The never ending challenge of regionalism

[lecture given in the University of Cordoba, March, 2005]

I feel extremely happy to be here with you in Cordova and I am grateful to Professor Villar Movellán, who organised this event on Regionalism and its challenge today for asking me to be part of it. In my talk, I will try to give an explanation why at this moment and within this new ‘globalised’ world-landscape, whereby everything appears to be everywhere, Regionalism, Critical Regionalism, Regionalism’s contemporary phase, is an approach to architecture that still dominates discussions and, even more, why it can be seen as one of the most significant design strategy to complement the creative, but also limiting and destructive, forces of globalisation.

I was much moved, the other day, to be invited to the presentation of the book on Francisco Azorín Izquierdo who contributed so much to the combined ideal of architecture and human emancipation, the subject of my talk today, here. And I must add, I am excited, in fact filled with awe, to be lecturing in the place where Maimonides once lived and worked in whose writings one can find the ancestors of contemporary critical studies, critical in the sense of going beyond the surface of a mental construct and be ceaselessly vigilant against false gods. To be more precise, the idea of Critical Regionalism that Liane Lefaivre and I were developing for the last three decades, as much as it is part of recent debates about regional versus global approach to design it also has deep roots in history of architecture, in cultural, and philosophical debates that go as far back as the era of Maimonides, and as we will see, even before.

One of the first public discussions on the question of regionalism in architecture took place in Seville, in 1985. I think it was Fernández Alba who put together this event on the problem of Regionalism at a time Spain was in the process of joining the European Union. While Lefaivre and I continued with more research and writings on the same topic, more symposia and seminars took place followed after the Seville gathering. Some of these meetings were too much involved with detailed aspects of regionalism rather than looking at the issue within a larger framework related to the problems of our time. Some were immersed in rather esoteric debates about the ‘essence’ of regionalism rather than its meaning in use. Being rather dubious about these developments, in 1992, in an international conference in T. U. Delft, Lefaivre and I decided to recommend publicly to end such discussions on Regionalism pleading with the audience to be concerned more about Realism rather than Regionalism. We dramatically erased five letters from Regionalism to make the point. Well, it is now 2005 and the question of Regionalism is still debated, perceived as still pressing and baffling, as it was 1985, in Seville; baffling, because of the ambiguous, if not contradictory, connotations of the term through history seen as nationalist, chauvinist, environmentalist, touristic, utopian, as well as ‘critical’; pressing because regionalism emerged as an antidote to the harmful impact of globalization which together with increasing accessibility to opportunities, it amplified inequalities, anomy, and ecological distraction,.

What I will try to do here is to resolve some of these ambiguities and show that indeed regionalism today, in the Critical sense we suggested, provides a framework useful to overcome several of the negative aspects of globalization without rejecting its valuable contributions. I believe the best way to do this is to give a historical panorama of the evolution of the idea, what it stood for and what it means today.

First the recent history: We introduced the notion of Critical Regionalism, beginning of the 1980s[1], to draw attention to the approach taken by a number of architects in Europe who were working towards developing an alternative to Post-modernism, the dominant architectural tendency of that period. Post-modernist Architecture, as its name suggests, aspired to succeed Modernist Architecture – not to be confused with Modern Architecture - whose ideals and doctrines were seen as responsible for numerous failures characterizing most reconstruction and urban renewal projects since World War II. Indeed, during the 1970s it enjoyed a meteoric rise. However, by the end of the decade, as it became clear that most post-modernist buildings were not more successful from the modernist ones, disappointment with and reaction against post-modernism followed. We called ‘Critical Regionalism’ a trend that tried to go beyond the discredited post-modernism without regressing to the errors of the disgraced modernism. Trying to go beyond the modernism vs. post-modernism debate, preoccupied mostly with dogmatic aspects of design and the appearance of buildings and not dealing so much with their use and impact on the environment, we introduced the term ‘regionalism’. We did so, borrowing a term from history of architecture as well as history of ideas, to indicate an approach to design giving priority to the identity of the particular situation, problem, and conditions rather than succumbing to routines, dogmas, and propaganda, commercial or ideological as post-modernism and modernism did. We attached to it the term ‘critical’ in the original Kantian sense, that is applying the ‘the test of criticism’ to design. To understand better what we tried to suggest with these two terms, - ‘critical’ and ‘regionalism’ - and why we thought it was needed to combine them, a deeper recourse to history is needed. 

