Reflecting on tectonics is impossible without thinking about its ideation by Kenneth Frampton, which, despite the quasi-mysticism of Marco Frascari’s “Tell-the-Tale Detail”, or Peter Rice’s structural expressionism (especially as manifested in Piano’s best work), is how most architecture students, practitioners, and educators come to and deploy ideas of any poetics of construction (I suppose there is also Zumthor). If Frampton’s tectonics conception claims to resist architecture’s dissolution by capitalist production, programming mostly speaks the language of that dissolution. Like function (or functionalism), modernity typically limits programming to over systematization (even without informatics, algorithms, or parametric design). Likewise, despites Tschumi’s claims, “disprogramming” sits within the systematizing orbit of programming, similarly Koolhaas’ performative indeterminateness. In all instances, cybernetic aspirations infuse programming in architecture, inseparably from its happiest home in computer science. At best, tectonics and programming suggest a negative dialectical tension, impossible to resolve but worth pursuing. At worst, tectonics and programming are two sides of architecture’s systematizing habits paralleling the long erasure of its disciplinary status as a liberal profession.
Leaving programming aside, the argument here is: instead of providing architecture with a foolproof liberating grammatology, Frampton’s attempt to precisely define the parameters of tectonic resistance, as prerequisite for architecture’s redemption, disables the concept, and the architecture that follows, ensnaring both within ambits of totalizing system, ensuring results more programmatic than de-systematizing (which would constitute substantive resistance). Hence, the urgency of conceptualizing a negative tectonics, inflected by the initial thoughts on its contours introduced throughout the following pages, anticipates a conception (negatively) dialectical enough to resist easy capture, systematization, or transformation into the banalities of design school briefs, instrumentalized theoretical discourse, or architects’ confusedly self-promoting affirmations of art, autonomy, business, science, social justice, and spectacle.
Forward Towards the Negative
Helpfully, in her consideration of Frampton and his tectonics, Mary McLeod offers clues to the genetic defects of Frampton’s tectonics: “Frampton seems to be searching for a logic (and, in his case, an aesthetic vision) that would embrace the paradoxes of two seemingly disparate worldviews [phenomenology and Marxism] in his search for reservoirs of resistance against the onslaught of ‘commodity culture’ and the ‘imperatives of production.’”[1] I guess Marxism in the original quote alludes to the Frankfurt School and represents Left/modernism, whereas phenomenology represents Right/traditionalism.
Accepting McLeod’s reading, Frampton’s search “for a logic”, to construct “an aesthetic vision” resistant to architecture’s capture by the culture and building industries depends on his embrace of the “seemingly disparate worldviews” of “phenomenology and Marxism.”[2] Especially as performed by architects (practitioners, teachers, students), both represent totalizing visions. While Marxist tendencies toward absoluteness are familiar enough, architectural phenomenology mostly evades such badging, perhaps because it largely presumes the continuity of an unfallen golden age despite endless rupturing catastrophes, which sets it Right of center, in contrast to Marxism’s Left of center positioning. However, as Foucault concludes, “the phenomenological method certainly wants to account for everything, whether it be to do with the cogito or with what precedes reflection, with what ‘is already there’ when the cogito is activated; in this sense, it is clearly a totalising method.”[3] Arguably, Frampton’s persisting impulse to construct the logic of an aesthetic vision requires him to attempt to “account for everything” in totalizing fashion, intermixing Marx and Marxism with phenomenology. However, Frampton’s putative struggle against capitalist maximalization amounts to programming solutions ensnared within the constellations of thought and action he longs to resist and overcome.
Conveniently, Foucault provides a route away from tectonics and program by asserting: “from the moment one cannot describe everything, it is through the concealing the cogito, in a way putting aside that first illusion of the cogito, that we can see emerging entire systems of relation that otherwise would not be describable”; including, for example, the associability of phenomenology and Marxism as simultaneously conservative and totalizing in their nostalgic programmatic aspirations.[4]
Arguably, rather than liberating architecture, Frampton’s tectonics formulation ensnares it within totalizing system – immobilizing the concept while incapacitating the architecture it prefigures. Recuperating the tectonic entails rescuing it from programmatic Marxism and (Heideggerian) phenomenology alike. Admitting catastrophe and fragmentation rather than denying either are first steps towards a negative tectonics, guided by Adorno’s negative dialectics, which continuously thinks thought against itself (in theory and practice), thereby avoiding the resolving tendencies of Frampton’s tectonic ambition.
