Journal of Architectural Education

ISSN: 1046-4883 (Print) 1531-314X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20

Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of

Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Architecture

Ellen Soroka

To cite this article: Ellen Soroka (1997) Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction
in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, 51:1, 73-75,
DOI: 10.1080/10464883.1997.10734749

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.1997.10734749

Published online: 22 Aug 2013.

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 Much of the appeal of Contemporary Australian Architecture
results from its attractive presentation, its topicality, and the
accessibility of the information to all readers. However, though of
much value in many respects and splendidly designed, the book is
marred by some serious shortcomings that call for comment.
Structured as a collection of projects arranged under the headings
"Public Buildings," "Commercial Buildings," and "Houses"
(though the logic is elusive), the book includes a brief preface and
an introduction that are the only attempt to cast an overall historical
or critical perspective on .recent Australian architecture.
The book does not claim to be a history. Rather, it presents
written and visual information on forty-five individual projects.
Although interesting snippets of historical reference occasionally
appear in text, notes, and captions (see the writings on Seidler,
Daryl Jackson, and Murcutt), a clearer positioning of the projects
in the architectural context of Australian, and indeed world, history
would have afforded a more convincing argument as to their
standing merit. However, the text does contain a fair share of
penetrating insights from Jahn, and revealing statements by the
architects also come to light.
The quality of the paper and the large art-book format have
allowed for excellent reproduction of the clearly delineated
drawings and the high-quality photographs by Scott Frances.
Although some of the photography is outstanding, the use of color
is occasionally overpowering. Particularly notewothy is the
sensitivity shown by Frances to the shifting moods generated by
sunshine and shade and the value of both harmony and contrast. He
informs us of the buildings but perhaps tells more about the viewing
of architecture, awakening the observer to perceptions commonly
taken for granted or even overlooked.
No two people are likely to agree on a list of projects to be
included in such a book, and Jahn is certainly entitled to his own
selection. Given the stated criteria, however, a more widely
representative selection would have been desirable. Female
architects, as usual, are conspicuous by their absence. Those who are
acknowledged in the credits appear to gain that mention by grace
of the reputations of the men in their firms.
I, for one, would have found it refreshing to discover some
challenge to the established opinions regarding recent Australian
architectural history, even some fire and brimstone hurled in the
direction of previous writers on the subject! A disappointing aspect
of the material in this book is the predictability of what it reveals.
The same faces appear, and the same story is told. The dominance
of the Sydney-Melbourne axis persists, with the Sydney architecture
generally concerned with tectonics and environmental awareness,
73
and the Melbourne architecture involved in exploring theoretical
and formal issues. Queensland has been producing quite wonderful
climatically attuned architecture on and off since the nineteenth
century, and the recent renaissance, mostly on the Sunshine Coast,
has been in full swing for well over a decade.
Contemporary Australian Architecture is a welcome addition to
a growing list of books on current Australian architecture since the
initial publication in 1986 of Australian Architecture since 1960. In
its discussion of individual buildings, the book resembles two fairly
recent publications (Alan Ogg' s Architecture in Steel: The Australian
Context and Desley Luscombe and Anne Peden's Picturing Archi-
tecture), but Ogg's book covers a much broader geographic field, and
Picturing Architecture is more adventurous in its unconventional
approach to architecture through drawing techniques . 1 Overall,
Contemporary Australian Architecture makes a worthwhile
contribution to the recording of Australian architecture, and for the
uninitiated, it provides a readily digestible introduction to Australian
architecture, combining as it does a highly accessible text with a
splendid compendium of photographs of recent Australian buildings.
jENNIFER TAYLOR
University ofSydney
Note
1. Jennifer Taylor, Australian Architecture since I 960 [ 1986] (Red Hill,
ACT, Australia: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 1990); Alan Ogg,
Architecture in Steel: The Australian Context (Red Hill, ACT, Australia: Royal
Australian Institute of Architects, 1987); and Desley Luscombe and Anne Peden,
Picturing Architecture (Tortola, BVI: Craftsman House, 1992).
Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture
Kenneth Frampton, edited by john Cava
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and
MIT Press, 1995
430 pp., 510 illustrations
$50.00 (cloth)
] ust when Being has slithered back into the closet, it is provocative
at the end of the millennium to force this issue back into the general
discussion by stating that the material attendance of architecture is
