Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Hal Foster: Our occasion is the recent publication of Labour, Work and Architecture
(2002), but we should also look back to Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995) and
further back, given its wide readership, to Modern Architecture: A Critical
History (1980). Let’s begin with your formation as an architect.
Kenneth Frampton: I was trained at the Architectural Association (AA) in London from
1950 to 1956. After that I went into the British Army for two years, which was a
ridiculous experience except for basic training. I then went to Israel for a year,
which was a positive experience, architecturally speaking, in that it was a
simpler country with a basic building technology. Within this limited scope,
one was free to do what one wanted. I returned to London and started to work
for Douglas Stephen and Partners, a relatively small practice in the City Center.
I was an associate of this office until I left for the States in 1965.
Foster: Whom did you confront at the AA, in terms of teachers and fellow students?
Frampton: My group at the AA is a lost generation in many ways. There were and
still are peers of considerable talent, but they’ve had mixed careers. Neave
Brown is surely one of them. He has had the long career as a housing architect,
but it hasn’t been easy for him. Perhaps the most talented of my generation
was Patrick Hodgkinson, who worked briefly with Alvar Aalto as a student,
and then for Leslie Martin in Cambridge. He had a spectacular career at the
beginning, but then it faltered, and he spent the greater part of his life
teaching at the University of Bath. He was a brilliant teacher, but the
architectural talent he displayed as a student wasn’t fulfilled. Arthur Korn
was important to the AA climate at the time; he was a Jewish émigré from
Berlin who had worked for Erich Mendelsohn (he was also a close friend of
Ludwig Hilberseimer). Korn indulged in a radical leftist discourse during
this period. One of the things that now seems quaint is that in the 1950s,
inside a relatively small school like the AA, there were student associations
aligned with three political parties: communist, socialist, and conservative.
This was also the prime era of the British welfare state, which in architec-
ture affected school building in particular. After the Beveridge Report and
Education Act of 1944, there was a spate of rather brilliant school buildings,
OCTOBER 106, Fall 2003, pp. 35–58. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
36 OCTOBER
Above: Alison and Peter Smithson. Hunstanton school, Norfolk, England. 1949–54.
Facing page: Nigel Henderson. Farm machinery, Colchester, England. 1960.
A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton 37
Allen: Was there the sense, through the IG, that the boundaries between architecture
and art worlds were porous?
Frampton: It was particularly so for the Smithsons. They were close to Eduardo
Paolozzi and Henderson, and together they staged the Parallel of Art and Life
exhibition (1953). The Smithsons were also open to Art Brut, Dubuffet, and
Existentialism. The Situationists were too much for them, I think, but they
were interested in CoBrA, and that already brought them toward Situationism.
All of this was part of the Smithsons’ sensibility, but not of Stirling’s.
Foster: And you felt more sympathetic to whom?
Frampton: Well, I was closer to Stirling personally. I don’t think I understood the
Situationist position then; I didn’t begin to appreciate it until the 1960s.
However, in 1963, when I was technical editor of Architectural Design, we were
the first to publish an English translation of Constant’s New Babylon. I thought
it was an astonishing text. Also, at that time in Architectural Design I supported
the work of Yona Friedman, who often came to our editorial offices in
London. He was famous for his space-frame, megastructural proposal Paris
Spatiale. He was and still is a died-in-the-wool anarchist, fond of saying things
like, “I think there is one art and it is cooking!”
Foster: There’s no easy fit between the Situationists and the IG and its followers.
(Legend has it that when the Situat ionist s came to the Inst itute of
Contemporary Art in London in 1960, mutual incomprehension prevailed.)
In the simplest terms, the IG embraced certain aspects of emergent consumer
culture, and the Situationists did precisely the opposite. I’d think you’d feel
more affinity with the latter, and be skeptical of Banham’s interests, say, in
an imagistic architecture that worked to capture a Pop world on the rise—
the work of Cedric Price, for example, and Archigram.
