regional landscape, new patterns and spatial relationships come into view that determine our understanding of architectural regionalism. Throughout much of southeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, the defining patterns of the landscape that emerge are those of small mercantile towns interspersed amidst a rural landscape shaped by a wide variety of agricultural and industrial practices. The towns and villages mark the historic confluences of commerce and transportation patterns that have taken shape with respect to the natural features of landscape. While each of these towns varies in terms of architectural composition, in general, they are a composite of built expressions that include variations derived from the Georgian, Federal, Second Empire, Victorian, Greek Revival, Italianate, neoclassical, and Modernist periods/styles. None of these styles is endemic to southeastern Pennsylvania. At the most general level, what is architecturally regional (distinctive) about these towns and villages is not a particular style or tectonic mode, but the collective pattern and scale of settlement that has evolved in relation to the landscape. As with the towns and villages themselves, the character of the landscape by which they are bounded is also heterogeneous in terms of geology, soil, topography, and vegetation. Thus, the regional landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania cannot adequately be defined by a single or characteristic set of physical traits. It is a complex landscape whose diverse features have given way to many forms of human production practices. The forms of architectural expression that reside in the rural landscape of this region are as varied as the range of styles within the towns and villages.

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Farmhouses and barns range in size, style, and method of construction from one farm to the next. Stone houses, brick houses, wooden houses, houses with steep-pitched gable roofs, and houses with low-pitched hip roofs—what ties these divergent aesthetic forms together as a regional expression is the landscape in which they reside, a landscape that is imbued with generations of production practices. These practices determined the placement and configuration of houses, barns, outbuildings, millraces, fence lines, hedgerows, and circulation patterns. The resultant patterns elude formal assessment as they shift subtly across the landscape by virtue of adjustment to natural features. There is a worked or crafted quality to the landscape that quietly reveals itself through its historic patina. The character of the landscape is both ephemeral and enduring all at once. Its hills and valleys forever frame the moments when the morning sun glistens across the green rolling hills, the mist rises from the plains that follow the river, the smell of freshly fallen leaves in the forest during autumn after the rain, or the quiet serenity that accompanies a heavy snow. Unlike the world depicted by Frampton and Jameson et al., a world where “nature is gone for good” 22 and no living traditions remain, the landscape speaks volumes to those who know its language and patiently listen. There is no need to create a new identity to fill the void that was created when nature and traditions died; there is only the need to foster opportunities for the soft voice of the landscape to be heard above the ambient roar created by the instruments of globalized civilization. As such, the notion of architectural regionalism I am pointing toward here is not something that can be instantaneously constructed on the landscape (the site); it is something that is acquired from the collective landscape (the place) over time through regional focal practices. That is, the eloquence we refer to as regional identity can be recognized through practices that concretely engage us with the landscapes within which we live. Achieving Architectural Regionalism through Regional Practices

Following the Modernist tradition, critical regionalism’s dominant discourse places emphasis on formal architectural mechanisms. But the practices associated with the architecture are not discussed beyond the realm of tectonics, haptic sensations, thermal comfort, and responses to the environment such as solar orientation. This is not to say that these architectural considerations are not important or significant, only that they, of themselves, are not necessarily part of a larger set of lived practices that actively engage the regional landscape and reveal its eloquence. Instead of thinking of a building as an isolated architectural expression, we must conceive of what precipitated the need to create a building, the process of constructing a building, and the activities associated with the habitation of a building after it has been constructed as part of a larger set of practices that occur at the scale of the regional landscape. In other words, I don’t believe you can sit down and design a building composed of particular formal characteristics that will be, upon completion, architecturally regional, per se. It will simply be

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a new physical feature in the regional landscape. Thus, the goal should not be to design a building that is architecturally regional; the goal should be to design a building that has the potential to become regional over time. Unfortunately, this notion of architectural regionalism offers limited opportunities as a mode of practice because the programmatic requirements for most contemporary building typologies simply don’t lend themselves to creating vessels that can become imbued with regional identity over time. Historically, agricultural and industrial production was inextricably tied to the charactershaping forces of the landscape. Today, few buildings are intended for purposes that fully engage practices that are intertwined with the landscape. In the region where I live, the most poignant examples of contemporary architectural regionalism are still tied to agricultural practices and production of one kind or another. Even though contemporary farming practices require less physical engagement (back-breaking hard work) than those of the premodern world, farming remains a quintessential regional focal practice. 23 Farming is fully engaging in that it requires a specialized body of knowledge relative to the soil, topography, climate, seasonal rhythms of a particular region/place. By working with the land and patiently nurturing crops and animals, an authentic, firsthand understanding of the region/place is achieved. Thus, when farming practices necessitate the construction of a barn, shed, silo, fence, et cetera, the purpose of the building is immediately clear—it’s for farming. That is, nobody looks at a corrugated metal shed or a silo (on a working farm) and concludes that the farmer is trying to create a nostalgic agrarian image or, conversely, a chauvinistic symbol of authority. Upon completion of the construction, the role the farm building plays in farming practices over time clarifies its purpose and gives it meaning. But the building’s meaning is derived from more than its individual purpose of sheltering animals or storing crops and equipment. Its meaning is shaped, in part, by the collective set of farming practices of those who inhabit the farm (the farmers). In turn, the practices of a particular farm draw their meaning from a larger set of general agricultural practices, present and past, that are rooted in the regional landscape. Thus, the building becomes regional through its engagement with the region, not as a result of its formal characteristics. This notion of architectural regionalism agrees with Kenneth Frampton’s suggestion that such work not necessarily conform to any particular historical style. However, in contrast to a mode of practice based on the theoretical mechanics of abstraction and defamiliarization pointed to by Frampton et al., the mode to which I am referring is not afraid to embrace regional architectural traditions. Why shouldn’t a barn look like a traditional barn? I grew up farming in southeastern Pennsylvania, but I am no longer a farmer, I am an architect. Today as I witness agricultural practices in our community struggling to persist as the omnipresent forces of suburbanization (universal Megalopolis) lay siege to the landscape, it is clear that the physical character of the region is changing. But I still think of our community as agricultural, so am I just nostalgic? I don’t think so. This landscape still speaks to me.

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As an architect, I have struggled to define how to create a regional architectural response to this landscape. Unfortunately, there is no recipe for regionalism; no enumerated points for resistance. Instead, I realize that I cannot design buildings that are regional per se. I can only design vessels that have the capacity to be inhabited with regional and local practices that, over time, allow them to become architecturally regional. As designers, we can create the stage and help to write the score, but in the end it is the manner in which life is played out that determines the fate of the places we design. I believe that architects can learn to design places that have a greater capacity to become regional through engagement. My personal odyssey into the realm of architectural regionalism has occurred through the rehabilitation of an old farm house. Although much of the surrounding land that was once farmed is now covered with new suburban houses, the manner in which our house is situated in the landscape immediately offers clues as to how it was previously inhabited. Over time, I have come to realize that the farmers who designed and built my house had a comprehensive understanding of the local climate, landscape, and economy. The house’s orientation to the sun and prevailing breezes, its position on a knoll above the creek, and the traces of the nearby millrace all tell stories of this place. The rising sun in the kitchen welcomes us in the morning and the established shade trees protect us from the heat of the afternoon. In the spring we are welcomed by asparagus and in the fall we feast on juicy peaches. Peach pie is never nostalgic! The experiences provided by inhabiting and caring for this old house have helped me to better understand the rhythms of the regional landscape. So while I still struggle to define architectural regionalism in terms of formal characteristics, I am sure that answers reside in better understanding the traditions of a place, not in opposing them. Whether it is a rural community such as mine or an urban neighborhood, all communities, at some point, are faced with the tension that results as their established identities are challenged. As architects, we should be not be nostalgic; nor should we be afraid to delve deeply into the traditions of the places where we live and work. Not in search of some magic list of formal mechanics, but to better understand how we can create better vessels that can sustain themselves by affording those who inhabit them better opportunities to connect with their community. Instead of designing glamorous icons, intended to be published in glossy monographs and journals, that distinguish themselves in contrast to the regional landscape, the mode of practice to which I point strives to become interwoven with the landscape. This mode of practice is not heroic in the traditional art-historical sense of heroism of an avant-garde who endlessly challenges convention with bellicose visual rhetoric. Rather, it can be heroic as kind of peaceful resistance that leads by example—an architecture born out of a genuine bond with a region/place that is developed through protracted engagement. It is an architecture aimed not at expressiveness for its own sake, but one whose expressiveness is derived from participation and use, like lines on a face. It is free of conceit and frivolity. It is an architecture that gives back to the landscape

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as much or more than it draws. As such it is a reflexive regionalism that directs attention back toward the landscape, its history, and meaning for those who live there.

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At a 1998 symposium entitled

model of regionalism that enables

“Regionalism Searches for an

culture and life as it is actually lived

Identity,” seeking to renew the

in a place, not as it is fictionalized or

debate and promise of regionalism in

formalized.

architecture, Barbara Allen presented a critique of the extant theories of regionalism based in the theory of performativity and Pierre Bourdieu’s

Barbara Allen (b. 1956) is the director of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech and executive editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.

notion of the habitus. i Put briefly, performative theory generally seeks to better explain the dynamism and concealed bias built into the socially constituted concepts of identity and gender. As opposed to more normative and categorical explanations, performativity suggests that such categories are best understood through performance rather than as pre-existing or fixed concepts. Gender should be thought of not as a biologically definable thing, but rather as a set of social or personal performances that align along the social definitions of male or female; through this exercise, concealed relations of power, bias, and misunderstanding are revealed, along with a model for personal and cultural formation that is dynamic rather than static. It shifts the focus away from the imposition of an identity upon a person, place, or group and places the emphasis on the forces that continually “produce” the people, place, or group. With such tools in hand, Allen critiques the dominant mode of postmodern regional theory, critical regionalism, as only superficially engaged with questions of cultural identity and fixated on considerations of form over the very social practices or performances that give it meaning and life. In its place she proposes a

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Barbara L. Allen

On Performative Regionalism 2005

The phrase “Good regionalist architecture is 90% cultural practices and 10% style,” says much about regional, place-based architecture. And although it is admittedly simplistic, as catchphrases often are, it points to the important realization that people’s identities are constituted more by what they “do” and less so by what they appear as or “see.” This was an important marker on my path to understanding places and regions on a human level. While this may not seem like a radical idea, it is under-theorized and under-represented in the current literature on regionalism in any meaningful way. Take, for example, the writings on critical regionalism, a sort of ill-fitting Habermasian-Heidegerian hybrid approach to regionalism developed in the 1980s by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and, later, Kenneth Frampton.1 A fairly extensive perusal of the literature revealed two things. First, while these authors mention the importance of cultural practices, they do not explore it beyond a passing mention, without explication. According to architectural theorist Neil Leach, while “architecture is often linked to questions of cultural identity...[architectural theory] has been preoccupied almost exclusively with form.” 2 Tzonis, for example, titles one of his articles “Critical Regionalism: An Attitude, Not a Style” and speaks briefly about the “building as a place supporting human interaction” and then illustrates his article with thirteen images of buildings devoid of people. 3 Frampton, another theorist, similarly uses people-less images to illustrate his version of regionalism. In his important book Modern Architecture: A Critical History, he titles one of his last chapters, “Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity,” and only mentions cultural identity in the most general way: “Among other factors contributing to the emergence of regionalism of this order is...an aspiration at least to some form of cultural, economic and political independence.” 4 Such social blindness in architecture in not limited to these regionalist scholars but does appear as a glaring omission, given what critical regionalism, the most dominant and well-known regionalist theory, purports to advocate. What is needed in architecture and urban design are more robust tools for understanding the intersection of cultural practices and regional places. A view of regional design through some focused, well-theorized social and cultural lenses provides one set of tools. For this I turn to two important concepts,

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performativity and habitus, which together provide a richer understanding of how we can design for regional identity. But first, what do I mean by the term “culture”? Broadly speaking, culture is the totality of our behaviors, beliefs, customs, habits, and knowledge. In more contemporary terms, culture often means “identity” such as being of a certain gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It can also refer to a place-identified culture, in the form of a regional identity, such as that of being a Texan, or a Southerner. Each is meant to confer some general qualities by virtue of one’s place of residence. More commonly in the United States, we find places and people with hybrid identities that have arisen from the merging of a multiplicity of influences. Given this definition of culture, I argue that regionalism in architecture should be, in large part, based on the spatial dimensions of people’s practices and normative behaviors. So any investigation of regionalism must begin with an investigation into what people actually do in that region that marks them as part of that place. A region is a socially constructed concept. I define a region as a collection of shared geographically located identities. It is a locale in which people share an identity, or at least participate in compatible social practices. As such, regions can be hybrids of many cultures that reflect the multiplicity of people’s identities. Sections of the city are sometimes defined by their cultural activities, such as New York City’s Chinatown and Little Italy; oftentimes there is nothing notably Chinese or Italian about the building form or materials outside of decorative façades. Moreover, these neighborhoods have long histories, having had other inhabitants before them. In these and most cases, it is the activities and practices that make these places what they are as well as how they are named or understood. The region is the context for cultural practices and comes to have meaning via those activities. “Identity” as related to the physicality of place is another little-examined concept in architecture. We share identities with others in the ways we interact with each other in everyday life, forming a living culture. Regionalism can be thought of in the active sense as a relationship between people and their place of performance. One of the concepts that can inform an inhabited regionalism is performativity. This concept was developed in literary theory and was further enhanced in cultural studies, specifically in gender and queer theory. 5 “A performative act,” according to the literary definition, “is one which brings into being or enacts that which it names, and so marks the constitutive or productive power of the discourse.” 6 Thus performativity is defined by iterative acts, verbal and physical, that serve to instill norms, at the same time concealing the conventions or Foucauldian power force behind the acts. An example of this would be the practice of economic forecasting. Once a statement is released forecasting certain economic futures, these futures are often manifest as the result of the economists’ statements. Thus economics could be said to be self-constituted via its own performance, which, in turn, also neatly conceals the power structures behind the forecasts. Another common use of the concept in the cultural-studies literature is the social construction of

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gender and sexual orientation. There, gender is not an inherent characteristic or a by-product of one’s biological sex, but instead is the performance of a gender role, the fulfillment of a social or cultural definition of a gender. To use the language of Judith Butler on performativity I contend that “regionalism” is not a noun or a set of free-floating attributes. Rather it is performatively produced by practices of regional coherence. It is constituting the thing it is purported to be. 7 So our identity can be understood as constituted by our actions and behavior, and those actions and behaviors are influenced by the places and cultures from which we come—it is a reflexive process. As Neil Leach points out, Butler’s concept of performativity has important implications for architecture. He makes the argument that since “identity is a performative construct...then architecture could be understood as a ‘film set’ ...that derives its meanings from the activities that have taken place there.” 8 Additionally, through our performances we belong to a culture based on similarly performed identities and these are often acted out on a certain architectural stage engendering an attachment to a particular place or (micro)region. A second helpful conceptual lens through which to read regionalism is Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus. This refers to a system of “structured structures” that function to generate “practices and representations” in such a way that they appear to be a tacit form of knowledge as opposed to an obedience to rules. 9 Habitus is a “durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations [that] produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities” in social life. 10 It is a social, and therefore non-natural, formulation of the lived world consisting of acquired characteristics that are produced by social conditions and reproduce social conditions. Habitus is best understood as part of a field of variables and dynamic interactions that would also include the physical space in which practices and social norms take place. 11 Architecture is a language of form embedded within and giving meaning to discursive and non-discursive practices. The value of architecture lies dormant and has “to be reactivated by social practices which will, as it were, revive it.” 12 Human practices give meaning to built form. How do we get outside of narratives of form that permeate architectural discourse in order to locate what we mean by regionalism? As a subset of habitus, regionalism points to the necessary description of the tacit knowledge and norms that define cultures, specifically place-based cultures. This reading of habitus is heavily reliant on the spatial dimensions of social practice. But does regionalism have to apply to broad geographic parts of a nation or state, or can we have micro-regions within cities? Can parts of a metropolis defined by ethnic and racial differences be defined as regions of a city? For purposes of inclusion the answer would be “yes.” But there are deeper reasons why these micro-regions should be considered very important in the landscape of regional thought. The overarching concept that permeates regionalism is inherently conservative. It can serve as a ubiquitous norm that is applied everywhere even though there is no set of rules or laws enforcing

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the norm or way of life. The statement “that’s how we do things around here” captures this subtle social force. Sometimes, such regional or local norms serve to make invisible and unchangeable inherently unjust local ways of life. For Bourdieu, given his concept’s phenomenological leanings, this is simply part of the habitus, which functions without judgment—that’s just the way it is. In this instance Butler’s concept of performativity can explain social change and provide political agency in ways Bourdieu’s habitus, or encapsulation of norms, cannot. Take, for example, segregation in the Jim Crow South. Given that spatial separation of the races was a cultural norm in many parts of the South, how would one disrupt the legitimacy of the norm and draw attention to injustice and racism? How can new norms and conventions arise? “When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet,” explains Butler, “in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization...[she] began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.” 13 What limits the often useful concept of habitus in analyzing regionalism is its lack of a mechanism by which social conventions can change. One could argue that regionalism is inherently conservative and thus preservative of norms and conventions, which is most often a positive value. However, regions are living, changing organisms and must also be understood from their margins where the power of normativity, via performativity, is challenged. Thus, the concept of habitus helps to explicate the structure and means by which regional inflection is embedded in local or regional cultures. Butler’s concept of performativity activates that embeddedness and helps account for the inherent dynamism of such cultures in a helpful way that other theories do not. When I adopt the term “performative regionalism” I am making explicit a reading of regionalism that privileges local practices. This is directly counter to a representationalist view of architectural regionalism, which occludes understanding the relationship between power, spatial form, and cultural practices. Thus regionalism through the habitus lens is a thing or collection of things and is phenomenal or experiential. It is a set of interactive discourses and performances between places and people or material-discursive practices. 14 Such a posthumanist formulation of performativity and regionalism, whereby people and things (urban form, buildings, natural surrounds) have agency in the formulation of the place or region, is a better way to reformulate built form, nature, and human practices. Near Washington, D.C., in Montgomery County, Maryland, there are two close-in cities, Bethesda and Silver Spring, separated by five miles of residential neighborhoods. Both downtowns have been given a new-urbanist makeover replete with small stores, movie theaters, a large anchor bookstore, a feature water fountain, and restaurants spilling out onto the sidewalk. In a formal sense, architecturally, they are interchangeable. But there the similarity stops. Downtown Bethesda is a wealthy white community made up of doctors, lawyers, and high-level Washington professionals. On weekends and evenings, people mill along the crowded sidewalks and cafés and young people hang out

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in an orderly fashion around the public fountain. The place is crowded yet has a genteel feel about it—a muted urban energy. Silver Spring has long been the home of the working-class international community. Besides many African Americans and Hispanic Americans, the city streets are filled with new immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. At any café you can hear a half-dozen different languages being spoken. The volume is loud and the pace frenetic, with a carnivalesque feel in the air. Children run through the fountain and squeal with delight on warm days. While the renovated downtown has been open less that a year, the city police are now closing the main street some nights and weekends to allow for the exuberant use of urban space. Given that the urban form in both downtowns was the same, what led to a different regional or spatial “feel”? Clearly it was the performativities of the people: simply stated, what people were doing and how they were using the space deriving from their cultural proclivities. As such, regional design, under performativity, would suggest more attention be paid to how space is used locally rather than what sort of built fabric and expression happens to be found there. My observation that the regional feel of a place is “10% built form, 90% defined by what people do” can, in this way, be a positive message for architects. To be clear, the desire for public spaces on the part of all classes and races in our society is a positive for the profession and the culture as a whole. Evidence of people’s desires for the activities of urbane civic life as an antidote to faceless sprawling suburbias can been seen through the lens of a series of legal fights instigated by citizens in Montgomery County. In one case a developer promised new homebuyers a “new classic American town” with sidewalks, cafés, shops, and entertainment all walking distance from nearby homes. What the developer then gave them was a cluster of homes with a strip mall at the edge, not the “new urbanism” idea that they were sold. It was clear that the style of the building was not at issue. What was at issue was the form—a form that would allow for the kinds of practices and performances that they desired. The neighborhood form they were given was actually hindering the kinds of activities that had originally brought them to the new development. They filed suit not because of a distaste for the architectural style but because of urban form, not a distaste for form per se, but the fact that the form did not allow them to “perform” the kinds of activities they desired. The brochure for the community promised to “provide an opportunity for a vital civic environment in the Town Square, which reflects the democratic tradition of our communities.” 15 When the neighborhood saw the final plan for a parking-lot-oriented strip mall they were upset. “It was a question of lifestyle,” explains one resident, “I thought I’d be able to walk to up-scale restaurants and have a glass of wine. But I don’t think that anyone will be congregating in front of the Giant [supermarket] or having a glass of wine in front of the drycleaner.” 16 A number of years ago when I was teaching architecture in the Cajun parishes of the Bayou region in southwest Louisiana, I invited an environmental architect from Vancouver, British Columbia, as a guest. He

