Preamble

Starting with the cover page of part III of Kenneth Frampton's A Critical History (1980), this chapter proceeds to unpack the semantics of the title of the last part of the book, “Critical Assessment and Extension into the Present 1925–78,” a period ending two years before the publication of the first edition of the book. The argument presented in this chapter benefits from the cover page of part III of the book, a photo of the Willis-Faber & Dumas Building by Foster Associates (1974) (Figure 5.1). The chosen angle of the daytime image of this project draws attention: Was it intended to mirror the building's surroundings on the surface cladding at the expense of masking the architecture's vitality? However, like an X-ray, the nighttime image of the same project reveals the building's skeleton. The dual representative nature of these two images suggests a critique of postmodern architecture wherein quotations from historical languages camouflage the building's structural system. On the other hand, the daytime image highlights an atectonic interpretation of Miesian steel and glass architecture. Considering Frampton's definition of the “product-form,” the dual nature of the coverpage image suggests the decline of craft in favor of utilizing a Taylorized process of making that had been in the mind of modernists as early as the 1920s. We are reminded of Walter Gropius's Torten Seidlung Dessau (1926– 28), among other examples, that Frampton enumerates in another manuscript where he unpacks the concept of product-form. The title and the suggested two interrelated readings of the cover-page image set the stage for the present exploration of the themes and architects discussed in the four chapters compiled in part III of Frampton's book. Special attention will be focused on several works necessary for the stakes involved in postwar architecture and on how Frampton's analysis sharpens his critical agenda. The discussion begins with chapter 4, “Place, Production, and Architecture: Towards a Critical Theory of Building.” This chapter reads like a postscript to “Mies contra Aalto conundrum” and a prelude to Frampton's signature essay “Critical Regionalism,” much discussed then and now. These two subjects are discussed in the last two chapters of the present volume.

Kenneth Frampton is one of the few historians who has used an epigraph at the start of each chapter of his/ her work, in his case the famous volume Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980. Throughout the book, each epigraph either sets the basic theoretical tone of the chapter or plots the premise of Frampton's take on a subject, which is further elaborated on in other relevant chapters. Following Walter Benjamin, we could say that Frampton's appropriation of quotation intends to rob from the traditions of the historiography of modern architecture: an interventionist strategy and one in lieu of dismantling a linear vision of time central to the preceding historiographies of modern architecture. If we do not reduce historiography to the factual presentation of data, dates and building types, then historiography proper involves a philosophy of history by which the historian maps a constellation of architects’ work abreast of available textual interpretations, critical or otherwise. This definition of “historiography” was not popular a century ago, and the absence of such a perspective along various discursive formations necessitated the emergence of different approaches to the formation of modern architecture during the 1960s. Frampton's book, among a few others, is a case in point: it was written with an eye on the suggested theoretical vacuity. However, it would be premature at this point to reflect on the word “critical,” which has particular sociopolitical connotations for most of what Frampton has written to date, not to mention its implications for the history of modern architecture discussed throughout A Critical History. Considering the epigraph Frampton chose for the introductory chapter, it is appropriate to recall Benjamin's dream project: to write a book compiled from quotations! A brief discussion of a few writings that also influenced Frampton's positions on architectural history and criticism will shed light on his appropriation of the discursive differences between Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, especially the issue of technology. In reflecting on the work of these figures, this book hopes to provide the reader with a retrospective view of Frampton's book, casting light on his short introductory text to the first edition of the book.

