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Peaks and Valleys (by Architecture) in a Flat (Digital) World
[lecture given at the Symposium "Cultures of Design", June 2006, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar]

A new world-landscape is emerging, replacing the one we have known for millennia. It is a landscape whose space is increasingly “flat”. (Thomas Friedman). And this is good news. Peaks and valleys that make locations inaccessible keeping people apart are levelled off. Distances between locations that separate supply and demand are contracted, ‘places’ needed for people to interact disappear. At the same time differences between locations that peaks and valleys sustained are eradicated. Within this new world-landscape, where everything is everywhere, the concept of regionalism is a thing of the past substituted by that of globalism. Rooms, buildings, streets, and the very idea of the city – in the sense of the physical spaces for encounter – are traded for the electronic web and hub.

The new landscape is the product of fundamental legal, economic, and political developments of our time whose roots reach deeply into history. From the technological point of view, it is the outcome of a long term process of transportation and communication innovations. Architecture also, more than any cultural expression, has played an important role in this progressive flattening of the world. Not so much by shrinking distances between locations – that has been the role of means of transportation and media of communication – as by suppressing differences between sites around the world. Since the time of the Greeks and the Romans, it developed technologies that made local constraints and idiosyncrasies irrelevant, and exported standardized types and ‘international styles’ to help expanding states, immigrating institutions, and colonizing enterprises, to establish a legitimate base around the globe, homes away from home, eradicating the ‘genius loci’.

On the other hand, (since Antiquity as attested by Vitruvius) parallel to the levelling of regional identities, architecture played an equally important role in promoting the opposite. As much as it enhanced globalism, it enabled regionalism. Recognizing the limits and potentials of local physical and cultural resources, it forgrounded the particular, circumscribed the unique, and celebrated indigenous inventions and identities promoting a world of emancipation, difference, and diversity.

reacting to pressures of globalization underwent several phases, phases that were often contradictory to each other: the picturesque genius loci (Pope), the romantic nationalist (Goethe) and environmentalist (John Ruskin and Viollet Le Duc), the touristic genius commercialii, and the chauvinistic heimatsarchitektur, to name some of the most significant phases, adopting not only unlike attitudes to design – environmental determinism vs. utopian idealism - but also contradictory architectural strategies - ‘make-believe’ vs. ‘strange making’. What was common among all these of phases was the hostility to universal norms and top down standard solutions to human affairs.

During the twentieth century, the dominant trend of flattening the world landscape brought about a world of unprecedented life supporting services and opulence. Yet, very often the idea of a world wide platform based on shared values and the benefits from universality produced also a flatness that was far from perfect. In the midst of general affluence, pockets of the world remained, or even became, environments of pitiable alienating social quality, non-equitable wasteful economy, (Joseph Stiglitz) and poor self-distractive ecology. More importantly, the top down levelling, reducing the peaks and valleys of nature and culture, destroyed diversity creating a non-sustainable world of diminishing choices and declining capabilities for innovation and creativity.

The limitations and consequences of flattening (see globalisation) the world led to a new approach (Lewis Mumford) to regionalism. We called this new approach ‘critical’ in the Kantian sense, reflective rather than adversarial to globalism. The approach overcomes the intractable dilemma having to choose between globalism and regionalism.

This was the reason that at the end of the 1970s, when we first identified a number of architects that appeared to produce work that emerged out of the specifics of an individual situation; it seemed to us immensely important to provide a theoretical framework for their presentation. To avoid becoming entangled within the modernist versus post-modernist debate—so fashionable at the time—we endeavoured to shift the focus of the discussion towards what seemed to us a more imperative subject with long-term significance: the modern-anti-modern struggle. Situating it within history, we decided to make use of the term regionalism.

Regionalism was not the term that the architects themselves were referring to. It was a conceptual device that we chose to use as a tool of analysis. To make the argument more accurate and explicit we combined the concept of regionalism with the Kantian concept critical. In particular, the link was intended to distinguish the use of the concept of regionalism, from its sentimental, prejudiced and irrational use by previous generations. The Despite our warning regarding the objective to employ the concept of regionalism, it was repeatedly misused and distorted. In reality, it came to mean the opposite. Rather than being used critically—even when it was used together with that term—it was transported back to its obsolete, chauvinistic outlook[i].

To clarify the issue, we even publicly suggested that the concept of regionalism should be abandoned and replaced by realism, hereby erasing the middle part of re-‘gion’-alism. Realism was very appropriate in reflecting a commitment to the exploration of the identity of the particular (of each case), rather than to the generalities of doctrines. However, the concept of regionalism is still with us and even more prominent as a term today. The reason for this has to do with the ubiquitous conflict in all fields—including architecture—between globalization and international intervention, on one hand, and local identity and the desire for ethnic insularity, on the other.