Tectonics Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
The overriding effort of many contemporary purveyors of tectonics to achieve synthesis begs to be overcome negatively. Nowhere is the penchant for eradicating tension, critical historical perspectives, and consciousness from affirmations of the tectonic more pronounced than in the following:
“The authenticity of architectural experience is grounded in the tectonic language of building and the comprehensibility of the act of construction to the senses. We behold, touch, listen and measure the world with our entire bodily existence, and the experiential world becomes organised and articulated around the center of the body.”[5]
Unfortunately, too many architecture students are introduced to Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin, source of the preceding quote, without encouragement to critically interrogate the text. Were I to teach the text (I do not), I would introduce it something like this:
“The authenticity [what is meant by authenticity? Authentic to whom? How does it compare to the inauthentic?] of architectural experience is [is this universal, individual, situated, bodily, or primarily visual? Is architectural experience primarily aesthetic or is it primarily gained through use?] grounded in the tectonic language of building [What does it mean to say this? What is the tectonic language of building? If experiencing architecture is grounded in the tectonic language of building – whatever that might be – can there be no accounting of Le Corbusier’s arguably a‑tectonic work?] and the comprehensibility of the act of construction to the senses [How does this explain the generally extruded quality of contemporary construction? Does this simply hint at bodily perceptions of gravity?]. We behold, touch, listen and measure the world with our entire bodily existence, and the experiential world becomes organised and articulated around the center of the body [The first part might be true by default, what is the evidence for the second?].”[6]
Pallasmaa’s too problematic to be useful representation reveals Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s formulation of nearly the same as much more persuasively pragmatic.[7] Despite its association with Pallasmaa, Frampton’s working out of the tectonic is too compelling to ignore:
“Greek in origin, the term tectonic derives from the term tekton, signifying carpenter or builder. This in turn stems from the Sanskrit taksan, referring to the craft of carpentry and to the use of the ax. Remnants of a similar term can also be found in Vedic, where it again refers to carpentry. In Greek it appears in Homer, where it again alludes to carpentry and to the art of construction in general. The poetic connotation of the term first appears in Sappho where the tekton, the carpenter, assumes the role of the poet. This meaning undergoes further evolution as the term passes from being something specific and physical, such as carpentry, to the more generic notion of construction and later to becoming an aspect of poetry. In Aristophanes we even find the idea that it is associated with machination and the creation of false things. This etymological evolution would suggest a gradual passage from the ontological to the representational. Finally, the Latin term architectus derives from the Greek archi (a person of authority) and tekton (a craftsman or builder).”[8]
More succinctly, Frampton’s good architect is in parts a carpenter and builder, adept at using appropriate tools, including for construction in general. But emergence of its poetic dimension is what makes the tectonic interesting: shifting it from the specific (carpenter), to the general (construction), to arrive at the poetic, which for Frampton charts the movement of the tectonic from the ontological (related to the nature of being), to the representational (relating to symbolic interpretation). Together they confirm Frampton’s indebtedness to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, particularly “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1954).
Ultimately, Frampton’s debt to the reprehensible Heidegger’s tainted thought, especially when he attempts to blend it with Adorno’s negative dialectics, produces conceptualizations and programs that are soupier than salad-like and more gruel-like than either. Frampton is an incisive critic but a less powerful theorist: he continuously struggles to frame generative ideas, no matter how seductive. The irreconcilable differences between Heidegger and Adorno suggest forgetting the former to come closer to the latter could have better equipped Frampton’s critical regionalism and tectonic representations to resist systematization as aesthetic models of performative resistance, and thereby dissolution into easily digestible jargons of authenticity, ready for deployment in and by the culture industry. Perhaps Frampton – even more so than Zevi or Giedion – confirms Tafuri’s prohibition against operative history and criticism by historians, defined as follows:
“What is normally meant by operative [history and] criticism is an analysis of architecture (or of the arts in general) that, instead of an abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precise poetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historical analyses programmatically distorted and finalised. […]. Operative criticism is, then, an ideological criticism (we always use the term ideological in its Marxian sense): it substitutes ready-made judgments of value (prepared for immediate use) for analytical rigour.”[9]