The emergence of the concept: The awareness of a distinct kind of architecture that has a distinctive identity associated with an identifiable group and enhancing the group’s identity goes as far back as ancient Greece.  It was the Greeks—in the context of the politics of competition between their polis and control of their colonies - that used architectural elements to represent the identity of a group occupying a piece of land or being present in a Pan-Hellenic institution such as Delphi or Olympia. ‘Doric’, ‘Ionic’ and ‘Corinthian’ were not abstract decorative terms. They originated in the concrete historical context of ‘fission and fusion’ of regions and identities and their use was frequently loaded with complex political meanings, carving supra-regional identities and relations. Thus, Greeks from the Anatolian Miletos founding Naucratis—the first Greek trading colony in Egypt—at about 566 B.C, built their temple dedicated to the colonizing God Apollo using capital motifs, a girdle of hanging leaves and lotus flowers and buds around his neck, whose origin was from their mother city. As opposed to the colonies of southern Italy that utilized a Doric style, a similar motif of palm-like hanging leaves was used by the Greeks originating from Anatolia who established the colony now known as Marseille, in order to represent the identity of their Anatolian origins. When King Attalos II from Pergamon donated the famous stoa to Athens in the second century, he used the same capital—left unused for 350 years—to indicate the Anatolian identity of the donor, indirectly indicating the virtual presence of the group he was to lead. In the countless examples one can site, it is clear that the regional design motifs used across geographical regions do not indicate the identity of their users, as they designate the intention to identify with an existing or constructed group in reference to a real or fictitious region of origin.

However, during the Pre-Classical, Classical, and Hellenistic periods I am referring there is no specific word to stand for the above idea. An explicit reference to ‘regional’ design in antiquity is to be found in Vitruvius’ De Re Architectura, a Roman text that introduces the very concept of ‘regional’ to building and even discusses its political implications. Vitruvius was a materialist influenced by the philosophy of Lucretius. Natural causes and human rationality were to determine architectural form.  Thus, for him, ‘regional’ architecture, a notion that he acknowledges, was shaped by specific external and internal physical constraints. The differences between the ‘kinds’ of building (genera aedificiorum) one finds going from region to region (regionum) resulted from different physical environments, and the varying characteristics of a house as ordained by location and Nature (proprietates locorum ab natura rerum ...constituere aedificiorum qualitates...)[2].

On the other hand, in his encyclopaedic generalist manner, Vitruvius moves very quickly from the realm of building, to that of politics. As climate and physical conditions influence buildings so they influence human beings. Consequently, as the physical conditions (natura rerum) in the North dictate an extreme kind of building (with slopping roofs etc.), and the opposite occurs in the South, so do these conditions generate certain types of people. There is an in-between ‘temperate’ kind of environment that creates temperate architecture and temperate people. This is the environment and architecture that Romans inhabited and build in. This temperate state is superior to the extreme ones, its architecture and people too. They are more balanced, reflecting the stable environmental characteristics of the region they inhabit. This is why Romans have extraordinary qualities of courage and strength through which they overcome the deficiencies of the people of the north and south, presumably Germans and Africans. Thus, the Romans were allocated this ‘excellent and temperate region’ (temperatamque regionem). In conclusion, the materialist Vitruvius refers to God in order to rule the world (terrarium imperii). Implied here, is that it is as naturally legitimate for the Romans to be deployed around the world to rule as it is appropriate for their architecture to be applied universally. Obviously, Vitruvius’s linking of environment, groups and buildings arrives at contradictory conclusions, the political idea of global ruling being the exact opposite of the idea of regional difference, from which he departed. The contradictory conclusions resulted from his contradictory intentions. As a ‘natural scientist’ he, on the one hand, aimed at understanding and explaining the phenomenon of architecture as it appeared around the world. In developing the concept of ‘regional’ he recognized the identity and diversity of various architectures. On the other hand, although his main focus was on buildings, he aspired to be part of the leading Roman intellectuals of his time that were developing a political theory in constructing a Roman hegemonic identity. As a result, the ‘natural’ category of the regional was subordinated to the ethics-loaded political categories of temperatamque and imperium.

