Module 3

Syllabus
• Post Modern Theory-2: Contribution to architectural thought:
Ideas of Kenneth Frampton and Christopher Alexander
• Post Modern Theory-3: Contribution to architectural thought:
Ideas of Amos Rapoport, Geoffrey Broadbent-his design
generation theories.
KENNETH FRAMPTON
Kenneth Frampton
• Born 20 November 1930
• British architect, critic and historian
• Studied architecture at Guildford School of Art and
the Architectural Association School of Architecture,
London
• Technical Editor of the Journal -Architectural Design (AD)
(1962–65)
• Frampton has also taught at Princeton University School
of Architecture (1966–71) and the Bartlett School of
Architecture, London, (1980). He has been a member of
the faculty at Columbia University
• In 1972 he became a fellow of the Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies in New York -- (whose
members also included Peter Eisenman, and Rem
Koolhaas) -- and a co-founding editor of its
magazine Oppositions
Kenneth Frampton
• Frampton is especially well known for his writing on twentieth-century
architecture, and for his central role in the development of architectural
phenomenology
• His books include
• Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980)
• Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995)
• Achieved great prominence (and influence) in architectural education with
his essay "Towards a Critical Regionalism" (1983)
• Frampton's essay was included in the book The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on
Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, though Frampton is critical
of postmodernism
• In 2002 a collection of Frampton's writings over a period of 35 years was
collated and published under the title Labour, Work, and Architecture
Critical Regionalism
• “Towards a Critical Regionalism” is really an attempt to formulate a kind of
alternative modernity in the face of the advent of postmodernity. I think it’s
interesting to distinguish between Postmodern style and the Postmodern
condition. Critical regionalism, in that sense, was accepting the Postmodern
condition but not the Postmodern semiographic stylistic game”
• Critical Regionalism
• is an approach to architecture that strives to counter the placelessness and
lack of identity of the International Style,
• but also rejects the whimsical individualism and ornamentation
of Postmodern architecture.
• The stylings of critical regionalism seek to provide an architecture rooted in
the modern tradition, but tied to geographical and cultural context.
• Critical regionalism is not simply regionalism in the sense of vernacular
architecture
“Towards a Critical Regionalism”
• 1idoc.pub_kenneth-frampton-towards-a-critical-regionalism-si
x-points-for-an-architecture-of-resistance.pdf
“Towards a Critical Regionalism”

John Utzon
Bagsvaerd Church
Talked about in point 3: Critical Regionalism and
World Culture
“Towards a Critical Regionalism”