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spoke about the design elements in housing prioritized by residents of his city. After mentioning several times the importance of having a good view while at the same time maintaining the proper orientation to climatic elements, a student raised her hand and asked: “What do you mean by a view? In Louisiana we live in the lowlands, the swamps, surrounded by trees—we don’t have views.” He responded with a question: “So, if you don’t have any views, then what is important for you to design for?” She responded that, “here we have large, extended families and we like to get together, play music, cook food, and dance. We like to have spaces that open to the outside to accommodate large groups and where they can dance.” The architecture that would enable Cajun culture would not necessarily have to have a certain “look” or style as much as it would need to provide spaces for these types of cultural activities. Architecture needs to respond to practices and culture. My proposal for performative regionalism opens up many possibilities for architects. First, this allows architects a degree of interpretive freedom with regard to the regional-design “style.” Once the spatial dimensions of human activities are satisfied, the visual appearance of the built environment is open. Some think regionalism is equivalent to a sort of sentimental style. Far from it. Style, understood performatively, is an open domain. Designing with a reference to a region’s architectural history and traditional building materials should be considered, but what architects can bring to a place and people can go much deeper. Performative regionalism provides an understanding of the interaction of people and place that allows architecture to be understood as, in part, an enabler of cultural practices. As in the example above, design that takes into account the outdoor familial and recreational life of Cajuns enables the performance of their culture in more profound ways than through the mere replication of forms, materials, or motifs. As such, the subtlety of people’s use of space, its dynamism, and their sense of its meaning is of increased concern. Second, performative regionalism emphasizes the fact that architects often come to projects as outsiders, not part of the culture for which they design. Requiring a deeply cultural and perceptive understanding of everyday life as part of the design process expands opportunities for cultural insight on the part of designers. Often when one is inside one’s own culture, its norms are invisible. It is difficult to see the things that define us. It can take an outsider, a “valuable stranger,” to see the cultural behaviors that locals do not. 17 They see the omnipresent phenomena that lie in the background of culture, something that is invisible to those that are natives. Together, both the performative regionalist architect and the local community can determine what is most appropriate for the practices of the local culture. By sharing knowledge they can design for lively, engaged social places and regions.

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This brief essay was written as a dedication to the late Sam Mockbee, the creator and mentor of the Rural Studio, a unique and a socially progressive design-build program he initiated at Auburn University. There, the students and faculty collaborate with local citizens of Hale County, one the poorest in the nation, in the construction of homes and other infrastructural works free of charge and informed by the unique storyteller vision of Mockbee himself. Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth set the tone of the volume assembled in his honor, Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture, by suggesting that the work of the Rural Studio represents a true “critical” regionalism. i Work by the Rural Studio is critical of the structures of power that ignore, and therefore maintain, the plight of the very poor and seeks to operate within the interstices—sometimes even exploiting those systems to achieve their goals: to better the lives of those without the means to do so themselves. Through their work the students and faculty seek to express the principles of good design in local conflict and in the resolution of real and specifically local problems. Lastly, they seek to complete this work through education, presenting their own processes and goals as examples and measures of a more robust civic and professional practice of architecture. Jeremy Till (b. 1957) and Sarah Wigglesworth (b. 1957) are London-based architects, teachers, writers, and directors of Sarah Wigglesworth Architects.

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Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth

Strong Margins Originally published in Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture, David Moos and Gail Trechsel, editors (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003), 80–81. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

It was the dog days of the early nineties. In the UK, the death throes of true Thatcherism were being announced as an ineffectual Conservative Government attempted to wrap her iron fist in a softer glove. But the damage was done. A lasting damage. The world had bought the lie, promulgated by Thatcher and Reagan, that because the free market was based on rational—for which read “neutral”—principles of exchange it stood outside the political realm. Buildings, as part of that exchange system, are thus reduced to objects of capital, and at a stroke supposedly divested of any social role. It was in the eighties that architects finally relinquished their political responsibility and capitulated to the insatiable demands of the marketplace. A few glamorous arts projects provided aesthetic distraction, a few technologically advanced buildings suggested progress was being made—but nothing could really disguise the malaise. It was in those dog days that we went to a lecture in Chicago by a big Southern man with a big beard. Samuel Mockbee. Never heard of him before. But that lecture was one of those moments of revelation when what one has clumsily been thinking about is both articulated intellectually and enacted practically. In the lecture Mockbee contrasted his work—“for the poorest man in the world”—with that of Michael Hopkins who was then building for “the richest woman in the world” (the Queen). He contrasted his vision of a social and political role for architecture with Hopkins’s denial of such a role. 1 Afterwards we wrote to Sambo and asked if we could publish his lecture; in our subsequent exchanges, and engagement with his work, Sambo became a mentor. Funny to have a mentor that one has never met, but such is the power of his work that we feel we know him well. How, it may be asked, could work that is so marginal be so powerful? The Rural Studio works on the margins in every way. Spatially, they removed themselves from the center of institutional control, taking students away from the comfort of pedagogic structure and authority. Materially, the Studio turns away from the limits of the center (let’s face it, there is only so much one can do with brick, steel, glass, wood, and concrete) and scavenges the edges for inspiration. [FIG. 1] Socially, the Studio engages with communities consigned by poverty to that forgotten territory, that terrible analogy, of the other sides of the tracks. Constructionally, the Studio uses marginal labor, some unskilled 1

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Hopkins is far from the only architect from among the great and good to be guilty of this—but his clever combination of a soothing, conservative aesthetic with technological sophistication is exemplary of a certain kind of distraction from wider social issues.

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Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, 9 Stock Orchard Street, 2001. Scavenging round the edges like Mockbee, our own work employs found materials— sandbags, railway sleepers, straw and quilted cloth.

Fig.1

(students), some of it disenfranchised (prisoners). Geographically, 2 Hale County is off the national radar. Economically, the Studio operates beyond the limits of the market, offering a service to those who could otherwise not afford it and funding it through soft sources. Pedagogically, 3 it challenges many of the accepted norms of educational behavior. Margins all round. Too often the work on the margins is marginalized, pushed off into a corner, treated with disdain, or patronized with interest, where it is rarely effective in making changes. However, another reading of the margins, that of authors such as bell hooks, suggests that there is a latent strength in the margins. The first strength is that it is only from the margins that one can clearly view the center, and thus unravel all its closures, corruptions, and limits. The movement suggested by this unraveling is not that the margins should move inwards to be accommodated by the center (because that leads to a homogenizing suppression), but rather that the center should disperse to accept the multiple values and diverse cultures that the margins address. A second strength lies in the freedoms that the margins offer away from the normative concerns of the It is now twenty years since the publication of Frampton’s seminal essay on Critical Regionalism. The trouble then as now was that, despite Frampton’s Frankfurt School influences, his regionalism was not actually that “critical,” relying more on aesthetics and tectonics than a political engagement with place. The work of the Rural Studio fulfils the promise of the term. The Studio produces buildings tied to their place, to their time, and to their people—buildings which then empower their users. It is likely that the work of the Rural Studio will be held up as an exemplar of how to respond to a world of diminishing resources and increasing poverty gaps. In its dialogue with the local, the architecture—as product and process—will also be seen as a pioneering counterpoint to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, a critical regionalism in the true sense of the word critical. It is here that Mockbee’s contribution shows both depth and breadth. Breadth because in its engagement with wider forces it provides an example as to how others may operate beyond the specifics of Hale County. Depth because work of such complexity, and in its attention to the making, does not arise out superficial encounters with context; it comes from a profound understanding of the issues at stake in the processes of architecture. 3 The causes of the malaise in the architectural profession may be traced back to education. Four weeks into first year and students are exposed to the barbarity of the review/crit/jury. Power, hormones, fear, vanity, genius, and individuality form a rich mix that sets the ethos for what is to come. Architectural education is still guided by the Victorian values of the (male) individual genius architect silently supplying aesthetic delight for rich patrons. The Rural Studio explicitly challenges these paradigms. It champions collaboration, communication, and process over product. It exposes students to a range of issues that they are sheltered from in normative architectural education—group working, social responsibility, lateral thinking, building skills, new ways of building procurement, sustainability, contingent creativity. But at the same time one should not get too misty-eyed and see it as a completely non-authoritarian structure. Mockbee and his successors are far from shrinking violets; one needs this overarching vision (and it is vision, not mindless control) to avoid the work descending to a level of worthy mediocrity, as so easily could have happened. 2

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center; the margins offer, for bell hooks, “a space of radical openness.” 4 It is these two strengths—of reformulation and freedom—that Mockbee initiated within the Rural Studio. His legacy lies not just in the continuing, and continually inspirational, work of the Rural Studio, but in asking such major questions of the center. In particular his call to recognize the social context and content of architecture is crucial. The objects (buildings) and conditions (space) of architectural production are embedded in the social lifeworld. It follows that if we choose to deny that context, in turn it will shun us as an irrelevance. As long as the architectural center fixates on polished objects, formal gestations, and technologically determined production, it will inevitably get marginalized (in the weak sense of the word). It is only by working through the values set up by Mockbee’s strong margins that architecture can once again become relevant. 4 There

is the temptation when describing the Rural Studio to use words such as “worthy,” “decent,” “honest”—liberal sentiments that invite us to see the work as part of the center. In fact the Studio is more radical; operating from its strong margins, it produces work that can hold its own in any architectural beauty contest (the final objects are spatially and technically innovative), but also providing lessons for the center to open up its eyes to wider possibilities.

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Introduction to “Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism”

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Steven Moore began his career as a practicing architect in Maine in the 1970s and describes his built work of that period as “regionalist.” As a means to explore the relationship between critical regionalism and sustainable architecture he completed a PhD in the 1990s at Texas A&M University. In it he studied the demise of the Blueprint Demonstration Farm, a regionalsustainable project developed by the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (see Haslam, Chapter 6). This research became the background for his first book, Technology and Place. This article, which continues the intellectual trajectory established in that book, can best be understood as a restatement of the theoretical implications of that empirical study in more pragmatic terms, allowing Moore to sketch out his vision of a “regenerative architectural practice.” It is also a critique and extension of Kenneth Frampton’s theory of critical regionalism, from which Moore borrows the rhetorical strategy of distilling the conclusion into points. His work points the way toward the much needed reformulation of sustainability as a practice tied to place—as a kind of regionalism. Steven Moore (b. 1945) is an associate professor of architecture and planning, director of the Sustainable Design Program, and co-director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Steven A. Moore

Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism 2005

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the topic of regionalism enjoyed considerable attention within architectural discourse. The prospect of a progressive, or critical regionalism seemed an antidote to both the regressive fantasies of postmodern historicism and the various proposals for a deconstructivist architecture inspired by European linguistic theory. Since the mid-1990s, however, the regionalist moment has waned. The progenitors of the discourse, Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre, have moved on to other topics, and the projects of those architects who embodied the critical regionalist attitude has been re-framed by other discourses. This is a natural, if not satisfying, development. In the maturation of any discourse, some possibilities are suppressed just as others are amplified by the exigencies of the situation. The purpose of this article, then, is to reconstruct possibilities that reflect our current situation. To do so I argue that technology and place should be understood as the suppressed core concepts that are contained within regionalist architectural production. These are central to our understanding of what a “region” might be, and their interrogation is an opportunity to reconsider the history of regionalism as a concept. Place & Region

The geographer John Agnew has argued that, in modernist thought, the traditional concept of place is devalued for two reasons: first, modern social science has confused, or conflated, the distinction between “place” and “community.” “Community” in the modern view, argues Agnew, has been assumed to be both “a physical setting for social relations” and “a morally valued way of life.” 1 Because of this modern logic, place has been erroneously equated with the concepts of morality. Modernist logic, in Agnew’s analysis, fails to understand society as a dynamic process that transforms places and regions. As a result, moderns have tended to reify moral concepts as places so that their characterization of big cities as dens of iniquity and small towns as the vessels of morality is clearly ideological, not empirical. 2

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Second, beginning in the nineteenth century—a period that witnessed the dramatic evaporation of traditional communities—social scientists attempted to predict the trajectory of history. Common to all of these a priori predictions was the polarity of “community” and “society.” Writers as dissimilar as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx saw community as being coercive and intellectually limiting, or even idiotic, whereas national societies were characterized as liberative. 3 Conservatives, such as Auguste Comte, saw the loss of traditional village forms as the loss of the ideal social type. In contrast, the politics of nation building and the liberative project of Enlightenment became an ideology of “antitraditionalism.” To free humans from feudal bonds to the land, and the hierarchical relations inscribed there, was understood by moderns to be the grand scheme (or teleology) of history. The German sociologist Max Weber popularized this historical tension as the transformation of gemeinschaft into gesellschaft. 4 This logic suggests that the modern reification of moral codes and the teleology of history conspired to devalue place as a concept relevant to the conditions of contemporary life. “‘Becoming modern’ involves casting off ties to place (in work, recreation, and sense of identity) and adopting an ‘achievement oriented’ or ‘class conscious’ self that is placeless.” 5 Agnew argues, in concert with the postmodern geographer Edward Soja, that the devaluation of place was most vigorously promoted by Marxist ideology. 6 For traditional Marxists to consider social behavior as determined in any way by the conditions of place would have been to subvert the dialectic order of causality. Marxist logic has traditionally held that material order arises from a dialectic relationship with social activity. But if Marxists devalued the concept of place on ideological grounds, there is considerable irony in the recognition that it has been market forces that have most effectively devalued real places. 7 In the eyes of the Left, the doctrine of environmental determinism (which opposes a dialectic understanding of place by holding that societies owe their unique character to the conditions of their territory) amounts to nothing less than racism and the fetishization of place. 8 We will return to this logic shortly. In a renovation of this Marxist position, Agnew argues that places cannot be understood within the limited dimensions of architecture or physical geography. 9 Rather, Agnew argues that the variables that characterize places are multivalent. He offers three elements, or scales, by which we might understand the phenomenon of place: location, sense of place, and locale. 10 By “location,” Agnew intends that a place can be understood as a geographic area encompassed by the objective structures of politics and economy. In this sense, places are linked together, for example, by the interests of the European Union or the Monroe Doctrine. Using the same logic, one might argue that Houston is closer to the cities of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Stravanger, Norway, than to Austin, Texas, because the same corporate structures manage the oil fields of the North Sea and Texas. It is these structural conditions of political economy at the macro-scale that most concern Marxist scholars. At the other end of the spectrum Agnew argues for the existence of a “sense of place.” By this term he means the local “structure of feeling” that pervades

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being in a particular place. This dimension of place includes the inter-subjective realities that give a place what conventional language would describe as “character” or “quality of life.” For example, the reverence that the citizens of Austin reserve for a swim in Barton Springs and New Yorkers reserve for food, fashion, and style are ontological, rather than objective, dimensions of place. It is at this scale that the complex human poetics of place are experienced. It is the inter-subjective construction of conditions experienced as a sense of place that most concern constructivist scholars and phenomenologists. Between objective location and the subjective sense of place, Agnew establishes a middle ground, or “locale.” This quality of place is the setting in which social relations are constituted. Locale includes the institutional scale of living to which architecture contributes so much: the city, the public square, the block, and the neighborhood. By considering the concept of place, or region, from this meso-scale we avoid two problems. First, we can appreciate the insights of Marxists but avoid the over-determination that results from their preoccupation with the seemingly objective conditions of political economy. Second, we can appreciate the insights of constructivists and phenomenologists but avoid the under-determination that results from their preoccupation with the subjective conditions of atomized reality. 11 It is the “elastic” scale of all three dimensions, viewed from the meso-scale of the city-state, that best describes a place. By understanding the concept of place as a dynamic process that links humans and nonhumans in space at a variety of scales, we might get beyond the opposition between those who see it as a set of objective structures and those who see it as a set of romantic myths tied to subjective experience. Technology and Society

Just as place is typically thought of as primarily physical in quality, technology is commonly understood to be physical hardware—radios, refrigerators, or computers. This materialist definition discounts the social construction of such objects and assumes these “objects” are constructed based solely on technical measures. 12 Similarly, in the positivist tradition, technology is understood as the asocial application of scientific truths. In the philosophical tradition of Heidegger, technology is understood as an ontological practice, meaning that it comes to define who and how we are. In contrast to both of these traditions, the literature of science and technology studies has demonstrated that technology is a social system that is inextricably part of society. 13 Technology, like place, is a field where the struggle between competing interests plays out. The sociologists Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman have argued that technology, like place, includes three qualities: “human knowledge,” “patterns of human activities,” and “sets of physical objects.” 14 I find it helpful to examine technology as a process of social construction. Knowledge is required not only to build the artifact, but to relate the natural conditions upon which the artifact works and to use it. The second quality, “patterns of human activity,” or human practices, refers to the institutionalization, or routinization, of societal problem solving. In the practices of architecture, carpentry, or masonry are examples of

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these “routines.” Lastly, “sets of objects” takes us back to the things themselves. The point is that computers, hammers, or tractors are useless without the human knowledge and practices that engage them. What I want to argue here is that the definition of place offered by Agnew and the definition of technology offered by MacKenzie and Wajcman are similar to that shown in Figure 1. From it I propose three related ideas: first, that places and technologies are both spatial concepts with related structures; second, that these qualities are dialogically related; and third, that modern forms of knowledge, like the economics of location, tend toward the abstract and overdetermined (meaning that the outcome of events is strongly tied to structural conditions), while our understanding of objects and sense of place tends toward the under-determined (meaning that the outcome of events is weakly tied to structural conditions). These points serve only to magnify the centrality of locale and act as the glue that holds the discourse of places and technologies together. Place

Technology

Modernism

(-)

(+)

Postmodernism

(+)

(-)

FIG. 1

To argue that place is a spatial concept is a tautology and requires no further backing. However, to argue that technology is a spatial concept requires some explanation. Bruno Latour’s term technological network is helpful in this regard. Latour has argued that “technological networks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces.” 15 By “technological network,” Latour refers not just to “sets of objects,” but to the social networks that construct relationships between human knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman resources—the latter being the stuff—steel, wood, water, etc.—from which the objects themselves are made. His point is that technology is essentially a spatial concept because its operation depends upon the mobilization of human and nonhuman resources that exist in different places. 16 For example, architects, clients, contractors, and bankers make up a social network of building producers. Their relationship has a social and spatial quality to it. Advances in communications technology, many now argue, have radically collapsed the spatial reality of these social relations. When one recognizes, however, that lumber from Oregon, windows from Pittsburgh, carpet from Mobile, and compressors from Taiwan are required to realize the material intentions of the producers, the concrete qualities of their purely social network are materialized as a global technological network. A technological network produces spatial links that tie the social network of producers to those nonhuman resources required for construction. This is