By anticipating long before the fact, the failure of Frampton’s best-known forays into operative criticism (portrayed as historiography), Tafuri informs my analysis:
“But there is not much evidence that these deformations of history have had much impact, especially on the younger generations. In the last resort, operative historicism fails completely, precisely in the field of concrete action: if we take for granted the inability of architects and of the public in general to state the complexity and specificity of historical events, then the actualisation of history consciously ratifies the proliferation of myth. And myth is always against history.”[10]
Frampton’s planning of precise poetical tendencies is cognate with Tafuri’s characterization of operative criticism as preoccupied with the current “architectural situation”; for Frampton “the primacy given to the scenographic in the evolution of the bourgeois world” manifests “the predominant tendency today […] to reduce all architectural expression to the status of commodity culture.”[11] For Tafuri, to construct accounts of how dominant forces play out in cultural production, history must reject operativity by remaining independent of current activity. Perhaps Frampton’s inclination towards manifesto-like pronouncements – operative criticism – reveals an enduring attachment to himself as a practicing architect. Readers familiar with my most recent publications will be aware that much like Tafuri, I extol the value of operative criticism for artistic and architectural invention, so long as it is not portrayed as “scientific history”.[12]
Steps Towards Negative Tectonics
While I remain preoccupied with the oft neglected social dimension of architecture (mirroring general suppression of its political dimensions), these are symptoms rather than causes. Admittedly, identifying the sources of architecture's emptying – which preoccupies Frampton – presents nearly impossible problems, not least because the condition is profoundly overdetermined. Consequently, the shift from disciplinary knowledge to technicity, summed up as anti-theoretical commercial (or neo-avant-garde) practice, could begin to seem something like causes. But even these are symptomatic of something preceding them. Fixating on causes –diagnosis – preserves symptoms and their aetiology by shielding project (prognosis) from Utopia (the science of alternatives). Ultimately, no matter how much systemic transformation is claimed for performative Newness (its appearances), the claims themselves, and the results, sustain systemic homeostasis; even amplifying the dominant’s decisive hold on reality, including the production of space. The most obvious example of this, which each passing decade crystalizes, is the nearly complete dissociation of aesthetic and social claims from results in the case of stylistic postmodernism.
Ostensibly, postmodernism revalued intuition, locality, and ordinariness (irrationality) in reaction to modernism’s reputed scientific rationality. In art historical terms, as in the public imagination, this denoted “buildings that courted a selective eclecticism, often utilizing elements of Classical or Neo-classical origin.” Most charitably, 1970s and 1980s postmodernism is “perceived as growing out of the resistance to a canonical modernism in the 1960s, in turn related to the growing pluralism in art and architecture that came to be associated with Post-modernism from the early 1980s.”[13] Despite apparent variety, architectural postmodernism’s poles, staked out by so-called greys and whites, across a spectrum encompassing Venturi’s populism, Eisenman’s abstractions, Graves’ whimsy, Rossi’s initial seriousness, or Johnson’s cynicism (amongst many others), little changed. Instead, socioculturally, the myriad repackaging exercises were consolidating, unsurprisingly, since in most instances, apparent transformation was superficial – mere aesthetics, even when masked as either political or autonomous. From within this context, Frampton's imagined critical regionalism and then tectonics represented third way alternatives to populism (stylistic postmodernism) and abstraction (deconstructivism / the neo-avant-garde), able to resist the universalising tendencies of globalised production.
Although Fredric Jameson’s influential readings of architectural postmodernisms (at least for architecture academics; a select grouping of self-referencing architects; some PhD candidates in architecture, history, theory, or criticism; and fewer students) could seem a kind of boosterism of neo-avant-gardist pretences, his deepest insights (intriguingly close to Tom Wolfe’s conclusions in From Bauhaus to Our House, 1981) are revealed in the title of arguably his best known book: Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). As simultaneously captured by the building and culture industries, architecture – no matter the claims – decorates capital above all else. With very few exceptions, architecture’s sociopolitical project is feeble, its claims to autonomy unconvincing, and its results commercial. It is within this frame that Frampton’s tectonics, appropriated thereafter by others, begs to be interrogated; as an expression of postmodernism; more a manifestation of the cultural logic of (late) capitalism than a convincing form of resistance to architecture’s dissolution (whether aesthetic or political).
