Placing Resistance:
A Critique of Critical Regionalism
Keith L. Eggener, University of Missouri-Columbia
Critical regionalism emerged as an architectural concept during the early
1980s. For leading theorists such as Kenneth Frampton, critical regionalism
was an “architecture of resistance” seeking “to mediate the impact of universal
civilization” and “to re ect and serve the limited constituencies” in which it was
grounded. This paper examines critical regionalist rhetoric, particularly its
emphasis on resistance, as a theoretical construct that inadvertently marginalized and con ated the diverse architectural tendencies it championed. The
reception of Mexican architect Luis Barragán as a critical regionalist is highlighted to analyze some of critical regionalism’s most problematic assumptions,
implications, and effects.
Introduction
The term critical regionalism Ž rst appeared in print during the early
1980s, in essays by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and, a little
later, Kenneth Frampton. These described a type of recent architecture that engaged its particular geographical and cultural circumstances in deliberate, subtle, and vaguely politicized ways. In
making this engagement, critical regionalist architecture was said to
eschew both the placeless homogeneity of much mainstream modernism and the superŽ cial historicism of so much postmodern work.
“The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism,” Frampton
wrote, “is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.”
Critical regionalism thus aimed “to re ect and serve the limited
constituencies” in which it was grounded and “cultivate a contemporary place-oriented culture.” In this role, it was said to mark a
form of resistance—a decided reaction to normative, universal standards, practices, forms, and technological and economic conditions.
If critical regionalism was found difŽ cult to deŽ ne much beyond
this and to be lacking in stylistic unity, this was because it was a
method or process rather than a product, and the process varied
widely according to individual situations.1
Critical regionalism has been an in uential architectural concept whose application remains widespread.2 Yet as an intellectual
construct it can be highly problematic. When applied, as it has often
been, to the architecture of developing, postcolonial nations, the
term critical regionalism exempliŽ es a phenomenon described by the
urban historian Jane M. Jacobs: “Just as postcolonialist tendencies
have always been produced by colonialism, so colonialist tendencies
necessarily inhabit often optimistically designated postcolonial formations.” 3 Critical regionalism is such a formation. Identifying an
architecture that purportedly re ects and serves its locality, buttressed by a framework of liberative, empowering rhetoric, critical
Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 228–237
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May 2002 JAE 55/4
regionalism is itself a construct most often imposed from outside,
from positions of authority. The assumptions and implications it
bears have undermined its own constructive message and confounded the architecture it upholds.
The case of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán is revealing
in this respect. Barragán’s mature work—from the Gardens of El
Pedregal, begun in Mexico City in 1945, to late houses such as the
Casa Gilardi of 1975–1977—has frequently been upheld as critical
regionalist. (See Figure 1.) However well intentioned and beneŽ cial
to his reputation, this designation of Barragán’s work is an appropriation, a form of colonization along the lines that Jacobs describes.
