Bricks and Mortar

The New York Times Book Review, March 10, 1996.

Studies in Tectonic Culture:
The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.
By Kenneth Frampton
Edited by John Cava.
Illustrated. 430 pp. Cambridge, Mass.
The MIT Press. $50.

By Paul Goldberger

Kenneth Frampton has written a stunning book, based on a radical premise for a
theorist of modern architecture: the notion that buildings are real things. Real
things? What else could buildings be? Ah, dear reader, you must not be familiar
with much contemporary architectural theory, which views architecture as the
making of signs (pace, Jacques Derrida) or the making of space (as the modernist
historian Siegfried Gideon and uncountable followers have done) or perhaps as
the establishment of a social order or as an assertion of cultural hegemony. In
most architectural theory, the physical object of a building is but a vehicle to
some less tangible end. ...

The bulk of the text is a set of essays analyzing the work of individual
architects, including Frank LLoyd Wright, Auguste Perret, Mies van der Rohe and
Louis Kahn, among others, often in tremendous detail. ...

Mr. Frampton then reviews 18th- and 19th-century attitudes toward architectural
theory and perception, presenting Greek and Gothic architecture less as
opposites than as two triumphant streams of tectonic inspiration. He pays
particular attention to the work of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, the French
19th-century architect and theorist whose Gothic-inspired work emerged not out
of any nostalgic or picturesque view of Gothic architecture, but out of a
passionate desire to re-create the Gothic spirit of construction. The opposite
of a sentimental  revivalist, Viollet-le-Duc sought a kind of structural
rationalism: noble architecture built on the realities of construction. But the
testhetic of Greek architecture, too, Mr. Frampton reminds us, was driven first
by construction. ...

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Thus the canonical pantheon of modernist heroic "master builders" is reasserted,
as ever, politically and socially neutered.

Shame, Professor Frampton; shame, Mr. Goldberger, for this continuing -- now
over two decades-long by the two of you -- pusillanimous narrowing of the
architectural debate.

Pray, Mr. Muschamp will challenge this escape-from-reality into rebarbative
Russell-Hitchcockian-Johnsonian architectural historicism. And, perhaps,
depending on the security of his job, he will demonstrate why the "giants"
Frampton reviews and Goldberger cites would have guffawed at such epicene,
Scully-Venturi, couch-potato surfing of architecture.


E. V.-le-D.