of ontological and poetic significance. Kenneth Frampton's new
book, Studies in Tectonic Culture, resists much of what we have
book reviews
already come to accept: the simulation of organic materials and
form by synthetic materials, the disappearance of the body in virtual
space, the disappearance of place in the determination of form, the
dissolution of a lor of things, including discourse, into their own
simulacra. Therefore, we must be grateful to Professor Frampton for
a timely resurrection of an issue that has already begun to engender
a lot of debate.
The thesis Kenneth Frampton advances is not new to us. In
"Rappel a l'ordre: The Case for the Tectonic" (1990), he reminded
us that the traditional mimetic relationship between architecture and
nature has been severed for some time now and that this loss of
center, among many others, resulted in spiritual and material ruin.
He maintains in Studies in Tectonic Culture the critical Marxist and
Frankfurtian anxiety over the commodification of culture that he
expressed in both Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980) and
his essay on critical regionalism of 1983. His interest in advancing
what might be termed by now a rear-guard position is therefore
entirely practical and clearly critical. Frampton's own analysis of his
position allies with Clement Greenberg's position in "Modernist
Painting" (1965), in which Greenberg contends with the
commodification of the arts into kitsch by recognizing that the arts
provide a kind of experience (autonomy) not to be derived from any
other kind of activity. In Studies in Tectonic Culture, Frampton says,
"And while the tectonic does not necessarily favor any particular
style, it does, in conjunction with site and type, serve to counter the
present tendency for architecture to derive its legitimacy from some
other discourse."
Given the egalitarian aspirations of early modern architecture,
one might ask what kind of activity are Greenberg and Frampton
espousing? One must assume that Greenberg and Frampton are
delineating the autonomy of each of the arts in terms of their
material origins. As a historian, Greenberg's method identified the
field of art as simultaneously timeless and in flux: Forms of art might
be universal, but they derive specifically from their changing
situations. Unlike Greenberg, Frampton's critical history does not
sanction a break between premodern and modern architecture: "My
present stress on [structural and constructional] form rather than on
spatial enclosure stems from an attempt to evaluate twentieth-
century architecture in terms of continuity and inflection rather than
in terms of originality as an end in itself." In rendering the subtlety
of his rumination on tectonics he says that although the tectonic is
construction, it is poetic construction; it is interpretive construction.
However, because it is built, it is "a thing rather than a sign."
Frampton's prose suggests a quickening by the same muse that drives
archeology and anthropology in pursuit of origins-the life impulse
September 1997 JAE 51/1
that might still inform us today. In Frampton's anthropology, the
structural unit becomes the basis of evaluating architecture. Modern
or postmodern, Frampton's efforts are directed against tendencies
that deprecate derailing in favor of the image and the gratuitously
figurative. Instead, his position advocates an architecture of
endurance by proclaiming its tectonic heritage.
In his best Heideggerian prose, Frampton reminds us that our
modern preoccupation with architecture's space-rime disposition
began with the end of the nineteenth century (Nikolai lvanovich
Lobachevsky, Georg Riemann, and Albert Einstein) and has led to
a distracting obsession with cultural displacement of "spatial
displacement of the subject in rime." Attributing to Gottfried
Semper a recognition of this cultural displacement, he asks us to
redress this twentieth-century preoccupation-to redirect our
understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture by
meditating on the physicality of tectonics, or, as he defines it, the
"poetics of construction."
"We may assert that the built is first and foremost a
construction and only later an abstract discourse based on surface,
volume and plan." This is where Frampton introduces an
unrecoverable duality, bur he does so seemingly with a purpose. By
pursuing Semper's break between the spatial origins of architecture
and the constructional basis of tectonic form, he can denounce
formal invention as an end in itself, not because there isn't a
relationship between form and construction, bur because he wants,
as he says, to elaborate on the thingness of architecture rather than
on the whatness. He attributes the commodification of modern and
postmodern architecture to an overemphasis on representation and
scenography rather than what he defines as architecture's ontological
roots, or the Beingness of poetic construction. This is where
Frampton's assumptions become less apparent. Doesn't poetic
license entail artifice? Doesn't the history of architecture illustrate
the inauthenticity of material in irs correlation to Being? Whole
stylistic cycles have become the basis for inauthentic charades with
new materials. Is separating construction and form a useful
opposition? What about economics? As Richard Bolton has written,
'The information society, late capitalism, advanced urban life,
postmodernism-call it what you will-the present is marked by rhe
loss of the object, by the invisibility created by communication, by
