Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation

Abstract

In an age of climate emergency and amid the current global historicisation of the postmodern period, the concept of ‘critical regionalism’ is being reassessed, more than 40 years after it was first theorised by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981. With Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation, Stylianos Giamarelos insightfully scrutinised the critical regionalism project as a whole and from all possible directions: in its genealogy; its media construct; its application; and even as far as its misinterpretations and misopportunities. Looking at the positive worldwide dissemination and reception of the discourse of critical regionalism, Giamarelos poses the concept developed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and later popularised by Anglo-American scholar Kenneth Frampton, as one possible response to the enduring crisis of modern architecture. The result is an important new resource in the currently growing literature on postmodernism and a study that outlines critical regionalism as an unfinished project for the twenty-first century. Yet, ultimately, this in-depth scholarly enquiry is not merely a history of postmodernism, but also an alternative history of modern Greek architecture, a commentary on architecture’s media production, and a study of operative criticism. Taking a step back, Giamarelos starts his book in the year 1980, as he returns to the well-known history of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, ‘The Presence of the Past’. Announcing his ambition of telling that history from a very different perspective, the author approaches the event from the periphery and through the eyes of Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis. Amongst other things, the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale became famous for marking the decisive moment in which Frampton, by resigning from the show’s organisation committee, detached himself from other voices associated with postmodern architecture. As I have argued before, the Biennale also ‘enabled Frampton to develop ideas on critical regionalism that, though in reaction to the International Style, would open a path distinct to postmodernism’. Despite Frampton’s retreat, the 1980 Biennale turned into a theatre of many important encounters, mainly between Europeans and their American counterparts — following the lines already traced by Vittorio Gregotti’s 1976 ‘Europa/America’ exhibition at the Biennale. Yet, these encounters were ideologically charged; one of Giamarelos’ claim in this first chapter is that it might have been the American Review by Léa-Catherine Szacka Manchester Architecture Research Group, University of Manchester, UK lea-catherine.szacka@manchester.ac. uk