Frampton: Pop largely came out of This Is Tomorrow, especially with the work of
Richard Hamilton. My contact with Hamilton in the early 1960s also came
through Architectural Design. I found Hamilton a very interesting figure, and I
still do. As for Banham, his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)
was extremely influential. It was patently a model for my Modern Architecture:
A Critical History (1980).
Foster: In what sense?
Frampton: Banham organized his book in clear sections, with each one related to a
specific avant-garde movement; he also cited the protagonists themselves.
Those two aspects struck me as very effective, and I emulated them.
Foster: What about his particular revision of the canon of modern architecture
produced by first-generation historians like Nikolaus Pevsner and Siegfried
Giedion—his claim that by leaving out Futurist and Expressionist architects,
they had failed to articulate what was truly modern about modern architecture,
that is, its expression of “the machine age”? That emphasis appears somewhat
alien to you.
Frampton: It’s a complex issue. As you say, Banham’s book is energized by his
A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton 39
Frampton: No, it wasn’t. But something else was. In England I was influenced by
Anthony Hill, who is exactly my age. He is a British Constructionist—as
opposed to Constructivist—artist who contributed to this Anglo-Dutch
magazine Structure edited by Joost Bajlieu. Other members of this circle were
Stephen Gilbert, an English Neo-Constructivist sculptor living in Paris; John
Ernest, an American émigré in London; and Kenneth and Mary Martin.
Along with Victor Pasmore they were all inspired by Charles Biederman’s Art
as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), which is an all-but-mythic book,
astonishing in its way, but somehow virtually lost. These people made me
aware of Russian formalism and Theo van Doesburg’s Art Concret at about the
same time that the Gray book appeared.
Foster: Artists, then, more than architects: they are one source of your fascination
with the tectonic—not only in Russian Constructivism, but also through
Anglo-Dutch Constructionism . . .
Allen: I wanted to ask about the example of Stirling. His engineering building at
Leicester University is designed in 1959, and some of its elements have been
compared to Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club in Moscow
(1927–28)—the form of its cantilevered auditorium in particular. If you think
about Stirling’s trajectory—from, say, his flats for Ham Common (1955–58),
which is a weighty, brick architecture, wedded to the earth and influenced by
Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul, to the Leicester building, which is by contrast a
lightweight, predominantly glass-and-steel architecture, an assembly of almost
found pieces, very dynamically composed—it is almost a demonstration case
of the positive influence of the Constructivist example. I don’t know how con-
scious it was on his part.
Frampton: You’re right to recall Melnikov, but Aalto is present too in the way the
interiors of Stirling’s cantilevered auditoriums are furnished, as well as in
some of the plasticity at the level of the podium. There’s also a six-story, brick-
faced laboratory building, a bustle at the back of the tower, with clipped
corners along with isolated staircases and elevators, which owes something to
Louis Kahn. So there’s a play between these influences and the more overt use
of ferrovitreous construction, which has its roots not only in Constructivism,
but also in the British nineteenth-century engineering tradition.
Allen: So Stirling did not have to get it by way of Russian Constructivism.
Frampton: He didn’t really, and he wouldn’t have made that reference anyway.
Foster: When you come to this country, you confront consumer society more
directly than in England; you’re also affected by political developments, the
student movement in particular; and you’ve rediscovered radical Soviet art
and architecture as well. What’s the situation at Princeton when you arrive in
1965? I assume that’s before Michael Graves is there.
Frampton: No, Graves was there, and Peter Eisenman—in fact Eisenman invited me.
Foster: And there was Tómas Maldonado from the neo-Bauhausian Hochschule für
Gestaltung in Ulm.