Even though architecture's engagement with modernization was momentarily interrupted by the outbreak of war in the late 1930s, the sociopolitical outcomes of the war had drastic consequences for the building art. As noted in previous chapters, since the advent of modernity, architecture had to revise its lexicon according to the emerging new building types, most of which had no precedent in the premodern era. This development reached a decisive point in the architecture of postwar years, and Frampton outlines its profile in a chapter of A Critical History (1980) with the telling title “Architecture and the State: ideology and representation 1914–1943.” At stake was, among other issues, architecture's civic purpose under the auspices of a state apparatus, at least in America, the accelerative engine of which left almost no room for ideas such as civitas. Not only was the prospect of returning to the ideals of the Roman Republic shattered a long time ago but the postwar sociopolitical map differed from that of the 1920s and was in many ways colorful like a kilt. By the end of World War II, the thematic of the culture of building, discussed alongside the modernist notion of autonomy, for example, had been redefined. This was not according to the exigencies of a single and coherent totality (res publica) but rather according to diverse sociopolitical and cultural regimes tagged “advanced,” “developing” and “underdeveloped,” each with a specific understanding of the stakes involved in nation-state ideals. The question haunting most committed architects was: to what extent and at what price can architecture and the city be, once again, part of a totality that plans its path to success and failure within a network of decision-making with no constructive role assigned to architecture? Mostly considered as a means toward definitive ends, architecture faced a situation that had the least relevance to its disciplinary history, speaking relatively. Despite the unfavorable conditions of the 1950s, architects and historians did try to reenergize tropes such as civic architecture and monumentality.

Before getting to the bottom of these observations, a few words about the organization of Frampton's book, particularly its general ordering principle and the chapters compiled in part II, are in order.

Opening

Under the umbrella title of “A Critical History,” part II of Kenneth Frampton's Modern Architecture (1980) comprises 27 chapters, each of which focuses on the work and contribution of a particular architect or architects and thinkers associated with a tendency or a movement. The present chapter neither presents a detailed discussion of each chapter of this section of Frampton's book nor examines the extent to which the two major architectural trajectories of modernism outlined in the introduction to the book inform Frampton's take in each chapter. What it does instead is to present a close reading of the ways that a few protagonists cast light on the proposed “Aalto contra Mies” paradox. Central to this inquiry is the ideology of architecture, especially in the politics of public space, the Arendtian “space of public appearance,” that Frampton has even pursued its dialectical relevance for the private nature of domestic space. Following this line of consideration, ample attention is given to Frampton's discussion of Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (Figure 3.1), a project charged with civic and political connotations—and this concerning the concept of “monumentaliazation” introduced in connection with the late work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, discussed in the next chapter. What is involved here is a constellation of themes, if you wish, that anticipate Jürgen Habermas's annunciation of “Modernity—an Incomplete Project.” To start with, the historicity of the annotated period is mapped at the expense of exceeding the scope of disciplinarity, keeping in mind that autonomy is a grey zone informed by history and the contingencies of the present time, the Benjaminian “now-time” (Jeztzeit).

At the outset, the importance of the epoch-making decade of the 1930s is highlighted. During this time, the revolutionary specter haunting Europe since the end of World War I culminated in crisis, aspects of which Walter Benjamin unpacks in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” first published in 1936. Conversely, this is also the moment when the architecture of Europe and America cultivated the formative ethos of modernism. In retrospect, the ideological apparatus of the contingencies of the project of modernism did foreground various stages of contemporary architecture.

Kenneth Frampton's historiographic taxonomy is essential for the project pursued in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980. The previous chapter demonstrated the extent to which a well-known passage from Walter Benjamin's “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” (1940) set the theoretical premises of Frampton's brief introductory remarks, notable aspects of which he elaborates on in the subsequent chapters of the book. It is to Frampton's credit that he writes the history of modern architecture while criticizing the Enlightenment idea of progress. His text also critiques the stakes involved in the avant-gardist failed attempt to catch up with the wind of progress (in artistic terms) that pushes Benjamin's angel of history forward. This “failure” speaks to the ideology of modernity, wherein “reality persisted independent of that sentimental and romantic ‘sphere of culture.’ “ Accordingly, it took almost half a century, Fredric Jameson contends, to face the vanishing stage of the suggested mode of separation, at least in the regions of the world that were the bedrock of early modernism. Call it the postmodern condition or the full-moon visibility of an ideology when alternative views are almost nullified, if not tossed to the dark orbit of history, at least for now.

At issue for a historian, among other things, was/is the possibility of maintaining a strategic distance from the Real without isolating historiography from the objective and subjective conditions of the everyday life that capitalism has successfully managed since the middle of the past century. Frampton maps the historicity of the formation of modern architecture in three chapters of the book's part I. He argues that what makes modernity distinct from the Classical are transformations implanted in the cultural, territorial and technical areas, which are discussed under the rubric of the “trilogy” below. These transformations run the historical gamut extending from 1750 to 1939. In addition to witnessing the emergence of architectonic expressions motivated by technical changes, the last years of the decade of the 1930s designate the end of modernity. This does not mean the literal end of modernity, a singular historical event that has attained global currency since the end of the Cold War (ca. 1990), but the loss of the theoretical currency of the modernity versus Classical paradigm.