Vitruvius’ materialist theory of regional architecture - without its political aspects - survives still today as a basic concept in human Geography the study of human habitat in the context of its physical climatic geographical environment. On the other hand, Vitruvius’ political domination connotations can be seen enduring in chauvinistic theories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture.

But there is also a notion of region associated with architecture and with a different political view, that of emancipation. One can find this collaboration between design and politics clearly expressed since the 18^th century with early expressions of it that go at least as far as the Middle Ages.

A thousand years after Vitruvius’ writing, once more in Rome, but a Rome whose Romans are no more world rulers but under foreign rule and in search of independence. In an ironic twist of history, Roman classical architecture assumes the identity of the regional and the local, and the role of an ‘agent provocateur’ one might say with some exaggeration, in support of an emancipation movement.

Niccolò de Crescenzi—a citizen of mid-twelfth century Rome—leader of the ‘regionalist’ popular republican party struggling for the emancipation from the ‘imperial’ domination by the papal regime - the case is presented by the great art historian W.S. Heckscher[3] - decided to employ architectural means in order to manifest his political stance. Thus, using the opportunity of building his small palace, now known as the Casa dei Crescenzi, he integrated into the facade Roman fragments a row of half columns, in a collage-like manner. To make the political meaning of this regionalist architecture, a clear statement for the campaign for the freedom of the residents of Rome having very little to do with later revivalist uses of Roman motifs , Niccolò added an inscription in Leonine Hexameters’ Romae veterems renovare decorem.

In the Casa dei Crescenzi episode we see an early case of ‘regionalist’ architecture related to a ‘region’ - a normative entity that has to be identified, made visible, if not ‘constructed’ as many contemporary historians would have said.   

The case is interesting because it contrasts the ‘regional’, an assumed ‘natural’ entity to be found ‘out there’ waiting to be identified – with the ‘regionalist’ architecture, - a ‘normative’ entity that has to be built anew with the intention of enabling the consciousness, if not the construction of a group identity. As the case of Casa dei Crescenzi shows, ‘Regionalist’ architecture incorporated ‘regional’ elements in order to represent aspirations of legitimate liberation from a power perceived as alien and illegitimate.

Eventually, architectural romanità, which will be referred to in the future as ‘classical’, will triumph; this triumph, however had very little to do with Rome as a ‘region’ or the aspirations of emancipation of the local citizens of Rome. In another twist of history, it will assume an exactly opposite role. It will become the architecture to stand for world domination. It will be adopted to legitimize the princely rule of Renaissance and absolutist Europe by establishing an analogy between it and the precedence of the Roman Empire through the use of compositional, typological and decorative elements extracted from precedents of Roman monuments. In addition to buildings and artefacts, the classical compositional canon, was applied to the design of gardens, the so called formal ones. Characterised by massive levelling of the regional diversity of the natural landscapes, formal gardens partitioned space geometrically and populated it with figures alluding to the universe of law and order of the Roman Empire in the most flamboyant way. It is not surprising, therefore, that a regionalist revolt by a specific group identified with a specific location turning against absolutist, despotic rules, chose to express its values through garden architecture.

The case we will discuss now is in England. As opposed to the well-formed, triumphant formalism of French classical landscape, and drawing from the unfinished, the wild and the rustic of earlier Italian explorations, and the

Despite polemics against dominant architectural and political doctrines in France, the regionalist reaction to a normative Classical architecture was initiated by landscape designs in England and came to be known by the rather unfortunate name ‘Picturesque’[4]. The term was inspired in this story filled with contradictions and irony, by the serene, melancholic and totally apolitical paintings of the French artist Claude Lorrain. Claude,l who was based in Rome, painted landscapes characterized by the presence of classical ruins and the irregularity of an overpowering nature within which human figures and artefacts referring to classical antiquity were minimized.