Frampton: Yes. He was amazing, and brought there by Robert Geddes, Dean of
Architecture at the time, and not by Graves and Eisenman. An important con-
nection here was a Princeton student of mine, Emilio Ambasz, of Argentine
origin, who was an ex-pupil of Amancio Williams, designer of the famous
concrete-bridge home in Mar del Plata (1943–45). Emilio was a wunderkind:
upon graduating, he immediately became a teacher at Princeton. I’m sure it
was Emilio who persuaded Geddes to invite the Argentine Maldonado as a
visiting professor. Maldonado had a strong influence on my politicization. I
came upon Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization through him; as it happens,
I also heard Marcuse lecture at Princeton. Colquhoun was also switched on to
this line of thinking at the time. We still see some evidence of this in
Colquhoun’s book Modern Architecture (2002): for whatever else it is, it is surely
a Marxist history. And though he might not admit it, I think Colquhoun was
also politicized by the United States. He wasn’t a Marxist on his arrival,
though he was substantially influenced by Manfredo Tafuri later on. But
Maldonado was the key for me. He was an aphoristic teacher in the sense that
just a sentence or two would sustain one . . .
Foster: Didn’t Maldonado also represent, in part, the failure of the Ulm project to
regain control of the forces of production, that is, the recuperation of
modernist design by capitalist rationalization? Unlike some of your peers,
the recognition of that failure did not lead you to any postmodern position;
it made you recommit to another kind of modernism.
Frampton: Alexander Kluge was also involved with Ulm in the early days in the
department of communications, which was the first section to be closed. The
radical discourse developed by Maldonado, Claude Schnaidt, and Guy
42 OCTOBER
Bonsiepe inside Ulm before its dissolution in 1968 was important to me. I
forget exactly when Maldonado came to Princeton—it must have been
around 1967, just before the closure of Ulm.
Allen: The Ulm project would have faced an uphill battle in the context of 1960s
American consumer culture. On the other hand, there were designers in the
States working with industry—for example, in the industrial design department
at Cranbrook. Was there any engagement between those European figures
and American figures like Charles and Ray Eames or Harry Bertoia?
Frampton: I don’t think so.
Foster: So some parts of the modernist project seemed completely appropriated,
while other parts were newly rediscovered; there was the enormous problem
of a rampant consumer culture, which repositioned architecture dramatically;
and you also undergo a powerful politicization. How did you mediate these
different forces as you moved from Princeton to Columbia and the Institute
of Architecture and Urban Studies? What positions began to be articulated
at that point?
Frampton: That moment is difficult for me to characterize. It was centered on the
strange displaced family that Eisenman, through his charisma, gathered
around himself: Mario Gandelsonas, Diana Agrest, myself, Tony Vidler, and,
somewhat later, Kurt Forster. While we’re not all Europeans, we’re certainly
not Americans. Eisenman made this kind of international coterie, which in a
sense had always been his intention. When I first went to Princeton, he orga-
nized a group called CASE, Committee of Architects for the Study of the
Environment. It was a rather inclusive group that held a number of hot,
fairly confused weekend seminars. Eisenman was disappointed in me
because I wouldn’t become, as he put it, “the Siegfried Giedion of the
group”—one naiveté laid on top of another there. Later we repaired our
split, and in 1972 I became involved with the Institute for Architecture and
Urban Studies in New York. We started the journal Oppositions out of this
strange amalgam of Agrest and Gandelsonas’s Francophile semiotics, Vidler’s
emerging Tafurianism, Eisenman’s formalist predilections, and my own
born-again socialism. In the first issue I published the essay “Industrialization
and the Crisis of Architecture” (1973), which was a somewhat naive attempt
to adopt a Benjaminian approach to historical phenomena, which I then
pursued in Modern Architecture.
Somehow we’ve reached this point in our conversation without mention-
ing Hannah Arendt, who was also a key influence in politicizing me. The
Human Condition (1958) was and still is an important reference for my work.
It’s not a Marxist thesis, but certainly a political one.
Foster: When did you encounter the book?
Frampton: In London there was a fertile figure named Thomas (Sam) Stevens, who
had taught at the Liverpool School of Architecture, a leading training
ground in the postwar period (it produced Colin Rowe, among others). At
A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton 43
the AA he was a talking head par excellence with a B.A. in art history from
the Courtauld and a photographic memory. Stevens was the kind of person
who stimulates young students better than most academics. He put me on to
the book, and by coincidence I read it when I first came here. It seemed to
me a key to the States, to the condition of advanced capitalist production
and consumption, which I had never really understood before. My first essay
in Oppositions is patently influenced by Arendt: it opens with the Cartesian
split between appearance and being as a basis of the scientific method—but
also as the precursor of a great cultural predicament.
