Critical Regionalism is Exactly What this World Needs and No One Can Tell Me Otherwise

 “The investigation of the local is the condition for reaching the concrete and the real, and for rehumanizing architecture.”

Yesterday’s lecture and discussion gave me major flashbacks to arguments I’ve had with my mom over the city of Charleston’s architecture. Seriously. To me, it comes back to the sad notion that architecture has peaked and nothing that we will create can be improved from the past. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty pessimistic when it comes to most aspects of life and where society is going. But I struggle with the idea that architecture can only be beautiful when it mimics forms of the past. To me, that speaks of a lack of confidence in our own abilities, an acknowledgment that we cannot do what every century has done before us. If earlier cultures and civilizations had all taken this approach, what would we have? Replicas of Greek and Classical architecture and therefore, no Gothic, Byzantine, Renaissance? The simple fact is that we are able to study all of these beautiful forms and have different opinions on which is better because they exist. Because people took the chance to try something different and because they were designing for a very specific purpose, culture, and lifestyle.

This is exactly the variety and beauty that Critical Regionalism is trying to bring back. We are no longer designing under the influence of the environment we live in, but instead of images we have seen from Japan, construction techniques created in Norway, and materials shipped from Mexico. Critical Regionalism states the obvious: this globalization is creating a sameness among cultures. In 1oo years, we will no longer visit Paris to experience a remarkable difference in lifestyle, architecture and culture. Why should we? It will look exactly the same as where we live. Globalization is creating an artificial sameness, a banal and simple method of architecture.

But the answer is also not to replicate the existing forms of that region, because that is equally artificial. Of course, there is a middle ground and historical buildings should absolutely be preserved. But character of a place is not cemented in its form. It is so much more complex than that, and is affected by current events, current technologies, local materials, site conditions, the culture of the place and the specific purpose of the building. As I have argued with my mom, the Charleston Single House she that she loves would not exist if builders had simply replicated the exact forms that are found in England and Germany. That typology is an excellent example of responding to local conditions in an innovative way at the time. Frampton argues that “if any central principle of critical regionalism can be isolated, then it is surely a commitment to place rather than space.” Critical Regionalism gives us a chance to bring back a uniqueness to the place, a character and beauty firmly rooted in that place and time.