This book is neither a biographical investigation of Kenneth Frampton, a renowned historian, architect and architecture critic, nor a study of his oeuvre in its entirety, a huge task that would take into consideration many volumes, including the five editions of his Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in addition to the numerous published books, essays and forewords that he has written for scholarly books to date. Instead, it is a modest-yet-timely project: focusing on the first edition of A Critical History (as it will be referred to throughout this volume), published in 1980, it is a search for clues and positions that will provide the reader with a partial view of the significance of Frampton's historiography of modern architecture— “partial” because, in this volume, each chapter of the first edition of his book has not been examined. Although particular attention has been accorded to Frampton's work, the scope of this book is comprehensively narrow. Rather than reading the first edition of A Critical History through the lens of contemporary fashionable ideas and transient themes, the approach here is somewhat archeological: zooming into his book and simultaneously building out, an attempt has been made to historicize Frampton's positions, with a critical eye on the contemporary state of architectural praxis. The following reading of Frampton also offers a “prism” for comprehending architecture in global capitalism. Critically significant to this retrospective reading of Frampton's book is the fact that in the course of its subsequent editions, the first two parts of the first edition have remained almost unchanged, and also that its content comprises the core of the Modern Architecture movement, which still influences the course of future actions. For instance, among the many themes discussed in the second part of Frampton's book, his interpretation of events from 1930 to 1945—a watershed in the developmental process of modern movement architecture—is highlighted.

Overture

Following the genealogical investigation of architects mapped in the previous two chapters, and, more specifically, Mies van der Rohe's work, several questions related to the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto are raised in this chapter. For example, what is the genealogical index of his architecture? How does it amount to the “humanism” Kenneth Frampton has frequently attributed to Aalto? Furthermore, this also concerns the “humanism” that the organizers of the 2018 Venice Biennale associated with Frampton's vision of architecture. Whether Aalto's take on Humanism intersects with Frampton's is a subject that will be addressed later in this chapter. However, what concerns us in the first place is the possibility of reconstructing Aalto's later work in analogy to Frampton's reconstruction of late Mies in terms of the “monumentalization of technique,” and of Le Corbusier in terms of “monumentalization of vernacular,” discussed in Chapter 5 of this volume. Still, if we can contextualize Mies's late work after he migrated to America and Le Corbusier's after failing to establish the linguistics of civic architecture in modernity, how should we contextualize Aalto's architecture? This inquiry will shed light on the problematic notion of “humanization,” and the subject concerning Aalto's work as discussed in the following pages.

The postwar situation opened a vista for rethinking and challenging many modernist assumptions formulated during the late 1920s. However, this general observation should be indexed regarding the particularities of Aalto's work. For one, he subscribed to the idea of the “organic” that was also dear to Frank L. Wright. This line of theorization was dismissed by those involved in the institutionalization of International Style architecture (ca. the 1930s). However, after the war, Bruno Zevi took the idea to a different level. Aalto also gave ample attention to the notion of regionalism, another vital theme for immediately postwar architecture in the aftermath of Le Corbusier's early villas and his work in India. Regarding Le Corbusier's “monumentalization of vernacular,” it is helpful to differentiate the historicity of regionalism from that of vernacular. During the 1950s, emerging capitalism in America exported consumer and cultural goods and construction techniques, especially those instrumental for disseminating the modern language of architecture, to most countries then tagged as “Third World.”