Picturesque landscapes were characterized by informal composition and attention to the accidental, the particular, and the diverse, as well as the anti-formal, anti-universalist, and the anti-classical.

It was Nikolaus Pevsner who stressed the connection between the Picturesque as a way of designing - foregrounding singular regional geomorphologic and  plant characteristics of place - and the rise of English nationalism, forging questions of an English ethnic identity, ‘Englishness’. Of course the British of the eighteenth century were far from being really suppressed by another group or nation. The identity of Englishness served more to promote rather than emancipate the British. But it also enabled other political programs related to the goal of liberation. Once more Pevsner, in scholarly articles and architectural journalism[5], pointed out the ‘relation Picturesque gardening to liberty’, which he documented through references to writings of the period, such as Pope and George Mason who in his 1768 Essay on Design in Gardening ascribed the movement to English ‘Independency’, establishing an analogy between the freedom of nature to unfold and grow without any outside order imposed and the freedom of a people to think and act without an absolutist or foreign power controlling them, an attribute Pevsner associates also with the political concept of ‘tolerance’.

Anti-classical sentiments entangled with anti-absolutist values can be found in a 1692 text by William Temple (1628–99), an important statesman and essayist, with references to non-European gardens[6] among the Chinese,

‘… there may be other forms wholly irregular that may, for aught I know, have more beauty than any of the others. But they must owe it to some extraordinary dispositions of nature in the seat …’.

A decade later, an other statesman, moralist, and essayist, Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83), in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) more explicitly and forcefully supported anti-classical design principles meshed with anti-absolutist political values:

‘I sing of Nature's order in created beings, and celebrate the beauties which resolve in thee, the source and principle of all beauty and perfection … The wildness pleases. …We contemplate (Nature) with more delight in these original wilds than in the artificial labyrinths and feigned wildernesses of the palace. …the genius of the place, … at last prevailed. … Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely gardens...’

More epigrammatic and telling, was the great British poet Alexander Pope, (1688-1744), but also a kind of landscape desiger of his own estate, in his An Essay on Criticism published 1711 but written two years earlier when Pope was only twenty one years old:

‘Nature to all things fix’d the Limits fit,

and wisely curb’d proud Man’s pretending Wit..

Some figures monstrous and mis-shap’d appear,

Consider’d singly…’

are justified if

‘… th’occasion and Place comply’

Ridiculing the servile ‘Rule’ obeying French he praised,

‘… we brave Brittons, Foreign Laws despis’d,

And kept unconquered’d, and unciviliz’d’ 

He repeated the same point in a memorable line even more forcefully in Epistle to Lord Burlington, in 1731,

‘To build, to plant, whatever you intend,

... Consult the Genius of the Place in all;’

once more contrasting and deriding the French

‘ … proud Versailles! Thy glory falls;’

By the second part of the eighteenth century picturesque regionalism was no more a phenomenon confined to England or the ‘emancipation’ of the English who, as a nation rather than as a group, did not need it so much. It became a broad movement whose spread was considerably aided by the radical, if not revolutionary texts of Rousseau, whose ‘magic of writings’, to refer to Arthur Young’s testimony, almost single-handedly generated enthusiasm for the regional beauties of the countryside and their rural structures ‘equal to the historical monuments of antiquity and the great ecclesiastical buildings of the Middle Ages’.