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a central argument of this study that has important implications for how we understand an architecture of place in a contemporary context. My argument is that technology is best understood not through history, but through geography. History interprets reality as human events in time. Through temporal interpretation we might better understand the causal sequence in which humans construct artifacts. In contrast, geography interprets reality as human events in space. Through spatial interpretation we are more likely to understand how technological networks dominate the places inhabited by humans and nonhumans. Henri Lefebvre has argued two points that reinforce this dynamic relationship between technology and place. First, that social spaces are produced by technology acting upon nature. 17 Lefebvre’s second point is that each society—or each mode of production—makes its own peculiar type of space. 18 What architects might extract from Lefebvre’s logic is that the differing qualities of places are more a matter of technological practices than aesthetic choices because such practices are always already spatial. For example, carpentry requires not only forests and citizens in need of housing, but also the spatial mechanisms that link them. This is the heart of what I will characterize as the dialogic relation of technology and place. 19 The Nonmodern Thesis

In reconsidering Frampton’s critical regionalism hypothesis, it is necessary to examine the unresolvable conflict between his mix of modernism, as it is embodied in the doctrines of critical theory, and postmodernism, as it is embodied in the place-bound doctrines of Martin Heidegger. The simplest way to illustrate this conflict is demonstrated in Figure 2. Here I have plotted the way that modernism and postmodernism value the concepts of place and technology. 20 The point of the diagram is to argue, as did Agnew, that moderns have generally held a negative attitude toward place because the social hierarchies inscribed there restrict human liberty. Conversely, moderns have held a positive attitude toward technology because machines, science claims, will free us from the drudgery of place-bound tyrannies. qualities of place

qualities of technology

location

human knowledge

locale

human practices

sense of place

sets of objects

overdetermined and abstract

underdetermined and atomized

FIG. 2

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The flip side of the diagram in Figure 2 is to recognize that postmoderns, far from constructing a new worldview, have merely inverted the relationships constructed by modern thought. Where postmoderns desire to recuperate the propinquity of place and value it positively, they have become evermore skeptical of modern technologies and the unintended consequences that have followed in their wake. The malignant promises of atomic power and industrial agriculture are salient examples of the fears nurtured by postmoderns like Heidegger or the American poet-farmer Wendell Berry. Another way to argue this point is to claim that conservative postmoderns, at least in their attitude toward place and technology, are only anti-moderns. In the world of architecture, a figure like Leon Krier exemplifies this position—his drawings value the premodern city as the place that embodies ideal civic relations, but he employs technology only as a scenographic, or instrumental, tool to realize those social relations. The problem, or the opportunity, found in Frampton’s critical regionalism hypothesis, then, is that it relies upon assumptions drawn from opposing philosophical traditions. Critical regionalism proposes to value both technological means and the propinquity of place as positive forces in history, an admirable goal. By relying alternately upon the opposing assumptions of critical theory, which are modern, and those of Martin Heidegger, which are postmodern, critical regionalism leads to philosophical confusion. 21 I argue that the doctrines of critical regionalism are better served by nonmodern assumptions, as Figure 3 demonstrates. Bruno Latour has used the term “nonmodern” to argue that we have, in practice, never been modern at all. 22 If being modern means the isolation of subjects from objects, and the isolation of humans from nonhumans, then I agree with Latour that we have been modern in theory, but never in practice. It is a condition like pregnancy—one is never “sort of” modern. In this sense, modernity has been a convenient license to plunder nature, not an anthropological fact. NO

N-

TECHNOLOGY

MO

DE

RN

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(+) regenerative architecture

eco-tech

sustainability

Critical Regionalism

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conservative postmodernism: neo-traditionalism, or new urbanism

PLACE

(-)

orthodox modernism

avant garde postmodernism: radical nihilism

RN

DE

MO FIG. 3

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The nonmodern thesis proposes to erode the Cartesian distinctions between humans and nonhumans. In the nonmodern view, we are no longer subjects empowered to contemplate and order up resources from afar. When we examine how the world really works we are compelled to recognize that we—riders and horses, politicians and voters, bricklayers and bricks—are “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects.” 23 These terms suggest that what distinguishes a subject from an object at any given moment in time is only a temporary advantage in power relations. At one moment we are in control, and at the next moment we find ourselves being ordered about by the digital logic of machines that determine our health-care benefits or which telephone company will bill us each month. My point here is that in a nonmodern world, humans and nonhumans have more in common than they don’t. In such a world, places show up as place-making is practiced. In other words, it is hard to distinguish between the qualities of a place and the technologies employed to make them. This nonmodern logic further suggests that there is no effective distance between culture and nature. If there ever was such a thing as primeval nature— nature untouched by human invention—it has long ago disappeared. Far from lamenting the lost garden of human origins, nonmoderns see not ruination, but increasing opportunities in which human institutions can creatively participate in the cycles of natural systems. Participation in nature just might produce lifeenhancing conditions that will benefit all us quasi-objects. Just as critical regionalism constructs a positive nonmodern synthesis, a negative nonmodern synthesis resolves the modern dilemma equally well—at least from a purely rhetorical point of view. The position that I label as “radical nihilism” in Figure 3 is, I think, best exemplified by the projects of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas and those who see the world through similar lenses are simply disinterested in the project of regionalism. Koolhaas’s projects and those related to “sustainability” and “ecotech” are well documented elsewhere, so I won’t dwell on them here. 24 “Regenerative architecture,” however, describes the heart of the nonmodern thesis. This term is borrowed from the landscape architect John Tillman Lyle. I propose substituting it for Frampton’s “critical” because “critical” must always refer back to the modern dialectic assumptions embraced by “critical theory.” Just as Jameson would renovate critical regionalism as a postmodern doctrine, I propose renovating it as a nonmodern doctrine. 25 The philosophical trajectory of critical regionalism is best understood not in its modernist origins, nor in postmodern Marxism, but within a nonmodern, dialogic future. Lyle defines a “regenerative system” as one that “provides for the continuous replacement, through its own functional processes, of the energy and materials used in its operation.” 26 In this definition, the notion that technology might provide such continuous replacement does not mean that architecture might overcome the second law of thermodynamics, and thus escape the concept of entropy. While it is not possible for any technological system to reconstitute all of the energy consumed in its own creation, architecture—or “place-forms,” as Frampton would have it—can certainly participate far more effectively in

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the natural energy flows of a place than current technological practices do. It is through such participation that entropy might be radically reduced. Lyle offers the concept of “regeneration” as an alternative to the nowcommon term “sustainable” because, in his view, to simply sustain current entropic conditions is inadequate. I agree; to merely maintain the status quo of material systems is a necessary, but insufficient, strategy to achieve lifeenhancing conditions. It is equally necessary to recognize, as does Latour, that all material systems are technological networks in the sense previously defined. In other words, they are politically constituted. This political recognition requires that we reject the status quo of social systems as equally entropic. It is simply a passive form of positivism (traditional science by another name) to imagine that ecologists can repair the ecosystem in isolation from political processes. Lyle’s definition of a regenerative system, then, is flawed because it ignores the social and political constitution of an ecosystem. Rather than attempt a comprehensive redefinition of what a regenerative architecture might be in this short essay, I’ll simply add the following to Lyle’s definition: A regenerative architecture will seek to engage human institutions in the democratic reproduction of life-enhancing places. While not yet adequate it does point toward a cultural horizon where the dialogic relationship between technologies and places can be better understood. Having defined place and technology as the core concepts upon which regionalist architecture depends, I conclude by summarizing this discussion in three propositions followed by eight summary points that are meant to serve as a renovation of Frampton’s critical regionalism hypothesis: First, it is politically desirable and ecologically prudent to reproduce regionalism as a practice relevant to contemporary conditions. Regenerative or sustainable architecture provides a framework through which we might reconstruct and extend that discourse. Second, to do so we must understand the historic uses and abuses of regionalism, with particular attention paid to the geography of power relations. It is both possible and desirable to make places that relate human institutions to the natural cycles of a region without resorting to appeals that authenticate, and thus legitimize, the authority of entrenched social networks. Rather, a regenerative regional architecture might consciously, and democratically, construct places that relate humans and nonhumans in life-enhancing and ever-changing practices. Third, although critical regionalism offers a positive direction for architectural practice, its own assumptions are philosophically conflicted and require renovation as a nonmodern polemic for architectural production. The articulation of regenerative regional architecture is a first attempt to meet this challenge. Toward that end, I must agree with Fredric Jameson that Frampton’s discussion of projects by Mario Botta, Jørn Utzon, Alvaro Siza Vieria, or Glenn Murcutt is largely aesthetic in character. To expand this too-narrow interpretation I have engaged two additional issues—the political and the ecological—that are, I believe, essential characteristics of any architecture that aspires to be regenerative. The demand for an overtly political program

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comes not only from Jameson, but also from the advocates of social ecology. These observers require that architecture be understood not in the aesthetic terms of high culture, but in the social and material context of everyday life. The demand that regenerative architecture engage the ecology of places comes from the ecologists. These observers require that architecture be understood as the transformation of nature. The limits of a purely aesthetic discourse, critical though it may be, are that it remains outside the social and biological conditions that describe normative practices. As I have implied throughout this essay, the nonmodern dialogic requires that the discipline of architecture be reconstituted as a political, rather than an aesthetic, practice. Through this reconstitution the canon of architecture would be re-conceived as not a set of heroic objects, but as the material narrative. This proposal suggests that architects would no longer design “things” per se. Rather, we would design the political processes embodied in technological and topological choices. The points that follow are generalizations stated as practice-based attitudes, not as deductive propositions. Eight Points for Regenerative Regionalism: A Nonmodern Manifesto 1) A regenerative architecture will construct social settings that can be lived differently. This point rejects the notion that technology in itself might be an autonomous agent capable of liberating humans from the oppressive natural and/or social conditions of place. Rather, it suggests that human institutions are both affected by and, in turn, affect the social construction of technological networks. Humans might, then, rationally and democratically construct regenerative technologies as the engaged agents of the humans and nonhumans that collectively inhabit a place. 2) So as to participate in local constellations of ideas, a regenerative architecture will participate in the tectonic history of a place. Participation in the tectonic history of a place requires that the interventions of architects be, first, intelligible to local citizens and, second, perceived as relevant to the material conditions of everyday life. 3) Rather than construct objects, the producers of regenerative architecture will participate in the construction of integrated cultural and ecological processes. Historically, architects have tended to claim sole authorship for places and thus obscure the complex social and ecological processes in which buildings participate. A regenerative architecture will de-emphasize the significance of objects and emphasize the construction of processes that relate social activity to ecological conditions. 4) A regenerative architecture will resist the centers of calculation by magnifying local labor and ecological variables. The overt political program of regenerative architecture will include two principal strategies. First, the producers of regenerative architecture will consciously subvert the universalizing and optimizing measures of objective building performance. These

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are typically promoted by such technological networks as the air-conditioning industry and measured in BTUs, calories, and watts. This strategy should not be construed to mean that human comfort is to be devalued or energy squandered. Second, regenerative architecture will rely upon technologies that reveal the manner of their making to magnify local labor knowledge and local ecological conditions. 5) Rather than participate in the aestheticized politics implicit in technological displays, regenerative architecture will construct the technologies of everyday life through democratic means. The market has increasingly manipulated architectural technology in order to stimulate those consumers whose appetites have become dulled by the everincreasing rates of production and consumption. A regenerative architecture will subvert the power of market-driven technologies by engaging citizens in decision making about the technologies that enable everyday life. 6) The technological interventions of regenerative architecture will contribute to the normalization of critical practices. Rather than construct critical objects that inform viewers of how history might have been different, regenerative architecture will strive to influence normative construction practices. This proposition recognizes that the ontological dimension of building takes precedence over the representational—that the repetitive material practices of construction do more to influence the operation of society than do singular aesthetic critiques. In this sense, the reproduction of life-enhancing practices is preferred over aesthetic commentary. 7) The practice of regenerative architecture will enable places by fostering convergent human agreements. A durable architecture need only delay the inevitability of decay. A sustainable architecture need only maintain the status quo of natural carrying capacity. A regenerative architecture, however, must concern itself with the reproduction of the institutional agreements that tie humans to the ecological conditions of a place. This suggests that architecture itself must facilitate democratic consideration of the tidal cycle, of prevailing breezes, or of the coolth of the earth itself. This is a matter of democracy and technological development. 8) A regenerative architecture will prefer the development of life-enhancing practices to the creation of critical and historically instructive places. The critical place helps society to understand that the social construction of places and technologies might have been different. Such a place is a memorial to the forgotten or as yet untried modes of non-capitalist production that would transform nature in some other way. My final point is that critical places are not in themselves productive. Better yet, a critical place can become regenerative only through the production and reproduction of democratic, life-enhancing practices.

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PREFACE 1 Lewis Mumford, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Grove Press, 1959), vii. 2 As famously said by the late Tip O’Neil. INTRODUCTION 1 Felix Frankfurter as quoted in Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), xvi. 2 Ibid., xvi. 3 Lewis Mumford, “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism,” Sociological Review 20 (April 1928): 140. 4 Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory: 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 17. 5 Oikumene translates as inhabited land or world and refers to the notion of community, an occupied place, a collection of households, fields, orchards, and improved landscapes taken together. 6 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 175, 258. The first reference refers to the Persian antecedents to regional ordering. The second to the Roman practice of “regionalism” via style and motif. Further, there is some debate regarding the degree to which both the Greeks and the Romans allowed local expression. For more on Greek and Roman governance with regard to regionalism, see Paul Johnson, “From the Evil Empire to the Empire for Liberty,” The New Criterion, June 2003. 7 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, ed. Spyros Amourgis, 5–6 (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991). 8 Jonathan Smith, in correspondence with the editor, September 1998. 9 Marc Treib, “Aspects of Regionality and the Modern(ist) Garden in California,” in Regional Garden Design in the United States, ed. Therese O’Malley and Marc Treib, 5–42 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995). 10 Treib, “Aspects of Regionality,” 19. 11 A search for “regionalism” on the Internet will turn up a vast majority of citations concerning politics or economic policy. The minority refer to architecture or design. 12 In their multiple accounts, Tzonis and Lefaivre document the history of regionalism as a form of resistance. See Alexander Tzonis, “Introducing an Architecture of the Present. Critical Regionalism and the Design of Identity,” in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, ed. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, 8–21 (New York: Prestel, 2003). 13 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 37. 14 William Bechhoefer, “Regional Identity, Tradition, and Modernity,” The Art Book 7, no. 2 (March 2000): 4. 15 Architects such as Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Rudolph Schindler, and Frank Lloyd Wright among others took progressive and modern regional approaches to design. Le Corbusier is singular in that he also celebrated the destruction of local traditions as he simultaneously sought inspiration from them. See Francesco Passanti, “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 438–51. 16 Such views are captured in Nikolaus Pevsner’s classic text Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974). 17 Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 23. 18 Pilar Viladas, “Reluctant Regionalists,” House & Garden, June 1990. 19 Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 229. 20 Cecelia Lengefeld, as cited in Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4. 21 The notion of “invented traditions” is the work of Eric Hobsbawm in The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 22 Imagined communities is a concept analyzed by Benedict

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Anderson in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 23 Lane, National Romanticism, 4, 16. 24 Ibid., 8. 25 Rob Wellington Quigley, “Framing the Fit,” in Reflections on Architectural Practices in the Nineties, ed. William S. Saunders, 170–75 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). 26 Against this tendency Edward Relph suggests that architects and other professionals adopt an attitude he calls “empathetic insideness.” See Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 27 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 119. 28 Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 29 Harding, Whose Science, 124. 30 The concept of “affordance” and “constraint” is taken from Malcolm McCullough’s Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 193–220. See also Don Inde, Instrumental Realism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 31 This argument regarding regionalism and environmentalism is made in the conclusion to Dorman’s book. See Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 317. 32 Kimberly Dovey, “The Quest for Authenticity and the Replication of Environmental Meaning,” in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, Place & Environment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 33–49. 33 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 49–55. 34 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 91–108. 35 This is Dave Hickey’s term for the atmosphere and architecture of Santa Fe. See Dave Hickey, “Dialectical Utopias: On Santa Fe and Las Vegas,” Harvard Design Magazine 4 (Winter/ Spring 1998): 1–5. 36 William Curtis, Modern Architecture, Since 1900 (New York: Phaidon, 1996), 567. 37 Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 325. 38 Stephen M. Wheeler, “The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement,” Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 267–78. 39 For excellent accounts of the history of regionalism, see William Curtis, Modern Architecture, and Liane Lefaivre’s “Critical Regionalism. A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, ed. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, 22–55 (New York: Prestel, 2003). 40 For further discussion of “soft” and “hard” modernists, see Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition, and Americans (1964; repr., New York: Free Press, 1978). And David Gebhard, “William Wurster and His California Contemporaries: The Idea of Regionalism and Soft Modernism,” in An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, ed. Marc Treib, 164–83 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 41 Rudolph Schindler, “Space Architecture,” California Arts & Architecture, January 1935: 19. 42 This was aptly named “the Progressive Humanization of the Modern Movement” by Eric De Mare in his essay “The New Empiricism,” Architectural Review 103, no. 613 (January 1948): 10. 43 Susanne Dussel, “The ‘Own’ and ‘Foreign’: Cultural Identity in Contemporary Architecture in Mexico (1980–2000),” Architecture and identity research project (April 2004): 6. 44 Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture (1943; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1962), 14. 45 The concept is derived from Viktor Shklovsky’s ostraneniye which roughly translates as “making strange.” As a literary strategy it was employed to renew habitual and familiar stories through a variety of changes in the structure of storytelling. See Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 46 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece, no. 15 (1981): 164–78.

CHAPTER 1: IDEAS IN REGIONALISM 

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The Regional Motive / Wendell Berry i Thomas Hornbein, Everest: The West Ridge (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965). 1 Though I would think it dishonest to alter this and the earlier reference to “comfortable chairs of literature in Northern universities” in such a way as to imply that I never wrote them as first published, I feel nevertheless that certain qualifications are in order. In the first place, it would have been no more than appropriate to assume that there were compelling personal reasons, unknown to me, for the departure of the Agrarians from their region. In the second place, it is ungrateful and inaccurate to imply that their thinking has been without effect. I am uncertain what the general effect has been, but it is obvious, I trust, that the effect on me has been large. My proper concern, then, is not to complain against the departure of the Agrarians, but to warn that their departure should not be taken either as disproof of the validity of their principles, or as justification of absentee regionalism (agrarianism without agriculture). Universal Civilization and National Cultures / Paul Ricoeur i Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 314.

CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL POSITIONS IN ARCHITECTURAL REGIONALISM

Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture / Harwell Hamilton Harris i Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 119–20. ii Ibid., 104. iii Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 317–23. Regionalism /Harwell Hamilton Harris i Material from the symposium was later presented in the organization’s journal, North Carolina Architect, special issue, Regionalism (January–February 1978). Contributors included Ernest Wood, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Henry L. Kamphoefner, Brian Shawcroft, Dan MacMillan, G. Milton Small, Gerald Li, Ruth Little-Stokes, Robert W. Sawyer, John D. Rogers, and Charles C. Hight. ii Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 189. iii Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism, A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (New York: Prestel, 2003), 40–41. See Journal and Sentinel, 6 April 1952, for Kamphoefner’s regionalist architectural and educational program in North Carolina. iv Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 187. Regionalism and Invention / Lawrence W. Speck i Arthur Drexler, Transformations of Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 13–14. 1 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1934): 52. 2 Ibid. 3 For discussion of these origins, see Robert Goffin, Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (New York: De Capo Press, 1975). 4 Alfons Dopsch, Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization (New York: Gordon Press, 1985), p. 2. 5 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 2 (New York: 1907): 270. 6 Antonio Mancui, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, Vol. 2 (Florence: c. 1485): 23. 7 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Bramhall House, 1954): 15, 17. 8 Thomas Beeby, Modulus ([Charlottesville] Journal of the University of Virginia, Spring, 1981). 9 Goran, Schildt, Alvar Aalto, The Early Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1984): 102. 10 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 53. Regionalism in American Architecture / Rexford Newcomb i It is worth noting that both Newcomb and Mumford discuss the work of H. H. Richardson in texts pertaining to regional architectural history. The differences in their analyses are striking; Newcomb sees Richardson’s work as a variation of

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his French and Spanish inheritance of study in Europe—a sort of migration-via-education shift of styles—while Mumford’s characterizes Richardson as “our first truly regional architect” because he was able to interpret the sensibility of a region and reflect that sense back to its residents, teaching them something new. 1 Henry C. Foreman, The Architecture of the Old South, Medieval Style, chap. i. 2 Rexford Newcomb, The Colonial and Federal House, 36. 3 Ibid., 30–35. 4 Ibid., chap. iii. 5 Ibid., 29–30. 6 Rexford Newcomb, Modern Architecture with Particular Reference to the United States, 57–67. 7 Ibid., 67–75. 8 Natalie Scott and William P. Spratling, Old Plantation Houses in Louisiana. 9 Charles E. Peterson, “Early Sainte Genevieve, Missouri, and Its Architecture,” Missouri Historical Review XXXV (January 1941): 207–32. 10 Buford L. Pickens, “Regional Aspects of Early Louisiana Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, VII (January–June, 1948): 33–36. 11 J. Frazer Smith, White Pillars, chap. vi, vii. 12 Rexford Newcomb, The Old Mission Churches and Historic Houses of California, chap. viii. 13 Rexford Newcomb, Spanish-Colonial Architecture in the United States, 34–35, plates 51–94. 14 Ibid., 32–33, plates 47–50. 15 Ibid., 29–31, plates 29–46. 16 Ibid., 25–28, plates 1–28. 17 Rexford Newcomb, Mediterranean Domestic Architecture in the United States. 18 Newcomb, Spanish-Colonial, 36–39, plates 95–130. 19 Rexford Newcomb, Architecture of the Old Northwest Territory, chap. vi. 20 Rexford Newcomb, Old Kentucky Architecture, plates 5–89. 21 Clifford H. Cochran, Grandeur in Tennessee, 1–19. 22 Newcomb, Northwest Territory, chap. vii. 23 Ibid., chap. viii. 24 Ibid., chap. ii. 25 Ibid., chap. xi–xiii. 26 William Lewis Nida, The Story of Illinois and Its People, 168. 27 Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of Chicago, Vol. I, 504–5 28 Newcomb, The Colonial and Federal House, 35. 29 Newcomb, Modern Architecture. 127–31. 30 Ibid., 131–37. 31 Ibid., 141–54. 32 Ibid., 181–205. Excerpts from The South in Architecture / Lewis Mumford i Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 145. ii “The Regionalism of H. H. Richardson, and “The Social Task of Architecture” complete the text. iii Mumford, The South in Architecture, 31. Regionalism within Modernism / Suha Ozkan i Robert Powell and Suha Ozkan, “A Taxonomy of Regionalism” in Ken Yeang: Rethinking the Environmental Filter, ed. Robert Powell, 9–15 (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1989). 1 Paul Oliver, ed., Shelter and Society (New York: Praeger, 1969); Paul Oliver, ed., Shelter, Sign & Symbol (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1977).

Cultural Continuum and Regional Identity in Architecture / Balkrishna V. Doshi i Sangath: Vastu-Shilpa Consultants, “Methodology of Working,” www.indiabuildnet.com/arch/sangath_10.htm. ii William Curtis refers to this legacy quite succinctly: “He had worked with Le Corbusier, and had absorbed the notion that a harmony must be found between industrialism and nature.” William Curtis, Modern Architecture: Since 1900 (New York: Phaidon, 1996), 572.

Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East / Kenza Boussora 1 D. Kuban, “Modern versus Traditional: a False Conflict,” MIMAR, Architecture in Development no. 9 (1983): 54. 2 Antony M. Chitty, “The Need for Regionalism in Architecture, a Ghana Aesthetic,” The Builder CXCV, no. 6023 (September 5, 1958): 400; Larry Paul Full, “The Contemporary Regional Response,” Texas Architect (July/August, 1981): 43; Rory

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Spence, “Regional Identity,” Architectural Review CIXXVIII, no. 1066, (December, 1985): 24; Michel Ragon, “Regional Architecture: Canada, Quebec,” Architecture (Revue de l’ordre des architectes) no. 27 (August/September, 1987): 16. 3 KennethYeang, “Notes on Regional Influences Affecting Design,” Majallah Akitek, No. 1 (March 1981): 47; Bruce G. Sharky, “Strong Attitudes on Regionalism . . . but no Consensus,” Landscape Architecture 75, no. 2 (March/April 1985): 81. 4 G. Li, B. Shawcroft, D. MacMillan, G. Milton Small, Ruth Littlestokes, W. R. Sawyer, D. Rojers Jr., E. Wood, “Roundtable: Regionalism Present,” North Carolina Architect 25 (1978): 18–28. 5 Larry Paul Full, “The Contemporary Regional Response,” Texas Architect (July/August 1981): 43. 6 Chris Abel, “Regional Transformations,” Architectural Review 180, no. 1077 (November, 1986): 37.

Tradition & Modernity / Juhani Pallasmaa i Juhani Pallasmaa, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005. ii Pallasmaa, correspondence. 1 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1964; c1932). Quoted in Colin St. John Wilson, “The Historical Sense,” Architectural Review (October 1984). 2 Ibid. 3 Milan Kundera, Romaanin taide [Art of the Novel] (Helsinki: WSOY, 1986): 165. Juhani Pallasmaa, translator. Critique of Regionalism / Alan Colquhoun i Alan Colquhoun, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005. 1 Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, translated by Edith S. Aujame (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 218. The Concept of Regionalism / Alan Colquhoun 1 C.f. Guiliano Gresleri, “Vers une Architecture Classique,” in Jacques Lucan, ed., Le Corbusier, Une Encyclopedie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987). 2 C.f. Mary McLeod, “Le Corbusier in Algiers,” Oppositions 19/20 (Winter/Spring 1980): 5. 3 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 4 Norbert Elias, History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 5 Martin Thom, “Tribes within Nations,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, 25–26 (London: Routledge, 1990). 6 Though the Irish revolt started much earlier, its cultural manifestations belong to the 1890s. 7 As had already happened in the Balkans earlier in the century. 8 Maurice Barrés, as cited in Thom, “Tribes within Nations,” 38–39. 9 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich: 1900). Translated into English as Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (New York: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1910). 10 Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig: 1887). 11 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis,” Architecture in Greece 15 (Athens: 1981). 12 Ernst Renan, as cited in Homi Bhabha, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 310. 13 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), chapter 7. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Four Approaches to Regionalism in Architecture / Eleftherios Pavlides i Richard Ingersoll, “Conference Review: Context and Modernity, Delft, June 12–15, 1990,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 2 (February 1991): 124. Bibliography Besset, Maurice. Who Was Le Corbusier? Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1968. Dorson, Richard M. “Concepts of Folklore and Folklife Studies.” In Folklore and Folklife, an Introduction, edited by A. M. Dorson, 1–50. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973. Evans, E. Estyn. “The Cultural Geographer and Folklife Research.” In Folklore and Folklife, 517–32. Frampton, Kenneth. “Greek Regionalism and the Modern Project:

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A Collective Endeavour.” In Atelier 66, edited by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, 4–5. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Glassie, Henry. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Glassie, Henry. Patterns in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Jenkins, J. Geraint. “The Use of Artifacts and Folk Art in the Folk Museum.” In Folklore and Folklife, 497–516. Konstantinidis, Aris. Stoiheia Autognossias. Athens, 1976. Lefaivre, Liane, and Alexander Tzonis. Atelier 66. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 1985. Markopoulos, I. Laiki Arhitektoniki. Athens, 1940. Megas, Georgios A. Skopoi kai Methodoi dia tin Erevnan tis. Laikis Oikodomias. Horotaxia, Poleodomia, Architectoniki 8 (1942): 41–44. Also in Laographia 16 (1968–69): 3–12. Oliver, Paul. “Primary Forms and Primary Considerations: The Future of Studies in Greek Vernacular Shelter.” In Shelter in Greece, edited by O. B. Doumanis and P. Oliver, 9–15 Athens, Greece, 1974. Pavlides, Eleftherios. “Vernacular Architecture as an Expression of its Social Context: A Case Study of Eressos, Greece.” Ph.D. Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1985. Pavlides, Eleftherios, and Jana Hesser. “Vernacular Architecture in its Social Context.” In Current Perspectives on Housing and Culture, edited by Setha Low and Erve Chambers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Pavlides, Eleftherios. The Missing Dimension in Environmental Research. The Visual Environmental Design Research Association, 1991. Prussin, Labelle. Architecture in Northern Ghana: a Study of Forms and Function. Berkley: University of California Press, 1969. Rapoport, Amos. House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969. Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture without Architects. New York: Museum of Modern Art., 1964.

CHAPTER 3: MODERN REGIONALISM: REFERENTIAL REGIONALISM Toward a Southwestern Architecture / David R. Williams i O’Neil Ford Chronology, Arch B. Swank Jr.: An Inventory of His Drawings, Photographs, and Papers, 1951–1979, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, Austin.

Excerpts from Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest / Mary Colter i Arnold Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 9. Old Forms for New Buildings / John Gaw Meem i Eliel Saarinen, “The Principles of Modern Architecture,” Royal Institute of British Architects Journal 39 (January 1932): 235–37. Saarinen originally gave this address to the 64th convention of the American Institute of Architects. ii Ibid., 237.

The Myth and Power of Place: Hispanic Revivalism in the American Southwest / David Gebhard i David Gebhard, “Architecture in New Mexico: Discussion and Analysis” New Mexico Architect, May–June 1959, 11–14. ii Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 257. 1 Arthur B. Benton, “Shall We Plan for a Distinctive Architecture for the Southwest?” Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer VI (November 19, 1920): 18–19. 2 Ibid. 3 George La Mont Cole, “Primitive Architecture,” The Architect and Engineer XLIV (March 1916): 107. 4 David Gebhard, Charles F. A. Voysey, Architect (Los Angeles, 1975), 63–64. 5 James D. McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), 51, 149. 6 Ibid., 859. 7 Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York, 1882), 348–57, 370–86. 8 Gustav Stickley, Craftsman Home (New York, 1909), 9–11. 9 Gustav Stickley, “How Mission Furniture was named,” The

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Craftsman XVI (1909): 225. 10 Ibid. 11 Cosmos Mindeleff, “Pueblo Architecture”, American Architect LXVI (April 17, 1897): 19–21, (May 22): 59–61, (July 24): 31–33, (September 11): 87–88. 12 Albert C. Schweinfurth, “Country Hotel near Montalvo,” California Architect and Building News XV (April 1894): 39. 13 Samuel Newsom, “Parker House, San Rafael,” California Architect and Building News XVIII (September 1897), n.p. For Maramonte Hunt and Gun Club, Novoto, see David Gebhard, Samuel and Joseph Gather Newsom: Victorian Architectural Imagery in California 1878–1908 (Santa Barbara, 1979), fig. 94. 14 “Sanatorium at Alamagordo, New Mexico,” The Architect and Engineer II (September 1905): 25–26. “Sanatorium, Alamagordo, New Mexico, for D. A. Gregg,” The Builder and Contractor (June 25, 1903): 1. 15 Virginia L. Gratton, Mary Colter, Builder Upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, 1980), 14–19. David Gebhard, “Architecture and the Fred Harvey Houses,” New Mexico Architect IV (July–August, 1962): 11–17. 16 Letter of Ralph W. Atler of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad System to David Gebhard, December 14, 1959. 17 Charles F. Lummis, “The Patio” and “The Grand Verandah,” Land of Sunshine III (June–November 1895): 12–16, 63–67. A. V. La Motte, “Adobe Houses,” Overland XXX (September 1897): 239–42. 18 “Indian Room, Astor Hotel,” The Yearbook of the Boston Architectural League (Boston, 1908), 175. 19 Charles F. Whittlesey, “House for Margaret Ward, San Francisco, California,” The Architect and Engineer XXIX (May 1912): 84–85. “Residence of Mr. Fisher, San Francisco,” The Architect and Engineer XIV (October 1980): 59. “Unique Design in the Indian Pueblo Style,” The Architect and Engineer XXIV (March 1911): 58. 20 Carl D. Sheppard, Creator of the Santa Fe Style: Isaac Hamilton Rapp, Architect (Albuquerque, 1988), 79–83. Eugene Neuhaus, The San Fair (San Francisco, 1915), 57–58. 21 Neuhaus, op. cit., 46. 22 William J. Moore, Fun With Fritz: Adventures in Early Redlands, Big Bear, and Hollywood with John H. “Fritz” Fisher (Redlands, 1986), 14 and 120. 23 Frank Mead and Richard S. Requa, “Beach Cottage in Hopi Indian Architecture for W. S. Bailey, La Jolla, California,” The Western Architect XXIX (June 1920): plate 4 24 David Gebhard, “R. M. Schindler in New Mexico,” The New Mexico Architect VII (January–February 1965): 15–21. 25 Dione Neutra, Richard Neutra: Promise and Fulfillment, 1919–1932 (Carbondale, 1986), 101. 26 Richard J. Neutra, Wie Baut Amerika? (Stuttgart, 1927). 27 Ibid., 60–61, 75–76. 28 Donald Harris Dwyer, “Grosvenor Atterbury,” The Dictionary of American Bibliography, ed. John A. Garraty. Supplement 6, 1956–1960 (New York, 1980), 26. The Bayberry Point houses were illustrated in The American Architect, LXXXXVI (September 1909), n. p. 29 Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (London, New York, and Toronto, 1930), 270. Regionalism in Texas Architecture / Stephen Fox i The beginning of the movement is usually dated from the first publication in the Overland Monthly in 1868 of Bret Harte’s stories of California mining camps. A disproportionate number of contributors of local-color stories to national magazines were southerners. Further, some erroneously use the terms “local color” and regionalism interchangeably. See Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 1 The Villa of San Antonio de Béxar was authorized in 1731, thirteen years after the establishment of the first of the San Antonio River missions, now the Alamo. San Antonio is the only large Texan city that predates the establishment of the Republic of Texas by Anglo-American immigrants in 1836. Lewis F. Fisher, Saving San Antonio: The Precarious Preservation of a Heritage (Lubbock, 1996), 12–36. 2 Eugene George, “Espada Doorway: A Lesson in Harmony,” Perspective, A Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Texas Chapter 9 (May 1980): 13–14. 3 Marilyn McAdams Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist (Austin, 1973): 95–96. 4 “San Antonio National Bank Building,” Architectural Record 1

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(July–September 1891): 62. 5 Pauline A. Pinckney, Painting in Texas: The Nineteenth Century (Austin, 1958), and Cecilia Steinfeldt, The Onderdonks: A Family of Texas Painters (San Antonio, 1976). 6 Entries for “Local Color” and “Regionalism,” in James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature. With revisions and additions by Phillip W. Leininger (New York, 1995), 383– 84 and 556; Anne E. Rowe, “Regionalism and Local Color,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, 867–68 (Chapel Hill, 1989). 7 Karen J. Weitze, California’s Mission Revival (Los Angeles, 1984). 8 “Window of Mission San José near San Antonio, Texas,” American Architect and Building News 30 (December 20, 1890): plate section. 9 Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (New York and Cambridge, MA, 1983), 163–68. 10 John D. Isaacs, “The New Southern Pacific Passenger Station at San Antonio, Texas,” Engineering News 50 (December 31, 1903): 579–81. 11 David Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California, 1895–1930,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (May 1967): 131–47; “Hotel El Jardín at Brownsville,” Houston Post-Dispatch, August 1, 1926; “Row of Buildings Nearing Completion,” Houston Post-Dispatch, November 26, 1926; and “Border Cities Join Hands in Festival,” Houston Post-Dispatch, April 24, 1927. 12 Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Houston, 1990), 171. 13 Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston, 1936), 126. 14 On the architectural design strategy Colin Rowe described as “authentication,” see his essay “Character and Composition: Some Vicissitudes of Architectural Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century,” in Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1977), 74. 15 Emily Ballew Neff, Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Princeton, 2000); and Virginia Bernhard, Ima Hogg: The Governor’s Daughter (Austin, 1984). 16 William C. Harvard, “Agrarians, Vanderbilt,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1127–28. 17 Howard Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South (Austin, 1979), 77–78 and 106–13. 18 John F. Staub, “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” Civics for Houston 1 (February 1928): 6–7. 19 Muriel Quest McCarthy, David R. Williams: Pioneer Architect (Dallas, 1984), and Michael Glen Wade, “David Reichard Williams: Avant-Garde Architect and Community Planner, 1890–1962,” Ph.D. diss., University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1978. 20 I. T. Frary, “Picturesque Towns of the Border Land,” Architectural Record 45 (April 1919): 382–84; Frary, “The Carved Window of San José,” Architectural Record 47 (March 1920): 286–87; Frary, “A Group of San Antonio Cottages Showing Spanish Influence,” Architectural Record 51 (June 1922): 538–42; Frary, “A Group of San Antonio Houses Showing Classic Influence,” Architectural Record 60 (September 1926): 281–83. 21 David R. Williams, “An Indigenous Architecture: Some Texas Colonial Houses,” Southwest Review 14 (October 1928): 60–74. 22 David R. Williams, “Toward a Southwestern Architecture,” Southwest Review 16 (April 1931): 301–13. 23 O’Neil Ford, “Toward a New Architecture—II: Organic Building,” Southwest Review 16 (January 1932): 227–28. 24 Peter C. Papademetriou, “Texas Transitions: Eclecticism, Regionalism, Modernism,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1979, manuscript pp. 11, 13. 25 Mary Carolyn Hollers George, “Colley, Richard Stewart,” in New Handbook of Texas (Austin, 1996), Volume 2, 212–13. 26 “Northwest Architects Meet at Eugene,” Architectural Record 116 (October 1954): 16. 27 “The Architect and His Community—Cocke, Bowman & York: Harlingen, Texas: Shopping Center,” Progressive Architecture 36 (June 1955): 110–11.

Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism / James F. O’Gorman i Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings,

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ed. Spyros Amourgis, 9 (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991). ii James F. O’Gorman, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005. 1 In this brief essay I can only suggest some aspects of this important topic, and I must sketch a simple picture in black and white that is, in fact, a far more complex pattern composed of subtle shades of gray. 2 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York, 1932), 57. Elsewhere the authors modify the bluntness of this statement (p. 61) but permit only the architect “of courage” the use of curves, “with the sanctions of genius and in definite opposition to the discipline of regularity” (pp. 63–64). One review of the exhibition this book catalogues began its criticism of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye with the comment: “[H]ere is a plan which binds itself absurdly into a system of supports” (“The Editor’s Diary,” Architect 65 [April 1932]: 227). 3 Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (New York and Oxford, 1982), 84. 4 Richard Neutra, Life and Shape (New York, 1962), 221–22. 5 Remarks of the architect and the client make it sound as if a kind of regionalism operated in this design. Neutra found in Southern California as nowhere else at this date clients willing to build his work; Lovell is said to have observed that he was not going to build “my home the same as the woman from Peoria” (Hines [note 3], p. 78). The international elements of the design far outweigh casual and ambiguous remarks of this kind, however. 6 Hines (note 3), pp. 75–91, esp. 81; Neutra (note 4), p. 222; “The Demonstration Health-House,” Architectural Record 67 (May 1930): 433–38. 7 There is, as always, an exception to the generalization: the generous size of the kitchen was apparently dictated by the demands of vegetarian cooking. Still, it was shaped by the frame. By 1962 Neutra had convinced himself that his goal had been “to service with contemporary means organic lifeneeds” ([note 4], p. 224), but his discussion in Life and Shape of the design of the house begins with notes on technique (introduced with the revealing phrase “I had often thought . . .”), then proceeds to his client’s vegetarian needs (pp. 222–24). That seems to re-create the process of design. 8 And according to the Architectural Record (note 6), the dimensions of the plan units of the frame were themselves determined by the size of the stock steel casement windows. 9 Hines (note 3), fig. 88. 10 Rexford Newcomb, The Franciscan Mission Architecture of Alta California (New York, 1916); Mediterranean Domestic Architecture in the United States (Cleveland, 1928); and Spanish-Colonial Architecture in the United States (New York, 1937); see also Ida M. Tarbell, Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner (New York, 1928). The periodicals of the ’20s are peppered with articles on regional work in California and Florida. 11 It should be noted that Newcomb’s region was flexible indeed. His book of 1928 includes examples from as far afield as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Wichita! 12 See Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York and Oxford, 1985), passim. 13 David Gebhard, Schindler (New York, 1971), 80–89; “A Beach House for Dr. P. Lovell at Newport Beach, California,” Architectural Record 66 (September 1929): 257–61. 14 The New World Architecture (London, New York, and Toronto, 1930), 20–22, 260–72. 15 “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California (1895– 1930),” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (May 1967): 131–47. 16 Mediterranean Domestic Architecture, n. p. See especially the photographs of Neff’s Bourne and Marion-Thomson houses in this volume. The photographer knew exactly what he was looking at. These characteristics appeared early in Neff’s work. He is described as “a vivid realist who paints with strong shadows and bold form and rich color” by Harris Allen in “An Artist in Adobe,” Pacific Coast Architect 26 (August 1924): 6. 17 “Personality in Regional Architecture: An Appreciation of the Work of Wallace Neff, Architect,” Western Architect 35 (February 1926): 22. 18 American Renaissance (New York, 1904) (originally published in serial form in 1902); see esp. pp. 30–33. 19 “Modernism is Still in the Making,” Pencil Points 12 (February 1931): 87–88. 20 “Modernistic vs. Traditional Architecture,” Octagon 2 (October

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1930): 10–11. 21 George Howe, “What is This Modern Architecture Trying to Express,” American Architect 137 (May 1930): 108; see Robert A. M. Stern, George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture (New Haven and London, 1975). The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building was included in Hitchcock and Johnson’s catalogue (see note 2). 22 George Howe, “Functional Aesthetics and the Social Ideal,” Pencil Points 13 (April 1932): 215–18. 23 The original design was begun in partnership with Lescaze, but in 1932–34, on his own, Howe produced in Square Shadows, the Wasserman House, a work International Style in composition, modern in structure of reinforced concrete, but traditional in richly wrought, flexible spaces and textured, colorful walls of local stone and Virginia brick. The text of its initial publication (written by or with the help of the architect?) notes that in International Style work “it has seemed necessary to standardize methods of living to fit...[the] design.” It also calls this “one more important contribution by an American architect to the history of world architecture.” See “Square Shadows,” Architectural Forum 62 (March 1935): 192–205; see also Stern (note 21), 163–66. 24 Newcomb, Spanish-Colonial Architecture (note 10), 36–37. In fact, Californians in the early twentieth century built in every style from Spanish to modern, including the English Colonial: see, for example, Paul Robinson Hunter and Walter L. Reichardt, Residential Architecture in Southern California (n. pl., 1939), passim. 25 In fact too late. His own publication of his work, Architecture in Southern California (Chicago, 1964), is a name-dropping collection of mostly post–Second World War homes for Hollywood stars. It contains little that enhances his reputation. 26 Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Harmondsworth, Baltimore, and Victoria, 1958) is one that does. There is a chapter (24) entitled “Architecture Called Traditional in the Twentieth Century,” but even in this book only 18 of 435 text pages are devoted to traditional work (and that does not include the Californian). 27 Recent histories, especially those written from other than stylistic points of view, have begun to produce more inclusive accounts. Among these are, for example, Leland M. Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York, 1979), chap. 7: “Dichotomy: Tradition and the Avant Garde: 1915–1940,” 228ff. 28 Walter Kidney’s Architecture in Choice (New York, 1974) errs on the other side by omitting any reference to modern design as an available option. 29 I mean, of course, in interpretative histories. In guidebooks such as David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s Architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California (Salt Lake City, 1982), the works of both camps are admitted (although, in this edition at least, the Neutra entries far outnumber the Neffs).

CHAPTER 4: REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL PLANNING

An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning / Benton MacKaye i Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 14. ii Ibid. Regional Planning / Lewis Mumford i Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 197–98. ii Robert Dorman, The Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 9. iii Ibid., 1–25. iv Interestingly, Roosevelt’s New Deal relied on the revitalization of local economies by fostering pride in local or regional identity. v Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 198. vi Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 492.

Excerpts from A Pattern Language / Christopher Alexander i Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel, A Pattern Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 747. 1 J. B. S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” in The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, ed. J. R. Newman, 962–67 (New York:

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Simon & Schuster, 1956). Regional Development: The Architect’s Role / Albert Mayer i “Foreign News: India: Architect’s Dream,” Time, 19 June 1950, 37. ii Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism: A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, ed. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, 40 (New York: Prestel, 2003). 1 See AIA Journal (February 1969): 70. 2 See Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Natural History Press, 1969), 79–93. An altogether mind-stretching book. Perspectives on Regional Design / Paul D. Spreiregen i Paul Spreiregen, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005.

CHAPTER 5: REGIONAL MODERNISM: CONFLICT AND MATURATION Excerpts from Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning / Le Corbusier i William J. Curtis, Modern Architecture, 321. ii Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, transl. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 27–28, 36. iii Kurt Helfrich, “Building the Contemporary House: Modernity, Regionalism, and the Ideal of Japan in Antonin Raymond’s Residential Designs, 1921–1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1997), 180. iv Describing the basic house for man, Le Corbusier states: “Spanning the ages and in all climates, is a pure structure, a purity always characterized by a type, and this type, ranging from the shack to the palace, is unique in the current period, based on the same profound causes, rational and sentimental.” Le Corbusier, Une Maison, Un Palais: à la recherche d’une unité architecturale (Paris: Editions G. Crea, 1928), 39. 1 In Vers le Paris de l’époque machiniste (Redressement Français, 28. rue de Madrid, Paris).

ii Hugh Morrison, “After the International Style—What?” Architectural Forum, May 1940, 345. iii This show and the history surrounding it, including its European versions, are well documented in Liane Lefaivre’s essay “Critical Regionalism: A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, ed. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, 24–28 (New York: Prestel, 2003). iv Elizabeth Mock, ed., “Built in U.S.A.—Since 1932,” in Built in U.S.A.: 1932–1944 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1944), 14. v Mock, “Built in U.S.A.,” 12–14. vi Keith Eggener, “John McAndrew, the Museum of Modern Art, and the ‘Naturalization’ of Modern Architecture in America, ca. 1940,” (unpublished paper). Many exhibits held at MoMA reflected the sensibility of either regional or geographically particular architecture; see Mock, 124–27, for further discussion of these exhibits. vii Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The International Style Twenty Years Later,” Architectural Record, August 1951, 89–97.



Regionalism in Architecture / Richard J. Neutra i In 1932, Richard Neutra made a similar point in response to papers on functionalism: “And we can not claim sincerity while we camouflage our necessities and possibilities and ignore the financial mechanics of our building activity. . . . Form, usage, construction, and building economics must grow into a well-balanced unit and thus bring us finally ‘toward a new architecture.’” Richard Neutra, “Functionalism Again: Pro,” Southwest Review 17, no. 3 (April 1932): 352. ii Richard Neutra, “Cross-section of a Credo,” in Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, ed. William Marlin, 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: CAPRA Press, 1989). iii William Jordy, “The International Style in the 1930s,” in “Symbolic Essence” and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture, ed. Mardges Bacon, 155 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). After the International Style—What? / Hugh S. Morrison i Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial LXIV, no. 7 (11 April 1918): 337–39. Mumford refers to Morrison’s work directly: “These two biographies bear witness to the fact that the day of pleading for a usable past is now over.” Lewis Mumford, “Giants of Modern Architecture,” New Republic, 26 February 1936, 87. The Skyline: Status Quo / Lewis Mumford i Lewis Mumford, “Monumentalism, Symbolism, and Style,” Architectural Review, April 1949, 177. ii Ibid., 174. Later on page 177 he explained: “In such a movement, the regional will bear the universal stamp and the universal, fully embraced, will incorporate and further the regional. Where the canon of the ‘International Style’ has been strictly followed there is a certain aesthetic uniformity. . . but for an inclusive kind of modernism what one would seek is not uniformity but unity: the working out of fresh adaptations and forms.” iii Lewis Mumford, “The Architecture of the Bay Region,” Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949), 1. iv Ibid., 2.

What is Happening to Modern Architecture? / The Museum of Modern Art i Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line: Status Quo,” New Yorker, 11 October 1947, 109.

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The New Regionalism / Sigfried Giedion i Sigfried Giedion, “The State of Contemporary Architecture: The Regional Approach,” Architectural Record, January 1954, 132–37. A follow-up essay published in February 1954 was subtitled “The Need for Imagination” and speaks of the emerging experimentation with structures and space among architects. ii For more on Giedion’s influence on the International Style, see Alan Colquhoun, Chapter 2. iii Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 9. 1 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, third edition, 456–57.

The Meaning of Regionalism in Architecture / Pietro Belluschi i Meredith Clausen, Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 335. ii See Clausen, Pietro Belluschi, 190–93, for discussion of Belluschi’s lectures on regionalism. iii Jane Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 125. iv Pietro Belluschi, memorandum to Nelson A. Kenworthy, Cambridge, MA, 27 January 1954. Miscellaneous file, Office of Foreign Buildings Operations, Washington, D.C. v Pietro Belluschi, interview by Meredith L. Clausen, Portland, Oregon, 22 August, 23 August, and 4 September 1983. Regionalism and Modern Architecture / James Stirling i Thomas Muirhead, in a review of Stirling’s collected writings, suggests that this essay is the work of Colin Rowe based on its style and complexity. He does allow the possibility that Stirling consulted with Rowe in the formulation of the ideas or that Rowe may have only edited the text. See Thomas Muirhead, review of Stirling: Writings on Architecture, in Journal of Architecture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 377. ii James Stirling, “From Garches to Jaoul: Le Corbusier’s Domestic Architecture in 1927 and 1953,” Architectural Review, September 1955, 145–51; James Stirling, “Ronchamp: Le Corbusier’s Chapel and the Crises of Rationalism,” Architectural Review, March 1956, 155–61. iii Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture: 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 242. iv Kenneth Frampton, “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” in Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object, ed. John Thackara, 51–52 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988). 1 See “The Functional Tradition,” special issue of Architectural Review, July 1957, 5–73. 2 See Theo Crosby, “Contributions to ClAM 10,” Architects’ Year Book 7, 32–39. 3 See W. R. Lethaby, Form in Civilization: Collected Papers on Art and Labor (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1922). 4 George Melly, Intimate Review, 1956. 5 John Wain, “A Writer’s Progress—IV,” The London Magazine, November 1956, 61.

CHAPTER 6: BIOREGIONALISM

Reinhabiting California / Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann

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i Doug Aberley, “Interpreting Bioregionalism: A Story from Many Voices,” in Bioregionalism, ed. Michael Vincent McGinnis, 22 (London: Routledge, 1999); Peter Berg, “Strategies for Reinhabiting the Northern California Bioregion,” Seriatim: Journal of Ecotopia 1, no. 3 (1977): 2–8. ii Aberley, “Interpreting Bioregionalism,” 22. Bibliography Berg, Peter, ed. Reinhabiting a Separate Country. San Francisco: California Arts Council. Planet/Drum, 1977. Dasmann, R. F. A system for defining and classifying natural regions for purposes of conservation. IUCN Occ. Paper 7, 47 pp. Morges, Switzerland: IUCN, 1973. Forbes, Jack D. “The Native American Experience in California History.” California Historical Quarterly (September 1971): 234–42. Udvardy, Miklos D. F. A Classification of the Biogeographical Provinces of the World. IUCN Occ. Paper 18, 48 pp. Morges, Switzerland: IUCN, 1975.

Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice / Jim Dodge i He served as editor of Planet Drum’s journal. The issue he edited was entitled Open Fire: A Council of Bioregional SelfCriticism, Raise the Stakes, no. 10 (1985). ii Jim Dodge, in correspondence with Eric Ingamells, July 2005. Biotechnology and Regional Integration / Gary J. Coates i Gary Coates, ed., Resettling America: Energy, Ecology, and Community (Andover, MA: Brick House, 1981), 40. ii Gary Coates, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005. 1 Raymond Dasmann, Environmental Conservation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959). While the idea of bioregions has been used for nearly a half century in relation to plant and animal communities, it was first used in relation to human ecology by Raymond Dasmann in the 1950s. Also see Dasmann, “Biogeographical Provinces,” in Co-Evolution Quarterly 11 (Fall 1976): 32–37. 2 Lewis Mumford, “Regional Planning,” in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of The Regional Planning Association of America, ed. Carl Sussman, 201 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976). 3 Rene Dubos, “Symbiosis Between the Earth and Humankind,” Science 193: 462. 4 Lewis Mumford, “Regions—To Live In,” in Neglected Vision, ed. Sussman, 90. 5 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1938), 385–86. Mumford provides a thorough and comprehensive summary of his thoughts on regionalism as the basis for a new social order. The thoughts on regional planning and regional identity presented in this introduction largely follow those of Mumford in this fine book. For other examples of approaches to learning that would facilitate the creation of a meta-industrial society based on respect for bioregional ecologies, see Gary J. Coates, ed., Alternative Learning Environments (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson Ross, 1974). 6 See Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 327–31 for a discussion of the idea of common ownership of land. 7 See Shimon Gottschalk, “Rural New Towns for America,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 161–85 (Andover, MA: Brick House Publishing, 1981). 8 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 329. 9 Peter van Dresser, A Landscape for Humans: A Case Study of the Potentials for Ecologically Guided Development in an Uplands Region (Albuquerque: The Biotechnic Press, 1972). 10 Peter van Dresser, A Landscape for Humans, xix. 11 In Sussman, ed., Neglected Vision, 94–110. 12 David Pomerantz, “A Renewable Energy Future for Franklin County, Massachusetts,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 421–51 (Andover, MA: Brick House Publishing, 1981). 13 George Burrill and James Nolfi, “Strategies for Bioregional Food Systems,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 452–74; and Wes Jackson, “New Roots for Agriculture,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 498–518. 14 Earle A. Barnhart, “Agricultural Landscapes: Strategies Towards Permanence,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 475–97. 15 Peter van Dresser, “Goals for Regional Development,” in Resettling America, ed. Gary J. Coates, 415–20.

CHAPTER 7: CRITICAL REGIONALISM

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Constructive Regionalism / Anthony Alofsin i Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece, no. 15 (1981): 164–78. ii Anthony Alofsin, in correspondence with the editor, July 2005. iii Anthony Alofsin, Liane Lefaivre, and Alexander Tzonis, “Die Frage des Regionalismus,” in Für eine andere Architektur: Bauen mit der Natur und in der Region vol. 1, ed. Michael Andritzky, Lucius Burckhardt, and Ot Hoffmann, 121– 34(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981). iv Ibid., 121. v Alofsin, in correspondence. 1 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), 53. 2 Ibid., 104. 3 Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line, Status Quo” New Yorker (11 October 1947): 106–9. 4 “What is Happening in Modern Art?” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 15 (Spring 1948). See also Lewis Mumford, “The Architecture of the Bay Region,” Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region (catalogue) (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949). 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 3–96. 7 Vincent Scully, “Doldrums in the Suburbs,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 47. 8 Mumford, “The Architecture of the Bay Region,” passim. 9 See “William Wilson Wurster,” Architectural Forum 79 (July 1943): 45–66; William Wilson Wurster, “California Architecture for Living,” California Monthly (August 1954): 14–15; William W. Wurster, “San Francisco Bay Portfolio,” Magazine of Art 37 (April 1940): 301–5. Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic / Kenneth Frampton i Kenneth Frampton, “Universalism and/or Regionalism: Untimely Reflections on the Future of the New,” Domus 782 (May 1996): 8. ii Kenneth Frampton, “Critical Regionalism Revisited: Provisional Thoughts on the Future of Urban Design,” Agglutinations, 27 October 2003, http://agglutinations.com/archives/000012. html.

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism / Keith L. Eggener i Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 16 (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 1 Ibid., 21; “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 148; and Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 327. See also Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981): 164–78; and William J. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 331–43. Though Curtis wrote here of “modern regionalism,” this was essentially the same phenomenon that Frampton, Tzonis, and Lefaivre called “critical regionalism.” See also Curtis’s “Towards an Authentic Regionalism,” MIMAR: Architecture in Development 19 (January/March 1986): 24–31. 2 For texts on regionalism and critical regionalism in architecture published before 1988, see Michael Steiner and Clarence Mondale, Region and Regionalism in the United States: A Source Book for the Humanities and Social Sciences (New York: Garland, 1988), 9–78. Major symposia on regionalist architecture were held in Seville, Spain, in 1985, in Pomona, California, in 1989, in Delft, The Netherlands, in 1990, and in Milan, Italy, in 1991. Of these, only the proceedings of the Pomona meeting have been published; see Spyros Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, CSP Univ., 1991). When entered, on 10 October 2001, into the on-line search engine Google (http://www.google.com/), the term “critical regionalism” received 740 hits. 3 Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 14. 4 The reception of critical regionalism until now has been largely uncritical. Most of the publications discussing it have centered on explication, elaboration, or illustration of its concepts. Among the few previous essays to question these concepts directly are: Alan Colquhoun, “Critique of Regionalism,”

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Casabella 630–631 (January/February 1996): 51–55, and “The Concept of Regionalism,” in Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai, eds., Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), pp. 13–23; Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” Assemblage 8 (Feb. 1989): 36; and Richard Ingersoll, “Conference Review: Context and Modernity,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 2 (February 1991): 124–25. Ingersoll notes that at this conference, held at Delft Technical Univ., 12–15 June 1990, substantial critiques of critical regionalism were raised by Fredrick Jameson, Marshall Berman, Ingersoll himself, and others; the proceedings of this event have never been published. Worth noting is the fact that as a concept, critical regionalism has often proven more agreeable to critics than to the designers said to be its representatives. Architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, for instance, recalled that at a conference on the subject held in Spain in 1985, “the architects [in attendance] felt insulted when . . . described [as regionalists].” Luis Fernández-Galiano, “Ten Aphorisms on Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 31. According to one American editorial published a few years later, “architects who seriously regard themselves as regionalists now resent the very word.” Deborah K. Dietsch, “Regionalism Lost and Found,” Architecture 80 (August 1991): 13. 5 “Since, then, it is climate which causes the variety in different countries, and the dispositions of the inhabitants, their stature and qualities are naturally dissimilar, there can be no doubt that the arrangement of buildings should be suitable to the qualities of the nations and people, as nature herself wisely and clearly indicates.” Vitruvius, De Architectura (online version edited by Bill Thayer: http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/ europe/ancient_rome/E/Roman/Texts/ Vitruvius/6.html), book VI, chapter 1, paragraph 12. For a historical overview of regionalist writings see Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 2–23. 6 See, for example, Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). 7 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 30. 8 Tzonis and Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” 164–78. 9 Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” 162. 10 Since the early 1980s, Frampton has discussed the topic in numerous published essays and interviews. In addition to those already noted, see: “El Regionalismo Crítico: Arquitectura Moderna e Identidad Cultural,” Proa 354 (September 1986): 20–23; “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic,” Center 3: The New Regionalism (1987): 20–27; “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” in Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object, ed. John Thackara, 51–66 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988); “Some Reflections on Postmodernism and Architecture,” in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, 75–87 (London: Free Association Books, 1989); “Critical Regionalism Revisited,” in Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 34–39; and “Universalism and/or Regionalism: Untimely Reflections on the Future of the New,” Domus 782 (May 1996): 4–8. 11 Paul Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965), 276. The essays quoting Ricoeur are those appearing in The Anti-Aesthetic, edited by Hal Foster, Perspecta, and Frampton’s Modern Architecture. 12 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 315. 13 Ibid., 314; and “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” 16–30. 14 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 314–27. 15 Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” 149; and Modern Architecture, 315. 16 Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” 149. 17 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” 19. For related critiques of postmodern architecture in the 1980s see: McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” 22–59; and Diane Ghirardo, “The Deceit of Postmodern Architecture,” in After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, ed. Gary Shapiro, 231–52 (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990). 18 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” 21; and “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” 149. 19 Tzonis and Lefaivre: “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical

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Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 3, 20–21; and “Why Critical Regionalism Today?” A+U 236 (May 1990): 31. 20 Frampton, “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” 63–65. Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 20. 21 Classic texts posing these sorts of questions include: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983). A related book focusing on architecture is Lawrence J. Vale’s Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992). 22 Curtis, for instance, in setting up his laudatory remarks on Barragán’s work, rather lightly dismissed designs by Barragán’s compatriots Carlos Lazo and Juan O’Gorman. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 333. See also Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity, 54. 23 Emilio Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976). Sales figures come from a telephone interview with Kim Tyner of MoMA’s Office of Publications, 1 October 1993. 24 The jury’s citation emphasized Barragán’s “commitment to architecture as a sublime act of the poetic imagination”; it used words and phrases like “haunting beauty,” “metaphysical landscapes,” “meditation,” “solitude,” “passion,” “desire,” and “faith.” My thanks to Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker Prize jury, for sending me a copy of this citation. 25 Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán, 5. 26 Anibal Figueroa, “The Context of Luis Barragán’s Mexican Architecture,” Center: The New Regionalism 3 (1987): 48. 27 Figueroa, “The Context of Luis Barragán’s Mexican Architecture,” 46. O’Gorman’s remarks about Barragán and El Pedregal are recorded in Seldon Rodman, Mexican Journal: The Conquerors Conquered (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1958), 21, 84. 28 Jorge Alberto Manrique, “Luis Barragán ¿Arquitectura Nacionalista?” La Semana de Bellas Artes (6 July 1980): 6–7. 29 Legorreta speaking about Barragán’s influence on his work: “I am proud to be copying him.” James Steele, “Interview: Ricardo Legorreta,” MIMAR: Architecture in Development 12/43 (June 1992): 62. 30 For more on post-war architectural diversity in Mexico see: Fernando González Gortázar, ed., La Arquitectura Mexicana del Siglo XX (México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994); and Keith Eggener, “Contrasting Images of Identity in the Post-War Mexican Architecture of Luis Barragán and Juan O’Gorman,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 9/1 (March 2000): 27–45. 31 Quoted by Alberto Moreiras, “Afterword,” in Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, ed. Amaryll Chanady, 208 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994). Also see Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity, 272–93. 32 Octavio Paz, “The Uses of Tradition, “ Artes de México 23, New Series (Spring 1994): 92. 33 Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, 23. 34 Frampton, “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” 55. 35 Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 331–33. 36 Ann Binkley Horn, “Modern Mexico,” Architectural Record 102 (July 1947): 70, 72. 37 Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” 152–53; Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 333; and Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán, 105, 107. Barragán took his civil engineer’s diploma from Guadalajara’s Escuela Libre de Ingenieros on 13 December 1923. In a 1962 interview, he recalled that civil engineering graduates needed only to take a few more classes—drawing, composition, and art history—and submit a thesis to receive an architectural degree. He remembered completing his coursework, submitting his thesis, and gaining his mentor’s approval. The Escuela Libre, however, closed while Barragán was traveling in Europe, and so he did not receive the diploma he deserved. See Alejandro Ramírez Ugarte, “Entrevista con El Arq. Luis Barragán,” in Luis Barragán: Clásico del Silencio, ed. Enrique de Anda, 221 (Bogatá, 1989). 38 For a view of Barragán as both artist and entrepreneur, see Keith Eggener, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). 39 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 315. Frampton’s use and discussion of the term “world culture” proceeds directly from Ricoeur’s essay “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” 271.

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40 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 248. 41 Anthony D. King, “Vernacular, Transnational, Post-Colonial,” Casabella 630–631 (January/February 1996): 71. 42 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 314–15, 327. 43 Marina Waisman, “An Architectural Theory for Latin America,” trans. Richard Ingersoll, Design Book Review 32–33 (Spring–Summer 1994): 28. An earlier version of these ideas appeared in Waisman’s “Cuestión de ‘Divergencia’: Sobre el Regionalismo Crítico,” Arquitectura Viva 12 (May/June 1990): 43. See also Zeynep Celik, “Cultural Intersections: Re-Visioning Architecture and the City in the Twentieth Century,” in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, ed. Russell Ferguson, 190–227 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998). 44 Quoted in Esther McCoy, “Jardines del Pedregal de San Angel,” Arts and Architecture 68 (Aug. 1951): 24. 45 Luis Barragán, “Barragán on Barragán,” Archetype 2 (Fall 1980): 31; and Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán, 9, 108. 46 Keith Eggener, “Postwar Modernism in Mexico: Luis Barragán’s Jardines del Pedregal and the International Discourse on Architecture and Place,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58/2 (June 1999): 122–45. 47 Kenneth Frampton, “Luis Barragán: The Mexican Other,” unpublished typescript of a lecture delivered at Columbia Univ., February 1993, p. 6 (my thanks to Kenneth Frampton for sending a copy of this to me); and “The Legacy of Luis Barragán,” Columbia Architecture, Planning, Preservation Newsline (November–December 1992): 4. 48 Rodman, Mexican Journal, 97. Clients, colleagues, and friends even characterized Barragán as a snob and an elitist. See for example Yukata Saito, “Interview with Francisco Gilardi,” Luis Barragán (México: Noriega Editores, 1994), 132. 49 Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai, “Introduction,” Postcolonial Space(s), 8. Note, for instance, the section headings in Frampton’s essay, “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic.” These include: “Information and Experience,” “Space/Place,” “Typology/ Typography,” “Architectonic/Scenographic,” “Artificial/Natural,” and “Visual/Tactile.” 50 “The fight against colonial powers,” Ricoeur wrote, “and the struggles for liberation were, to be sure, only carried through by laying claim to a separate personality.” The nation emerging from colonialism “has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization,” to be economically and politically viable, the new nation must also embrace “scientific, technical, and political rationality.” That is, Ricoeur says, it must embrace “universal world civilization.” Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” 271, 277. 51 Jacobs, Edge of Empire, 14–15. 52 Mumford, The South in Architecture, 120. 53 In October 1984, the Architectural Review devoted an issue to regionalism (its second in a year and a half) because, its editors claimed, “so many architects see Regionalism as the salvation of modern architecture.” Architectural Review 176 (October 1984): 23. 54 King, “Vernacular, Transnational, Post-Colonial,” 71. 55 Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture,” The Texas Quarterly 1 (February 1958): 116. See also Frampton, Modern Architecture, 320.

CHAPTER 8: REGIONALISMS FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM Becoming Regional over Time: Toward a Reflexive Regionalism / Timothy Cassidy 1 Throughout this text the many permutations of the term “modern” (modernist, modernism, etc.) are used to connote both modernism as a social and technological epoch that began with the Enlightenment, and Modernism as a distinct architectural aesthetic. In this text the former will always be in lower case and the latter will be capitalized. 2 Kenneth Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 16–30 (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). See also Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis—With Prolegomena to a History of the Culture of Modern Greek Architecture,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981): 164–78. 3 Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” 17.

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4 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhart (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 24–27. 5 Kenneth Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 20 (1983): 162. 6 Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5–6. 7 Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 40–48; Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 12. 8 Frederic Jameson argues that postmodernism is what is left when nature is gone for good. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), ix–x. 9 Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 41. 10 Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 6. 11 Ibid., 119. 12 Ibid., 4–6. 13 Ibid., 119. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 119–20. 16 Ibid., 123–26. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 125. 19 Ibid., 126–47. 20 Ibid. 21 Suzanne Peston Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 22 Jameson, Postmodernism, ix–x. 23 Paul B. Thompson, “Framing as Focal Practice,” in Technology and the Good Life?, ed. Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). On Performative Regionalism / Barbara L. Allen i The symposium, organized by the editor of this volume, was held as a part of the 1998 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Southwest Regional Conference at Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture in October 1998. 1 While these authors have written extensively on the subject of critical regionalism, a good place to start would be Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (New York: Prestel, 2003), and Kenneth Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 147–62. 2 Neil Leach, “Belonging: Towards a Theory of Identification with Space,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place (second edition), ed. Hillier and Rooksby, 297–311 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005). 3 Alexander Tzonis, “Critical Regionalism: An Attitude, Not a Style,” Architecture of Israel 19 (August 1994): 78. 4 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (third edition) (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 314. 5 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 6 Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Nicholson, 134 (New York: Routledge, 1995). 7 Butler, Gender Trouble, 24–25. 8 Leach, “Belonging,” 308. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72. 10 Ibid., 78. 11 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, 45–47. 12 Leach, “Belonging,” 298. 13 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 147. 14 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 818. 15 Peter Whoriskey, “Residents Find Small-town Vision Blurred,” Washington Post, 31 July 2005, A-12. 16 Ibid. 17 Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 124. Strong Margins / Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth i David Moos and Gail Treschsel, eds., Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003).

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Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism / Steven A. Moore 1 John Agnew, Place and Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 62. Agnew also discusses the theme of the historic devaluation of place in “Representing Space: Space, Scale and Culture in Social Science,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley, 251–71 (New York: Routledge, 1993). Agnew interrogates the concept of place. I use the terms “place” and “region” interchangeably in this text; although they do not mean the same thing, for the purpose of this discussion I conflate them. 2 For example, crime statistics reveal that the murder rate in New York City is dramatically lower than that of rural Arkansas. See Fox Butterfield, “Nationwide Drop in Murders is Reaching to Small Towns,” New York Times, 9 May 2000. 3 Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London, 1848), 36. 4 Although Max Weber is commonly credited with coining these terms, Ferdinand Tonnies actually first used them, in 1887. See Tonnies, Community and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 5 Agnew, Place and Politics, 231. 6 Soja’s position is associated with the tradition of critical theory, however his intention is revisionist. See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 120. 7 I am indebted to my colleague Stephen Ross for this insight. 8 Anna Bramwell, for example, has argued that German antiSemitism arises from the multiple doctrines of environmental determinism. To generalize that all Germans share a genius that originates in the forest and that wandering Jews share a rootlessness that originates in the desert is a classic example of determinist, reductivist logic. See Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walter Darre and Hitler’s Green Party (Abbotsbrook, England: Kensal House, 1985). See also Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 9 Agnew’s concern is apparently that those of us who are most concerned with the physical world—architects and physical geographers among the chief suspects—are prone to fall into the trap of environmental determinism. 10 Agnew, Place and Politics, 28. The definition of these terms is further amplified in his essay “Representing Space,” 253. 11 Thomas Misa, “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism,” in Does Technology Drive History, ed., Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 115–42. 12 Reductive, materialist definitions of technology tend to be less sophisticated in their understanding of the social construction of artifacts. However, in his essay “Three Faces of Technological Determinism” in Does Technology Drive History, ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx, 79–100 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), Bruce Bimber develops a very scholarly yet reductive definition of technology as limited to apparatus. Bimber’s project leads to other ontological problems, which are beyond the scope of this study. 13 For more on the various traditions within science and technology studies see my “Technology and the Politics of Sustainability at Blueprint Demonstration Farm,” Journal of Architectural Education 51, no. 1 (September 1997): 23–25, and Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001). 14 Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman, introduction, The Social Shaping of Technology (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 3. 15 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 117. 16 Ibid. and Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (JAI Press, 1986): 1–40. 17 Implicit in this point is the claim that original nature, if it ever existed at all, has long ago been incorporated into second nature, which is a work of society. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; reprinted Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 190. 18 Ibid., 31. 19 In constructing this dialogic relation between place and technology, I should make clear that I am not building a case for environmental determinism, which would be to say that places cause technologies. Given different cultural conditions, the sets of objects that dominate any particular place might be different.

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Given constant environmental conditions, the interpretive flexibility of culture is entirely contingent. I want to argue that environments do shape technologies but are in turn shaped by them. As a corollary, I am not building a case for technological determinism, which would be to say that technologies cause places. The same logic holds that technologies do shape places but are also shaped by them. The point here is that the relation of place and technology is both spatial and discursive. It is a dialogue of cause and effect, means and ends. They are inseparable but contingent concepts that lead inhabitants of a place to a dialogic narrowing of cultural horizons. 20 I want to stress that I am not making a claim in this diagram that modernism or postmodernism can be described entirely within the limits of these two concepts. Rather, I only suggest that these concepts are particularly helpful as heuristic devices to get at those qualities of our time that are relevant to a discussion concerning regionalism. 21 In philosophical discourse Herbert Marcuse attempted a similar blending of Heidegger and Marx. In Marcuse’s case, however, the project was further confused by the inclusion of Freud as a third pole. To be clear, I am not suggesting that such hybridized texts are unhelpful, only that their confused assumptions lead to previously unrecognized possibilities. 22 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 23 Ibid., 51–55. 24 The term “sustainability” is much used and much contested. For an analysis of the term, see Simon Guy and Steven A. Moore, eds., Sustainable Architecture: Natures and Cultures in Europe and North America (London and New York: Spon Press, 2005). The term “eco-tech” has come into use to describe the environmentally responsible projects of those firms like Sir Norman Foster & Partners that were previously described as “high-tech” practitioners. For more, see Catherine Slessor, EcoTech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 7. 25 Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 194. 26 John Tilman Lyle, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (New York: Wiley, 1994), 10.

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CHAPTER 1: IDEAS IN REGIONALISM Abel, Chris. “Architecture as Identity.” In Semiotics 1980, edited by M. Herzfeld and M. Lenhart, 141–50. New York: Plenum Press, 1981. Anderson, Bendict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995. Bechhoefer, William. “Regional Identity, Tradition, and Modernity.” The Art Book 7, no. 2 (March 2000): 3–5. Blache, Paul Vidal de la. “Les Régions Françaises.” Revue de Paris, December 1910, 821–42. Brooks, Van Wyck. “On Creating a Usable Past.” Dial LXIV, no. 764 (11 April 1918): 337–39. Brown, Richard Maxwell. “The New Regionalism in America, 1970–1981.” In Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, edited by William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross, 37–96. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983. Dewey, John. “Americanism and Localism.” Dial LXVII, no. 817 (June 1920): 685–86. Dorman, Robert. Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Dovey, Kimberly. “The Quest for Authenticity and the Replication of Environmental Meaning.” In Dwelling, Place & Environment, edited by David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, 33–49. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” In Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 65–77. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Gussow, Alan. The Artist As Native: Reinventing Regionalism. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1993. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jensen, Merrill, ed. Regionalism in America. 1951. Reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Odum, Howard W., and Harry E. Moore. American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration. New York: Henry Holt, 1938. Odum, Howard W. “The Promise of Regionalism.” In Regionalism in America, edited by Merrill Jensen, 395–425. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. First published 1976 by Schocken Books. Ransom, John Crowe. “The Aesthetic of Regionalism.” American Review 2, no. 3 (January 1934): 290–310. Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976. Schurch, Thomas Wm. “Common Culture and Regionalism as Determinants of Urban Form.” Avant Garde 5 (Winter 1991): 42–55. Steiner, Michael, and Clarence Mondale. Region and Regionalism in the United States: A Source Book for the Humanities and Social Sciences. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988. Taylor, Brian Brace. “Perspectives and Limits on Regionalism and Architectural Identity.” MIMAR 19: Architecture in Development (1986): 19–21. Thomas, John L. “Lewis Mumford: Regionalist Historian.” Reviews in American History (March 1988): 158–72. Treib, Marc. “Aspects of Regionality and the Modern(ist) Garden in California.” In Regional Garden Design in the United States, edited by Therese O’Malley and Marc Treib, 5–42. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. Umbach, Maiken, and Bernd Hüppauf, eds. Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Upton, Dell. Architecture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Vale, Lawrence J. Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Wirth, Louis. “The Limitations of Regionalism.” In Regionalism in America, edited by Merrill Jensen, 381–93. 1951. Reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.

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Greer, Nora Richter. Architecture & Landscape: Northwest Regionalism. Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1991. Hagan, Susannah. “Whatever Happened to Regionalism.” Architectural Review, February 1994, 72–73. Haque, Saiful. “Towards a Regional Identity: the Evolution of Contemporary Architecture in Bangladesh.” Architecture + Design 4, no. 4 (May–June 1988): 23–45. Harris, Harwell Hamilton. “A Regional Architectural Expression.” Architectural Record, January 1955. Hatton, Brian. “Swallow’s Swan Song: Regionalism and Fragmentation, 1975–91.” Architects’ Journal 193, no. 26 (June 1991): 60–61. Heath, Kingston W. “In Search of a More Empathetic Regionalism: The Vernacular as Regional Expression and Source for High Style.” Delft International Working Seminar on Critical Regionalism, Delft, The Netherlands. Proceedings (Summer 1990). Howey, John. The Sarasota School of Architecture, 1941–1966. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Jain, Uttam C. “Regionalism: Resource for Identity.” In Regionalism in Architecture, edited by Robert Powell, 46–54. Singapore: Concept Media, 1985. Johnson, Roger. “Burma: Tradition and a Modern Regional Architecture.” Landscape 15, no. 2 (Winter 1965–66): 7–11. Kamphoefner, Henry L. “Regionalism Past.” North Carolina Architect, January–February 1978, 12–17. Kazimee, Bashir A. Hybrids: Tradition, Modernity and Space. Berkeley: Center for Environmental Design Research, University of California at Berkeley, 2002. Lilienthal, David E. TVA: Democracy on the March. New York: Pocket Books, 1944. Malton, James. An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle That Peculiar Mode of Building Which Was Originally the Effect of Chance. London: V. Griffiths, 1798. Marvel, Thomas S. Antonin Nechodoma, Architect 1877– 1928: The Prairie School in the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Moore, Charles, and Gerald Allen. “Southernness: A Regional Dimension.” In Dimensions: Space, Shape, and Scale in Architecture. New York: Architectural Books, 1976. “The Need for Regionalism in Architecture: a Ghana Aesthetic,” Builder 195 (September 1958): 400. Newcomb, Rexford. Modern Architecture with Particular Reference to the United States. New York: John Wiley, 1939. “Regionalism and the Vernacular Tradition.” Progressive Architecture, June 1981, 75–114. “Regionalism: the Southwest.” Progressive Architecture, March 1974, 60–77. Rodriguez, Eduardo Luis. “The Architectural Avant-Garde: from Art Deco to Modern Regionalism.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22 (1996): 254–77. “Roundtable: Regionalism Present.” North Carolina Architect, January–February 1978, 18–27. Ryker, Lori. Mockbee Coker: Thought and Process. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. Schumacher, Thomas. “Regional Intentions and Contemporary Architecture: a Critique.” Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 3 (1987): 50–57. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Excerpts from Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Douglas den Uyl, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). 3 vols. [Originally published: 1711] Spence, Rory. “The Concept of Regionalism Today: Sydney and Melbourne Considered as Contrasting Phenomena.” Transition 4, no. 3 (July 1987): 3–17. Taylor, Jennifer. “Looking at the Sydney School.” Transition 1, no. 2 (November 1979): 4–8. ———. An Australian Identity: Houses for Sydney 1953–63. Sydney: University of Sydney, Dept. of Architecture, 1972. Teicher, Jonathan, and Wayne Attoe. “Frank Lloyd Wright as a Regional Force.” Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 3 (1987): 96–99. “Theme: Anatomy of Regionalism.” Architectural Review, November 1986, 37–109. “Theme: Regional Identity.” Architectural Review, October 1984, 23–71. “Theme: Regional Perspectives.” Architectural Review, November 1990, 35–91. “Theme: Regionalism.” Architectural Review, May 1983, 14–61. “Theme: Regionalism in the Developed World.” Architectural

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Review, May 1988, 27–93. Umbach, Maiken, and Bernd Hüppauf, eds. Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Veith, Thomas. “A Northwest Architecture.” Column 5 (1991): 30–35. Vigato, Jean-Claude. L’architecture Régionaliste: France, 1890–1950. Paris: Editions Norma, 1994. Wigglesworth, Sarah, and Jeremy Till. “Strong Margins.” In Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture, edited by David Moos and Gail Trechsel, 80–81. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003. Yeang, Ken. Tropical Urban Regionalism: Building in a Southeast Asian City. Singapore: Concept Media, 1987. Welch, Frank. “Regionalism as a Renewable Resource.” Texas Architect, May–June 1989, 38–41.

