Critical Regionalism as Compromise

I had never heard of critical regionalism before these readings, which is interesting because I think I’ve been indoctrinated with this concept throughout my architectural education. It seems critical regionalism is the closest thing our generation has to an agreed upon movement, but where does it compare with the movements of the recent past?

Modernism was shocking. It was a total departure from the norm, a dramatic shift. Architects were the authors of real change, and they challenged the public’s understanding of the built environment. The public trusted us, they trusted our expertise.  When the weaknesses of modernism became more and more apparent, that trust was weakened, and the public became more reluctant to accept the wild ideas of the architect.

Postmodernism, then,was an apology for modernism. It gave up on the challenging nature of the avant-garde and set out to make a pleasing, comprehensible architecture. Architecture began to lose its impact on culture and society, and the already weakened trust of the architect was threatened more by a lack of relevance in a globalizing society.

I believe critical regionalism is a compromise between these two movements of the recent past. Architects today find themselves in a global society, with local identities disappearing around them. They find themselves in a weakened position compared to their predecessors, without the same implicit trust of the public. At the same time, we are trained to recognize and diagnose the issues of the built environment and respond to them. We know we can’t completely throw out the playbook and start over; modernism did that. We know we can’t lean into globalized construction methods and vernacular without significant meaning; postmodernism did that. We recognize the faults in each as well as our own limitations in the marketplace. We can’t invent a new method; we can’t roll over and lose the significance of place. What we can do is bend our designs, our response to context, our construction details in a way that subtly feels challenging, but not out of place. Neither obvious nor incomprehensible, these designs challenge the public, but leaves a trail of bread crumbs to explain ourselves. It uses accepted and understood construction methods, but differently from the expected.

This is how I think of critical regionalism. I believe it is a slow return in status for the architect; it treads lighter than the universal shift of modernism, but demands more relevance and intellectual respect than postmodernism. The critical regionalist is neither a revolutionary nor a doormat, but a master of balancing expectation and ambition.