The participants of this broad movement were elite intellectuals, aspiring bourgeois, but also members of the very absolutist courts the Regionalist-Picturesque was supposed to criticise. There is a debate about what generated this fascination with things regional, natural and anticlassical, the second part of the eighteenth century. Was it because they were effectively representing the idea of returning to the countryside and consequently promoting the desperately needed revive of rural economy? Was it because they implied a laissez faire, laissez passer organization, as opposed to the absolutist rules and privileges, an idea the physiocrates endorsed too? Was it for hygienic reasons, regional design preserving the ‘purity of air’ and the shapes and colours that could have a therapeutic effect[7] for the inhabitants of the cities, which were already seen as polluted and psychologically oppressive? Was it only an expression of the need of the elites of the ancient regime in search of ‘amusement’, ‘gaiety’, ‘happiness’, or a ‘virtuous life’ in an effort to escape the rigidity, artificiality, and boredom of the absolutist court, as the case of Maria Antoinette demonstrated? Or was it a combination of all the above?

The fact is that from France to Russia ‘princely gardens’ started to be furnished with ‘regionalist’ artefacts: windmills, thatched huts, dairies waterfalls, and caves. Picked up from far away regions, these regionalist objects composed virtual-regional trompe-l’ oeil places out of place. In effect, what was regional about them was that they were from identifiable ‘regions’ as opposed to centres, that is the far from the seats of political, economic, and cultural power such as Normandy Bretagne but also China, Siberia, and the tartar lands[8].

The bond between group emancipation, the construction of identity, and regional architecture, that turns up in germinal form in the picturesque movement in England in the first part of the eighteenth century and retreats in the second in the ‘court-picturesque’ landscapes we discussed above, will come to the fore more forcefully in Germany, initiating a new phase termed Romantic regionalism. One of the key texts that were responsible for this development is Goethe's Sturm und Drang manifesto Von deutscher Baukunst of 1772[9]. 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. But this is beside the point because the essence of Goethe’s argument was not about the origins of the Gothic but the potential of architecture to make people become aware of their common past, and participate in a collective memory, and enable the construction of a common identity.

Goethe’s text refers only to the medieval Strasbourg Cathedral. Like Macpherson’s Ossian, using the old building as a ‘heroic’ exemplar, he tried to develop a new ingenious approach to architecture in accordance with new nationalist aspirations. Rather than comparing it with it with the classical canon he contrasted it by using a new set of aesthetic criteria. He guided the viewer to understanding that the cathedrals' violations of the universal (but foreign to the Germans) canon are the result of being a unique object of a particular region.

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, and 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 abandon imposed conventions (the classical canon) and focus instead on certain attributes of the fabric of the building. He invites the observer to be drawn into an intimate emotional relationship with the building, establishing what we might call an affective affinity between material and his own self.  A sense of 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 collective identity being part of a group and as a result developing a sense of empowered to become free.

As it is well known, Goethe moved away from the regionalist, nationalist themes of his early years. He became a passionate admirer and student of classical architecture and of its universal norms. His Universalist approach, on the other hand, the embraced the world and included 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.

Neither is the idea of the crisis of community identified within nationalist confines.  (Well known the impact the text had on Max Weber)[10] He describes an Englishman arriving in the midst of 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 what he ‘considers his 'abode', or 'home', 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.’

While Goethe’s explorations moved into directions beyond questions of ethnic identity, by the end of the eighteenth century, Romantic regionalism grew as one of the most creative movements in architecture in the first part of the nineteenth century in support of popular ethnic-regionalist campaigns following the disintegration of the Ancient Regime, the Ottoman Empire, and the decline of the Spanish and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The 1848 Revolutions in Europe as much as they were driven by economic and political demands – parliamentarism – to overthrow the obsolete formations of the Old Order – with arbitrary structures linking for example Belgium with Spain, Austria, and Naples, having very little to do with geographic proximity and territoriality, they were also propelled by ethnic calls promoting the Irish, Polish, Magyar, Moldavian, Walachian, Rumanian, Croatian, Venetian, Tuscan, Roman, and Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek - one of the earliest autonomist revolts - cause. Within this context, buildings, urban compositions, and landscapes began assuming the role of custodians-agitators of collective memory and identity as well as memory’s and identity’s constructors.

