Reading Kenneth Frampton: A Commentary on 'Modern Architecture', 1980

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This book focuses on the first edition of Kenneth Framptons Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published in 1980. It searches for clues and positions that will provide the reader with an unprecedented insight into the significance of Framptons historiography of modern architecture. It explores selected themes in line with Framptons many-faceted contribution, certain aspects of which can be noted between the lines of his ongoing criticism of the present-day architecture, which inevitably lead us to a critical understanding of the past, the modernity of architectures contemporaneity. The compiled chapters attempt to open a window onto the constellation of themes that allowed Frampton to hold on to his anteroom view of history even amidst the flow of time and flood of temporalities spanning 19802020. The book elucidates how Framptons critical presentation of the history of modern movement architecture and the books classificatory mode (periodization) contribute to our understanding of the contemporaneity of architecture today.

Reviews

The book is a critical unraveling of Framptons ideas; his use of Walter Benjamin, Hanna Arendt and Martin Heidegger, which the author elegantly analyzes. It is well structured and written. The approach (starting with the importance of epigraphy), the selection of key themes (the cultural, technical and territorial), and the close readings, are convincing and strong. The book speaks to Framptons ongoing critique of contemporary architecture culture. Hartoonians book is a timely contribution to this ongoing debate. Patricio del Real, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, USA

Kenneth Frampton is unquestionably one of the most influential and original architectural thinkers of the last hundred years. Now in its fifth edition, his Modern Architecture: A Critical History remains a mainstay in architecture schools and design offices around the world. In this brilliant study, Gevork Hartoonian offers us a lucid and in-depth account of the authors who shaped Framptons thinking, from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt. He also gives us a compelling interpretation of Framptons engagement with leading protagonists of the modern movement, from Le Corbusier to Louis Kahn, from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Alvar Aalto. This book is necessary reading for students of postwar architectural thought, as well as for those seeking a deeper understanding of the debates and ideas shaping architecture today. Nader Vossoughian, Associate Professor, Architecture, New York Institute of Technology, USA

Hartoonian's historical study of the first edition ofModern Architectureaims, per the introduction, "to establish Framptons historiography and his ongoing endeavor to promote a critical understanding of the historicity of architectural crisis."Hartoonian does not do a chapter-by-chapter account ofModern Architecture, in other words.Reading Kenneth Framptonis dense historiography for other historians, not a book for architects, even those enamored with Frampton. - A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The first two chapters focus on the big picture, in order to trace Framptons historiographical approach through his selected cover images, timespans, and opening quotes to the main parts of his Critical History; the remaining five chapters then move along selected parts of this history, with the last chapter ushering in the formulation of critical regionalism. As a result, one feels that they are diving into Framptons book hand in hand with Hartoonian, the well-versed scholar and experienced commentator - Stylianos Giamarelos; Fabrications; Routledge Taylor and Francis

Author Bio

Gevork Hartoonian is Professor Emeritus of Architecture, University of Canberra, Australia. He is the editor of The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate, (Routledge, forthcoming) and the author of Time, History and Architecture (Routledge 2018), and Ontology of Construction (Cambridge University Press, 1994), among other volumes.