Cultural Memory & Architectural Regionalism

Kenneth Frampton proposes the idea of critical regionalism as a force to counter globalism in architecture. His idea focuses on six concepts and the final one, “The Visual Versus the Tactile,” begins to talk about the tactile and tectonic experience of building that can reflect a culture or region. I would like to offer that at a certain point, this focus is too heavy on the building as an object and not as a backdrop for daily life (social interaction). While the tectonics of a building can be intriguing to a passerby and can certainly alter the perception of a mass in space, I do think that too much value can be placed upon architectural objects and their visual, not spatial, quality.

In his writing, Here, There, and North of Nowhere, Jeremy Till claims that an architecture of details, which is more or less what Frampton proposes in his sixth point, ignores its role as background and instigator of real life. Till also offers that in the case of a duality, such as globalism and regionalism, one entity assumes the dominant role over the other. Often times the result is that the submissive entity, in this case regionalism, is adapted to the dominant one. However, for something to be critical is must suggest change in the other entity. If this is the case, then critical regionalism should simply be defined as adapting global knowledge to a more specific setting, which in architecture is really no more than best practice.

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