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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
Tiktok
Vol. 1
Letter from the Editor -
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds -
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function -
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd -
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia -
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture -
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture -
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi -
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? -
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia-
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model -
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion -
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism -
Nolan Aucone
About
Order
CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E14
Critical Regionalism
Critical Regionalism
In the Past and Current Neoliberal World
Nolan Aucone
In today’s neoliberal world of architecture, there has been a pronounced shift from regional, local, and culturally-rooted projects to a more globalized, homogenized aesthetic. Critical regionalism as an idea is widely credited to the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in his publication, Towards a Critical Regionalism, in which he discusses this cultural loss and the lack of conceptually-grounded localized projects. Frampton’s criticism could still be a wake-up call to architects today, on a global scale, to preserve cultural identities and traditions across the globe. Without regionalism, vernacular, and differentiation, identity is lost, replaced by characterless repetition.
In the early 1980s, architectural theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre conceived the term “critical regionalism.” This duo viewed critical regionalism as complementary, rather than contradictory, to the parallel contemporary trend toward high-tech architecture in a more globalized economy and culture. What they opposed was high-tech’s undesirable, contingent by-products due to private interests and public mindlessness.1 Critical regionalism was fundamentally a response to modernism and its technological advances, universality, and globalized design. They asserted that a placeless urban landscape was the result of global capitalism’s “world culture.” In opposition to uniformity, critical regionalism took on the shape of cultural and spatial resistance rather than political resistance. This school of thought emphasized methods
of construction, tectonics, honesty in material choices, relationships to landscape, specifically defining culture, expressing locality, and constructing identity. Following Tzonis and Lefaivre in 1983, architect, critic, and historian Kenneth Frampton wrote the essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architectural Resistance.” Frampton elaborated on and popularized Tzonis and Lefaivre’s theory of critical regionalism. Similarly, Frampton discussed the importance of tectonics, construction, and materiality in a project. Foregrounding the integration of nature and a deep interplay and response to each individual site, rather than a “cookie-cutter” insertion, were defining features for Frampton. Describing the manipulation of the landscape, the way the site and climate interact, controlling natural light, he states:
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What is evident in the case of topography applies to a similar degree in the case of an existing urban fabric, and the same can be claimed for the contingencies of climate and the temporally inflected qualities of local light. Once again, the sensitive modulation and incorporation of such factors must almost by definition be fundamentally opposed to the optimum use of universal technique. This is perhaps most clear in the case of light and climate control. The generic window is obviously the most delicate point at which these two natural forces impinge upon the outer membrane of the building, fenestration having an innate capacity to inscribe architecture with the character of a region and hence to express the place in which the work is situated.2
Frampton would go on to say, “The tactile and the tectonic jointly have the capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical in much the same way as the place-form has the potential to withstand the relentless onslaught of global modernization.”3 Frampton’s theory behind Critical Regionalism was to combat “placeless” architecture, placing the blame upon global modernism. Buildings with material richness and expressive construction were anchored and human.
Frampton discusses two precedents which exemplify his conception of critical regionalism: the Bagsværd Church, located in Denmark, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon; and the Säynätsalo Town Hall, in Finland, by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. The Bagsværd Church, completed in 1976, is a fairly
modest modernist exterior which would preface — but withhold — the drama of the interior space and its expressive geometric forms.4 It’s sited in a suburb, tucked away within a collection of birch trees, blending within its context. The clean, white aesthetic and use of the curved, cloud-like ceiling control the natural light pouring in from above, giving a sense of a Higher Being while emphasizing the altar below. Frampton considered the Bagsværd Church by Utzon unique due to the spiritual setting created inside the main sanctuary. “A work whose complex meaning stems directly from a revealed conjunction between, on one hand, the rationality of normative technique, and on the other, a rationality of idiosyncratic form,”5 blending local identity with more typical techniques of construction, including typical cast-in-place concrete,
concrete cladding with pale-colored wood accents, and an aluminum roof. For Frampton, the project achieves a self-conscious synthesis between universal civilization and world culture.6
The Säynätsalo Town Hall by Alvar Aalto, located in Finland, was completed two decades before Bagsværd in 1952. It was built in a small farming village, nestled in the trees and natural landscape. The site was specifically designed for the Nordic climate, with connections between the indoor and outdoor revolving around a raised center courtyard space made from re-used excavated soil from the site. With a warmer modernist aesthetic, the building pays reference to the European vernacular of the courtyard with accompanying tower. It was constructed of typical local timber construction with hand-laid brick laid in an irregular fashion to “dance” in the sun, creating interesting shadows across its facade. The use of natural light guiding you through the building and expressive structural elements — the finger and hand-like timber
trusses, which Aalto calls butterfly trusses — evoke a sense of place. “It is clear that the liberative importance of the tactile resides in the fact that it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself: it cannot be reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent presences.”7 For Frampton, this project is a work of art, one you can’t truly understand in its full complexity without experiencing in person.
