Kenneth Frampton, L'altro Movimento Moderno
Academy of Architecture
This volume grew out of a series of lectures given by the author in Mendrisio, at the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana. The lessons are designed to compensate for a tendency to oversimplify the cultural complexity of the so-called Modern Movement, which today appears very diverse in its many manifestations. Many of the architects of the works discussed in this collection, despite adopting a seemingly shared syntax, seem in fact to have approached the task of building on the basis of their own values and models and to have adopted methods that are relatively open, both technologically and socio-culturally. Hence the thesis presented here, namely that though certain works can be included in the category of a generic abstractism, they yet each reveal a subtle variation in response to the context in which it is situated, even if all of them invoke the dogma of the flat roof, accompanied by a structural steel or reinforced concrete system and large glazed surfaces.
The book is organized into eighteen chapters, each devoted to an architect (from Rudolf Schindler to Arne Jacobsen, Richard Neutra, Max Bill, Johannes Duiker, Jaromír Krejcar, passing through Eileen Gray, Willem Marinus Dudok, Louis Herman De Koninck, Pierre Chareau, Sigurd Lewerentz, Evan Owen Williams, Antonin Raymond, Erich Mendelsohn, Berthold Lubetkin, Vilhelm Lauritzen, Max Ernst Haefeli & Werner Moser, and Alejandro de la Sota), giving a brief historical-biographical introduction to each before analysing in particular a relevant work. The text is richly illustrated.
Kenneth Frampton (1930) is one of the leading theorists and critics of architecture. A professor at Columbia University in New York, he has also taught at the major academic institutions, including the Royal College of Art in London, the Polytechnics of Zurich and Lausanne, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam and the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture. He is the author, among other books, of "Modern Architecture: A Critical History" (Thames & Hudson), a classic of historiography translated worldwide.
Pierre-Alain Croset: «Book after book, Kenneth Frampton continues making distinctive choices in defending and reaffirming the validity of the project of modernity, while supporting the necessity to critically analyse architectural works as a built form that can produce quality of experience and programmatic innovation».