The idea of this book is to rethink regionalism within the context of this conflict, as a bottom-up approach to design, that recognizes the value of the identity of a physical, social and cultural situation, rather than mindlessly imposing narcissistic formulas from the top down. The urgency has less to do with the term as such, but rather with the need within the context of the current ecological, political and intellectual crisis, to further explore and develop the potentials of this design strategy. In response to this need, a dual approach is taken here. On one hand, regionalism is looked at as a long-term historical phenomenon where we identify the emergence and evolution of its means, as well as the shifting targets in the course of history. On the other hand, we examine its present critical stance by way of examples in contemporary architecture.

The relation between group emancipation and the construction of identity that appear in germinal form in the picturesque movement in England will come to the fore more forcefully, enriched and articulated in Germany, hereby initiating a new phase termed Romantic regionalism. One of the key texts that were responsible for this evolution and crossover is Goethe's Sturm und Drang manifesto Von deutscher Baukunst of 1772[ii]. Written when he was only nineteen, Goethe defended the superiority of German Gothic architecture over Classical French architecture. As we are aware of today, this historical claim was mistaken because the first Gothic buildings were indeed French. Nevertheless, this is beside the point because the essence of Goethe’s argument was not the precedence of the architecture, but its power to make people become aware of their common past and participate in their collective memory.

Goethe was ingenious, developing a novel frame of mind in architecture in accordance with new nationalist aspirations. In the most technical way possible, he identified a new set of visual values. Explained briefly, he contrasted the medieval Strasbourg Cathedral with the classical canon using a new set of aesthetic criteria. He introduced a temporal experience evoked by the attributes of the materials and the details that evoke an awareness of a collective past. He guided the viewer to an understanding that the cathedrals' violations of the universal (but foreign to the German) canon are unique attributes of a specific object and to a particular region, far from making it an anomaly thus establishing it as a new paradigm enabling the Germans to construct their identity and fulfil their aspirations of emancipation and unification.

The Cathedral first appears to Goethe as an ‘astonishing’ but ‘barbaric mass’ of details. But after a night of contemplation—during which he is visited ‘in faint divining’ by ‘the genius of the great master mason’, the medieval architect Erwin von Steinbach—Goethe finds other qualities in the Cathedral. It now appears to him as a well-constructed whole (he uses the term gestalt that will later become famous as an aesthetic and psychological category). No longer just a vaguely barbarian product, it is identifiable with a precise regional and historical origin. Finally, rather than being a cause for shame, it becomes a source of pride for himself and the people it belongs to. As the morning sun touches the Cathedral's facade, Goethe stretches out his arms towards it shouting adoringly, ‘this is German architecture, this is ours’. Thus, while the universalist, ‘paternalist’, classical canon is imposed from the top down—from ‘another region of the world’— it produces a ‘uniformity’ of buildings ‘which presses upon the soul’. The cathedral can be admired without any imposition and ‘without the need of an interpreter.’

The text establishes three seminal points which defined the path of Romantic regionalism, through the nineteenth and twentieth century up to World War II. The spectator is invited to shed acquired conventions (of the canon) when relating to a building. Instead, Goethe suggests that the spectator focuses selectively on certain attributes of the material fabric of the building. The observer is drawn into an intimate relationship with the building, establishing what we might call an affective affinity between material fabric and himself. A sense of emotional familiarization arises, a state Goethe called 'faint divining': an inexplicable temporal awareness of the past, a past region in space and time, and a past community. The rapport between spectator and building reaches a high point as the spectator becomes aware of his identity as part of a group empowered to become emancipated from a foreign yoke.

Goethe’s future development moved away from the regionalist, nationalist themes of this early text. He became a passionate admirer and student of classical architecture and of its universal norms. His universalist approach, on the other hand, included an aim of the study of the world and non-Western products of culture (weltliteratur). However, he also pursued his investigations into the mechanisms of memory and design cues that stimulate it. Thus, in the Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809), a later text, he described how past and present become one through design triggers, how ‘all these things’ (of 'German origin'), old objects or new ones designed ‘in the same spirit ... in form and color’ direct ‘imagination back upon old times’, and how they bring spectators into such a state of vivid remembering and familiarity with the object that they ‘ask themselves whether they really were living in a modern time, whether it was not a dream ...’ gazing ‘towards ... a region ... (of) a vanished golden age’ (my emphasis added). However, as much as the notion of memory persists, the idea of a lost golden age coupled with the yearning for cultural emancipation for a group of a vanished identity, does not play an important role anymore.