Opening Salvo
In his 1973 book, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, Tafuri militated for nothing less than reimagining architecture, far beyond Frampton’s remediations:
“when the role of a discipline ceases to exist, to try to stop the course of things is only regressive Utopia, and of the worst kind. […]. What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture. That is to say, what it has taken away in general from ideological prefiguration.”[14]
What if divisions of labour are the primary cause of architecture’s perpetual crises, just as its more critical observers have identified. Bereft of its previous tasks, emptied of its political (ideological) dimensions, and social project (Utopia), and dissociated from art, architecture’s projects struggle against consumption and dissolution. In almost every instance, architectural conception and production are circumscribed by habituation to the logic of capitalism; limited to “form without Utopia”, the “ideology of the plan”("as an operative mechanism"), and the performative (or futile) resistance of outmoded “hopes in design”, which transforms most work into contributions to the “plan of capital”.[15]
Whether plans, or constructions extruding them into three-dimensions, the “ideology of the plan” precludes social transformation – the basis for a resistant architecture, even prefiguratively (the architecture and transformation it imagines or that precedes it). In recapitulating Tafuri’s lamentations on architecture’s demise, I have introduced at least some provisionality – tempering his absolutist tone with fugitive agency’s feeble possibility: almost or most, rather than all. Even so, this is no giddy optimism. All it suggests is skirmishes with capitalism, mainly doomed to failure, but extolled in my book Recoding Architecture Pedagogy.
Amongst all the schematising divisions of labour architecture has been subject to, engineering’s split-off from it around 1750 remains decisive. Into the void, image-making, spectacle, performative ethics, and technicity threaten to overwhelm almost all other concerns – the very things Frampton sought to counter. As a commercial enterprise, dominated by the building industry, myths of autonomy, dreams of escaping use, disregard for tectonics (gravity), and the bodily experience of buildings (use as primary) constitute false promises that sharpen the divisions of labour Tafuri believed deprived architecture of “a corresponding institutionally defined role”, which “illusory hopes” in design offered no hope in redressing.[16] Ultimately, even the pivotal split between architecture and engineering is less cause than symptom; it simply advances intensification of the divisions of labour capitalism depends on.
Nonetheless, the critical juncture marked out by engineering’s separation from architecture demands attention, not as fixable by education, any more than by picturing suturing the cut with magical remediation, even if persuasively represented as either an aesthetic or a form of resistance, which overburdens the tectonic. Inevitably, liberal fantasies of progressive education are ineffectual in shifting matters of consciousness or influencing systemic transformation, highlighting a conundrum of the tectonic: no matter how it finds its way into architecture culture, or at whichever level – as structural expression, exhibitionism, as sober and disciplined, or as a mediated poetics of construction – prevailing modes of production, of space and of buildings, defeats it.
And yet, the pull of Frampton’s tectonics represents an apparent holding action against architecture’s wayward descent into an abyss of meaninglessness. But it is at best a placebo – devoid of curative capacities that nonetheless on occasion produce efficacious outcomes (Miralles more than Zumthor). No matter its apparent rude health, or however much the tectonic promises cure, or sporadically produces worthwhile results, identifying new tasks for architecture within the present reality – free of mythifying delusions, or masquerading as scientific history – is pressing.
Architecture’s Death & Rebirth?
With my thinking influenced by Lefebvre, Ruskin, and other (mostly Jewish) romantic anti-capitalists, often anarchist in name or spirit, my estimation is reconstructing architecture entails imagining demythologised tasks for it (an argument developed in Recoding Architecture Pedagogy). Preoccupied with rooms in one direction, cities and land in the other, mediated by buildings; addressing architecture’s multitudinous problems to define its tasks – beyond image or technicity – depends on intensifying tensions between conflicting desires, including between artistic autonomy and the burdens of use, to establish cross-axes out of which promising work could emerge (but only if Frampton’s confused aesthetic/activist inclinations are resisted).
Complexifying Frampton’s tectonic brackets its tendencies toward (fictionally resistant) polarities – ostensible mediation between extremes (the aesthetic and the political), and its drive towards synthesis (as a poetics of construction); necessary to shield it from being “essentially non-transgressive”, by “in fact” affirming “the framework” it ostensibly criticizes.[17] Indeed, this makes the tectonic incapable of transgressiveness – despite Frampton ascribing noncompliant aspirations to it: by affirming what it criticises, it is subsumed within the construction industry. But identifying unacknowledged tensions in the tectonic (it cannot be both autonomous – art, and political – action simultaneously), or its theoretical shortcomings (the attempt to synthesise art and politics deprives it of a critical position by making it neither political nor art), can chart a path towards recuperating its pragmatic value as semiautonomous, thereby unleashing it to agonistically skirmish with capitalist production, disabused of its current mythologising distortions.
