Critical Regionalism (public post of shame #9)

In his essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism, Peter Frampton argues “avant-gardism” has been taken over by capital commercialism and therefore can no longer be sustained as a liberative movement.  In the time after WWII, capitalism became divorced from the liberative drives of cultural modernization.  A movement that once used innovation and novelty to impart wisdom is now used primarily to make money.

Opposed to the avant-garde position, Frampton’s notion of looking back, the arriere-garde, is a position he believes architecture must take in order to sustain itself.  The position includes architecture removing itself from the optimization of technology and from the impulse to return to nostalgic historicism.  The concept intends to give architecture a cultural identity and fight universalization of style and technique.

In a technological age of innovation it seems impossible to completely remove architecture from the optimization of technology.  I think of Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.  Advanced mathematics were used to create a dynamic space frame for the building envelope using thousands of unique parts.  Once developed, the system and technique can be applied anywhere in the world regardless of the regional context. (Of course the project narrative links the undulating form to the geology of the place, though with questionable integrity).

On other hand I think of Peter Zumpthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel.  The ethereal space was created using a simple, almost primitive technique.  112 local pine trees were cut and stacked in a pyramid formation using help from the local community.  The same group managed and poured a concrete encasement around the trees.  After the concrete set, the trees were burned away revealing a captivating, highly specific and sacred place.

Could Zumthor create and equally important chapel using the space frame techniques developed through the Aliyev Cultural Centre?  Could Hadid use field chapel’s low-tech approach more rooted in local materials, place, and people to achieve a more representative cultural center (i.e. – Louis Kahn’s Sher-E-Bangla Nagar)?