Regionalist architecture continued to grow during the second part of the nineteenth century; politically, this period was not any more an era of centrifugal regionalist ethnic drives. What we might call ‘nationalist’, as opposed to ‘ethnic’, movements in the reverse direction, centralising nationalist campaigns claiming a regionalist identity. Characteristically the royal anthems expressing devotion to the absolutist ruler were replaced by ‘National Odes’, the outdated Junkers and local baronets coat of arms, by versions of the tricolour flag. These changes of symbols celebrated national-regional independence but also for a new unity, a region of regions, within which many ethnic-regionalist groups were inscribed. Propped by studies - historical, folklore, and even archaeological – very often supported by regionalist national interests, architects tried to delineate regional enclaves by implanting buildings where none existed before, buildings with common authentic ‘regional’ architectural attributes - common treatment of site, common spatial arrangement, common materials and common decorative details. They served as markers, making this new kind of region familiar, affirming the identity of its boundaries and the legitimacy of its appropriation by a new entity, the nation. But they also worked as destroyers of memory and as liquidators of precedent identity of local ethnic communities.

In the context of parallel economic developments advancing a marked economy - and the same time a costly machinery of the new national state - these projects, - buildings, urban compositions, and landscapes – assumed not only a political propagandist role but also a new economic role as advertisers of regional commodities. A new architecture of the genius commercialii was born publicizing regional artefacts and agricultural products as well as regional tourist and entertainment enterprises.

Characteristically the old Austrian imperial anthem “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (“God Save Franz the Emperor”), by Franz Joseph Haydn, became (1797) in the nineteenth century became “Das Lied der Deutschen” a national anthem, the wars that were waged in the name of sovereigns were now fought in the name of race-based nations the classical palaces built in the name of sovereigns were now replaced by theaters and city halls in the name of racially defined communities designed according to ‘regional styles’.

with the collapse of the Ancient Regime, the military machine changes, the army is nor anymore professional, the officers are professional but the army is by conscription, so you have to move the masses in a voluntary way and the masses are moved in the name of patria. But patria is regionalistically defined.

In the design of these projects the architects used simulacra of ‘regional’ architecture – once more materials, site placement, and compositional, decorative features – being less concerned with authenticity and more preoccupied with as-if settings of kitsch regions which did not require a ‘translator’, offering the illusion of easy access in the sense of Goethe, to be understood, feeding emotions and starving rationality. Without being poor in skill it was 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 emancipative 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.

In contrast to August Compte accept as true   in the law of progress Durkheim believed in individual societies driving after diverse goals their own way

To make things even more confusing by the end of the nineteenth century, certain regional styles, such as the Alpine, Moorish, or Provençal, were applied indiscriminately, especially for the design of houses, in any region of Europe as means of a growing culture of leisure, escape and entertainment. 

One of the most successful examples of this kind of regionalist architecture was the vast Palace of the Arts by Anibal González for the Exposición Iberoamericana de Sevilla in 1929. In polychromic tiled amphitheatre-like celebrational composition Gonzales succeeded to integrate and unite diverse artisan ceramics derived from artefacts from the various regions of Spain expressing the ‘patriotic’ idea of political concordance of the regime turning the nation into one super region, dispensing with emancipative aspirations of many of these regions. A similar populist propaganda more extreme in its scale, was carried out in the Exposicion Internacional in Barcelona where urban fragments from diverse villages and towns of the regions of Spain were merged into an over-familiarized ‘as if’ settings of an urban kind of theme park.

During the of economic and political crisis of the 1930s, with the exception of Mussolini’s regime, aggressive ‘antipacifist’, ‘antiparliamentarian’ movements adopted romantic nationalist regionalism as a device to help fight against imaginary ‘cosmopolitan’ intruders subverting a fictitious, mostly top down imposed, national unity.

Echoing the rhetoric of writings of 1880s by Barrès or Comte de Gobineau, they assailed modern buildings cultivating a hysteria of siege and tried to inspire identity through exclusion and, as in the case of the nazi volkisch or heimatsarchitektur and the pastiche “genuinamente espanola” housing and planning projects for the Regionas Devastadas of the early years of Generalissimo Francesco Franco’s regime, nostalgic empathy with rural-feudal agrarian society and politics.

