interview with kenneth frampton

excerpts from architecture austrailia, september 2004 :

What is very interesting about [Glenn] Murcutt’s work is the extent to which it has an internal consistency and precise energy. The work engages a series of ideas and constructional tropes that are carried over from one project to another and are transformed in the process. So his language continually evolves. While it doesn’t evolve with every project to the same degree, this evolutionary aspect is extremely important.

Good criticism is hard to find and also hard to write. In the 1950s there was a habit of publishing buildings with a critical essay attached. This has also occurred more recently, in Italian magazines such as Domus or Casabella, and even in The Architectural Review under Peter Davey. But in general it’s regrettable that magazines are not very selective about the buildings they publish. In general today’s editors don’t seem to be very willing to commit themselves to the extensive publication of any building, not even when they think it’s worth publishing. They feel compelled to cover the entire field and you get the longstanding phenomenon of many different leading magazines publishing exactly the same material.

At some point, I stopped lecturing on critical regionalism because students in the US would respond by saying, there is no regionalism here. So, although that position could be argued with, I began to focus on the question of tectonics and on the “poetics of construction” in order to formulate a more specifically resistant attitude to the tendency for architecture to be dominated by fashion and spectacular images and by the spectacle in general. Through readdressing the specificity of the construction I thought one would be able to keep the fashionable image at a distance.