Alvar Alto
Saynatsalo Town
Hall 1962
Talked about in
point 6: The Visual
vs the Tactile
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER
Christopher Alexander
• Born 4 October 1936 in Vienna, Austria
• Currently emeritus professor at the University of
California, Berkeley.
• His theories about the nature of human-
centered design have affected fields beyond
architecture, including urban
design, software, sociology and others
• In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of
the pattern language movement.
• Alexander's work is used by a number of different
contemporary architectural communities of practice to
help people to reclaim control over their own built
environment
Christopher Alexander
• Alexander is known for many books on the design and building process,
including
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form
• A City is Not a Tree (first published as a paper and re-published in book form in
2015)
• The Timeless Way of Building
• A New Theory of Urban Design
• The Oregon Experiment.
• Alexander is perhaps best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language, a
perennial seller some four decades after publication
• Reasoned that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect
could be
• He produced and validated (in collaboration with his students a "pattern
language" to empower anyone to design and build at any scale.
The Pattern Language
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977)
• described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical
mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar.
• contains rules for how human beings interact with built forms
• codifies practical solutions developed over millennia, which are
appropriate to local customs, society, and climate.
• The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are
attractive and harmonious.
• The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local
regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to
adapt them to particular situations.
• The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken
from the precise environment of the project.
The Pattern Language
• It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe and
attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through
cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in
furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs.
• A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of
classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by
multiple architects for beauty and practicality.
• The book includes all needed surveying and structural
calculations, and a novel simplified building system that copes
with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily stored
inexpensive materials, and produces long-lasting classic
buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor.
The Pattern Language
• It first has users prototype a structure on-site in temporary materials. Once
accepted, these are finished by filling them with very-low-density concrete.
• It uses vaulted construction to build as high as three stories, permitting
very high densities.
• This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon, as described
in The Oregon Experiment (1975), and remains the official planning
instrument. It has also been adopted in part by some cities as a building
code.
• The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex
engineering task, and has been applied to some of them.
• It has been especially influential in software
engineering where patterns have been used to document collective
knowledge in the field.
The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
• Described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:
• There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old,
and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional
buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which
man feels at home, have always been made by people who were
very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great
buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel
yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.
And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to
buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the
trees and hills, and as our faces are.
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building
and the Nature of the Universe
• (2003–04), which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A
Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground,
• is Alexander's most comprehensive and elaborate work.
• In it, he puts forth a new theory about the nature of space and describes how this
theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in which
we view the world in general.
• The mostly static patterns from A Pattern Language have been amended by more
dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly
be seen as the end result of sequences).
• Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his
theory of space goes beyond architecture).
• In his most recent work, The Nature of Order, Alexander demonstrates that it is illogical
to separate formal manifestations from the underlying processes or sequences which
produce the form, as both are observable aspects of the same field, thereby resolving
the apparent conflict between this work and his subsequent pattern research.
Influence on computer science
• Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form was said to be required
reading for researchers in computer science throughout the 1960s.
• It had an influence in the 1960s and 1970s on programming language
design, modular programming, object-oriented programming, software
engineering and other design methodologies.
• The greatest influence of A Pattern Language in computer science is
the design patterns movement.
• Alexander's philosophy of incremental, organic, coherent design also
influenced the extreme programming movement
• The Wiki was invented to allow the Hillside Group to work on
programming design patterns. More recently the "deep geometrical
structures" as discussed in The Nature of Order have been cited as having
importance for object-oriented programming, particularly in C++
AMOS RAPOPORT
Amos Rapoport
• 28 March 1929, Warsaw)
• one of the founders of Environment-
Behavior Studies (EBS)
• His influential book House Form and
Culture explores how culture, human
behavior, and the environment affect
house form.
• Rapoport has taught at the University
of Melbourne, University of California,
Berkeley, University College
London and University of Sydney
Amos Rapoport- Writings
• 1969 - House Form and Culture
• 1976 - The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built
Environment. A Cross-Cultural Perspective.
• 1977 - Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-
Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design
• 1982 - The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal
Communication Approach
• 1990 - History and Precedent in Environmental Design
• 2003 - Culture, Architecture, and Design
•
Amos Rapoport
• He describes two mutually exclusive traditions in architecture
• The architect belongs to the grand design tradition
• Tight control over the environment
• Detached, fashionable, intellectual values of the high culture whc is unresponsive to people
• Creates repetitious boring universal space
• Folk (Vernacular) Architecture
• Grows directly out of the needs, means, materials, tradition, culture and natural orders of
the user
• Unselfconscious form melt into a rich continuous fabric of vital overlapping uses, chance
juxtapositions and varied personal sentiments
• Contribute to a high visual density and compexity
• Only if people can directly affect their architecture, as in vernacular tradition, can they
achieve visual richness that is preferred by man
• Modern architects must build open ended frameworks which peopl e can complete
and change which may give their own meaning
Amos Rapoport
• He believes that a complete designed environment like the CBS creates
instability
• The urge is not to resist oppression of a resolved environment but a
demand to be included in that environment as a participant rather than
a bystander or consumer
• In the environment of vernacular architecture, the building respond in a
very direct and immediate way to every changing need, desire and
whim
• These aspects of folk architecture need to remain if environments are to
be livable
• Rapoport refers repeatedly to two basic concepts of urges
• The urge to territorialise
• The need to personalise
GEOFFREY BROADBENT
Geoffrey Broadbent
• Born 11 June 1929
• English architect, academic and professor
emeritus, and a prolific author
in architectural theory, especially semiotics
• He is professor emeritus at the School of
Architecture at the University of
Portsmouth, England
• Among his best known works are the books
• Design in Architecture: Architecture and the
Human Sciences (1973)
• Emerging Concepts in Urban Space
Design (1990)
Geoffrey Broadbent
• His seminal book Design in Architecture: Architecture and the
Human Sciences (1973) attempted to break down the
architectural design process into its constituent parts.
Broadbent’s method
• Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Sciences (1973)
• Relies upon four distinct ways of generating design
• Pragmatic:
• Use of available materials and methods of construction, generally without
innovation, as if selected from a catalogue
• The designer has a good grasp of strengths and weaknesses of traditional and
established techniques
• Iconic Design:
• Effectively calls the designer to copy existing solutions
• Designer begins with existing solutions and modifies them to meet new
conditions
• Greater stability and avoids commonly found errors
• Designer’s may take advantage of clever ways in which vernacular architecture
solved problems
• This technique could perpetuate errors
Broadbent’s method
• Analogical Design
• Results from the designer using analogies with other fields or contexts
to create a new way of structuring the problem
• Techniques such as brainstorming and synectics rely on the
assumption that a group of people are not likely to approach a problem
in the same way
• Natural variety of individuals can be harnessed to make the group
more productive
• Canonic Design
• Relies on the use of rules such as planning grids, proportioning systems
and the like
• The classical architectural styles… Renaissance approach, Vitruvius,
Alberti, le Corbusier's “Modular” can be seen as an attempt to produce
canonical rules that allowed for more iconoclassic designs
VTU Questions