To Ž t it into the critical regionalist paradigm, writers have neglected
or distorted much of the architecture’s primary content and character. This essay, arguably another variety of appropriation , uses the
reception of Barragán’s work as a lens through which we might
observe some of critical regionalism’s more dubious implications
and effects.4
DeŽ ning Critical Regionalism
As an idea, critical regionalism’s roots run deep. When Vitruvius,
in the Ž rst century B.C.E., discussed regional variations in architecture, he touched on a theme that would occupy countless architects
and architectural writers ever since. For Vitruvius, architectural
forms—like the physical, intellectual, and behavioral characteristics
of the people that made them—were determined and essentially
Ž xed by geography.5 The “romantic regionalism” and “nationalis t
romanticism” propounded by architects and theorists worldwide
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew from similarly determinist notions of culture and geography.6 It was this sort
of “blood and soil” regionalism, and its perversion by the Nazis,
that Lewis Mumford cautioned against in his book, The South in
Architecture (1941). Culture and identity, Mumford realized, were
more mutable and conditional than the romanticists and nationalists supposed, and so must be their architectural expression. “Regionalism,” he wrote, “is not a matter of using the most available
local material, or of copying some simple form of construction that
our ancestors used, for want of anything better, a century or two
ago. Regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual
conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people
feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the
soil but they re ect the current conditions of culture in the region.” 7
Mumford’s was a modern, self-re exive regionalism that shunned
revivalist pastiche and cheap nostalgia. Forty years later, in 1981,
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Tzonis and Lefaivre took up this thread in their essay “The Grid
and the Pathway.”8 The term critical regionalism was born here, and
its use quickly spread. By 1983, in his Ž rst of many articles on
the topic, Frampton would argue that critical regionalism offered
something well beyond comfort, accommodation, and re ective expression. It was also a powerful medium of resistance. Critical regionalism, in its emphasis on place, “seem[ed] to offer the sole
possibility of resisting” the alienating and dehumanizing assault of
the placeless, consumption-driven “universal Megalopolis.”9
No one has written of critical regionalism more often or with
greater effect than Frampton.1 0 His deŽ nition is the best known,
the most complex and astute, and the one most often adopted by
other writers and architects. Frampton began three of his earliest
and most widely read papers on critical regionalism by recalling
Paul Ricoeur’s 1955 essay, “Universal Civilization and National
Cultures.” Ricoeur had warned of the “phenomenon of universalization,” a tendency “constitut[ing] a sort of subtle destruction” of
not only “traditional cultures,” but of “the creative nucleus of great
cultures . . . the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.”1 1 Following Ricoeur’s lead, Frampton described critical regionalism’s
emergence as a self-conscious reaction to the “global modernization
[that] continues to undermine, with ever increasing force, all forms
of traditional, agrarian-based , autochthonous culture.”1 2 The new
regionalist architecture—beginning in the late 1940s and continuing into the present—proceeded from an awareness of, and an
effort to subvert, the “universal technological norm,” the effects of
global capitalism, international style architecture, and the sense of
placelessness that these fostered. As such, it should be considered
an “architecture of resistance,” fueled by “not only a certain prosperity but also some kind of anti-centrist consensus.”1 3 The examples of critical regionalist practice Frampton cited were for the
most part limited and localized, small-scale projects (houses, gardens, churches) “consciously bounded” in space and time. Architects identiŽ ed by him included Jorn Utzon (Denmark), Mario
Botta (Ticinese Switzerland), J.A. Coderch (Catalonia), Alvaro Siza
(Portugal), Gino Valle (Udine, Italy), Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis (Greece), Tadao Ando ( Japan), Oscar Neimeyer (Brazil),
and Luis Barragán (Mexico).1 4 Their products were both “borderline manifestations” operating in “the interstices of freedom,” and
“locally in ected manifestations of ‘world culture.’”15
Frampton insisted that the critical regionalism of these architects be regarded as not a style—“a received set of aesthetic
preferences”—but a process, applicable to a range of situations and
more or less independently realized in a variety of locations. And,
as a process, critical regionalism was inherently dialectical and con-
1. Luis Barragán, Gilardi House, Mexico City, 1975 –1977
(author photo).
tradictory. It depended on, and to some degree sympathized with,
universal modernism, even as it worked against it. As Frampton
bleakly opined, “no living tradition remains to modern man other
than the subtle procedures of synthetic contradiction.”1 6 So critical
regionalist architecture necessarily, discriminatingly, identiŽ ed, abstracted, and melded local physical and cultural characteristics with
more ubiquitous modern practices, technologies, and economic and
material conditions. To be regional and modern involved an extremely delicate balance.
If critical regionalism’s relationship with modernism was
complex and uneasy, its associations with postmodernism were no
less so. Postmodern architecture, Frampton said, had reduced itself
to “pure technique or pure scenography,” pure commodity. “The
so-called postmodern architects are merely feeding the mediasociety with gratuitous, quietistic images rather proffering, as they
claim, a creative rappel à ordre after the supposedly proven bankruptcy of the liberative modern project.”1 7 Yet despite Frampton’s
evident desire for distance, critical regionalism can hardly be understood apart from postmodernism, whether as its antithesis or
accompaniment. On the one hand, critical regionalism was reactive,
directly rejecting postmodernism’s widely perceived banality, superŽ ciality, and cynicism in favor of a formal rigor and serious,
social purpose akin to modern architecture at its best. On the other,
it endorsed postmodern pluralism, its recognition of diverse subjectivities, and its assault on modernism’s leveling, global sweep.
