Review

Reviewed Work(s): Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture by Kenneth Frampton
Review by: Tim Culvahouse
Source: ANY: Architecture New York , 1996, No. 14, Tectonics Unbound: KERNFORM
AND KUNSTFORM REVISITED ! (1996), pp. 10-11
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41852135

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 1 The preface was given a less elegant
tgeois ambitions, the transitory facts, of the first century of industrial
sulted, did not even illustrate the library interior. Rather, he celebrat-
translation in a special issue of Rassegna on
ed the facade as a brilliant reinterpretation and reversal of the
Giedion as an historian: 'Sigfried Giedion: un I I culture. Rather it was to achieve a new synthesis, to overcome the
projetto storico," Rassegna 25 (1986). confusion of the 1 9th century by bringing material, even tectonic
scheme of the Doge's Palace in Venice.6 By then the classical had
2 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk,
facts to the higher task of the new forms demanded by the age. become a very elastic concept, although Gromort's procedure antici-
RolfTiedemann ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1982), 1:572 [N, 1, 11], Grasping at once the possibilities of radically new, even "demateri-
pates in startling ways Colin Rowe's later revision of our understand-
3 Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth alized" forms - here his admiration for recent Dutch architecture ing of Le Corbusier 's relationship to history.
Century," in Reflections, Peter Demetz ed. (New
York: Schocken, 1978), 147. On page 87 of shines through - Giedion issues a plea that the modernist dream of All of this however remains far from the framing of issues offered
the Getty translation Giedion writes "Construc-
Das Existenzminimum (the minimal dwelling) might be realized as the by Georgiadis, whose introduction serves more to link Giedion 's
tion in the Nineteenth Century plays the role of
the subconscious."
legitimate expression of an age in which "no building conceived inbook to the other undertakings in the Getty translation series, notably
4 Sokratis Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion.An Intellectual luxury . . . can any longer have an importance in the history of its anthologies of debates over style and over space and empathy in
Biography, [1989] trans. Colin Hall (Edinburgh:
architecture" (191). Although he had detailed the riie of iron and the 1 9th-century German tradition. With this superb translation and
Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
5 Lucien Magne, L'Architecture Française du Siècle concrete and made radical and unexpected juxtapositions between production, however, a new chapter opens in the ongoing réévalua-
(Paris: 1889), 23, italics mine. the modern movement's early achievements and a vision of the tion of Giedion, to which Dedef Merten s contribution to this issue
6 Georges Gromort, "Architecture," in Histoire
1 9th century through the radical close-up photographic lifting of of -ANY adds new insights. It is now possible not only to situate
Générale de l'Art Français dela Révolution à nos jours

(Paris: 1922), 2: 61. details from their contexts, Giedion was anything but wed to the Giedion s polemical historical project in its vital moment of the con-
materials of modernity's prolonged gestation period. Buiding in Francesolidation of the modern movement and its historical production in
ends on a rousing open note: "Just as the nineteenth century - at a Europe around 1928 but also to understand its legacy in the larger
given moment - developed iron and ferroconcrete for its needs, so histories of modern architecture that have come to prevail, notably
we can assume that our age, too, will find the material that Giedion 's own Space, Time, and Architecture, first published in 1 941 .This
responds to its needs" (204). canonic work grafts the earlier French genealogy onto the new
In such statements it is clear that Giedion himself is heir to the American foundation myths of the balloon frame and the Chicago
entire tradition of 1 9th-century historicist philosophy and art histo-School. The republication of Building in France could not be more time-
ry Georgiadis has traced many of these strains in {lis earlier intellec- ly, given the current reassessment of the historic avant-gardes by a
tual biography of Giedion, which must be used alongside the new new generation of architects, historians, and theorists. Just as Giedion
volume in order to assess Giedion s historical-polemical project.4 set out to recollect the 1 9th century's capacity to illuminate his
Reluctant perhaps to retrace his own steps in the Getty text's intro- present, so a critical edition of this seminal work in modernist propa-
duction, Georgiadis frames the problematic from an entirely new ganda sheds light on the historical project at the very core of the
perspective. Alongside concise treatments of Giedion s biography, avant-garde position.
the history of the book's making, and Giedion 's involvement with
architectural photography - including photographic reproductions

