Kenneth Frampton

Architect, historian and critic, United States
Kenneth Frampton is an architect, historian, and theorist based in New York. As an
architect with Douglas Stephen and Partners from 1961 to 1966, when he designed an
eight-story (48-unit) apartment block, Craven Hill Gardens (1964), in Bayswater,
London. It received a Ministry of Housing award and is now a Grade Four historic
monument.
In 1962, Frampton also became a technical editor for Architectural Des ign and improved the depth and
quality of the magazine’s coverage of new work, such as the Smithsons’ Economist
Building in London. In 1965, he accepted a teaching position at Princeton University
through the efforts of Peter Eisenman, then a young professor there who had studied at
Cambridge University with Colin Rowe. While at Princeton, he became a member of the
Institute for Architecture and Advanced Studies (IAUS) in New York and eventually one
of the editors of its influential historical and theoretical journal, Oppositions (1972—82). While a
professor at Columbia University (1972–73), with Theodore Liebman and others, he was
involved in the design of an innovative low-rise, high-density, low-income housing
project, Marcus Garvey Village, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for the New York State Urban
Development Corporation.
Frampton is perhaps best known for the concept of “critical regionalism,” which he
first advanced in two articles in 1983. Influenced by the writings of the philosopher
Martin Heidegger, Frampton argued that local building culture and climactic influences
could provide a form of resistance to what he saw as the homogenizing and
environmentally destructive forces of worldwide capitalist development. A vehement
critic of the ironic manipulation of formal imagery characteristic of Postmodernism, since
the 1980s he has asserted the importance of the tectonics of building, a position reflected
in his Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995). In addition to his position at Columbia, he has taught in recent years at
the University of Virginia, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, the ETH (Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology) in Zurich, the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in
Lausanne, and the Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland.
Frampton’s international advocacy for an environmentally and culturally appropriate
modern architecture has gained him considerable respect around the world, although in
the 1990s some have charged him with being too naively idealistic about the role of
architecture in contemporary society in light of the immense changes being wrought by
computing and the spread of a global consumer economy. His response is that our mode
of building has an important role to play in addressing issues of sustainability and global
warming, and he continues to insist that the “architectural profession has an ethical
responsibility for projecting works which have a critically creative character.”