CONSTRUCTIVE REGIONALISM

Anthony Alofsin, 2005

This May, 2005 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coining of the term
Constructive Regionalism. The phrase appeared in a text I finished writing as a
gradudate student at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Design on May 26, 1980.
The text was subsequently incorporated into the essay, The Question of Regionalism,
co-authored with Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre. At the time of writing I argued in
my original essay that a Constructive Regionalism would respond to local colors,
materials, and customs; it would embrace traditions and transform them; it would be wed
to its setting, in either rural or urban landscape; it would foster craft and push the limits
of technology; it would speak to the individual and search for the universal. A
constructive regionalism would exalt the craft of building while at the same time
encourage a new consciousness in the manufacture of machine products. This concept
of regionalism was intended to be constructive not only in the sense of tectonic
expression of construction, but in the sense of creating a positive dialogue between
culture, buildings, and the environment. The phrase and concept of Constructive
Regionalism was the precursor to term critical regionalism.
Our co-authored essay was subsequently translated by Lucius Burckhardt into
German and published as Anthony Alofsin, Liane Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis, Die Frage
des Regionalismus in Fur eine andere Architektur: Bauen mit der Natur und in der
Region, edited by Michael Andritzky, Lucius Burckhardt, Ot Hoffmann. (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981) vol. 1, pp. 121-134. Neither the English
version nor the German translation contained the term critical regionalism, which
Tzonis and Lefaivre have developed in depth in numerous publications. The German
publication of our essay is out of print, and the original English-language text has not yet
been published. For further information, contact Prof. Anthony Alofsin, University of
Texas at Austin, Goldsmith Hall.
The following is the first publication of my original text on Constructive
Regionalism.

Constructive Regionalism
Anthony Alofsin
Just as we have begun to perceive many meanings of modernismthe good
modern, the bad modern, the anti-modern, and varieties of neo-modernthere are many
meanings of regionalism. We intend here to discuss the multiplicity of meanings with the
intent of creating nuances and distinctions in our understanding of regionalism. Our hope
is that an incisive clarity will render regionalism a constructive tool in the production of
architecture.

What are some of the various domains to which a notion of regionalism has been
attached? Folkish architecture, the country counterpart of a legitimizing neo-classicism
found in German speaking lands during the first three decades of the century. There is a
regional architecture attached to an English movement of the 1950s involving James
Stirling and others. There is a regional architecture associated with developments in the
Scandinavian countries. And there is a regional architecture connected with the western
United States, particularly in the architectural development of California.
An analysis of these varieties of regionalism, however insightful in clarifying
blurred notions, does not provide us with a more profound understanding of regionalism.
In turning to the work of Lewis Mumford we may observe a more comprehensive
understanding of regionalism, an understanding which has general applications. In a
series of lectures entitled The South in Architecture, published in 1941 Mumford equated
Thomas Jefferson, American patriot and amateur architect, as a chief exponent of the
International style of the eighteenth century. 1 The first truly American regional
architect, however, was Henry Hobson Richardson. There were four attributes which
Mumford saw as regional in the work of Richardson. First, Richardson used local
materials in his buildings; New England quarries supplied Milford granite, brown
sandstone, and Longmeadow stone for New England buildings. Secondly, Richardson
transformed the traditional white cottage or farmhouse into a wide-windowed cottage
with a new feeling for American requirements and the landscape. Thirdly, Richardson
utilized local colors in his work: the richness of sumac, red oak, sweet fern, lichened
rock, pine tree, and butternut. Finally, Richardson, in his domestic production continued
the established traditions of working with wood while transforming those traditions. The
essence, then, of Richardsons regional architecture is that it is composed in such a
fashion that it cannot be divorced from its landscape without loosing something of its
practical or aesthetic valueor both together. 2
But, significantly, Richardsons architecture went beyond local tradition, color,
and material; his work sought an expression of universal form. While Richardson
embraced the responsibilities of functional necessities, requirements of program, comfort,
the presence of local materials and traditions, Mumford accorded Richardson an extra
dimension, a transcendence rooted in Richardsons romanticism and search for a
universal expression of form in the context of a regional architecture. To actually
experience one of Richardsons major works, such as Trinity Church in Boston (1872), is
to be in the presence of an architectural search for formal expression, an open-ended
search connected to urban landscape and locale and the traditions of architecture itself.
The physical experience of Richardsons work, then, tends to confirm Mumfords
observations.
For Mumford this conception of regionalism had additional implications. Through
Richardson, Mumford saw an influence that extended to other American architects. In
one domain were such successors as Buffington, Sullivan, and Root; in another, Frank
Lloyd Wright; in a third realm, John Galen Howard and the contemporary Bernard
Maybeck. To each of these architects Mumfords ideas of regionalism could be applied as
an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them, that employs local
materials and colors, and marries itself to the landscape while searching for an
architectural expression in universal architecture forms. Furthermore, in the work of