Allen: It seems useful here to differentiate your thinking from Tafuri’s. You’re
working from some of the same sources, such as Benjamin and Adorno, but
there are important differences. The reference to Arendt is one thing that
distinguishes you.
Frampton: There are also overlaps, such as the young Italian Massimo Cacciari and
his manifest interest in an existential, phenomenological approach. That
comes to be inserted into Tafuri’s discourse. But my interest in Arendt does
distinguish us, and with Arendt begins my susceptibility to Heidegger, Arendt
having been his pupil. Here there is a split in my position, which has always
irritated some people, such as Tony Vidler, who surely views my combining of
Heideggerian and Marxist critiques as a scandal. This was already evident in
the early years of Oppositions as a kind of tension between us.
Foster: What were the other forces in play? If Agrest and Gandelsonas were interested
in French semiotics, and you were drawn to Frankfurt School critique with an
Arendtian twist, what were the other important discourses?
Frampton: At the time Eisenman was interested in Noam Chomsky and his
grammatical notion of deep structure. At some point he shifted his ground
from Chomsky to Derrida. I can’t recall exactly when, but he made that
move almost overnight: the grammatical approach of Chomsky was carried
over into a deconstructive register through Derrida. Foucault was never a
reference for Peter—for good reason, I suppose—and he was never that
interested in Chomsky’s politics.
Allen: Eisenman found Chomsky on his own, and that interest in linguistics led
him to invite Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, who had studied with
Roland Barthes in Paris, to the Institute. So Peter was introduced to
French structuralism through Diana and Mario, but it didn’t have a strong
influence on him. However, it was necessary background for his later
fascination with Derrida.
Foster: Many architects and artists use theory on the basis of analogy: it’s more a
source of models to be adapted than a genealogy of concepts to be developed.
This speaks to the porosity to theory in architecture and art circles over the
last three decades. Of course, critics are hardly exempt here—often they
have led the way—and in some ways it has been a very productive exchange.
But frequently too it has seemed a hit-and-run relationship.
44 OCTOBER
Machine Age. What other points of reference existed for you, especially in
terms of how you developed your canon of twentieth-century architecture?
How calculated was the book in its recoveries and revisions?
Frampton: Certainly Leonardo Benevolo was an influence, first his Origins of
Modern Town Planning (1963; translated 1967) and then his History of
Modern Architecture (1960; translated 1971). Tony Vidler was also an important
influence, in particular in the chapter “Tony Garnier and the Industrial
City,” which was informed by many conversations with him.
Foster: But did you feel, as Banham did in 1960, that Pevsner, Giedion, and
Bruno Zevi had somehow got the history wrong?
Frampton: I never found Pevsner’s book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936),
particularly interesting. I still find Giedion stimulating, when returning
casually to the pages of Space, Time, and Architecture (1941). But Banham’s
book was my model.
Foster: But did you, like Banham, feel that there was another kind of modern
architecture to foreground, another story to tell? That’s my question.
Frampton: Mainly it’s a question of the architecture of the Left. Banham omitted
the Left architects of the Weimar Republic almost completely: Hannes
Meyer is absent, along with Otto Haesler, whereas both are featured in my
book. Unlike Banham, I realized that New Deal architecture had to be
acknowledged. The same goes for the New Monumentality as formulated
by José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion in 1943. This was a
very important development, especially in relation to Soviet Realism and
the Indian architecture of British imperialism. Indeed, for the entire
interwar period, that aspect of modern building culture that wasn’t tied to
radical social projects had to be treated: hence the passages on Italian
Rationalism, Nordic Doricism, Lutyen’s New Delhi, the American Art
Deco movement , Rockefeller Center— they each find their place in
Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in part under the rubric of New
Monumentality. (I was indirectly influenced here by Clement Greenberg’s
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.) Then too Banham didn’t deal with
Aalto really, or the whole Scandinavian movement for that matter, and
these are also discussed in my book.