Equally indifferent to the question of ethnic identity was John Ruskin when inquiring about the role of memory and region in architecture in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘There are two strong conquerors of forgetfulness of the men’ he asserts, ‘poetry and architecture’ and between the two, architecture is the ‘mightier in its reality’, the more potent to bring back to mind a past long lost. ‘We may live without architecture,’ he writes, ‘worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.’ But what is this past he was after if it was not a lost ethnic identity? The answer lies in his ideas about architectural practice. It is well known that Ruskin, despite his love of medieval architecture, rejected its restoration. Restoration, even the most skilful, brings the form of a building back in its efforts to be perfectly faithful to the original, cleans the surfaces of the building out of the dirt and distortions of time. But in doing so, it erases the skin which, together with the traces of dirt, carried the human touch of the people that lived next to it or passed along before it. Conservation of buildings of the past rather than restoration, therefore, is what is needed. Yet, Ruskin’s suggestions were more than a program for historical preservation. This becomes evident in his analysis of the morphology of the Alps whose shape he admired because it embodied the processes of its formation. Similarly, buildings, whether they are old with ‘walls ... long ... washed by the passing waves of humanity’, or new with ‘decorations ... animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning’ expressing ‘all that need be known of national feeling or achievement ...’ can ‘admit ... a richness of record altogether unlimited’ and they have that unique ‘deep sense of voicefulness’ ((reference?)). What Ruskin implied here is the participation in the human, rather than the ethnic community, present but also past, that can take place through the medium of the building.

For Ruskin, emancipation was not aimed against any specific imperial power anymore, even if he was an outspoken critic of the policies of the empire to which he belonged as a citizen and he did approve of the Austrians occupying his beloved Italy. It was ‘the present system of political economy’. In The Crown of Wild Olive he asserts with bitter irony that the ‘political supremacy of Great Britain’ is its control over power resources, the ‘cheapness and abundance of our coal’ which he saw to guide ultimately not only to social disaster but also to environmental catastrophe, ‘carbonic acid’ leading to ‘the sky black’ and ‘ashes to ashes’.

The malaise of the crisis of community defined outside nationalist confines is also developed in another text by Goethe, the Elective Affinities Die Wahlverwandtschaften. (Well known is its impact the text had on Max Weber)[iii] An Englishman arrives in the midst of the hard working Germans busy building a heimat. He is an expert on the design of country seats. An amateur, rather than a professional, he has already designed such a place for himself, and has travelled widely observing many similar projects. Asked where he ‘considers his 'abode', or 'home' to be, he responds ‘in a manner quite unexpected’ that he no longer has a home because his son took ‘no interest in the place at all’ and has gone instead ‘out to India.’ The son, the generation that followed the ‘country seat builders’, in other words, has opted for ‘a higher use of life’ rejecting the local identity and ‘region’, in favour of a life of mobility and international commercial exchange. ‘Who is there to enjoy such places?’ the Englishman wonders wistfully in relation to picturesque country seats. ‘Only strangers, visitors, curious, restless travellers,’ he answers in response to his own question, concluding bitterly that ’we spread ourselves out wider and wider, only to make ourselves more and more uncomfortable.’

In the nineteenth century Romantic regionalist ideas were spread out into folklore studies aimed at delineating regional enclaves by identifying buildings with common architectural attributes: a common treatment of site, common spatial arrangement, common materials and common decorative details. On the other hand, there was also an active implantation of new buildings with ‘regional’ stylistic characteristics to serve as markers to affirm the identity and boundaries of a region and the rights of its appropriation by a group. Towards this end, in case no local architecture was available to serve as a prototype, historical and archaeological studies were carried out to unearth material to construct the necessary regional canon. As a result, archaeology received significant support by such regionalist movements while these movements themselves received assistance for their claims. In the end, the construction of such regional canons—as much as it tried to recruit science—was obliged to mobilize fantasy. That was applied not only to public buildings but also to private ones. In both cases such efforts were mostly linked with the creation of a new nation which was based on ethnicity as well as ethnic-territorial disputes and secessionist ‘peripheral’ political struggles against ‘central’ authorities.

