CRITICAL REGIONALISM

It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is the paradox: how to become modern and return to the sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth

Presented by Silvinus Clisson , Parthiban & Azharudeen

DEFINITION Critical Regionalism is an approach in architecture that strives to counter the lack of identity and relationship of architecture towards its location and context. Critical Regionalism is a strategy for achieving a more humane architecture in the face of universally held abstractions and international clichs. It implores the designer to use critical analysis in solving problems or exploring possibilities rather than creating a solution which is insensitive to its context and location. Critical Regionalism seeks architectural traditions that are deeply rooted in the local conditions which results in highly intelligent and appropriate architecture. Critical Regionalism is not regionalism in the sense of vernacular architecture, but is on the contrary, an approach which starts from the premises of local or regional architecture. Critical regionalism is different from regionalism which tries to achieve a one-to-one correspondence with vernacular architecture in a conscious way without conscious

BACKGROUND In the post war era, the ambitions of the modernists and their strong sense of social responsibility and that architecture should raise the living conditions of the masses which seemed so progressive and promising. Modernist planning was a popular idea, and used as a solution to these problems. But the movement could not adequately comprehend and cater for the social dynamics of family and community. 1970s saw the demolition modernist social projects due to large scale failure. The ultimate example of failure was the infamous Pruiit Igoe urban housing development in St.Louis, Missouri which was demolished in the march of 1972 The famous architecture critic Charles Jencks declared this day to be the day on which modern architecture died in his book The Language of Post Modern Architecture. A new paradigm was required towards architecture where a more sensitive approach was required rather than a global solution. The idea of Critical Regionalism emerged in the early 1980s when Postmodernism was at it heights after the failure of modernism. This idea was prevalent before postmodernism it was defined only in the 1980s by Alexander Tzonis and later more famously by Kenneth Frampton. Its evident from the examples cited in his examples.

INCARNATION OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM. The idea of critical regionalism was first coined by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivrein 1981.as a new approach to regionalism in their essay The Grid and the Pathway published in Architecture in Greece. Alexander Tzonis employed a concept whose origins rooted in Vitruvius ideology. To deal with a current problem , the need to define a role for buildings and cities in a planet that seems to be united only by the globalization of the media and divided by the confrontation arising from the competition. Tzonis and Lefaivrein implores designers to Overcome biases favoring imported or local choices through questioning and reflection. Consideration towards the specifics of the actual situation and the region. To value the uniqueness of the region, the quality of social ties, the physical and cultural resources. Tzonis and Lefaivrein put forth that Critical Regionalism need not directly draw from the context rather elements can be stripped of their context and used in strange than familiar ways. This idea from Tzonis and Lefaivrein initiated an overabundance writings the most among them was Kenneth Framptons essay Towards Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance which was published in the book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern culture in 1983.

INCARNATION OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM. Its also initiated numerous debates, and symposia among which the most important one is the International Working Seminar on Critical Regionalism organized by Marvin Malecha and Spyros Amourgis (1989) hosted by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona - and inspired projects around the world. Frampton is critical of postmodernism and attempts to defend a version of modernism that looks to either critical regionalism or a momentary understanding of autonomy of architectural practice in terms of its own concern with forms and tectonics which cannot be reduced to economics, a leftist viewpoint regarding the social responsibility of architecture. Frampton begins the essay by quoting Paul Ricoeur. Paul Ricoeur sites the fact that every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. He states that there is a paradox: how to become modern and return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in the universal civilization. The six points put forth Frampton are Culture and Civilization The Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde Critical Regionalism and World Culture The Resistance of the Place-Form Culture versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form. The Visual versus The Tactile Frampton criticizes that modern buildings have been optimized by universally conditioned technology which limits the significance of urban form. He states that scope of urban design has been reduced either to manipulation of elements predetermined by imperatives of production or a superficial masking which is required for the facilitation of marketing and the maintenance of social controls.

INCARNATION OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM. Frampton puts forth that Critical Regionalism is also a sort of resignation, a sense of holding operation, a sense of resistance Critical Regionalism in a way is an attempt to preserve some ideals of what has been or what is todays culture. It is in a way attempting to put on the brakes of the avant-garde pendulum. Frampton proposes that this attempt to preserve will generate a resistant, identity giving culture with an underlying links to universal technique. Frampton criticizes the Tabula Rasa approach of Modernism with respect to site conditions. This removal of topography is a gesture of the universal technique resulting in placelessness. Critical Regionalism would embrace the topography as a manifestation of the region geologic and agricultural history which will reflect in the form of the building placed there. The building will be set into the terracing contours of the land. Frampton sites Mario Bottas phrase building the site. This statement not only refers to how his building rest on or into the ground but how it reconstructs the site in its various forms, historical, vernacular, geologic, etc

INCARNATION OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM. Frampton proclaims that the place conscious poetic can be guaranteed by the constant inflection of a region. Placeless character of museums and galleries can be resisted by allowing an expression of the local light condition and climate swings. Frampton acknowledges that windows are critical element in the expression of architecture and has the ability to inscribe the character of the region through its placement in the wall. Frampton substantiates the priority of the tectonic over stenographic. Frampton states that structure is not to be confused with economics of skeletal frameworks for the tectonic, the relation between the material, craft, and gravity, is to be structural poetic rather gratuitous covering of the faade. Frampton cities two buildings in his essay as a benchmark for Critical Regionalism Bagsvrd Community Church Bagsvrd, Denmark Syntsalo Town Hall, Jyvskyala , Central Finland.