Allen: Does the last interest go back to your experience of British architecture
in the 1950s and its closeness to the Scandinavian model?
Frampton: That came a bit later. The Leslie Martin office, which I mentioned
earlier, was closely related to Aalto’s position. And Martin was also an
important patron of New Brutalism. The Leicester engineering building
was given to Stirling by Martin through the University Grants Commission
where Martin was indirectly responsible for giving out faculty buildings to
various architects all over the country. The History Faculty Building at
Cambridge also came to Stirling via Martin. Patrick Hodgkinson assumed
an Aalto position as well, and he designed the brick-faced dormitory at
48 OCTOBER
Caius College, Cambridge, in this manner for Martin. The work of the
Martin office was always in brick and somewhat organic: it was an effort to
create a kind of normative modern brick tradition for the English situation.
Foster: Your work differs in other ways from how prior historians have presented
modern architecture. Whereas Pevsner looked back to the socialist reform
movements of the nineteenth century for the origin of his story, and Emil
Kaufmann turned to the typological forms of the Enlightenment for his
beginning, and Giedion was focused, perhaps more transhistorically, on
questions of space, you have followed two lines of inquiry fairly consis-
tently: an attention to the tectonic, which has become more and more
foregrounded in your work, and an emphasis, developed through Arendt,
Aalto, and others, on place creation. Can you talk about how those two
concerns emerged, and what the relationship is between them? Some
might assume that a stress on structure might interfere with a sensitivity
to place. . . .
Frampton: My preoccupations arise out of the direct experience of making
buildings, at the societal as well as the professional level. Even though it’s
not explicitly elaborated, I tend to approach historical material through
the eye of an architect: I ask myself what is the predicament faced by the
architect in making a particular work in a physical setting at a given historical
moment. That attention binds my two concerns together—place on the
one hand and structural expressivity on the other. Both preoccupations
have to do with finding some basis on which architects can ground their
practice in what Heidegger refers to as a destitute time.
On my first visit to the States in 1965 I was accompanied by James
Gowan (the ex-partner of Stirling), who remarked of the New Jersey suburbs:
“It looks as though it could all be blown away tomorrow.” That sense of
placelessness was more evident perhaps to a European forty years ago
than it would be today. Hence there followed the task of trying to estab-
lish places as sites of resistance. As for the stress on the tectonic, well,
while it might have derived from my interest in Constructivism, it became
more conscious as a result of my desire to resist the tendency to reduce
architecture to images.
Foster: So in part it was developed in resistance to the emergence of a postmodern
discourse of scenographic architecture.
Frampton: Yes. If you want to split the two, the concern with place was articulated
in relation to the reality of the megalopolis, and the emphasis on structure
to the postmodern reduction of things to images.
Allen: Princeton in the 1970s and ’80s became identified with postmodernism
in architecture, especially the formalism of Graves. I wonder if that was
incipient in the earlier period. Tony Vidler, for example, developed a differ-
ent genealog y of modernism, going back to t he eighteent h
century—hence his interest in Ledoux, and his account of typology as a
A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton 49
much that can be considered overtly tectonic in it. There are small-scale
elements—window and door frames, perhaps, certain spanning components
here and there—but in the main, Siza’s work is not tectonic in its character, as
opposed to, say, Utzon’s. This brings up the difficult question of the limits of
sculpture versus architecture: where does structural expressivity lie between
sculpture on the one hand and architecture on the other? How can one
demonstrate this difference by example, or, more precisely, how can one
demonstrate the limits of the sculptural versus the tectonic within architec-
ture? For me this is a point at which one may discriminate between Frank
Gehry and Enric Miralles, say. In almost all of Miralles’s work the tectonic ele-
ment is closely integrated with the sculptural. In Gehry’s case, apart from his
very early work, there’s no interest whatsoever in the tectonic. He’s only
interested in plast icit y, and whatever makes it st and up will do —he
couldn’t care less. That’s very evident in Bilbao.
Foster: Isn’t there a distinction too between an autonomy that the sculptural
seems to assume and a sitedness that the tectonic aspires to achieve?