Opening

The title of this chapter sums up, in a nutshell, Kenneth Frampton's project of critical historiography of Modern Movement architecture and beyond. Frampton has remained sympathetic to the humanistic and sociopolitical aspirations of modernity's project, which had significant repercussions for the intellectual labor of architecture produced between the two wars. Frampton penned most of the manuscript of Modern Architecture: A Critical History during the 1970s when he could not but share aspects of various criticisms launched against the International Style architecture. The language of this unique architectural tendency evolved during the first two decades of the past century in Europe, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) institutionalized it in the famous exhibition of 1932. Following this exhibition, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock co-authored a book celebrating the event. As stated in previous chapters, the scope of Frampton's intellectual work during the writing of his book was informed by many sources, including the English reformist concern for the social condition of the working class. However, unlike their German counterparts, the English reformers showed less interest in matters concerning theory and history. At another level of consideration, and as discussed in previous chapters, Frampton celebrated Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, Martin Heidegger's take on technology and “placemaking.” Equally important was Hannah Arendt's distinction between labor and work and her advocacy for the “space of human appearance,” the res publica. In contemporary circumstances, ushered in by global capitalism, the virtual network of communication has almost invalidated Arendt's idea, at least for now. What Frampton has taken away from the work of these three thinkers and their associates is a discourse of the critical, the scope of which includes the state of architecture in contemporary fully-fledged commodity form. If Benjamin is central to Frampton's historiography, the other two thinkers have assisted him in formulating a discourse of resistance detectable in Critical Regionalism.

In the preface to the book's second edition (1985), he dedicated a chapter to the subject. Frampton wrote:

Why Pergamon? Our story began with ten Roman commissioners, who in 188 BCE drew up a new map for cis-Tauric Asia after the defeat of Antiochos III at Magnesia-under-Sipylos. That map was an artifact of the Settlement of Apameia. A century-old Mediterranean interstate system had broken down at the end of the third century, and the Romans’ map proposed just two pieces of a new geopolitical order, the partition of the Anatolian peninsula between two allies, Rhodes and Pergamon. The failure of Rhodes to integrate or even retain control over its share along the south coast in Lycia and Caria is emblematic of the fact that enforcement of the settlement fell to the actors on the ground. The Romans withdrew and did not soon return, even as Pan-Anatolian wars between Pontos, Pergamon, Bithynia, and their respective allies embroiled the entire region for a decade. While a cunning and opportunistic diplomacy had helped put the Attalids in a position to win an empire, sovereignty over these vast new territories and peoples was never guaranteed. This was the basic assumption of an inquiry into the mechanics of imperial rule, rapid state formation, and the ideological tendencies of the Pergamene kings. My central argument was that the Attalids creatively employed noncoercive means to capture control of Greek cities and Anatolian rural communities, ultimately, making local civic culture depend on their tax revenues.

The ramified monetary system of the Attalid kingdom is described and its relationship to other monetary systems of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period explained. The character of the cistophoric coinage was neither fully royal nor civic, but should rather be understood as a “coordinated coinage” that required the cooperation of both polis and Attalid authorities. Local monetary needs could dictate the shape of the money supply, as in the signal case of Tralles. The burden and profits of epichoric coinage at regional scale were shared, while the kings ceded symbolic space on the coin types for representations of civic identity. Cooperation can also be glimpsed in countermarks and proxy coinages. Unlike Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom was not a closed currency zone, though the cistophori helped integrate vast new territories. Their reduced weight standard economized on silver, but Pergamene mines existed in Anatolia and should be factored into explanatory models.

Cultural diplomacy was a central plank of the Attalid campaign to secure an empire. Yet the nuances of Attalid cultural politics and the dynasty’s own cultural hybridity remain poorly understood. Intellectuals associated with the Library of Pergamon, such as Polemon of Ilion and Demetrios of Skepsis, promulgated a distinctly Pergamene vision of the Panhellenic community, which emphasized the primacy of place and the cultural parity of East Greece. Demetrios provided learned support for the Attalid claim to the mantle of Priam of Troy and a kingdom of cis-Tauric Asia. That the Attalids sought to present themselves as Anatolian kings is also evident in their choice of the tumulus as a tomb type and in the form of urbanism evinced in their royal capital. By design, Pergamene cultural universalism was not only Panhellenic but also Pan-Asian: in a founding myth, victory over the Galatians secured Attalid Asia. However, a different playbook was required to draw urbanizing Pisidians or Phrygian temple dependents away from Galatian and Bithynian rivals and into the Attalid fold.

In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room’s walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on display: the Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French, and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back.