Architecture Books – Week 39/2023
42 Years of Critical Regionalism
This week on A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books:
If your first reaction to the subtitle of this newsletter is something along the lines of, "Wait, isn't critical regionalism just 40 years old?," then everything you think know about critical regionalism is partial, in both senses of the term: incomplete and biased. Yes, Kenneth Frampton's "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" was published in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture in 1983, exactly 40 years ago, but the term "critical regionalism" was coined two years earlier by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their article "The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis" in Architecture in Greece. But as the term took hold in architectural circles that decade, and to a lesser but still lasting degree in the decades since, it has more often been associated with Frampton's essay, even though he acknowledged the earlier essay at the time and that acknowledgment brought Tzonis and Lefaivre a good deal of attention beyond their native Greece. Yet, if critical regionalism is some sort of –ism, then should it be defined by just one critic? Is it unfair, in other words, that Frampton's take should take precedence over Tzonis and Lefaivre's?
Continuing reading “42 Years of Critical Regionalism,” my review of Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation by Stylianos Giamarelos
Architecture Book News:
Over at BD, Katharine Heron reviews Becoming Urban: The Mongolian City of Nomads, the new book by Joshua Bolchover, one half of Rural Urban Framework (RUF), a non-profit organization providing design services to charities and NGOs working in China.
An article in Fodor's Travel digs into Swimming in Darkness, a six-year-old graphic novel (four years for the English translation) by Lucas Harari that is set in Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals: “When [Harari] first laid eyes on the Vals Thermal Baths, he experienced a ‘profound aesthetic shock.’”
Hackaday, a website with “entertainment for engineers and engineering enthusiasts,” recently featured two architecture books in its “Books You Should Read” series: David Macaulay’s Architecture Series (I’m most partial to Unbuilding) and Why Buildings Fall Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori.
#archidosereads
As an addendum to my photo of the Camper Store the other day, here are older photos of Richard Haas's mural at 112 Prince Street (1974–75), starting with a "before" photo. [Click and swipe to see more photos] from Richard Haas: Architecture of Illusion (Rizzoli, 1981):
A few recently received books:
See these and more recently published and forthcoming architecture books on my blog and on my Bookshop.org page.
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— John Hill