This is the professional architecture of the genius commercialii of tourism and entertainment which offers—for a good price—to alleviate the pain of atopy and anomy of contemporary life in as-if settings, simulacra of places, facades, masks of environments offering the illusion of participation in their internal activities. In other words, commercial regionalist works that give the feeling of ‘a world being there,’ a make-believe regional entity of easy access which not only does not require a ‘translator’, in the sense of Goethe, to be understood, but also requires no effort to be totally possessed. Like other kitsch works or mass media products, these feed emotions settings and starve rationality. They are an architectural pornography of sorts, targeting the economically privileged in the second part of the nineteenth century, but as we moved into the twentieth, increasingly embraced the masses.

A typical kind of project that utilizes this approach for mass consumption is the National Exposition. These proliferated from the second part of the nineteenth century onwards along with the ‘regional style’ buildings promoting the sale of ‘regional’ food and artefacts, one of the most essential and most successful components of their repertoire. One of the most successful products of this development of regionalist architecture was the vast Palace of the Arts by Anibal González for the Exposición Iberoamericana de Sevilla in 1929. Regional elements from Bilbao, Santander, Valencia, Madrid among others from the Iberian peninsula are joined together in a pleasant ((?)). A similar regionalist eclectic strategy was pursued at the same time for the Exposición International de Barcelona, which turned out an accumulation of several regional buildings in a kind of global village, rather than a building assemble, as was the case in Seville. However, the Seville Palace of the Arts was not only a commercial project. It was also a political statement and as such it reflected a complex strategy to articulate and give place to a multiplicity of regional identities and to force unity upon them. The building does that very successfully. As Goethe said about the Strasbourg cathedral: the message could be received by the masses without a translator. However, the political use of Romantic regionalism in this case, as in many similar projects of the first part of the twentieth century, have very little to do with the ethnic emancipation movements we discussed before, although it appropriated many of its discourses and emulated a large number of its design strategies. Typically, the Seville palace was intended to advance the nationalist dictatorial plans of Primo de Rivera that had no relation to the emancipatory aspirations of the Spanish regions. Similarly, most politically motivated regionalist buildings of that period employ, like the commercial regionalist ones, highly typified folkloristic motifs aiming at over-familiarized ‘vulgar’ ‘as if’ settings, a technique to be adopted by the political populist propaganda and serving as an instrument of cooptation for totalitarian and mostly chauvinistic regimes.

The most extreme case of this post-Romantic and debased regionalist architecture appears during the period of economic and political crisis of the 1930s, threatening the very existence of the basic institutions of modern states. The regionalist reaction against the universalist doctrines of modern architecture was not a resistance against any real central hegemonic power but rather a fictitious ‘cosmopolitan’ threat subverting the national unity. A neo-tribal, illusionist and true-to-the-race architecture is called forth cultivating genuine hysteria of siege and inspiring a delirious taxonomy of identity and exclusion. It came to be known in Germany as volkisch or heimatsarchitektur, but similar trends emerged at the same time in large parts of the world where totalitarian regimes had taken over.

At the time that regionalism was loosing its strong ties with movements of emancipation, increasingly becoming a launch pad for commercial or chauvinistic campaigns, also in reaction to this mixture of scum politics, convert oppression, and to quote Ruskin, commercial ‘lying tongue … advertisement’[iv], a young American Lewis Mumford reconstructs the concept of 'regionalism’. In his book Sticks and Stones, American Architecture and Civilization (1924), the first history of American architecture whose title alludes to Ruskin’s 1853 masterpiece The Stones of Venice, Mumford juxtaposed an approach to architecture he identifies as regionalism to the ‘imperial’ Beaux Arts architecture whose strong hold was still apparent in the United States thirty years after its apotheosis at the 1893 World's Columbian exposition in Chicago. Mumford accused the architecture of the Beaux Arts as being ‘conspicuous waste’, ‘icing on a birthday cake,’ ‘putting in a pleasing front upon a scrappy building, upon the monotonous streets and the mean houses,’ to cover up the ‘new slums in the districts behind the grand avenues,’ which he likens to congested human ‘sewers’.((reference?)) He considered it to have ‘placed a premium upon the mask’, the ‘imperial facade’, ‘the very cloak and costume’ of an ‘imperialist approach to the environment’ in support of the policies of the ‘holders of privilege in the “capital city” to exploit to their own benefit … the life and resources of separate regions.’ He further accuses it for the ‘negligence of the earth,’ using the land for ‘profitable speculation … exploitation’ rather than approaching it as a ‘home’, causing ‘depletion and impoverishment’, and producing buildings that are not ‘framed for some definite site and occupants.’ The alterative that Mumford proposed was ‘regional’ architecture; an architecture based on the perception of ‘place’, derived from ‘achievements in science … experiments in democracy’ will ‘not be stifled’ as they had been in the ’imperial’ framework that would ‘serve economically’ without ‘depleting resources’ ‘for the benefit the capital city’.