While there is much about Frampton’s definition of critical regionalism that is still true today, it’s notable that his theory was first published over 40 years ago. Time marches on, and what he was reacting against has become even more apparent today, as the effects of globalization in architecture are practically universal. More recently, Hudson Yards in New York City has been coined “Little Dubai” by the architectural critic Matt Shaw. As a smaller example of a special economic zone, Hudson Yards was offered rezoning and tax incentives and abatements to catch developers’ eyes. “The towers themselves look like those nondescript condominiums and offices that make up most of the building stock in Dubai.”8 The full glass towers, which populate the sky of western Manhattan with surface-level articulation, could seemingly be placed in any urban area across the globe — exactly what Frampton was fearful of. Coincidentally, the neoliberal world today emerged from the same time period Frampton was writing, as we’ve seen a shift, as Matthew Soules argues in his book Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultrathin, from the mantra of architecture being form follows function to a reality where form instead follows finance. “As architecture has become finance and finance has become architecture, key aspects of both have changed. These changes involve how buildings are conceptualized, used, and managed, and — at the same time — how they are designed, entailing everything from their proportions to their programmatic composition.”9
Michael Meredith of MOS is looking to reverse this course architecture in the 21st century has traveled down. In his book, Smaller Architecture, recently published in 2025, he discusses the problem today with what he terms “Larger Architecture.” Meredith discusses the issues with Larger Architecture as taking over the practice of architecture as a whole, characterized by globalization or homogenization, through outlets of large-scale finance and corporate enterprises. Media buzz, branding, and the social media-trained influencer mindset become important parts of architectural practice. “This Larger Architecture started thinking as if it was an influencer with a large following. It was enmeshed in larger scale neoliberal global capitalism. It benefitted from the largesse of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, as it promised to shape the world at large.”10 What Meredith proposes instead is, unsurprisingly, “Smaller Architecture,” rejecting Larger Architecture. “Smaller Architecture rejects the Larger Architecture that has come to dominate in the last thirty years, with globalization of architecture, with what Rem Koolhaas celebrated as “Bigness,” and with the embrace of new forms of large-scale finance and corporate management.”11 Smaller Architecture is local, with true connections between the client and the community where the project is situated, creating interplay at the human scale within the pr oject’s context and responding to the vernacular of the surrounding area. It seems that Smaller Architecture solves a particular problem through the process of authored design and
attention to detail; it’s not so big that it bites off more than it can chew. Meredith wants a return of Smaller Architecture as a way of reconnecting or reconstructing the practice to its core values, turning the profession away from a focus on image toward thoughtfulness and interconnectedness. Meredith leaves us with a quandary, which everyone may or may not have a different answer to: “Smaller, but more _______.”12
Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism and Michael Meredith’s Smaller Architecture are both responses to globalization and standardization suppressing the originality of architecture and stripping its meaning or purpose. While they both are discussing the future of architecture from their own perspectives and lenses, Frampton’s Critical Regionalism is a call to architects to seek place-based, culturally grounded projects that are enriched in locality and tectonics. Meredith, meanwhile, discusses the discipline of architecture as a whole, criticizing the fact that Larger Architecture is shaping the profession negatively by focusing energy on the wrong stuff. “Smaller Architecture imagines local, radically inclusive, and anarchist forms of organization in smaller practices. And against the signature diagrammatic branding of ‘star architecture,’ which seeks to capture mass attention in a high-speed, image-saturated world, Smaller Architecture invites us to picture a form of architectural creativity that addresses a more varied, more concentrated, and more intentional form of attention.”13 What could this vision of the profession of architecture look like in the near future? Should we revert to Frampton’s theory of critical regionalism over 40 years later, or do we follow Michael Meredith’s manifesto of Smaller Architecture? Finding a definitive answer may allude to how we, as the architecture profession, will reshape the world as we know it.
- Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. (2001). 8-9
- Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 26.
- Ibid. 29
- Ibid. 22
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. 28
- Shaw, Matt. “Welcome to Little Dubai, New York City’s Newest Neighborhood.” The Architect’s Newspaper, March 14, 2019. https://www.archpaper.com/2019/03/little-dubai-hudson-yards/
- Matthew Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2021), 33.
- Meredith, Michael. Smaller Architecture. North Haven, CT: Architecture Exchange, 2025. 3-5
- Ibid.
- Ibid. 65
- Ibid.