CHAPTER 3: MODERN REGIONALISM: REFERENTIAL REGIONALISM Adams, Nicholas. “The Santa Fe Style and Urbanism in America.” Casabella, July 1998, 62–65. Belloli, Andrea, ed. Wallace Neff, 1895–1982: The Romance of Regional Architecture. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1989. Berke, Arnold. Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Bunting, Bainbridge. John Gaw Meem: Southwestern Architect. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. Bywaters, Jerry. “More About Southwestern Architecture.” Southwest Review 18, no. 3 (April 1933): 234–64. Chauvenet, Beatrice. John Gaw Meem: Pioneer in Historic Preservation. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1985. “Developing a Regional Type.” American Architect, 20 August 1926, 144–48. “Developing Regional Types of Architecture.” American Architect, 4 September 1918, 277–81. Gebhard, David. “Regionalism and Romance.” In Wallace Neff, 1895–1982: The Romance of Regional Architecture, edited by Andrea Belloli, 37–50. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1989. ———. The Elusive Image: Regionalism in Twentieth-century Architecture. Christchurch, NZ: School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, 1993. ———. “Traveling Exhibit—Architecture in New Mexico: Discussion and Analysis.” New Mexico Architect, May–June 1959, 11–13. Gebhard, David, and R. Winter. “Architectural Imagery, the Mission, and California.” Harvard Architecture Review 1 (Spring 1980): 137–45. Grattan, Virginia L. Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1980. Heatherington, Edna E. “Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture: The Mystique of New Mexico.” New Mexico Architecture, November–December 1988, 7. Hickey, Dave. “Dialectical Utopias: On Santa Fe and Las Vegas.” Harvard Design Magazine 4 (Winter/Spring 1998): 1–5. Lane, Barbara Miller. National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Longstreth, Richard. “Academic Eclecticism in American Architecture.” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring 1982): 55–82. Markovich, Nicholas C. Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990. Meem, John Gaw, and William E. Tydeman. The Pueblo Revival Architecture of John Gaw Meem. Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1989. Wilson, Chris. Facing Southwest: The Life & Houses of John Gaw Meem. New York: Norton, 2001. ———. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 4: REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL PLANNING Calthorpe, Peter, and William Fulton. The Regional City. Washington DC: Island Press, 2001. Dickinson, Robert E. City Region and Regionalism: A Geographical Contribution to Human Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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Selected Bibliography

Easterling, Keller. Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Friedmann, John, and Clyde Weaver. Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Glikson, Arthur. The Ecological Basis of Planning: Collected Essays, edited by Lewis Mumford. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Hare, S. Herbert. “Regional Planning.” Southwest Review 16, no. 3 (April 1931): 329–33. Hough, Michael. Out of Place. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Katz, Bruce. Reflections on Regionalism. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. Kelbaugh, Doug. Repairing the American Metropolis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Luccarelli, Mark. “Benton MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail.” In Technologies of Landscape, edited by David Nye, 207–17. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. MacKaye, Benton. Expedition Nine: Return to a Region. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1969. ———. The New Exploration: A Philosophical of Regional Planning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962. Mayer, Albert. The Urgent Future: People, Housing, City, Region. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. McHarg, Ian. “Ecological Determinism.” In Future Environments of North America, edited by Fraser Darling and John P. Milton, 526–38. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1966. ———. Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969. Mumford, Lewis. “Closing Statement.” In Future Environments of North America, edited by Fraser Darling and John P. Milton. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1966. ———. “The Fourth Migration.” The Survey—Graphic Number 54, no. 3 (1 May 1925): 130–33. ———. “The Regional Community.” The Survey—Graphic Number 54, no. 3 (1 May 1925): 129. ———. “Regionalism and Irregionalism.” The Sociological Review 19 (October 1927): 277–88. ———. “Regions—To Live In.” The Survey—Graphic Number 54, no. 3 (1 May 1925): 151–52. ———. “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism.” The Sociological Review 20 (January 1928): 18–33. ———. “What Are Our Goals—I: Cities Fit to Live In.” The Nation, 15 May 1948, 530–33. Rosenbaum, Alvin, and Marcy Mermel. “Why Now is the Time to Rethink Regionalism.” Colloqui 10 (Spring 1995): 3–37. Sussman, Carl, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Welter, Volker M. Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Wheeler, Stephen M. “The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement.” Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 267–78. Wojtowicz, Robert. Lewis Mumford & American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan.” Architectural Record, April 1935, 243–53.

CHAPTER 5: REGIONAL MODERNISM Anderson, Stanford. “The New Empiricism—Bay Region Axis: Kay Fisker and Postwar Debates on Functionalism, Regionalism, and Monumentality.” Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 3 (February 1997): 197–207. “Bay Region Domestic.” Architectural Review, October 1948, 164. Boddy, Trevor. “Regionalism, Nationalism, and Modernism: the Ideology of Decoration in the Work of John M. Lyle.” Trace 1, no. 1 (1980): 8–15. Brown, Wayde. “Modernism and Regionalism: Influences on the Work of Leslie Fairn.” Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Bulletin 14, no. 1 (March 1989): 14–18. Callister, Winsome. “The Response to the City: Melbourne Regionalism of the 1950s and 1960s.” Transition no. 19 (Winter 1989): 33–48.

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———. “Dealing with the ‘Sydney School,’” Transition no. 21 (September 1987): 6–12. Clausen, Meredith. Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. De Maré, Eric. “The New Empiricism: Sweden’s Latest Style.” Architectural Review, June 1947, 199–204. Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949. An exhibition catalog. Ford, Katherine Morrow. “Modern is Regional.” House and Garden, March 1941, 35–37, 79. Frampton, Kenneth. Le Corbusier. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Gebhard, David. “William Wurster and His California Contemporaries: The Idea of Regionalism and Soft Modernism” In An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, edited by Marc Treib, 164–83. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Germany, Lisa. Harwell Hamilton Harris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Helfrich, Kurt. “Building The Contemporary House: Modernity, Regionalism and The Ideal of Japan in Antonin Raymond’s Residential Designs, 1921–1952.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1997. Ikuta, Tsutomu. “Regionalism and Belluschi.” Sinkentiku, July 1956, 49–51. Jordy, William. American Buildings and Their Architects. Vol. 4, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Lefaivre, Liane. “Critical Regionalism. A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945.” In Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, edited by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, 22–55. New York: Prestel, 2003. Ludlow, William Orr. “Modernistic vs. Traditional Architecture.” Octagon, October 1930, 10–11. McLeod, Mary C. “Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985. Mock, Elizabeth. “Built in U.S.A.—Since 1932.” In Built in USA: 1932–1944, 9–25. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1944. Mumford, Lewis. “The Architecture of the Bay Region.” In Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949. An exhibition catalog. ———. “Form in Modern Architecture IV: The Community as a Source of Form.” Architecture, July 1930, 4. ———. “Monumentalism, Symbolism, and Style.” Architectural Review, April 1949, 173–80. ———. Roots of Contemporary American Architecture. New York: Grove Press, 1959. ———. Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. “The New Empiricism.” Architectural Review, January 1948, 7–22. “The Northwest Architecture of Pietro Belluschi.” Architectural Record, April 1953, 135–36. “Northwest Architecture: the Great Northwest Revival.” Progressive Architecture, August 1974, 46–[63]. Passanti, Francesco. “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 438–51. Pokinski, Frances. The Development of the American Modern Style. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984. “Roundtable: Regionalism Present.” North Carolina Architect, January–February 1978, 18–27. Scully, Vincent. “Doldrums on the Suburbs.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 36–47. Smith, Keller, ed. H. H. Harris: A Collection of His Writings and Buildings. Raleigh: University of North Carolina School of Design, 1965. Treib, Marc, ed. An Everyday Modernism, the Houses of William Wurster. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. See esp. “William Wilson Wurster: The Feeling of Function.” Wilson, Christopher. “Regionalism Redefined: the Impact of Modernism in New Mexico.” Mass 1, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 16–21.

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Wurster, William W. “Architecture Broadens its Base.” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 10 (July 1948): 30–36. ———. “California Architecture for Living.” California Monthly, April 1954, 14–19. CHAPTER 6: BIOREGIONALISM Aberley, Doug. “Interpreting Bioregionalism.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, 13–42. London: Routledge, 1999. Alexander, Don. “Bioregionalism: The Need for a Firmer Theoretical Foundation.” Trumpeter 13, no. 3 (1996). Dasmann, Raymond F. “Man in North America.” In Future Environments of North America, edited by Fraser Darling and John P. Milton, 326–34. Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1966. Flores, Dan. “Place: Thinking About Bioregional History.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, 43–57. London: Routledge, 1999. McGinnis, Michael Vincent, ed. Bioregionalism. London: Routledge, 1999. McTaggert, W. Donald. “Bioregionalism and Regional Geography: Place, People, and Networks.” Canadian Geographer 37, no. 4 (1993): 307–19. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985. Taylor, Bron. “Bioregionalism: An Ethics of Loyalty to Place.” Landscape Journal 19, no. 1 (2000): 50–72. Thomashow, Mitchell. “Towards a Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, 121–32. London: Routledge, 1999. Van Andruss, et al. Home!: A Bioregional Reader. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 1990.

Style.” Architecture of Israel, August 1994, 78–89. Tzonis, Alexander, and Liane Lefaivre. “Why Critical Regionalism Today.” Architecture and Urbanism 236 (May 1990): 25. ———. “Critical Regionalism.” In Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, edited by Spyros Amourgis, 3–23. Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991. ———. “The Grid and the Pathway.” Architecture in Greece, 1981, 164–78. Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre, and Bruno Stagno. Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Fonds, The Netherlands: Wiley-Academy, 2001. Woolsey, D. Kristine. “Critical Regionalism: A Theory of Process.” In Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, edited by Spyros Amourgis, 322–29. Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991.

CHAPTER 7: CRITICAL REGIONALISM Amourgis, Spyros, ed. Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings. Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991. “Anatomy of Regionalism.” Architectural Review, November 1986, 36–84. Cassidy, Timothy. “Critical Regionalism: A Reflexive Perspective from the Brandywine Valley.” PhD diss., Texas A&M University, May 2000. “Critical Regionalism.” Arcade 16, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 6–24. Fernández-Galiano, Luis. “Ten Aphorisms on Regionalism.” In Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, edited by Spyros Amourgis, 31–33. Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991. Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Frampton, Kenneth. “Critical Regionalism Revisted.” In Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, edited by Spyros Amourgis, 34–39. Pomona: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991. ———. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992. ———. “Place-Form and Cultural Identity.” In Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object, edited by John Thackara, 51–66. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988. ———. “The Present Situation: Six Points For An Architecture of Resistance.” Architecture and Urbanism 160, no. 1 (January 1984): 19–26. ———. “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism.” Perspecta 20 (1983): 147–62. ———. “Universalism and/or Regionalism: Untimely Reflections on the Future of the New.” Domus, May 1996, 4–8. Ingersoll, Richard. Conference Review: Context and Modernity, Delft, June 12–15, 1990. Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 2 (February 1991): 124–25. Lefaivre, Liane, and Alexander Tzonis. “Lewis Mumford’s Regionalism.” Design Book Review 19 (Winter 1991): 20–25. ———. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Nalbantoglu, Gülsüm Baydar. Postcolonial Space(s). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. “Regionalism: a Discussion with Kenneth Frampton and Trevor Boddy.” Fifth Column 3 (Summer 1983): 52–60. Tzonis, Alexander. “Critical Regionalism: An Attitude, Not a

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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Research Library, UCLA; 218m and 218b, By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Introduction 19, Vincent B. Canizaro, after maps from the United States Forest Service, left, and the State of California, center and right; 20, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carol M. Highsmith Archive, #LC-DIG-pplot-13725-01340, Carol M. Highsmith, Photographer, 2005; 23, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, #HABS, ALA, 49DAW, 1-3. E. W. Russell, Photographer, January 15, 1937; 28t, Grand Canyon National Museum Collection, #452. National Park Service Photo by George Grant, 1932; 28bl, Grand Canyon National Museum Collection #8430; 28br, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, #HABS, NM, 25SANFE, 10-1; 29, David R. Williams Collection, Coll #27, University Archives and Acadiana Manuscripts Collection, Edith Garland Dupré Library, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; 31l, Hervey Parke Clark Collection, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara; 31tr, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, #HABS, MASS, 9-LIN, 16-20; 31mr and 31br, Oakland Museum of California, Roger Sturtevant Collection, Gift of Roger Sturtevant; 32l, Vincent B. Canizaro; 32r, Eino Mäkinen, Alvar Aalto Museum, Alvar Aalto Foundation

CHAPTER 4: REGIONALISM AND REGIONAL PLANNING

CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL POSITIONS IN ARCHITECTURAL REGIONALISM

CHAPTER 7: CRITICAL REGIONALISM

An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning / Benton MacKaye 231, Vincent B. Canizaro, after original by Benton MacKaye

Excerpts from A Pattern Language / Christopher Alexander 247 and 250, Christopher Alexander

Perspectives on Regional Design / Paul D. Spreiregen 261l, Map researched, constructed, and drawn Andrew Perez, amended by Vincent B. Canizaro; 261r and 263, Drawn by Vincent Canizaro based on original; 265t, From The Survey— Graphic Number 54, no. 3 (1 May 1925): 159; 265b, Drawn by Vincent Canizaro based on original

CHAPTER 6: BIOREGIONALISM Biotechnology and Regional Integration / Gary J. Coates 358, Gary Coates

Regionalism and Invention / Lawrence W. Speck 73, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, #LCDIG-ppmsca-03791, Abdullah Frères, Photographer; 76tr, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, #HABS ILL,16-RIVFO, 1-4. Richard Nickel, Photographer, 1965; 76l, 76br, 78tl, 78tr, 78ml, 78mr, 78bl, 78br, Larry Speck Regionalism within Modernism / Suha Ozkan 106tl, Aga Khan Award for Architecture, C. Avedissian; 106ml and 106bl, Suha Ozkan; 106r, Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Ahmet Eyüce; 108t and108m, Aga Khan Award for Architecture Archives; 108b, Suha Ozkan

Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic / Kenneth Frampton 379, Eino Mäkinen, Alvar Aalto Museum, Alvar Aalto Foundation Critical Regionalism in Houston: A Case of the Menil Collection / Richard Ingersoll 391l and 391r, Vincent B. Canizaro

Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism / Keith Eggener 396, 401l, 401r, and 405, Keith Eggener

Regionalism: Lessons from Algeria and the Middle East / Kenza Boussora 122l and 122r, Kenza Boussora; 125l, Courtesy of the Embassy of the State of Qatar, Washington, D.C.; 125r, Kenza Boussora

CHAPTER 8: REGIONALISMS FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

CHAPTER 3: MODERN REGIONALISM: REFERENTIAL REGIONALISM

Technology, Place, and Nonmodern Regionalism / Steven Moore 436–438, Steven Moore



Strong Margins / Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till 430, Paul Smoothy

Toward a Southwestern Architecture / David R. Williams 175–177, David R. Williams Collection, Coll. #27, University Archives and Acadiana Manuscripts Collection, Edith Garland Dupré Library, University of Louisiana at Lafayette The Myth and Power of Place: Hispanic Revivalism in the American Southwest / David Gebhard 200t and 200m, Architecture & Design Collection, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara; 200b, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction #HABS, NM, 1-ALBU, 5-16; 201t, Architect and Engineer XIV (October 1908): 59; 201b, R. M. Schindler Collection, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara; 202, George Washington Smith Collection, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara

Regionalism and Texas Architecture / Stephen Fox 207l, 207tr, and 207mr (Fig. 4), Vincent B. Canizaro; 207mr (Fig. 3), Matt Martinez; 207br, Stephen Fox; 211l, From River Oaks: A Pictorial Presentation of Houston’s Residential Park, 1929; 211r, Stephen Fox Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism / James F. O’Gorman 216t, By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; 216b, Arthur Luckaus, Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA; 218t, Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young

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INDEX

Aalto, Alvar, 25, 31, 52, 76, 77, 103, 128, 132–35, 143, 148, 280, 291, 306, 326, 328–30, 371, 379 abstraction, 36, 38, 67, 131, 155, 161, 202, 244, 281, 285, 303, 371, 417 academic, 38, 70, 104, 111, 113, 120, 134, 157, 158, 159, 271, 290, 295, 322, 329 adobe, 32, 91–92, 156, 161, 191, 190, 199–200, 203, 283, 359, 364 aesthetic, 24, 30, 31, 93–94, 107, 117, 121, 125, 135, 137–39, 161–62, 170, 191, 215, 217, 219, 288, 290, 315, 327–28, 352, 362, 369, 374–76, 378, 382, 398, 412, 416, 429–30, 437, 441–42 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 102, 103, 110, 120 Agnew, John, 433, 435, 437 Alberti, Leo Battista, 314 Alexander, Christopher, 163, 245–50 Algeria, 121–27 Alofsin, Anthony, 368, 369–73 Allen, Barbara, 33, 374, 421–26 analogy, 386, 390, 429 anthropology, 18, 130, 131, 164, 173 Antonakakis, Dimitris and Susana, 387, 398 Appalachia, Appalachian Mountains, 19, 82, 224–34, 254, 261, 260 Appalachian Trail, 225–34, 252, 258, 450–57 Architectural Forum, 276, 281 Architectural Record, 206, 209, 311, 321, 402 Architectural Review, 291 Arts and Crafts Movement, 143, 149, 196–98, 211, 386 authenticity, 18, 21, 26–27, 30, 130, 139, 140, 142, 151, 160, 208, 211, 386 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 293–294, 298, 300, 307, 370–71 Barragán, Luis, 77, 79, 131, 380, 395–407 Bay Region Style. See style beauty, 59, 68, 77–78, 92, 139, 160, 171, 173, 175, 181, 188, 220, 224, 321, 323, 325, 342, 347, 378, 392 Belluschi, Pietro, 321–25 Berg, Peter, 335–39, 350 Berry, Wendell, 11, 29, 33, 37–40, 42, 438 bioregion, 19, 337–39, 350–54, 357, 359 Columbia Bioregion, 19 bioregionalism, 32, 334, 341, 345, 349, 351, 362 bioregional management. See bioregionalism Blake, Peter, 293, 304–6 body (physical), 132, 384–85, 414 Botta, Mario, 380, 398, 440 Borgmann, Albert, 412–14 boundary, 18, 58, 239, 241, 277, 337, 382 Bourdieu, Pierre, 33, 420, 423–24 Boussora, Kenza, 121–27 Breuer, Marcel, 58, 280, 293, 303–4, 370–1 Butler, Judith, 423, 424 California, 19, 56, 58–60, 52, 86–87, 91, 195, 197–99, 201–3, 206–8, 214–21, 278, 283–84, 291–92, 304, 317, 334–40, 343–44, 349, 369, 380–81 California Mission Style. See style capitalism, 42, 45, 140, 144–45, 147–48, 243, 347, 376, 397, 399, 404, 411, 429, 442 laissez-faire, 10, 198 cartography, 17 Casabella, 141 Cassidy, Tim, 33, 374, 411–19 Center, 70–71, 375 Chaco Canyon (Pueblo Bonito), 184 character, 17, 43, 46–48, 49, 52, 60, 78–80, 83, 85, 91, 98, 126, 132, 134, 142, 152, 160, 181, 189, 191, 219–20, 305, 321, 351, 359, 416, 418, 435 regional, 21, 100–1, 124, 131, 135, 159, 190, 302, 322, 388, 404, 413 architectural, 125, 135–36, 157, 199, 305, 417 Chareau, Pierre, 380 city, 236–43, 245–50, 272–73, 312, 339, 344, 389, 435 regional, 236–37, 241, 253 traditional, 126, 166, 389, 438 city planning, 110, 113, 237, 240, 273, 314 Civic Environmentalism, 11, 243, 425 civilization, 39, 40, 43–53, 91, 130, 173, 189–90, 197, 225,