Without replacing one systematization with another, Adorno’s reflections on art and architecture suggest how the tectonic could become more robust if freed of impulses to synthesise, or to conceptualise dialectics as opposites, to instead intensify its internal tensions by embracing perpetual collision. And, inevitably, Heidegger must go. According to Adorno,
“Art is not to be reduced to the unquestionable polarity of the mimetic and the constructive, as if this were an invariant formula […]. But what was fruitful in modern art was what gravitated toward one of the extremes, not what sought to mediate between them; those works that strove after both, in search of synthesis, were rewarded with a dubious consensus.”[18]
Despite its apparent clarity, there is a softness to Frampton’s tectonic conception, which sets it drifting toward mediation, if not synthesis, including between Adorno and Heidegger (and the Frankfurt School and phenomenology more generally). While synthesis might seem the aim of dialectical thinking, Adorno is clear, gravitating toward one of the extremes – ontological or representation in Frampton’s tectonics – protects efforts from “dubious consensus”. The tectonic would benefit from gravitating towards the extreme of representation, or better yet, use, in tension with production. As framed by Adorno, it is a fruitful dialectic of “construction” in tension with “expression”:
“Construction is not the corrective of expression, nor does it serve as its guarantor by fulfilling the need for objectivation; rather, construction must conform to the mimetic impulses without planning, as it were […]. Similarly, construction cannot, as a form empty of human content, wait to be filled with expression. Rather, construction gains expression through coldness.”[19]
One pole of the dialectic neither corrects nor guarantees the other, rather, intensifying tensions between them leans toward work that in maintaining some degree of autonomy persists as critical, which makes it significant. The human warmth of expression in intensifying tension with the coldness of construction establishes a dynamic condition wherein mimesis inflects construction, gaining in expressiveness through intensification of its nonhuman coldness. Without anticipating anything beyond the hidden causes of significant work, the contours of Adorno’s reflections are nearly untraceable in Frampton’s affirmational tectonics. Clarifying the point further – right up to identifying great architecture with its “superfunctional language”, Adorno provides a much stronger conception of an intensified tectonic – a negative tectonic:
“Functionalism today, prototypically in architecture, would need to push construction so far that it would win expression through the rejection of traditional and semitraditional forms. Great architecture gains its suprafunctional language when it works directly from its purposes, effectively announcing them mimetically as the work's content.”[20]
A major shortcoming of Frampton’s tectonic is sacrifice of a negative dialectic in favour of practice-ready schemas for ostensibly good work. Not only does this deprive his conception of traction, but its failings also sets the ground for an overabundance of precisely the sort of work he hoped adherence to his concepts could resist: the scenographic preponderance of architectural production today that reduces architecture to commodity, mirroring the bourgeois world.
What if instead, the suprafunctional language of great architecture was understood to be gained only “when it works directly from its purposes [uses], effectively announcing them mimetically as the work's content”, achieved by pushing “construction so far that it [wins] expression through the rejection of traditional and semitraditional forms”, including renouncing buildings as decorative spectacles adorning increasingly incomprehensible cities.[21] “Architecture would thus attain a higher standard the more intensely it reciprocally mediated the two extremes — formal construction and function.”[22] But not the tectonic, so long as Frampton’s diffusive appropriation of intellectual sources prevails, limiting its capacities for pushing beyond superficial amelioration.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
For Frampton, the world is overwhelmingly just, reconcilable to the will of the good, but it is precisely this affirmation that ultimately binds the tectonic to what already is – building production transparently manifesting the dominant that dominates, propagating exactly the sort of work Frampton seeks to resist. In this way, Frampton’s tectonics is ultimately a phenomenology of spirit – identified with direct access to a golden age of unfallenness supposedly accessible simply by turning toward it. It presumes the possibility of absolute knowledge, informed by comprehensive understanding, ostensibly ensuring overcoming alienation, or rendering it a nonissue. Apart from being tainted by Heidegger’s unrepentant affinity for National Socialism, with its indivisible antisemitism, aligned with the ideology and results of the Holocaust, Frampton’s tectonic disregards the intransigent conditions of alienation that Catastrophe renders a permanent fixture of existing in the world, including for cultural production and recovery’s limited prospects. Crucially, this reveals nothing more than Frampton’s apparent naiveté in one direction and underdeveloped critical historical grounding, or dialectical thought processes, in the other.