The 1980s was an era of aggressive foreign intervention by
the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and of
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Eggener
resurgent nationalism worldwide. Critical regionalism might also
be seen in part as a quasi-radical, intellectual reaction to both of
these movements. Its proponents opposed the domination of hegemonic power and reactionary populism, rampant globalization and
superŽ cial nationalism.1 8 Although, or because, “the practice of architecture [was] more global than at any time before,” said Tzonis
and Lefaivre, it was important to consider regionalism because it
alerted people to “the loss of place and community.” Yet, like
Frampton, they warned against “counterfeit settings” and the easy
“sentimental embracing” of the past. Unlike romantic regionalist
works that attempted to arouse “afŽ nity” in the viewer via familiar
imagery, critical regionalist works “prick[ed] the conscience” into
thought and action through an effect of “defamiliarization,” challenging “not only the established actual world but the legitimacy
of the possible world view in the minds of the people.”1 9 Both
Frampton and Tzonis and Lefaivre supported their assertions of
critical regionalism’s criticality, its subversive challenge to the status
quo, with references to Jürgen Habermas and the neo-Marxist
Frankfurt School, whose ideas Frampton called “the only valid basis
upon which to develop a valid form of (post) modern critical culture.”20 Although Frampton, Tzonis, and Lefaivre were all careful
to indicate architectural regionalism’s historical relation to a broad
spectrum of political and cultural agendas (republican, absolutist,
totalitarian , antifascist), the new, critical regionalism they outlined—resistant, reformist, conscience-pricking, Frankfurt School–
fueled —implied a distinctly progressive, confrontational, even
radicalized project.
Region and Resistance
What effects have these ideas of critical regionalism had on architectural discourse during the past two decades? Since World War II,
a great many architects worldwide have endeavored, for a variety of
reasons and in a variety of ways, to situate modernism. They did
this to foster a sense of place, to humanize the machine à habiter,
to address issues of personal and cultural identity, and to serve local
constituencies and political interests. Critical regionalism has provided a powerful tool for studying some aspects of some of these
architects’ work. The idea of a “critical regionalism” has raised signiŽ cant questions about modernity, tradition, cultural identity, and
place. It has helped bring much-deserved attention to otherwise
neglected architectural activity, and it has provided a sophisticated
interpretativ e apparatus through which to approach this activity. It
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also has operated as a lens that can  atten, distort, or marginalize
the cultural practices it surveys.
The major targets of critical regionalism’s critique—universal
modernism, placelessness, reactionary populism, the capitalist culture of consumption—have already been identiŽ ed. But where did
critical regionalism stand with regard to the regions it referenced?
We might begin by raising a series of questions that are often asked
by scholars of nationalism and postcolonialism: What are the constituents of cultural (or regional or national) identity? How are these
to be represented and utilized? How and by whom are the answers
to these questions decided? What are the implications of these decisions having been made?21 If so-called critical regionalist designs
exempliŽ ed an “architecture of resistance,” it is ironic that writers
discussing the places where these designs appeared so often emphasized one architect’s interpretatio n of the region over all others:
Tadao Ando for Japan, Oscar Niemeyer for Brazil, Charles Correa
for India, and Luis Barragán for Mexico. In other words, a single
correct regional style was implied, or imposed, sometimes from
inside, more often from outside “the region.”2 2
Barragán’s case provides persuasive evidence of this inclination. By the mid-1970s, Barragán’s work was largely unappreciated,
if not actually dismissed, inside Mexico and unknown outside
of it. Yet, if his architecture remained suspect in some Mexican
circles—on account of its elitism and idiosyncrasy, its aloof distance from the more pragmatic, socially oriented concerns of
other prominent architects operating in that nation —it was
soon validated internationall y for its formal and poetic qualities.