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229, 241, 248, 307, 313–14 globalized, 411, 414, 416 industrial, 335, 356 universal, 43–46, 48, 96, 374, 385, 395, 406 classicism, 141–44, 147, 277 neo-classicism, 143, 369 Nordic, 135 climate (local), 12, 57, 61, 72, 80, 84, 103, 152, 161, 163, 170, 267, 270, 320, 325, 352–54, 380, 383, 387, 390 climatology, 18, 20, 22, 31–32, 40–41, 87, 95, 99, 103, 111–13, 147, 219, 252, 264, 283, 285, 301, 319, 372 Coates, Gary, 351–60 codes: architectural, 152–55, 255, 274 historical, 209 moral/ethical, 109, 313, 424, 434 Colonial Williamsburg, 27, 278 Colquhoun, Alan, 30, 140–55, 374 Colter, Mary J., 11, 27, 179–86, 199, 214 commercialization, 11, 30, 33, 145, 178, 198, 208, 229, 294, 381 commodification, 128, 361, 411–13 context, 11, 23, 77, 79, 127, 131, 140, 151, 157–58, 165, 352, 382, 391, 412–13, 441 regional, 264, 266, 371, 412 social, 105, 132, 152, 161, 164–66, 372, 422, 431 contextualism, 17, 390 contrast, 76, 304, 329, 371, 418 craft, 25, 75, 105, 112, 124, 127, 154, 279, 301, 338, 368, 372, 389, 416 Cram, Ralph Adams, 207–9, 295, 386, 389–90 Crecenzi, Nicola de, 22 critical regionalism, 10, 19, 23, 26, 32–33, 96, 156, 368, 374–407, 411–13, 415–16, 421, 430, 437–40 cultural geography, 17 cultural studies, 18, 33, 422 culture, 18, 19, 23–24, 30, 32, 44, 49–52, 71–72, 97, 100, 131–32, 149, 242, 313, 342, 397, 422–23 building, 21, 29 local, 17, 21, 32, 73, 75, 110, 120, 204, 246, 354, 380, 426 national, 39, 116, 401–2, 406 regional, 23, 42, 100, 103, 130, 145, 149, 153, 217, 270, 272, 414, 424 traditional, 29, 47–48, 51, 397, 414 world, 202 Curtis, William, 29, 270, 402–3 Dasmann, Raymond, 335–40 de Stijl, 143, 147, 314–16 deconstructivism, 433 defamiliarization, 11, 33, 151, 368, 386, 399, 404, 412, 440–42 democratic, 11, 19, 24, 33, 44, 75, 94, 96, 198, 244–46, 353, 357, 374, 376, 425, 440–42 detail, 22, 83, 90, 156, 160–61, 173–74, 180–83, 278, 285, 304, 325, 372 dialectic, 16, 21–22, 32, 137–38, 205, 210, 374, 386, 390, 398, 411, 434, 439 difference, regional, 29, 82, 153–54, 206, 336 Dodge, Jim, 11, 341–49 Dorman, Robert, 24, 236 Doshi, Balkrishna, 106, 108, 111–18 Dovey, Kimberly, 27 Dutch Colonial. See style dwelling, 164, 240, 276, 278–79 eclecticism, 16, 23, 30, 56, 80, 94, 107, 128, 137, 142–43, 188, 210, 214, 305, 310, 322, 327 École des Beaux Arts, 92, 199, 290, 377, 381–82 ecology, 21, 32, 96, 224, 249, 347–48, 352, 355, 363, 441 ecological context, 17–18, 255, 266, 334, 344, 362, 382, 441 Eggener, Keith, 292, 374, 395–407, 410 environmental determinism, 434 ethics, 40, 47, 49–50, 96, 107, 109, 209–10, 358, 397 European influence, 10, 56, 60, 62, 72, 83, 85, 87–88, 97, 189, 305, 308, 317, 402, 433 existentialism, 130, 139, 375 experience, 37–38, 46, 67, 81–82, 92, 130, 139, 192, 197–98, 321, 336, 343, 352, 354, 381, 411, 413, 418, 435 direct, tactile, 19, 27, 105, 155, 327, 368, 374, 384–85, 370 expression, 25, 29, 58, 61, 70, 73, 81, 85, 101, 299–300, 397 regional, indigeneous, local, 17, 27, 31, 60–61, 64, 72, 77, 90, 107, 188, 288, 302, 371, 412, 416 authentic, 51, 272, 400

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Index

462

façade, 60, 125, 161, 255, 295, 373, 411, 422 Fathy, Hassan, 103, 106 folk, 141–43, 197, 202 architecture, 159–60, 305, 369 folklore, folklorist, 17, 30, 105, 130–31, 157–60, 166, 170, 236 folk ways, life-ways, 81, 85, 95, 142, 270 Ford, O’Neil, 170, 209–10 Foreign Buildings Operations (FBO), 320, 322 formalism, 301 Foster, Norman, 377 Fox, Stephen, 205–12 Frampton, Kenneth, 19, 22, 29, 33, 42, 58, 96, 128, 140, 167, 326, 374–85, 395, 397–99, 400, 403–8, 411, 413–16, 421, 430, 433, 437–40 Frankfurt School, 399, 430 functionalism, 77, 80, 210, 276, 282, 290–91, 295–96, 300, 303, 310, 322, 380 garden city, 263, 307 garden suburbs, 208, 262 Garreau, Joel, 19 Gaudí, Antonio, 75–78, 79 Gebhard, David, 195–204, 219 Geddes, Patrick, 20, 120, 238, 240 Gemeinschaft, 150–51, 434 genius loci, 381 gender, 420, 422–23 geography, 32, 48, 57, 72, 81, 85, 150, 154, 239, 344, 397, 434 geomorphology, 32 Georgian. See style Gesellschaft, 150, 434 Giddens, Anthony, 22 governance, 16–18, 67, 85, 121, 130, 160, 166, 279, 347, 388 federal, 234, 260, 264, 320 regional, 253, 245, 255, 339 bioregional, 345 Giedion, Sigfried, 56, 99, 143, 148–49, 277, 290, 296, 299, 301, 306, 311–19, 370 globalization, 16, 18, 22, 29, 36, 42, 110, 128, 374, 398, 404 Grand Canyon, 28, 178–86, 199 Gropius, Walter, 31, 56, 160, 162, 280, 290, 293, 300–2, 329, 305–6, 310, 314, 329–30, 371 Hagia Sophia, 73 Harding, Sarah, 26, 426 Harris, Harwell Hamilton, 36, 57–70, 211, 380, 407 Haslam, Michael, 362–64 Heidegger, Martin, 52, 374, 382, 413, 435, 437–38 Heimat, 143, 150 historical determinism, 310 historicism, 23–24 history, 38, 47, 80, 117, 134, 221, 266, 434 local, 11, 27 regional, 30, 72, 170, 362 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 215, 217, 290, 292–97, 306–7, 309, 371 humanism, 137, 293, 303, 307, 322, 371 hyperreality, 413 identity, 19, 21, 103, 129–31, 208–9, 406 cultural, 18, 102, 132, 142, 205, 397 national, 24 regional, 22, 115, 131, 160, 205–6, 210, 354, 413–16, 422 imitation, 22, 25, 97, 114, 141–42, 173, 220, 282, 325 India, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 145, 322–25, 327, 399 individualism, 152, 296 Ingersoll, Richard, 374, 387–92, 407 International Style. See style internationalism, 103, 107, 216, 221, 306, 404 intervention, 96, 121, 351, 382, 398 intuition, 50, 147, 191, 341 invention, 29, 71, 74–75, 79, 95, 376, 439 of tradition, 148 jazz, 72–73, 75, 79 Jefferson, Thomas, 96, 98, 100, 196–97, 260, 262, 369, 390 Johnson, Philip, 215, 217, 292, 294–97, 298, 308, 370, 388, 390 Kahn, Louis, 77–79, 117, 135, 138, 391 Kallmann, Gerhard, 293, 305–6

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Kant, Immanuel, 149–54 Koolhaas, Rem, 439 Krier, Leon, 438 Kultur, 143, 149–51 La Ciudad Universitaria, 63–64 Land Ordinance, 260 Land Institute, 358–59 landscape, 75, 77, 125, 130, 134, 189, 210, 262, 354, 369, 411–19, 423 Landscape Urbanism, 17, 374 Lane, Barbara, 25 Latour, Bruno, 436, 438, 440 Le Corbusier, 31, 110, 135, 143–45, 147–48, 160–61, 210, 252, 271–74, 276, 280, 290, 296, 298, 301, 306, 310, 316, 327–28, 387, 404 Leach, Neil, 421, 423 Lefaivre, Liane. See Tzonis, Alexander, and Liane Lefaivre Lefebvre, Henri, 437 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 49 local, the, 12, 21, 30, 100–1, 105, 170, 279, 390, 418, 426, 430 local color movement, 202, 204, 206, 208 localization, 17, 25, 61, 202, 292, 398 Los Angeles, 21, 56, 199, 203, 206, 208, 215, 278, 336, 339, 381 Lyle, John Tillman, 439–40 MacCannell, Dean, 27 MacKaye, Benton, 225–34, 252, 258, 262, 358 “making strange.” See defamiliarization Marx, Karl, Marxism, 151, 345, 376, 399, 434–35, 439 Mayer, Albert, 252–57 Meem, John Gaw, 27–28, 188–92, 214 Mesa Verde, 178, 181 Mexico, 63–64, 77–79, 86–87, 197, 199, 278, 339, 396–404 Middle East, 120–27 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 143, 290, 296, 310, 316, 327, 371 MIMAR, 111, 120 Mockbee, Samuel. See Rural Studio modern, 11, 23–24, 30, 32–33, 43, 47, 63, 74, 82, 98–100, 103, 105, 109, 116, 121–26, 137, 150, 162, 189–92, 206–8, 212, 220, 228, 277, 287–88, 321–22, 327, 330, 398 architecture, 62, 80, 109, 121, 125, 127, 144, 160–63, 179, 205, 211, 278, 287, 290, 297–305, 370, 401 regionalism, 31, 107–9, 153, 170, 194, 214, 283–84, 292, 401 Modern Movement, 107, 111, 129, 133, 147, 161, 210, 305, 378, 395, 402 modernism: American, 56, 281–83 European, 56, 60, 188, 194, 215, 280, 288, 328 regional, 31, 109, 120, 128, 143, 194, 281–83, 286, 401 Moore, Charles, 135, 163 Moore, Steven, 33, 374, 433–42 Morrison, Hugh, 280–87, 292 Mumford, Lewis, 16, 22, 26, 29–30, 33, 56, 66, 71, 79, 97–101, 120, 237–43, 262, 289–97, 300, 304, 306–9, 350, 353–54, 369–72, 397, 406 Murcutt, Glenn, 440 Museum of Modern Art, 162, 215, 293–309, 370, 400 National Romanticism, 24–25, 135, 148, 397 National Socialism, 150, 297 nationalism, 37–38, 95, 197, 399, 401 Nazi regime, 25, 96, 397 Neff, Wallace, 215–21 Nelson, George, 293, 302–3 Neue Sachlichkeit, 143, 147, 297 Neutra, Richard, 56, 202, 215–21, 276–79, 310, 317, 380, 404 New Alchemy, 358–59 New Empiricism, 293, 302, 305–6, 371 New Urbanism, 425, 438 New York, 79, 82, 85, 93, 236, 242, 253, 289, 400, 422 Newcomb, Rexford, 29, 81–95, 217, 219, 221 Niemeyer, Oscar, 317, 399 nonmodern, 437–42 nostalgia, 11, 25, 32, 48, 80, 82, 151, 163, 197, 397, 405–6, 412, 417–18 novelty, 79, 143, 198

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463

oikumene, 16 O’Gorman, James, 215–21 orientation, 111, 158, 255, 416, 426 ostraneniye. See defamiliarization Ozkan, Suha, 102–10, 120 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 29, 128–39 Pavlides, Eleftherios, 157–67 performativity, 33, 421–26 phenomenology, 18, 128, 374, 410 Piano, Renzo, 387, 390–91 picturesque, 37, 85, 92–93, 162, 173, 188–89, 199, 202–3, 217, 219, 221, 228, 328, 382 English, 22 place, 17, 20, 22, 27, 32, 39–40, 68, 73–77, 129, 157, 198, 208, 212, 279, 283, 345, 374, 382, 385, 406, 430, 433–42 placelessness, 25, 382, 387, 397, 395, 399, 403–4, 434 local place, 37, 239, 382, 395, 406, 417–26 rooted to place, 24, 56, 134, 170, 430 sense of place, 128, 133, 343, 399, 405, 435–36 “living-in-place,” 335–36 planning, 18, 46, 50, 67, 111, 113, 116–17, 121, 127, 282, 304, 377, 410 postmodern theory, 16, 412 postmodernism, 16, 24, 135, 156, 387, 398 precedent, 22, 75, 91, 94, 98, 170, 183, 198 progressive, 12, 23, 25, 30, 58, 66, 71, 110, 117, 142, 170, 205, 224, 295, 328, 399, 406, 428, 433 provincialism, 12, 20, 21, 30, 80, 82–83, 87, 133, 329, 356, 374, 404 Pueblo Style, Pueblo Revival. See style Quigley, Rob Wellington, 25 Rapoport, Amos, 157, 164 reference, 12, 23–24, 30, 92, 104, 123, 147, 166, 178, 278, 377, 394, 399, 404, 426 region: definition of, 18–20 Middle Atlantic, 81, 85, 92, 284 New England, 60–62, 77, 84, 89–90, 197, 221, 227, 254, 284–85, 291, 369 Southwest, 82, 87, 92, 171, 173, 175, 178, 186, 189–92, 195–204, 209–10, 219, 26 the South, 19, 37–38, 96, 99, 284, 369, 397, 424 West, 38, 88–89, 92, 260–61, 303, 313, 325 regional: planning, 30, 225–67, 353–56 school, the, 58, 293 survey, 20, 120, 354 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), 19, 224, 236, 244, 262, 340, 353, 358 regionalism: definition of, 20–21 liberative, 381 reflexive, 397, 410–11, 419 regionalist, 24, 27, 74, 103, 107, 124, 126, 138, 143, 194, 205, 208, 210, 240, 321, 353, 388–402, 421, 433 critical, 389–90, 395–96, 399–400, 403, 406, 433 theory, 11, 147, 421 regere, 17, 341 regressive, 36, 140, 142, 151, 433 reinhabitation, 334–35, 336, 338, 350 Relph, Edward, 27 Renaissance, 16, 58, 74–75, 79, 92, 141, 148, 191, 283, 295, 313–14, 327 representation, 141–42, 150, 152, 212, 314, 374, 383, 385, 424, 442 political, 19, 22 resistance, 20–22, 51, 137, 139, 151, 347, 349, 356, 385, 395–98, 402–4, 406, 411 response, 12, 20–22, 40, 157, 161–63, 166, 196, 280, 322, 326, 374, 388–89, 392, 404, 416–18 revivalism, 16, 23, 305 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 92–94, 99, 197, 369–70 Ricoeur, Paul, 29, 43–53, 397, 406 Romanticism, 16, 25, 32, 141, 147–150, 194, 210, 304, 370 Rome, 22, 60, 73–75, 82, 101 Rudofsky, Bernard, 157, 162–64 rural, 24, 46, 72, 75, 104, 114, 126, 195–97, 264, 356 Rural Studio, 33, 428–31

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Saarinen, Eliel, 136, 188–89, 196, 295 Santa Fe, 25, 82, 88, 158, 178, 191, 194, 198–99, 204 scenography, 27, 30, 131, 214, 374, 383, 392, 398, 411, 438 Schindler, Rudolph M., 31, 56, 201–2, 217, 221 site, 17, 25, 63, 126, 160, 163–64, 181, 205, 240, 318, 325, 383, 416 site-specificity, 11, 17 Siza, Alvaro, 131, 152, 380, 398, 440 social sciences, sociology, 18, 48, 165, 435 Spanish Colonial. See style Spanish Mission. See style Speck, Lawrence, 22, 36, 70–79 Spreiregen, Paul, 258–67 Stirling, James, 327–30 style, 12, 18, 24, 29, 50, 61, 77, 80, 82, 87, 90, 93–94, 132, 134, 142, 159, 173, 217–19, 283, 288, 291, 294–96, 301, 311–12, 320, 327, 371, 378, 387, 421, 426, 435 Bay Region, 31, 57, 288, 291–92, 297–99, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306, 308, 371–72 Colonial, 85, 285 Federal, 88, 90, 219, 415 Georgian, 83, 88, 209, 220, 285, 415 Greek Revival, 82, 84, 90, 93, 284–85, 415 International, 23–24, 31, 56, 73, 135–36, 188, 196, 202, 215, 220–21, 270, 281–86, 291–304, 309, 312, 369–70, 377, 403 Pueblo Style, Pueblo Revival, 194, 198–99, 201, 203 Spanish Colonial, 86–87, 199, 203, 283, 400 Spanish or California Mission, 25, 197–98, 199, 201, 202, 206–8, 210 sustainability, 11, 30, 33, 358, 362, 374, 414, 430, 438–39 technology, 22, 63, 72, 104–5, 113–14, 117, 123–24, 130, 144, 372, 383, 435–42 tectonics, 368, 383, 394, 403, 415, 430, 441 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 255, 257, 300, 302 Texas, 79, 86–87, 92, 171–77, 205–12, 364 San Antonio, 171–72, 176, 205–6, 208–11, 259 Houston, 387–90 Till, Jeremy, 429–31 topography, 18, 21, 61, 68, 95, 124, 211, 239, 274, 282–83, 351, 371, 382–83 tourism, 36, 105, 198, 381 tourist, 27, 68, 105, 126, 178, 195, 195, 204 traditionalism. See tradition tradition, 22–23, 25, 29, 48–49, 72, 106, 111–27, 129–38, 142–43, 153–54, 284, 286, 315, 327, 399, 406, 411–18, 426, 435 Treib, Marc, 21 Tunnard, Christopher, 293 typology, 382 Tzonis, Alexander, and Liane Lefaivre, 17, 33, 96, 128, 140, 151, 163, 368, 374, 387, 395, 399–407, 411–12, 421, 433 universalism, 96, 141, 147, 307 universalization, 42, 46–49, 151, 353–54, 397, 407, 441 urban, urbanization, 40, 77, 112, 126, 152, 224, 241, 248, 262, 266, 308, 351–56, 372, 388, 411, 425 urbanism, 145, 252, 387 “valuable stranger.” See Sarah Harding van Eyck, Aldo, 130, 138, 375 Venturi, Robert, 163, 387 vernacular, vernacularism, 20, 70, 103–7, 129, 134, 141, 144, 157–66, 196–97, 270, 285, 378, 388–90, 404, 411–14 Vitruvius, 17, 397 Walker, Ralph T., 280, 293, 303 Wigglesworth, Sarah, 429–31 Williams, David R., 10, 27, 29, 171–77, 209–10 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 66, 75–76, 79, 93, 135, 284, 290–91, 295, 297, 300, 306, 370, 378, 381, 404 Wurster, William, 31, 56, 291–92, 297, 308, 371–72 Zivilization, 149–50

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