Given such uses of regionalism, it is not surprising to find many young architects, in Europe and the United States, by the beginning of WWII, viewing it as at best obsolete if not ‘reactionary’, anti-modern, approach to architecture. However, there were also those who appreciated it as an advancement of modern architecture not only as an antidote to totalitarian tendencies of the times but also as answer to modernism, a formalistic tendency during the 1920s and 30s that reduced modern architecture to just an other style, several times referred to as International Style.

Mumford employed the concept of regionalism as a guiding framework to present the first history of American architecture in his book Sticks and Stones, American Architecture and Civilization (1924). Many of the ideas were taken from the writings of Violet-le-duc and Ruskin - the very title of the book alluding to Ruskin’s 1853 masterpiece The Stones of Venice. The significance of Mumford’s text, however, was that he readapted the concept of regionalism from abuse of it in reframing it in a new context relevant to new realities of the time. On one hand he juxtaposed regionalism to the ‘imperial’ Beaux Arts architecture which still captivated people in the United States, thirty years after its apotheosis at the 1893 World's Columbian exposition in Chicago. On the other, he began to adopt a critical, reflective view of the concept, contrasting it to the commercial and chauvinistic interpretations of his time.

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’. 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 indicted it for ‘negligence of the earth,’ using the land for ‘profitable speculation’ rather than approaching it as a ‘home’, causing ‘depletion and impoverishment’, and producing buildings that are not ‘framed for some definite site and occupants.’ By contrast, Mumford argued, ‘regional’ architecture, based on the perception of ‘place’, was driven by ‘achievements in science … experiments in democracy’ and ‘serve(d) economically’ without ‘depleting resources’ ‘not be stifled’ by  ’imperial’ interests and the drive ‘for the benefit (of) the capital city’.  

Mumford’s critical approach became clearer in a series of lectures entitled The South in Architecture delivered at the beginning of World War II, addressed to a young audience of cadets soon to leave for the battlefront. Interestingly, Mumford chose architecture and specifically regionalist architecture as his subject for this occasion to reflect on the state of affairs in America and the meaning of that war. [11] In the text, Mumford tried to define contemporary regionalist architecture, in opposition to the ‘international style’ and the ‘despotism’ of ‘the mechanical order’ but also to the other versions of regionalism: on one hand the reductive one standing for the ‘rough’, the ‘primitive’, the ‘purely local’, the ‘aboriginal’, and ‘the self-contained’, on the other the Nazi ‘deification’ of the heimatsarchitektur that digs an ‘unbridgeable gulf between the peoples of the earth’.

The aim of new regionalism according to Mumford was deeper: to support ‘the actual conditions of life’; to make people ‘feel at home’; even to embrace the ‘universal’ if and when was offering better solutions than the regional; and to give ‘form and order to a democratic civilization’ ‘brotherhood of people’ which cannot be substituted by the ‘brotherhood of the machine’.

While Mumford was struggling to spread these ideas in the United States in the 1930s and 40s, a new kind of architecture was developing in Mexico, - among others by Juan O’Gorman and the landscape designer Burl Marx- and in Brazil – among others by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Affonso Reidy,  in search of innovative design solutions driven by ideas of technological, social, and economic modernisation while the same time working hard to circumscribe them within local precedents, resource potentials and environmental constraints.

Brazil’s regionalist architecture became internationally known through the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) which organized an exhibition and published a catalogue, Brazil Builds, edited by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrel Stone, in 1943. Acknowledging its regionalist agenda Goodwin, in his introduction to the catalogue, disapproved of architects in North America at that time who, in contrast to Brazilian architects ‘blandly ignored the entire question (of climate) ... the average (North American) office building (being) like a hot house, its double hung windows half closed and unprotected. The miserable office workers either roast(ing) or hid(ing) behind airless awnings or … Venetian blinds…’