Maybeck and other architects of the San Francisco Bay Region Mumford saw a modern,
regional architecture that provided a critique to the International Style.
After the publication of The Brown Decades in 1931 Mumford began encouraging
the inclusion of the Bay Region school into the corpus of American architectural history,
a body which had been formed from a European perspective. When Mumford published
his advocacy in 1947 of the Bay Region style as a native and humane form of
modernism, he proposed a corrective to a sterile and abstract modernism. 3 The origins
of the Bay Region style existed in the work of John Galen Howard, a transplanted
easterner educated in the Beaux Arts tradition, and Bernard Maybeck; their work was
contemporaneous with the launching of modernism in Europe, but they had, in effect,
been superseded by the proponents of the International Style.
Mumfords article created a furor. Siegfried Giedion suggested that Mumford had
made a reactionary attack on the whole of modern architecture. Another response came
from the Museum of Modern Art, the institutional sponsor of the International Style. A
symposium was organized in New York four months after the publication of Mumfords
article in February 1948, and the title of the meeting, What is Happening to Modern
Architecture?, indicated the seriousness with which Mumfords article was taken. 4
The speakers at the MOMA symposium included those who had introduced the
International Style to America, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Director of the museum Collections of
MOMA, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer,
Talbot Hamlin, Lewis Mumford and others. The debate ended rather inconclusively and
had consisted of an attempt to redefine International Style by its originators, and a
reaction presented by those supporting the New Empiricism that was then allied to the
new humanism of the Bay Region school. The controversy was reduced to those who
spoke of standards and styles and those who denounced neologisms as secondary to
producing architecture. From our point of view such a debate is instructive because it
shows the dilution of Mumfords regionalism and its relegation to a level of
misunderstanding and abstraction.
A similar debate occurred later as part of a symposium, The Decade 1929-1939,
organized by the Society of Architectural Historians in 1965. 5 Some of the key speakers
were present at both symposia, including Barr, Hitchcock, and Vincent Scully. With the
expectation of Catherine Bauer Wurster the participants, particularly Scully, revealed a
disdain for ideas of regionalism. In a rather reductive polemic Scully equated Richard
Bennetts ideal scheme for a New York of the Future (1940), the Bauhaus and the Bay
Region School, Mumford, Gropius, and Breuer with pictorialism. In contrast to an
architecture of thin, sliding planes and lightness Scully advocated an architecture of mass
and solidity; his heroes were Mies, Corbus Chandigarh, and the strong, big, masculine
and powerful building of Alvar Aaltos dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (1949). Scully further argued that the Bay Region style was incapable of
developing a monumental urban architecture because it was preoccupied with the singlestory house. We must ask, however, if the Bay Regional school had the opportunity or
need to construct urban monuments and further to inquire about the implications for the
necessity and expression of monuments in a regional context. Also, while it was
appropriate to critique the limitations of the Bay Region style, it was perhaps unfortunate
that Scully and his associates could not see the broader implications of a regional