The alternative to insurgent and inventive practices is submission to the seemingly inexorable eradication of architecture’s remnant roles (social, cultural, political/ideological), transforming it into little more than a protected title. Following successive dissolution of its capacities, including prohibition against engaging in what Tafuri called “ideological prefiguration”, architecture’s destiny (intensifying since its digitisation from the late 1980s onwards) – the apotheosis of its disciplinary cessation – appears to be on the near horizon, as more of its tasks are inevitably displaced to Ai.[23]
More than fifty years ago, Tafuri argued that architects transformed into technicians in building industries demanded reconceptualising their tasks, starting with architecture education. His motivations were dialectical, not subservient (or instrumentalizing) – even in his darkest estimations, sparks of alternatives are findable, though not by him (stymied as he was by Marxian orthodoxies). His welcoming the instauration of new tasks for architecture is emancipatory, not conformist (despite being obscured by the interminable wait for revolution). Today, architects’ next transition seems their transformation from building industry technicians (with few exceptions), to fully fledged imagineers — devolving the last remnants of architecture’s discipline to the new tasks of effective but compliant prompt engineers. And yet, embracing their proletarianization could translate into architects’ self-organisation (unionisation), which promises at least the return of a modicum of autonomy to their practices. As Spencer and D’Aprile observed, “this movement […] does not spell the death of architecture but rather, in the long run, a new life for it”.[24]
Beginning with the complexities of Adorno’s proposition that writing “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, the comforts of phenomenology and program in their tectonic and technocratic guises beg for abandoning, to begin working in the fallen world as it is, guided by desires for alternative relationships, anticipatorily illuminating elusive revolution.[25] A negative tectonic foregoes illusions of continuity without renouncing use (bodies or gravity), while disavowing autonomy myths, even as some artistic distance is maintained. The persisting political context of architecture’s production implicates it in making and maintaining brutal inequalities, including despoiling the planet, confirming the persisting significance of Adorno’s thinking for working in and through catastrophe, necessitating foregoing repetition in favor of reconstruction, while surrendering all prospects of resolution, if not desires for it.
Slicing through cross axes is the operative procedure for recovering tectonics from the totalizing conceptions that neutralize its potential power. Frampton’s error was to fall into the trap of sloganeering, coining easily digestible catchphrases that make his brand of radicalism palatable. Although this popularized his most powerful ideas, it also defanged them, most dramatically his “critical regionalism” conceptualization, which quickly devolved into a jargon of authenticity perfectly aligned with the culture industry, a failing Jameson adeptly observed when writing about Frampton’s “critical regionalism”, one cause perhaps of Frampton later backing away from the concept. His “tectonics” appears to have fared much better. But Jameson’s reservations about “critical regionalism” are largely applicable to “tectonics” as well. For example, Jameson notes that “critical regionalism” inevitably seeks, “by describing the constitutive features of authentic works of art as they already exist, to suggest invariants and norms for the production of future works.”[26]
Ideations of regions are ultimately as circumscribed as any poetics of construction subject to (subsumed within) the building industries determined by technicity; shaped by capitalist production; beholden to performance standards; and restricted by material costs. In short, just as the idea of a region, the regional, and the local are at best fragile, but increasingly implausible (notwithstanding stubborn traces), Frampton’s tectonic presumes a barely existent solid ground to support the normative presumptions animating both “critical regionalism” and the “tectonic”. Perhaps Frampton’s age or his professional status when he wrote both is significant. He was 52 or 53 in 1983 when “Critical Regionalism” was published (the age when many architects finally come into their own), and 64 or 65 in 1995 when Studies in Tectonic Cultures was published, the capstone of his work on the topic and of his career. His reflections on a poetics of construction extend back through “Rappel a L'ordre the Case for the Tectonic”, 1990, and Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980, which contains some of Frampton’s strongest writing, especially the sections where he powerfully intertwines cultural expression and technological production, from the 17th-century to the near present in the 5th edition (2020).[27]
Inevitably, Frampton’s tectonic conception is more persuasive than critical regionalism, not least because the latter is so clearly a mythologization of a wish in the form of a project, while the former is a powerful fairytale – a utopian longing – potentially compelling enough to begin reshaping reality. Perhaps that has less to do with its hopeful narrative than with moribund architecture culture, generally weak teaching in architecture schools, and the corrosive effects of professional cultures, the representative bodies of each, and the downward direction legislated by accreditation – the milieu Frampton by default is constrained to represent, rather than effectively resist.