14.10 of some of the layouts on which Gropius and Moholy-Nagy worked

together - and an account of Giedion 's dealings with his publisher,
Book Reviews Georgiadis offers a detailed history of the often anguished debates Kenneth Frampton
over the use óf iron in architecture from the 1 830s to the 1 920s.
Studies in Tectonic Culture:
This offers a pointed if not explicit reproach to Giedion 's claim that
the use of iron was purely a matter of the subconscious in the 1 9th The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth
century. While Giedion chose to celebrate France as the pioneering
and Twentieth Century Architecture
industrial country - discounting England via numerous unfavorable
photographic juxtapositions and debunking such established icons
as the Crystal Palace (he even got Paxton's first name wrong, calling Kenneth Frampton's Studies in Tectonic (Chicago: Graham Foundation
for Advanced Studies in the Visual
him John rather than Sir Joseph) - Georgiadis surveys instead the Culture ambitiously attempts to
Arts; Cambridge: MIT Press,
debates in Germany, and especially in Berlin, from the pupils of reinterpret architecture of the past
1995) $50.00 cloth, 430 pages,
Schinkel via the positions of Gottfried Semper and Karl Bötticher, to century according to a dynamic 510 illustrations

Hermann Muthesius in the opening years of this century. Much of of constructional signification.
this material was well known to Giedion, although it has little to do Frampton emphasizes that construction is by no means a simple,
with the highly selective genealogy chosen for his polemical history straightforward, purely utilitarian act. Through chronological case
or the extended period he spent in France researching his volume studies, he describes various roles and situations through which
and seeking the direct aid of Perret and Le Corbusier to shape his construction forms architecture. However, the case-study approach
vision. It is surprising that the equally lively debates in 1 9th-centuryis itself the book's principal shortcoming because it assumes the
France over the expressive capacities of iron are ignored altogether existence of a tectonic culture rather than articulating the manifold
here. These would have provided some perspective for the myths interactions of institutions, theories, practices, and influences that
about the 1 9th century set up by Giedion, which were every bit as make up that culture. Though it claims to be an inquiry into the
powerful and lasting as his assertions about the modern masters. culture of construction in the modern era, Studies in Tectonic Culture too

An examination, for instance, of Giedion 's role in elaborating the often reads like a history of great modern architects. This tension
myths surrounding Henri Labrouste 's Paris Bibliothèque Sainte- carries certain undeclared assumptions about the boundaries of
Geneviève ( 1 843-50) , which achieved a new iconic status in Buildingtectonic culture and how such a culture develops, maintains, and
in France's polemical photographic spreads, would have been enlight- disseminates knowledge.
ening. Giedion was ready of course to acknowledge Labrouste 's rep- In the opening chapter Frampton introduces an array of
utation as a radical in his own day. This indeed dovetailed nicely withconcepts that suggests, without narrowly delimiting, the contours
the antiacademic polemic that permeates the entire book with of a tectonic culture: "etymology," "topography," "corporeal
strong echoes of Le Corbusier: "By the time he was assigned the metaphor," "ethnography," "representational versus ontological,"
library," Giedion writes, "Labrouste was recognized by everyone as "tectonic/atectonic," "technology," and "tradition and innovation."
the purest incarnation of the espirt nouveau" (1 06). The polemic is Here the historian and critic revisits issues of tactility and cultural
driven home by the juxtaposition above this claim of a photograph and topographic integration previously broached in his writings on
of the rarely considered ground-floor rare-book reading room of critical regionalism. In the chapters that follow, these concepts
Labrouste 's library, with its exposed, undecorated, and unarticulatedweave in and out of individual studies of a diverse group of emi-
cast iron supports, with a photograph of a piloti interrupting the nent modern architects - Frank Lloyd Wright, Auguste Perret, Mies
open space of a bedroom in Le Corbusier 's Cook House. The largest van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Jörn Utzon, and Carlo Scarpa.
typeface on these carefully laid out pages is reserved for the dates Informative and insightful, these case studie^ illuminate the ten-
" 1 843 ... 1 926." Giedion had scarcely discovered Labrouste, but hesions between constructional technique and other agendas shaping
reinvented him for a new radical history. In fact, in the 1 9th century, the architects' work, such as Mies's investigations in abstract space
as Neil Levine demonstrated 20 years ago, Labrouste was heralded or Kahn s preoccupation with monumentality.
for his radical historical understanding of modernity, in which iron The failure of Studies in Tectonic Culture adequately to articulate the
had as much a symbolic as a material role to play. As late as 1889, nuances of a tectonic culture can be traced to the conceptual frame-
Lucien Magne, an architect trained in the tradition ofViollet-le-Duc, work that Frampton installs between his introduction and the case
celebrated Labrouste s daring in using exposed iron "for the decorationstudies. This framework concentrates on representation as an intellectual
of a great room,"5 while the Beaux-Arts' own polemical historical problem and consequendy neglects other avenues through which
tradition had already assimilated Labrouste as the reinventor of the tectonics promises to open up contemporary discourse. These
classical tradition. Georges Gromort, whose standard history of avenues include not only those, such as phenomenology, in which
1 9th-century French architecture Giedion must certainly have con- Frampton shows little interest but those that he has himself identified,