architecture. The significant point for us, however, is the diminution of the promise of
regionalism.
Nevertheless Mumford had continued to support the Bay Regional school because
he felt its works were a steady growth, producing forms accepted as natural and
appropriate to both client and architect. It was an architecture that was not obsessed with
the flat roof, and did not deliberately avoid projections and overhangs. It was an
architecture that made no effort to symbolize the machine through a narrow choice of
materials and forms: that [had] a place for personalities as different as Maybeck and
Dailey and Wurster and Kump. For Mumford the main problem of architecture at the
time was the reconciliation of the universal and the regional, the mechanical and the
human, the cosmopolitan and the indigenous. The Bay Region style absorbed the
universal lessons of science and the machine and have reconciled them with human wants
and human desires with full regard for the setting of nature, the climate and topography
and vegetation From Mumfords point of view a balance was necessary: no manner
of building that exaggerates the local at the expense of the universal can possibly answer
the needs of our time And ultimately, Bay region architecture both belongs to the
region and transcends the region: it embraces the machine and transcends the machine. It
does not ignore particular needs, customs, conditions, but translates them into the
common form of civilization. 6
In exploring Mumfords ideas of regionalism, expressed in his advocacy of the
Bay Region style, we do not seek to encourage the spread of this style, but the absorption
of its principles. When we summarize these principles we are provided with both criteria
for criticism as well as a direction for the production of architecture, in essence a
constructive regionalism. A true constructive regionalism would respond to local colors,
materials, and customs; it would embrace traditions and transforms tradition; it would be
wed to its setting, in either rural or urban landscape; it would foster craft and push the
limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search for the universal. We may
apply these criteria broadly to any work of architecture, and to any specific work or
architect. When applied to William Wurster, whom Mumford included as a central figure
in the Bay Regional school, we indeed see aspects of constructive regionalisman
emphasis on climate, terrain, program, social functionas well as a preoccupation with
construction detailing and modernist vocabulary that may exist to the detriment of a more
elusive search for architectural form. 7
In effect, then, examining architecture in serious depth may lead us to an
observation which is true of the larger movings of modernism itself: that the model of
modernist aspirations contains profound contradictions, contradictions which have never
been resolved and which have always existedalthough sub rasain the Werkbund, the
Bauhaus, and other generating movements of the avant garde. What, then, are some of the
paradoxes of constructive regionalism? One paradox is that while constructive
regionalism conveys universal qualities, it denies universal style. The imposition of style
or visual hegemony into a particular environment is contrary to a constructive
regionalism. While a constructive regionalism may reveal the personal attributes of a
designer or builder, it denies the glorification of the individual; a constructive regional
architecture is an art of building that does not create an artistic elite or designer caste. We
may admire the artist, the work of his or he hand and eye, but the artist remains one of us.
A constructive regionalism would exalt the craft of building while at the same time

encourage a new consciousness in the manufacture of machine products. The work of the
hand and the skilled use of the machine would achieve new levels of synthesis. In other
words, a constructive regionalism would embrace a total vision of design, a vision not
foreign from that of William Morris, while at the same time embracing an optimistic
belief in the potentialities of technology. A constructive regionalism would embrace
native detail and color and at the same time discourage cultural hedonism. A constructive
regionalism would encourage bonds between people while providing a focus for the pride
and distinction of the individual and his domain through his own production. A
successful constructive regionalism will not only celebrate the individual and his social
context but reinforce those qualities which provide architecture with its own autonomy
and its own cultural life.
Despite paradox a constructive regionalism would provide an ideal, a direction
imbued with optimism. Commodious buildings with proportions appropriate to human
use and facades that are faces of architectural tradition and local life will encourage not
only the bonding of people, but also elevate architecture into an ennobling product of
culture.
May 26, 1980
Anthony Alofsin
1

Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1941), 53.
2
Ibid., The South, 104.
3
Ibid., Skyline, Status Quo The New Yorker, (11 October 1947): 104-106, 109-110.
4
What is Happening in Modern Art? Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 15 (Spring
1948). See also Lewis Mumford, The Architecture of the Bay Region, Domestic
Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, (Catalogue) San Francisco: San Francisco
Museum of Art, 1949.
5
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24 (March 1965): 3-96.
6
Mumford, Bay Region, passim.
7
See William Wilson Wurster, Architectural Forum 79 (July 1943): 45-66; Ibid.
California Architecture for Living, California Monthly (April 1954): 14-19; William
W. Wurster, San Francisco in Portfolio, Magazine of Art 37 (December 1944): 301305.