In 1976, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened
a well-received exhibition of Barragán’s postwar work. The lavishly
illustrated, sparely worded catalogue by the Argentine-born, New
York–based architect and curator Emilio Ambasz, sold more than
Ž fty thousand copies worldwide and made Barragán famous.23 Four
years later, in Washington, DC, a jury composed of American, English, and Japanese representatives awarded Barragán the prestigious
Pritzker Prize, the “Nobel Prize of architecture.”24 (He remains the
only Mexican to have received this prize.) Internationally, Barragán
was now the most celebrated of Mexican architects; for all practical
purposes, he was at that time the only Mexican architect recognized
outside of Mexico. As much as anything, his work was applauded
for appearing so very Mexican, or Mexican at least in a sense that
people in places like New York, London, and Tokyo could readily
understand and appreciate. Its elegantly minimal cubic forms,
rough-textured walls and stark voids, brilliant saturated colors, subtle evocations of Spanish Colonial convents and haciendas, and
splashes of water and Mexican handicrafts were swathed in a rheto-
230
ric of memory, sensuality, and Roman Catholic mysticism. In the
MoMA catalogue Ambasz praised Barragán’s buildings and gardens
as essentially modern yet “deeply rooted in [Mexico’s] cultural and
religious traditions . It is through the haunting beauty of his hieratic
constructions,” wrote Ambasz, “that we have come to conceive of
the passions of Mexico’s architecture.”25 (See Figure 2.)
Success at home followed success abroad. Soon after the
MoMA exhibition Barragán—whose fame had peaked during the
early 1950s and languished thereafter—was awarded various Mexican prizes and honors, including the coveted Premio Nacional des
Artes and an honorary doctorate from the University of Guadalajara. Mexican authors began discussing his work with renewed frequency and appreciation. Many of these, implicitly or explicitly,
utilized critical regionalist language. Echoing Frampton’s essays of
the early 1980s, Mexican architect and historian Anibal Figueroa
claimed in 1985 that Barragán had “sought an authentic expression
of his culture devoid of both the artiŽ ce of intentional fashion and
of ‘folkloric’ quaintness. He has sought a genuine contemporary
expression.”2 6 Barragán’s work, which architect Juan O’Gorman
once described as “exactly what Mexican architecture shouldn’t be,”
now came for many in Mexico to represent that country’s architecture at its best and most distinctive. According to Figueroa, Barragán’s oeuvre offered “a timeless expression of Mexican culture.”2 7
For critic Jorge Alberto Manrique, it was an expression without
parallel:
There is no relation between the architecture of Luis Barragán
and other [Mexican] architectonic nationalisms. There is
nothing within his work of their revivals of traditional forms
(nothing of pastiche, nothing of decorative elements), nor
of their utilization of characteristic materials nor of their inclusion of forms or Ž gures that transmit a vague prehispanic
past. . . . There is instead [in Barragán’s work] the idea that
to create architecture is to create an ambience, an atmosphere,
to make a place to be. . . . [T]he architecture of Luis Barragán, without nationalistic program, is the most clearly Mexican.2 8
The situation of architect Ricardo Legorreta provides further
evidence of Barragán’s enduring in uence on both national and
internationa l perceptions of what Mexican architecture is and
should be. If Legorreta is the best-known Mexican architect alive
today, this seems due in part to the fact that his widely published
museums, libraries, hotels, and ofŽ ce complexes, whether sited in
Mexico, the United States, or elsewhere, incorporate all the ele-
2. Luis Barragán, Tlalpan Chapel, Mexico City, 1953 –1960
(author photo).
ments that people have come to expect of Mexican modern architecture. That is to say, his buildings look a great deal like those of
his mentor Barragán.29 (See Figure 3.) Meanwhile, the other regionalisms and antiregionalisms of Barragán’s postwar Mexican
contemporaries—the pre-Colombian–inspired “plastic integration” of O’Gorman, the “fusion” of “las dos raṍces de México” (the
European and the American) of Alberto Arai, the fervent antiregionalist modernism of Mauricio Gómez Mayorga—have largely
faded from public memory.30
Barragán’s architecture has been characterized as both highly
personal and representative of modern Mexican culture. Can it be
both? Should it? As historian Ella Shohat put it, the key questions
for any critical analysis of identity, regional or otherwise, should be
“who is mobilizing what in the articulation of the past, developing
what identities, identiŽ cations and representations, and in the name
of what political vision and goals?”31 These questions have yet to
receive their due in the literature on critical regionalism in general
or on Barragán in particular. In 1994, Mexican author and Nobel
laureate Octavio Paz went so far as to suggest that “Mexican politicians and educators should follow” in the footsteps of those who,
like Barragán, “employ our popular tradition with intelligence.”
