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Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and

Twentieth Century Architecture Kenneth Frampton John Cava

Article in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · March 1997

DOI: 10.2307/991220

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KENNETH FRAMPTON,
JOHN CAVA, ed.,
Studies in Tectonic Culture: the poetics of construction in nineteenth and twentieth
century architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1995, xiv + 430 pp., 485
illus., $50.00 (cloth), ISBN

This remarkable book is both critical and polemical -- critical of the

scenographic character of much contemporary architecture, and polemical in its

argument for "tectonics" as the proper locus of architectural thought and invention.

Were this not significant enough, the book argues further that "tectonics" -- defined

by Adolf Borbein in 1982 as "the art of joining," but here considered more

expansively as the interrelated arts of structure and construction -- encompasses both

cultural content and poetic meaning. Frampton argues for a reversal of long

standing habits of thought, particularly those well-worn assumptions about the

categorical separation between cultural import in architecture and the pragmatic

consequences of building. In this book there is no notion of “mere building.”

Instead, the author challenges the history of modern architecture portrayed as the

sequence of styles and artistic movements - the style to end all styles. In opposition

to style history, Frampton presents a hermeneutics of thoughtful construction, the

construction of buildings which in turn construct culture.

Frampton's arguments are persuasive for two reasons: his command of the

technical depth of his subject matter, and his ability to interpret the conceptual

underpinnings of the buildings and writings he examines. Neither of these by itself,

however, would have produced such a compelling presentation; it is their

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intertwining and complementarity that gives the book its distinctive voice and

authority and sustains the restorative description of architecture as a craft of making

with its own intellectual tradition, as I think it should be seen. Studies in Tectonic

Culture has the potential to show how the stylistic commodification of architecture

can be resisted -- whether promoted as a neo-traditional or avant garde commodity --

and how architecture can be redirected toward its proper subject matter. The

consequence of this may well be the recapturing of architecture's productive role in

human life: a practice that endows the patterns of our lives with durable dimension

and symbolic expression.

The Introduction to the book, "Reflections on the Scope of the Tectonic,"

defines its subject matter, outlines its concepts, and explains the uniqueness of the

history that will be presented. The distinction between a history of modern

architecture that chronicles and explains the development of concepts of space and

one that focuses on the tradition of tectonics is particularly important. Eduard Sekler

posed this distinction in his “Structure, Construction, Tectonics” (1965), where he

also observed the concentration on concepts of space in the received accounts of

modern architecture. Frampton introduces a paradigm that will be rediscovered in

subsequent chapters: the essential pairing of architectural earthwork and framework,

alternatively named topography and tectonics.

The relationship between topography and tectonics is developed initially in

the chapter called "The Rise of the Tectonic: Core Form and Art Form in the

German Enlightenment." The term "core form" is taken from Karl Bötticher, who

distinguished the inner tectonic structure of buildings from their outer and artistic

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kunst form, or cosmetic and surficial enrichment. This distinction was also at the

center of Werner Oechslin’s Stilhulse und Kern, Zurich, 1994. For Karl Schinkel

and Friedrich Gilly who recall Johann Friedrich von Herder, considerations of

topography or earthwork introduced physical and material topics, but also

characteristics of "the primitive conditions of human culture." On top of but

engaged with this substructure was the (assembled) framework, whether of load-

bearing masonry walls or of ferro-vitreous construction in the case of Schinkel.

Frampton treats the earthwork/framework theme more expansively in his

account of Gottfried Semper's description of the "elements of architecture." While

Semper distinguished four elements -- the hearth, the platform or earthwork, the

framework/roof, and the enclosing membrane -- Frampton tends to reduce the

elements to two -- the topographical mass and tectonic frame. In fact, Semper

himself leads in this direction, yet he never neglects the space-defining woven or

textile element, and he insists on the radical priority of the hearth. Semper also

attaches both cosmological and symbolic significance to these elements, which are

dimensions of meaning that future proponents of "curtain walling" often neglected,

as Frampton indicates.

Frampton discovers the pairing of mass and frame in the architecture of

Frank Lloyd Wright, emphasizing the uniqueness of each site or earthwork in his

Usonian houses, and the openness of the tectonic enclosure in these same buildings,

resulting from horizontal openings at their corners. Frampton finds other examples

in the more recent practice of Jørn Utzon, whose Sidney Opera House is a

particularly eloquent example of the relationship between a "site building" platform

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and a roof-work of diagonally superimposed shells. This pairing is also seen in the

work of the acknowledged masters of the modern movement, in Mies van der Rohe's

Tugendhat Villa for example, and in the work of Le Corbusier, whose Maison

Week-End is a particularly poignant example, as well as the work of more recent

figures, such as Mario Botta and Sverre Fehn. In all of these cases, and in others,

architecture is seen as something built and built somewhere, these two facts giving it

its architectural and cultural significance.

