by Cristina Bianchetti

Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, Liane Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis Prestel, Munich-Berlin-London-New York 2003 (pp. 160, s.i.p.)

This is a study of critical regionalism, a term that contains both a warning and a precise reproach. The warning is that generic use of the term may be distancing from its usual significance, which defines a careful approach to details and a diffidence toward general stances. The reproach is for people like Alexander Tzonis, Anthony Alofsin and even Kenneth Frampton, with regard to their work on buildings that succeeded in moving slowly away from modernism without throwing off the emancipating aspects of modern architecture.

These studies were very well known in the 1970s, and already appeared to have eliminated the idea of regionalism as a fashion of historicism rooted in the 19th century and ostentatiously based on regional architectural cultures. Faced with that attitude, Tzonis, Alofsin and Frampton helped clarify that critical regionalism really was an attitude marked by the importance assigned to site, topography, climate and other elements, such as light, that can bring out a structure’s tectonic side. It is a marginal approach, but it matters because it captures the sensitivity that has become ever more accurate after the 1950s.

The book’s preface mentions a specific event: the 1978 invitation to Lucius Burckhardt, then director of the new Werkbund, to adopt this approach by taking a closer look at the work of a group of young German architects. Within the new international style, they sought architecture based on local needs or the past. Today we might call this a kind of sustainable attitude. The fact that we are going back to thinking that is 25 years old is partly due to the current discussion of Luis Barragan, José Antonio Coderch, Dimitris Pikionis, Peter Zumthor, Jorn Utzon and Sverre Fehn.

It comes from the appearance of a more general matter. How can you develop a design strategy when faced with today’s crisis? The architect has been uncomfortably placed within odd conflicts that oppose globalization, the internationalization of artistic creations and local identity and ethnic insularity. It is a key issue, and it surely doesn’t deal solely with architecture (in fact, cosmopolitanism is making a comeback with some sociologists).

The book’s idea is to try to rethink critical regionalism with this conflict in mind, going back to its side attitude that, as Frampton wrote, ‘tends to prosper in the cultural gaps able to escape the optimizing tension of universal civilization’. Now the point of contrast between universal civilization’s optimizing tensions and sheltered areas is harder to pinpoint than in the 1970s. The places are no longer gaps or enclaves, and many now maintain that local history is the only way to comprehend space; by dealing with the local, artistic languages speak of other things.

Early modernity’s idea that something can be protected from general tensions and redefine an atmosphere of very precise, frozen, sheltered identities has failed. The global and the local are mixed; they blend and impact each other. This logic is no longer oppositional; it is inclusive. So the question really concerns site and situation in architecture – what characterizes it changes over time. This upsets the commonsense idea that culture and cultural imagination (hence design) are historically specified and rooted. This made them regionalist.

These often-repeated affirmations do have some serious implications. I stress them because it seems to me that on this very point the authors do so even in the subtitle, though it simplifies the tale. The success of the picturesque in England, based on a solid reference to the values of individualism, may oppose the affirmation of general values, the revival of classical or universal positions in France or elsewhere. But the alternation of the picturesque, classicism followed by romanticism, emancipation and the building of local identities cannot apply to Ruskin, Goethe and us as well. We are really different.

Therefore, the obstinately Mumford-like rereading of all critical regionalism from the end of the war to the 1970s actually seems to simplify this point. The volume’s other strategy – to consider critical regionalism by means of some contemporary buildings – is more viable. However, it is done in a conversation-like form that leads one to wonder why someone has been included or excluded. The strategy is more viable because it is skilfully played out by key figures of globalization, such as Jean Nouvel, Foreign Office and MVRDV.

It is so for the value of the examples chosen, for their ability to show that architecture can, in some cases, use sites and circumstance to its advantage, by taking apart from the inside the symbolic and spatial orders. It uses space in its own way. In these examples, critical regionalism is again a somewhat slippery practice, yet it can challenge models of history and architectural criticism.

Cristina Bianchetti Professor of Urbanistic at the Turin Polytechnic