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such as corporeality and topography. Moreover, this framework ascribes
particular authority to a linear succession of thought and practice
that prefigures his later concentration on a succession of works of
individual genius.
Frampton's account begins with the writings of Claude Perrault
at the beginning of the French Enlightenment. From here he traces a
line of tectonic inquiry - from Michel de Fremin and the Abbé de
Courdemoy at the beginning of the 1 8th century through Eugène-
Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Anatole De Baudot in the latter half of
the 1 9 th - as these architects and theorists struggle to reconcile the
idealization of nature with structural rationalism, a conflict staged
between ancient Greek and Gothic architecture. Their explorations,
which have somehow to account not only for the facts of structure but
also for its representation, are both propelled and complicated by the
contribute to this culture? Does it embrace the regionally evocative
work ofTurner Brooks or Fer nau and Hartman? The sculpturally
expressive and allusive work of Frank Gehry or Scogin, Elam and Bray?
The materialist rigor of Herzog & de Meuron?
Beyond individual efforts, a tectonic culture might include various
forms of collaboration, from the vast but individually anonymous work
of the Tennessee Valley Authority Architect's Office to the modest recent
efforts of Kuth/Ranieri and Jim Jennings. A study of tectonic culture
might also productively investigate collaborations between the archi-
tect and the other players in the construction process. Frampton touch-
es on this sort of collaboration in his account of Kahn 's close working
relationship with the engineer August Kommendant, but Kahn s
practice also stands as an exemplary instance of cooperation with the
contractors and fabricators who realized the built work.

emergence of iron as a building material, first as a supplement to
masonry construction and then, toward the end of this period, as the
reinforcement for concrete.
Reinforced concrete, with its tensile component hidden away,
poses with particular clarity the intellectual problem of the gap
between the action of structure and its representation. The problem's
full articulation depends upon two distinctions that emerge in the
design investigations of the German Enlightenment, distinctions
that for Frampton are central to understand the tectonic. The first,
advanced by Karl Bötticher in the 1 840s, is between Kernform - "the
mechanically necessary and statically functional structure" - and
Kunstform - "the characterization by which the mechanical-statical
Although I find the emphasis that Frampton places on the intellec-
tual apparatus of the German Enlightenment too narrow for his
larger purposes, his chapter on the development of that apparatus
offers a glimpse of the role that a tectonic culture could play in a
more complexly defined realm of cultural inquiry. Here Frampton
describes exchanges between architectural thought and practice and
other realms of intellectual and artistic endeavor. This chapter sug-
gests a more satisfying way of understanding a tectonic culture -
not as something wholly contained within architectural culture
but as something that necessarily intersects with other spheres of
cultural production.
What is the role of tectonic culture in the midst of such intersec-

function is made apparent." The second distinction is one that tions? How does a culture that is simultaneously intellectual and man-
Gottfried Semper draws between, in Frampton's words, "the tectonics ual reframe the dichotomies - theoretical and institutional - of cur-

