Dear Eugene Viollet-le-Duc III,
At 08:45 3/9/96 -0800, you wrote:
>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. ...
>
>-----
>
>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.
>
>
With all due respect to your third generation architectural genes I think
that the thesis set out by Prof. Frampton is crucial and timely.
The realisation that the choice of materials and their arrangement is the
most important defining process in an architectural work, beyond space,
style or sign, represents not only a pragmatic spring cleaning for the
"giants of architectural historicism" but a critical first step towards an
appropriate architecture.
Whether your name allows your strident tone is for you to consult with your
family but I do not think, monsieur, that your grandfather, or for that
matter, any true architect, have the need to rail against any establishment,
no matter how decadent, in order to further their life's work.
Build, mon ami, that is my humble advice.
Vive la clarte des idees justes, mais construisons nos internes batiments,
pierre a pierre, avec douceur.
Tano Cabanyes
Architect
GAIATEC
Environmental Design: "as if our world could be perfect".
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