Though he arrived from practice, Frampton is first and foremost a career academic. Hierarchically organized bureaucratically rational organizations cannot countenance agitation or insurgency. As such, utopian aspiration is incompatible with career progression within institutions. In the event, Frampton is as much consumed by the culture industry as his Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) office-mate Eisenman. But since the tectonic and critical regionalism constituted some form of putative resistance for Frampton, or his contribution to activism, the moment his programs took the form of an aesthetic they could no longer be political in an operative sense, nor could they be art, which is why both tended toward ideology in its bad sense: mythologizing resistance, thereby limiting it to performative displays. Naming critical regionalism and the tectonic were the first missteps on the road toward lost marginality, to become subjects of architecture school modules, learned conferences, and journals, edited collections, or single authored books: just more platitudes for architects to pay lip service to. Despite being compelling, or precisely because of this, the tectonic is neither a form of resistance nor autonomous (difficult) art. It is instead just one stream of professional culture (amongst others) mostly beyond reflection, with its thought structures immune to modes of thinking against itself, dialectically (and negatively). As Jameson observes,
“If, as Adorno came to think, current society reproduces itself by way of practices and habits, and technocracy and consumerism not only no longer require ideational grounding but aim precisely to eliminate the last vestiges of distance implicit in ideas and concepts as such […] then ideological critique loses its mission, and the tracking down and correction of intellectual error is a less urgent ideological and political activity than the elimination of philosophical activity altogether.”[28]
Paradoxically, what makes Frampton so much more agreeable than many architecture writers (who fantasize autonomy by way of third level abstraction, while dutifully attending to their careers), also entraps his concepts in a kind of not-political, not-autonomous, not aesthetic netherworld, whereby they too easily become toothless soundbites unable to resist consumption, lacking the robustness to take the first steps towards changing the world. But since revolution remains as far off as ever, its promised redemption constitutes yet another distortion amongst others. At best, all that is possible, and hardly that, are skirmishes with capitalism that must ultimately be self-destroying, not as nihilistic acts of self-abnegation but as autonomous maneuvers capable of fending off – even momentarily – the solvent of consumption.
The thing Frampton never quite deals with but learned anarchists cannot avoid, is the relative obdurateness of the very structures that all but nullify Frampton’s split concepts: aesthetic dictates masquerading as resistance, or resistance masquerading as aesthetic dictates. While Frampton knows the shape of architecture, its tectonic or critical regional potential does not reside in the hands of architects, since the production of space is ultimately out of their control; he does not subject his thinking to the necessary discomforts of thinking against itself, which a negative tectonic must do to do to resist, even quixotically, its immediate devourment. And just as Utopia can be desired but not depicted, or ‘Pataphysics is nameable but undefinable, a negative tectonics is a matter of consciousness, not a politics, nor an aesthetics — it has no final form. But as this is an architecture paper, proffering some model seems obligatory, even if only by way of analogy, which brings me to van Eyck and back to Adorno (though other architects and philosophers are available).
Inevitably, alongside Adorno’s negative dialectics, taking steps towards a negative tectonics follows a parallel track vigorously laid out by Aldo van Eyck in his extraordinary 1962 essay “Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline”, which persists as a surer path to reform for architecture than the tectonic offers, although barely trod by educators, students, or architects. Echoing the substance of van Eyck’s proposition, Adorno argues,
“A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them. Mere formal beauty, whatever that might be, is empty and meaningless; the beauty of its content is lost in the preartistic sensual pleasure of the observer. Beauty is either the resultant of force vectors or it is nothing at all. A modified aesthetics would outline its own object with increasing clarity as it would begin to feel more intensely the need to investigate it. Unlike traditional aesthetics, it would not necessarily view the concept of art as its given correlate. Aesthetic thought today must surpass art by thinking art. It would thereby surpass the current opposition of purposeful and purpose-free, under which the producer must suffer as much as the observer.”[29]
Adorno’s thought breathes in and out in ways Frampton barely approaches in his thinking. Aldo van Eyck envisioned an architecture likewise, organised around the interstitial in-between referring to psychological ambivalence as to its spatialisation as thresholds, but never primarily abstractly as might be imagined — material prevails as the first point of contact between buildings and their users, manifested by strongly defined structural systems, and forms offered up for continuous appropriations, fully cognisant of the building industry.