INFLUENCE OF CRITICAL REGIONALISM IN ARCHITECTURE. The following architects works were embodied by the factors which is elaborated in Critical Regionalism. Alvar Aalto, JrnUtzon, Studio Granda, Mario Botta, B.V.Doshi, Charles Correa, Alvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo, Geoffrey Bawa, Raj Rewal, Tadao Ando, Mack Scogin / Merrill Elam, Ken Yeang, William S.W. Lim, TayKheng Soon, JuhaniPallasmaa, and Tan Hock Beng. Critical Regionalist approach of these architects lead to the creation number of project which served as a epitome of practice in architecture.

INFLUENCE OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM IN OTHER WALKS OF LIFE Subsequently, the term "critical regionalism" has also been used in cultural studies, literary studies, and political theory The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is influenced by Crictical Regionalism. In her 2007 work "Who Sings the Nation-State? co-authored with Judith Butler, Spivak proposes a deconstructive alternative to nationalism that is predicated on the deconstruction of borders and rigid national identity. Douglas Reichert Powell's book Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (2007) traces the trajectory of the term critical regionalism from its original use in architectural theory to its inclusion in literary, cultural, and political studies and proposes a methodology based on the intersection of those fields.

EXAMPLES OF CRICTICAL REGIONALISM IN ARCHITECTURE Bagsvrd Community Church, Bagsvrd, Denmarkby JrnUtzon. Syntsalo Town Hall, Jyvskyala, Central Finland by Alvar Alto. BAGSVRD COMMUNITY CHURCH, BAGSVRD, DENMARK BY JRN UTZON. JornUtzon'sBagsvaerd Church near Copenhagen built in 1976 is used to illustrate the different aspects of universal civilization and world culture. The exterior in general is constructed following the universal technique while the interior, in general, expresses the secular or world culture of the region, which is not specified beyond Copenhagen. The exterior built of concrete blocks and precast concrete wall panels is set up on the repetitive rationality of a grid. This is an economic building technique found throughout the world and largely 'conditioned' by the industry, therefore universal in nature. The interior, a billowing concrete vault is far from economic with its idiosyncrasies.

BAGSVRD COMMUNITY CHURCH, BAGSVRD, DENMARK BY JRN UTZON. The modest church, the color of the Nordic sky, stands tall and proud between birch trees and its back turned towards the noisy street. The exterior walls are clad in white prefabricated concrete panels and white glazed tiles that reflect the light. The aluminum roof gives the church an industrial, almost austere, appearance. The ambulatories and connecting pathways are covered with glass roofs. The main sanctuary dominates the tight geometry of the plan; three sections and a courtyard between two parallel corridors. The glass roofed circulation ways blur the transition between nature outside and the church interior. The sculptural concrete ceiling in the church is sublime and always changing with a blend of direct and reflected light that filters through floating clouds. In Utzon's early sketches we can see his inspiration, as in his other buildings, came from nature; the sky and moving clouds

BAGSVRD COMMUNITY CHURCH, BAGSVRD, DENMARK BY JRN UTZON. Structurally, the vaulted ceiling is supported by the glass topped ambulatories.In contrast to the tight exterior, the softly curved ceiling and the white light in the sanctuary gives you a feeling of being elevated...of getting closer to the heavens. The interior of the church is almost all white; the walls are specially treated white concrete, the floors are white concrete tiles, and the trellis like altar screen is glazed white tiles. The white is offset by the light pine church benches designed by Jan Utzon and the textiles designed by Lin Utzon. A trellis wall of light pine covers the glass wall that separates the sanctuary from the entrance room. In a country where church buildings are universal, without religious references, Utzon has designed a church that exalts and comforts with poetic purity.

SYNTSALO TOWN HALL, JYVSKYALA, CENTRAL FINLAND BY ALVAR ALTO. The design of the Town Hall was influenced by Finnish vernacular architecture Aalto won the competition in January 1949 with an entry marked 'Curia', and was immediately commissioned to prepare working drawings. Completed in 1952, the building is one of Aalto's most admired designs. The building is known for itndividualism, harmony with nature, civilized moderation, disdain of ostentation and superficial effects. The building has a variety of functions. Seat of the municipal council and administration and the local lending library; it also contained rented space for different business purposes; and housing for municipal employees. Aalto laid out four two-storey wings around a square courtyard set one storey higher than its surroundings. The courtyard is entered by terraced grassy staircase at the open west corner and by a granite staircase to the east corner.

SYNTSALO TOWN HALL, JYVSKYALA, CENTRAL FINLAND BY ALVAR ALTO. Apartments occupy one of the wings; the businesses face outward from the ground floors of the remaining three wings; and the administrative and cultural facilities look inward to the quiet courtyard. The library has taken over the shop that was originally beneath it. Materials are dark red brick, wood and copper, and the abruptly varied roof shapes, seen through closely planted trees, cause the whole group to be absorbed into the rugged landscape and to appear as a romantic intensification of the scene in which it is set down. The dominant element of the building is the council chamber, which soars tower-like above the complex.

SYNTSALO TOWN HALL, JYVSKYALA, CENTRAL FINLAND BY ALVAR ALTO. This monumental, elegantly simple room is enlivened by spare side-lighting filtered through wooden louvers and by two technically innovative roof trusses justified by the need for ventilation between the ceiling and roof. The entire interior, including fixtures, furnishings, and lighting, was designed specially by Aalto.