This book brings together Kenneth Frampton's essays from the 1960s to today which epitomize his reflections on the historical-theoretical entanglements of architecture with place, the public realm, cultural identity, urban landscape and environment, and the political question of the "predicament" of architecture in the new Millennium.
The essays explore Frampton's contention that architecture's imperative is to assume a significant responsibility for the edification and stewardship of the Arendtian 'public world.' One of the most theoretically sophisticated and politically committed architectural thinkers, Frampton's work breaks emphatically with the limits and norms of much contemporary practice and restores a sense of richness and social consequence of architecture's 'unfinished project,' while offering abiding lessons not only for architecture but for social, cultural, and design criticism alike.
Architecture and the Public World brings together key writings by Kenneth Frampton, the eminent architectural historian and critic, from the 1980s to the present. Articles are grouped into thematic sections representing abiding concerns of Frampton's criticism: history and critical theory; modes of criticism; the vicissitudes of urban form, and tactility, tectonics, and resistance. The volume also includes a new interview with Frampton and an essay by Clive Dilnot exploring the relevance of Frampton's thought for design history and criticism.
The anthology represents Frampton's abiding concern for labor and the political dimensions of architecture, including his development of the concept of 'critical regionalism', but, in featuring writings from across the range and breadth of Frampton's career, enables a broader understanding of his work, demonstrating the potential for architectural interpretation and analysis to function as a mode of cultural criticism.
By employing his deep understanding of the process of designing and crafting buildings, Frampton peels back the layers of a building to reveal its meaning, to understand its relevance, to evaluate its impact. He inhabits the world between thinking and doing, observing what is being done, capturing with incisive clarity the inner workings of projects, charting their equally possible outcomes. Just in case we might forget in this busy, digital world, Frampton reminds us that people's experience of architecture is of highest cultural importance.