Frampton: Perhaps, but if you take the model of Gottfried Semper and discriminate
in a simplistic way between light and heavy structures, you get a different
reading. By its very nature, the heavy gravitates toward the earth, and so is
telluric in character, while the light tends to reach for the sky because it is
usually framed, skeletal, and aerial. If you think about building in these
very generic terms, the sculptural then tends to emerge more naturally out
of the earth and out of the plastic character of the earthwork.
Foster: So the terms can be reversed.
Allen: It has to do with the way the structure is realized. The assembled charac-
ter of light st ructures is almost self- ev ident , and t he v iewer can
reconstruct the process of construction. The sculptural unity of Gehry’s
work is by definition scenographic inasmuch as the plastic, “carved” char-
acter of his shapes is at odds with their necessarily part-by-part realization.
In Miralles’s work, on the other hand, it is possible to understand how the
pieces are put together to create his forms, however elaborate and sculp-
tural they may be.
Frampton: It’s also clear how they relate to the ground. In my view a more elaborate
theorization of all these relationships still remains to be done. I was recently
reading Merleau-Ponty, and there are very interesting passages in The
Phenomenology of Perception that point to the potential of the body to experi-
ence at a microlevel the space made available in architectural form. From this
point of view the elaboration of the program should avoid any formalistic
short-circuiting of what one might call the ontological potential.
Foster: This last reference also speaks to your affinities, conscious or not, with
your generation of Minimalist and site-specific artists who are concerned
with an idea of the sculptural as sited, indeed as phenomenological, in
resistance to other kinds of forms and experiences that you call sceno-
52 OCTOBER
graphic. But even in the early 1960s, these effects were present not only in
Pop art but in image culture at large, to the degree that they encouraged
a kind of disembodiment of the viewer and a dissolut ion of place.
Ironically, there are also some convergences between these Minimalist and
Pop trajectories.
Allen: In this regard I was interested to read your critique, in Labour, Work and
Architecture, of Swiss German Minimalism (Peter Zumtor, Herzog and de
Meuron, and others). It speaks to Hal’s point, and there’s an interesting
overlap with his essay “The Crux of Minimalism”: the project to recover
phenomenological depth in the experience of the work of art can also
open up onto an unanchored kind of subject-effect. The same Minimalism
that can support the kind of place-making and recovery of perception that
you advocate can also lead to a play of sheer surfaces and a rendering
indifferent of perception that you scorn.
Frampton: Certain aspects of early Minimalism in art were very place-oriented,
and they could generate, out of very few elements, a very strong symbolic
presence, however esoteric—an arresting physical presence and not an
imagistic one. That kind of position is difficult for architects due to the
very complexity of building—the way it has to respond to the life-world
and also be integrated within it to some extent. That is a burden that
might drive the architect to displace the significant effects exclusively to
the surface.
Foster: At the same time you also insist that architecture is privileged, not just
distinguished, by its engagement not only with the life-world, but also with
earth in a Heideggerian sense. There’s a primordialism in your thought, a
commitment to Semperian materialism, even anthropology, and for some
people this insistence on origins and earth makes your work . . .
Frampton: Conservative. . . .
Foster: But for you this dimension touches on an essence of architecture: that
architecture is, in the first instance, about marking the earth (you invoke
Vittorio Gregrotti on this point) before it is about constructing space or
even making shelter, and certainly before expressing symbols or typologiz-
ing forms. This marking is not just a heuristic or historical fiction for you;
it is an essential part of architecture that subsists, or that should, for you.
As Stan says, you value architects who are able to articulate this marking,
to pronounce it, even or especially under adverse conditions, in a desti-
tute time.
Allen: Here, too, the reference to Minimalism is important, for example in the
case of Tado Ando. And here we come full circle: in the art world the
Minimalists were trying to build on the unframed experience of architec-
ture as opposed to the framed experience of the traditional art work . . .
Frampton: Escaping the gallery by moving into architecture and beyond . . .
Allen: Exactly. And now some of that opening out gets cycled back into the
54 OCTOBER