Throughout the tradition of architectural writing from remote antiquity to the

early twentieth century cultural meaning has been discussed under the heading of

decorum, sometimes called aptness, appropriateness, or suitability. An especially

interesting aspect of this book's argument about "tectonic culture" is the way this

theoretical topos is introduced and developed without depending on considerations

of use patterns and spatial concepts. This argument is decisive in the book. "Every

building has its position in a strata [of types]," said Mies van der Rohe, "every

building is not a cathedral." From this it follows that types with institutional status

will be constructed with one tectonic, private or domestic types with another. This is

true for both building and room types; the living rooms of Mies’ later European

houses, for example, are public and hence freely planned around free standing

columns, while the private bedrooms are enclosed by load-bearing brick walls.

Similarly, for Auguste Perret the range of types led to a graduated expression of

tectonic forms, from the trabeated frame for public institutions to load-bearing

masonry for private houses, with frame and infill for upper-class villas. These and

similar observations go a long way toward demonstrating Frampton's thesis about

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the cultural import of tectonics. Because it is principally this argument that

distinguishes this book from a history of modern building technology, I would have

liked to see it developed more fully.

The literature of architecture usually considers the expression of cultural

meaning in relation to ornament. This subject figures prominently here as well. The

sort of ornament Frampton examines, however, is less thin and applied than thick

and material, and results from various techniques of assembly and of finishing, as in

the work of Carlo Scarpa, Adolf Loos, and Mies. In the last two cases, Loos and

Mies, it is incorrect to say their buildings are unornamented; while their buildings

elicit a full range of bodily experience, they are also designed to be seen and

understood visually. Recent studies of Loos' architecture, particularly of the Müller

Villa in Prague, confirm suspicions about his "compositional" method; see, for

example, Christian Kuhn, Das Schone, das Wahre und das Richtige (Braunschweig,

1989). The term "ornament" is, however, distracting in these cases if it is taken to

suggest anything extraneous to the task of building a durable construction. In a

reference to Ananda Coomaraswamy's observations on ornament, Frampton

demonstrates the productive connection between expressive or symbolic surfaces

and concerns of both function and material reality. Coomaraswamy, however,

stressed patterns of conduct: “It will be found that. . . ornament. . . originally

implied a completion or fulfillment of the artifact or other object in question; that to

decorate an object or person originally meant to endow the object or person with its

or his ‘necessary accidents,’ with a view to proper operation; and that the aesthetic

senses of the words are secondary to their practical connotation,” (Ananda

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Coomaraswamy, “Ornament,” Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers, 1, Traditional Art

and Symbolism, Princeton, 1977, p. 242). Frampton acknowledges this because it

leads directly to the cultural part of “tectonic expression,” but he tends to stress

constructional rather than practical operations. Does this concentration reduce

cultural meaning? Put differently, can a “poetics of construction” really sustain

“tectonic culture?”

With this question and, more broadly, this book in mind we need to envisage

a kind of architectural significance that results neither from painterly nor sculptural

techniques, a domain of meaning that is neither an aesthetics of appliqué nor of

masses in the light. Instead we need to discover the sort of expression and

significance that arises out of the means specific to architecture -- namely, structure

and construction as they give durable form to places and dwelling practices. This

book does not develop a sustained treatment of the term "tectonic expression,"

which is surprising because Frampton attaches cultural import to the concept. The

reader may be left with the impression that "tectonic expression," "metaphoric

value," and "symbolic form" contribute to tectonic culture equally, and in the same

ways. I confess that I am not sure if this is Frampton's argument. Many of the

architects Frampton cites have observed that while every building practice leaves

traces of its methods on the outwardly apparent elements of the construction, not

each of these traces is symbolic. Vestiges of construction practice can also be seen

as "mechanical," admitting little or nothing of the "abstraction" that is assumed in

the development of symbolic form. For Semper or Loos, for example, and perhaps

for Frampton, it is possible to distinguish the cultural import of different

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architectural figures; to distinguish, for example, the sorts of meanings that arise

from triglyphs from those that arise from the traces of concrete formwork. If the

onyx dorée and macassar ebony used by Mies in the Tugendhat Villa have

metaphoric significance, does the machinery of the moveable plate glass wall make

the same kind of sense? When, or under what conditions is a pragmatic solution also

poetic? Frampton could have written more about such a distinction because so

much is implicit in his close interpretations of built works. Nevertheless, Frampton's

use of the term "tectonic expression" does show how architectural construction has a

role in the formation of culture. This is the consistent message of this book and its

challenge.

-- David Leatherbarrow

University of Pennsylvania

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 Hilary Ballon
261 Glenwood Road
Englewood NJ 07631

September 17, 1996

Dear Hilary,

Enclosed please find a copy of my revised review of Frampton’s Studies in

Tectonic Culture, together with a disk (I use Microsoft Word on an IBM system, but
have also copied it in Word Perfect, thinking that may be useful). Please let me
know if the changes are OK, you will see I’ve followed your suggestions. You will
see also I haven’t added much in reply to your last question about Frampton’s sense
of ornament, I hope its all right as I’ve left it.
I thought Hubbard’s review was fine; of the many people who have
reviewed it, he is one who seems to have read the book carefully and understood my
aims.

best regards,

David Leatherbarrow

ps. If you need to reach me on Email, my address is: Leatherb@[Link]

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