MOMA is renowned for its 1932 International Style exhibition organized by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Little is known today, however, about its activities during WWII and immediately after, a period during which Philip Johnson was away for the museum. In 1944, a major exhibition under the title America Builds devoted, as the title indicated, to home grown architecture was sympathetic to regionalism in the Mumfordian sense. It was followed by one titled Buildings of the Past Ten Years curated by Elizabeth Mock. Transformed later into a travelling exhibition, renamed Built in USA 1932–-44, was even closer to the new regionalist ideas, Mock dismissing the International Style exhibition of 1932, as ‘badly assimilated European modernism.’[12]

The same period, 1947, Lewis Mumford published a text, one of the most controversial of his career that appeared in his column “Sky Line,”, in the New Yorker [13].. criticising the state of architecture and pleading once more for the idea of a new kind of regionalism.  There he criticized Stalinist eclectic ‘'academicism’', together with Henry-Russell Hitchcock’'s ‘'personalism’' and Sigfried Giedion’'s ‘'new monumentality'monumentality’ identifying, for the first time,And  for the first time a specific group of regionalist architects - --  which included William Wurster, -- -  he argued represented a ‘native and humane form of modernism’. With the guidance of Mumford, but also Buck Minster-Fuller, the Department of Architecture of University in North Carolina, begun to specialise in Regionalism studies in architecture investigating issues that could fall very easily today under the title ‘sustainability studies’.

However, by the middle 1950s, due to major international, mainly political, developments, the dominant tendency of architecture shifted away from Mumford’s regionalist ideas. It turned towards, on the one hand even more formalistic, see ‘personalist’ and ‘monumental’ or, according to Robert Venturi, Big Duck, version of International Style, and on the other - for reasons of ideological expediency particularly in the US - skin deep regionalism, a benign caricature of Goethe’s idea of an architecture that could be received by the masses without the need of a ‘translator’.

Examples of this regionalism were: many Hilton Hotels, of the first part of the 1960s, institutional complexes, such as the Edward Durrell Stone’s Pakistan Institute of Technology and Gropius’ University of Baghdad (1957-1960), and US Embassy buildings, - under the direction of the Foreign Buildings Operations recommending ‘a style which would be appropriate for … those regions’ - such as Edward Durrell Stone’s in New Delhi, Walter Gropius’ in Athens (1959-1961), or John Johansen’s in Dublin (1962-1964) – the architect explaining the design ‘regionally’ as emerging out of the pattern of an Irish fisherman’s pullover.

While this was the position of official conformist practitioners, a new generation of architects on both sides of the Atlantic and East Asia adhered to the promise and program of what we called ‘critical’ regionalism. Among these architects were Paul Rudolph, - during early 1950s - Edward Barns, and Charles Moore in US, Ricardo Porro in Cuba, Shadrach Woods in France, Ernesto Rogers - using the term continuitá – and Giancarlo de Carlo, in Italy, Antonio Fernandez Alba and Eduardo Chillida and Luis Pena Ganchegui - the mythopoetic landscape with sculptures, designed by the Basque artist, located on the Western tip of the horseshoe bay of San Sebastian overlooking the Atlantic Ocean - in Spain, James Stirling, in England, and Kenzo Tange in Japan. 

The Post-modernist episode in Architecture, during the 1970s, while in theory was concerned with context and site in reality its practice was indifferent to environmental issues, physical, social, or cultural. Thus, once more, the regionalist reaction of the next wave of young architects, - committed to social, environmental ‘sustainable’ values - we referred to at the very beginning of this talk that ranged from the modest and ordinary structures designed by Pascuala Campos for the poor fishing village of Combarro (1971-74), on the Atlantic coast of Galicia[14], to the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center (1991-98), Noumea, New Caledonia by Renzo Piano and from the Live Oak Friends Quaker Meeting House (1995) by James Turrell, in collaboration with Leslie Elkins to The Yuhu Elementary School Expansion Project in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Lijiang, Yunnan, China, a  community service project to Southwest China by the Chinese architect Xiaodong Li.

I tried to explain here why the challenge of regionalism, a concept with a long and ambiguous and often confusing past, far from fading away continues to be present in the centre of architectural debates. In its particular contemporary ‘critical’ sense, it is seen as one of the most significant alternative approaches to design to complement the creative but also destructive forces of globalisation.