What was most significant in Mumford’s text was that he succeeded in salvaging the concept of regionalism from the commercial and chauvinistic abuse of it in reframing it in a new context relevant to new realities of the time, relating it to economic and environmental costs of the misuse of resources. This becomes clearer in a series of lectures entitled The South in Architecture delivered at the beginning of World War II, addressing a young audience of cadets who were soon to leave for the battlefront. Interestingly, Mumford chooses architecture for this occasion as his subject.Iit is fascinating that he decides to be critical and challenging about the state of affairs in America in relation to this topic. [v]

Mumford further develops his definition of regionalism in confrontation to the idea of regionalism by the Nazis in the ‘deification of heimatsarchitektur’. He is anxious that his critique will not be taken as a suggestion to return to the traditional picturesque or Romantic regionalism in search of the ‘rough’, the ‘primitive’, the ‘purely local’, the ‘aboriginal’, ‘the self-contained’. For this reason he rushes to stress that regionalism is not a matter of using the most available local material ... or ‘construction’. Neither is it in conflict with the ‘universal’. He argues that regionalist architecture has to overcome the ‘deep unbridgeable gulf between the peoples of the earth’, which heimatsarchitektur is in fact deepening. At the same time regionalism, as redefined by Mumford, has to help people come to terms with ‘the actual conditions of life’ and make them ‘feel at home’. ‘Regional insight’ has to be used to defend us from the ‘international style’, the absurdities of present technology and the ‘despotism’ of ‘the mechanical order’. They all fail to create better social conditions giving ‘form and order to a democratic civilization’. ‘The brotherhood of the machine,’ argued Mumford, ‘is not a substitute for the brotherhood’ of people. The problem therefore lies not with science or technology but with society, institutions and morality failures.

As we move into the unknown territories of the twenty-first century, the unresolved conflict between globalization and diversity and the unanswered question of choosing between international intervention and identity, are increasingly leading to crises as vital as the threat of a nuclear catastrophe in the middle of the twentieth century. The idea of critical regionalism is to rethink architecture through the concept of region. Whether this is the case of complex human ties or the complex balance of the ecosystem, mindlessly adopting the narcissistic dogmas in the name of universality, leads to environments that are economically costly, ecologically distractive and catastrophic to the human community. What we call the critical regionalist approach to design and the architecture of identity, - not nationalist but the one defined by the value of the singular, that circumscribes projects within the physical, social, and cultural constraints of the particular, aiming to sustain diversity while benefiting from universality. It suggests a complex multidimensional landscape, which, while flattened - a job carried out mainly by the new media of transportation and communication – nurtures, bottom up, the diversity of peaks and valleys - natural, cultural, and social – a job architecture is uniquely equipped to do.

[1] See A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, ‘The Grid and the Pathway,’ in Architecture in Greece, no. 5, 1981 and A. Alofsin, ‘Die Frage des Regionalismus,’ by M. Andritzky, L. Burckhardt and O. Hoffmann (Eds.) Fur eine andere Architektur , Vol. 1, (Frankfurt: Fischer 1981), pp.121-34.

[1] K. Frampton ‘Towards a Critical regionalism’ in H. Foster (Ed.) Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend: Bay Press 1983)

[1] Vitruvius, De Architectura, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press ??)

[1] W.S. Heckscher, ‘Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Medieval Setting,’ Journal of the Warburg Institute 1937-8, Vol.1. pp 204-20

[1] L. Heydenreich ‘Der Palazzo baronale der Colonna in Palestrina,’ in W. Friedlander zum 90 Geburtstag (Berlin, 1965), p. 87

[1] N. Pevsner, ‘The Genesis of the Picturesque,’ Architectural Review , Vol. XCVI, 1944

[1] W.D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. ??

[1] 1860 Untot his Last, four essays on the first principles of political economy, Essay III, ??

[i] K. Frampton ‘Towards a Critical regionalism’ in H. Foster (Ed.) Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend: Bay Press 1983)

[ii] W.D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. ??

[iii] Herbert, Richard, H. (1978). 'Max Weber's Elective Affinities: Sociology within the Bounds of Pure Reason', American Journal of Sociology, 84, 366-85.)

[iv] 1860 Untot his Last, four essays on the first principles of political economy, Essay III, ??

[v] The South in Architecture (New York, Harcourt, Brace & co, 1941)