the electronic and the photographic distribution of images,
information and capital. Objects are merely vehicles used to reach
some rarefied semiotic stare. " 1 Can a return to materials really resist
posrindustrialism's unwitting drive toward dematerialization?
Frampton's passion for the built almost becomes a eulogy in the
context of our present predicament because it promotes a
74
corporealiry only the privileged among us may pursue while obliging
us ro issue an architecture of place and au then ticiry when economic
and political circumstances are, at best, determining the opposite.
Nor does it acknowledge the frontiers left ro architecture-that is,
the elusive terrirory of the electronic, or research-generating, form
outside the necessiry of materials. On the other hand, it provokes the
most questions that advocates of the electronic rarely acknowledge:
Has the significance of the body itself become decorative?
In the first chapter, Frampron introduces us ro a distillation
of characteristics present in the tecronic: words he intends ro use in
the narratives he tells of unique modern architects. In the second
chapter, he turns ro the eighteenth-century French Greco-Gothic
ideal (Perrault, Cordemoy, de Fremin, Laugier, Souffiot, Labrouste)
and nineteenth-century rationalism (Viollet-le-Duc and Choisy).
The third chapter develops the theme of reciprociry between the
structural and the visceral in the tectonic. Frampron returns ro the
German Enlightenment and classical romanticism (Alois Hirr,
Schinkel, Goethe, and Durand), where we are permirred ro indulge
not only in the synthesis of a pagan with rational culrure, but also
in the reconciliation of typos and topos in Schinkel's work.
The rest of the book is devoted ro guiding us through the
unique tecronic proclivities of individual modern architects whose
works, collectively illustrate a lack of unity in modern architects:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Auguste Perret, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
Louis Kahn, Jorn Utzon, and Carlo Scarpa. Although modern
architecture was eventually defined by a commitment ro new
materials and a machine aesthetic, these particular architects are
united only in their exceptional arrention ro material and in some
cases craft, an issue that divided the Bauhaus in its early years and
finally became alien ro modern architecture. What is not obvious
is what Frampton's book, as a whole, intimates: how the
inclinations of these architects were influenced by the theoretical
objectives iterated in the first three chapters. Historically, and
because he has chosen exceptional modern architects (architects
who do not collectively represent the polemics of hardened
modernism), Frampton presents an exhortation of what modern
architecture includes-an extraordinary group of privileged
architects com mined to exploring the logos of techne, and in that
vein he teaches us abour modern architecture's discontinuities. The
book becomes an encyclopedic companion guide to the material
works of these architects. Because each architect represents a unique
trajectory, each chapter might be a book in itself and certainly
envisions a bounry of research ro be done.
Most important, this book is a very courageous and timely
rappel aux armes (call to action) for designers and architectural
75
hisrorians. It continues Frampron's passionate support of designers
who continue to build an architecture of substance at a time that
seems most inauspicious. Frampton 's career as an important savant
and critic of the architecture of late capitalism is sustained in this
effort because it proclaims his interest and belief in an architecture
of physical experience and material presence despite circumstances
that seem to undermine that very possibility. It challenges us, as
always, to reexamine ourselves in light of our presenr crisis. Finally,
it reveals Frampton's critical desire along with a hypersensitiviry and
resistance to economic and political circumstances that
fundamentally threaten the future of architecture.
ELLEN SOROKA
Arizona State University
Note
I . Richard Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents .from the Recent Controversies
in the Arts (New York: New Press , 1992).
Architecture after Modernism
Diane Ghirardo
Thames and Hudson, 1996
240 pp., 166 illustrations (40 color)
$14.95 (paper)
In his book, Death ofthe Guilds, Professions, States, and the Advance
of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present, the sociologist Ell ion Krause
argues that the "guild power" of the professions "is declining as state
power and capitalist power encroach upon it. " In Architecture after
Modernism, Diane Ghirardo shows how that decline has affected
not only the profession of architecture, but also the form and
substance of architecture itself.
Architects, she suggests, have capitulated to the growing
alliance of state and capitalist power largely by ignoring it. "The
post-industrial, post-Fordist, global economic world ... rarely
figure[s] in architectural discussions." Instead , she argues, we
maintain the modernist stance of the "heroic architect formalizing
personal interpretations of social crises" while our role "has been
steadily eroded and increasingly marginalized. " At the same time,
she says, we hold to the ideal of "professional services for hire in an
economy dominated by entrepreneurial capitalism."
Ghirardo traces how this polariry of personal formalism and
pragmatic servitude has enabled us to appear resistant to an
book reviews