of the frame, in which lightweight, linear components are assembled
so as to encompass a spatial matrix, and the sterotomics of the earth-
work, wherein mass and volume are conjointly formed through the
repetitious piling up of heavyweight elements." These distinctions
frame the problem of the relation between representation and ontol-
ogy, first by delimiting the tectonic as a field of separable, intercon-
nected elements, and second by rendering conceptually independent
the roles of structural action and representation.
Frampton's deployment of the tectonic as an intellectual methodol-
ogy, while no doubt decisive in the formation of at least some of the
20th-century architects he considers, produces too narrow a conceptu-
al framework to comprehend either the richness of their work or the
still richer proposition of a tectonic culture for our era. Granted, the
genealogy of acknowledged masters accomplishes one of Frampton s
aims - the displacement of histories of space and histories of style by a
history of constructional signification. Yet precisely because it appeals
exclusively to canonic works of individual genius, Frampton's account
neglects the nuanced mechanisms, the disparate institutions and
individuals, that could constitute a culture of the tectonic.
rent debates inside and outside the discipline of architecture? What
relations does such a culture draw between figures as far removed
from one another as Christian Norberg-Schulz and Jacques Derrida?
14.11
Just as tectonic culture has the potential to reshape intellectual dis-
Tim Culvahoiise
course, it also promises to reshape the ways in which we construct
our pedagogies, our professional affiliations, the structure of the pro-
fession itself, and our entry into it. Reconsiderations of these struc-
tures may then affect other, parallel structures, other disciplines and
professions. A culture that must account for the infinitely manifold
properties of materials - and the infinitely graduated judgments to
be made among them - enriches the terms that we use to understand
and apprehend the visible, tactile world.
Studies in Tectonic Culture begins the process of imagining a tectonic
culture. It outlines a rich field of concepts that enable the possibility
of a tectonic culture; it articulates a central theme of tectonic inquiry
in the last three centuries in the West; and it offers examples of the u
V
ways in which architects of recognized genius have realized the
formative possibilities of the tectonic. However, neither the clear ?
articulation of concepts and their development nor the elucidation 0

1
Taking the proposition of a contemporary tectonic culture seriously of individual works of merit confronts the contemporary challenges
leads to a series of basic questions that merit consideration: What is the that a cultural engagement with the tectonic might help us to meet.
shape of tectonic culture? Where is it located? What were the centers, I have in mind the many dissociations that mark our building prac- 2 V
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geographical and institutional, of its influence in the preceding two tice: ideological dissociations within the critical and theoretical 1
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centuries, and how have they changed in our own? To understand community and between that community and the mainstream of
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how this culture develops, maintains, and disseminates knowledge practicing architects; dissociations among the several players in the JS
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demands, first of all, a closer look at institutions of research and educa- building process - architects, engineers, contractors, laborers,
tion. These include professional schools of architecture and related building officials, developers, and so on; and, perhaps most crucially,
institutions of learning, from engineering schools to building trades the dissociation of interests between the building profession as a 1 i»
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schools, the corresponding professional and trade organizations, whole and the users of buildings. I say dissociations rather than %
including labor unions, and the regulatory institutions that codify conflicts because conflict requires a greater engagement than that Ì £ à

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tectonic knowledge, the state and municipal building authorities and which prevails in many of these relationships today. Ä §
their national affiliations.

Moreover, which forces - economic, material, political, industrial,

Ideally, a culture of the tectonic would promote engagement among
these various constituencies because it would raise, as Frampton's
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ecological, electronic - constrain tectonic culture, or should constrain introductory chapter suggests, issues that cannot be resolved in any ě i
it? How does a tectonic culture incorporate changes in the broader one bailiwick or at any one level of consideration. To put it crudely,
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context, like the ascendance of information technology or the deple- one of the perverse wonders of architecture is its propensity to bind <

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tion of natural resources? Are such changes necessarily at odds with an together barely compatible concerns, like representation and water-
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already established tectonic culture, or are they a part of its continuing proofing. I would imagine a tectonic culture to be one that revels in Id
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development? Does digitalization alienate tectonic culture or, as that propensity and that offers, as Frampton suggests in his closing M
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William Mitchell argues, facilitate the integration of that culture across remarks, "the revelation of the human spirit, through the specific man-
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greater distances? Given Frampton's ongoing concern with the eco- ner in which a work comes to be collectively developed and realized." V)
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nomic structures that affect archi tectural production, we might expect
- and we certainly would welcome - his insights into the economic
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relations through which tectonic culture is linked to society at large. (A

Frampton's central chapters, which are devoted to a half-dozen 3

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heroic modern architects, and his "Postscriptum: The Tectonic Z ra 0
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Trajectory, 1 903-1 994," which surveys another dozen or so essentially
modern figures, provide a limited picture of the individuals who
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contribute to tectonic culture. His picture is indeed that of a trajectory,
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not a culture in all of its multifarious richness. Yet isn't it precisely

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the complexity and irreducibility of a culture that recommends it over

a trajectory as a model of inquiry? Accordingly, who else might rö

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