Barragán’s work, he suggested, made effective and appropriate use
of a Mexican “political and moral legacy.” To be truly modern, Paz
concluded, we must, like Barragán, “come to terms with our tradition.” 32 Yet we would do well to remember that where one image
of a nation’s culture prevails, others have been submerged or sup-
231
Eggener
3. Ricardo Legorreta, Hotel Camino Real, Mexico City,
1967 – 1968 (author photo).
pressed. When one individual’s image of identity is projected onto
the nation, it is important to scrutinize the background, beliefs, and
aspirations of that individual and his or her advocates. Built form
does not simply re ect culture; it shapes it, and therein lies much
of its power. If work like Barragán’s began, on some level, as an
architecture of resistance, it might very well be seen today as an
architecture to resist.
Center and Periphery
Revisiting the topic of critical regionalism in 1991, Tzonis and
Lefaivre defended it as “a reaction to a global problem . . . most
urgent in superdeveloped parts of the world and not an expression
of identity for so-called ‘peripheral’ regions.”3 3 The fact, however,
May 2002 JAE 55/4
is that up until that time much of the writing on critical regionalism
involved Western European and North American urbanites discussing architecture from developing nations in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, or from the less developed regions of their own
countries or continents. The major cities of Europe and the United
States were for these writers the centers that made possible critical
regionalism’s “anti-centrist consensus.” Based in New York, Frampton used the term peripheral nodes when speaking of the sites of
critical regionalism’s emergence—Mar del Plata, Mexico City,
Udine, Póvoa de Varzim, and Athens among them.3 4 Writing from
Boston in 1982, the critic and historian William Curtis began his
essay, “The Problem of Regional Identity,” by calling the “modern
movement . . . the intellectual property of certain countries in Western Europe, of the United States, and of some parts of the Soviet
Union. . . . But by around 1960, transformations , deviations and
devaluations of modern architecture had found their way to many
other areas of the world” [my emphasis]. Curtis then turned directly
to Mexico and Barragán’s “vital immediate post-war experiments”
there.3 5 That which lies beyond the center is by deŽ nition peripheral. No matter how vital, the peripheral is other than, deviant from,
and lesser than the center, the norm.
This kind of center/periphery thinking carries with it some
unsavory implications. In July 1947, Architectural Record published
an article on recent architectural activity in Mexico City. The New
York–based author, Ann Binkley Horn, wrote of the “visual hysteria,” “impulsiveness,” and lack of analysis or re ection that was
characteristic of the work she had seen there.36 Few responsible
critics or journals today would use such biased and sweeping terms,
but a related, if more circumspect, vocabulary has often been applied to contemporary regionalist architecture. Writing about Barragán’s work, for instance, has concentrated on form over polemics
or pragmatism, on sensuality and emotion over intellect, on mystery
over analysis, and on an implied primitivism, however noble.
Frampton characterized Barragán’s as a “sensual and earthbound”
architecture, imbued with “feeling for mythic and rooted beginnings.” Curtis emphasized its “sense of ancient values” and “genuinely archetypical mood.” Ambasz wrote of Barragán’s “animistic
feeling for matter” and (inaccurately) of his lack of a formal architectural education.37 While himself romanticizing Mexican village
life and appropriatin g its forms and colors, the well-read, welltraveled, well-heeled, institutionally educated architect Barragán
was likewise romanticized by European and North American–based
writers. He was made to seem more an innocent or a shaman than
the highly successful professional designer and real estate developer
that he was. He remains to this day better known for his other-
232
worldliness and his spicy Latin talk of God and death and beauty,
than for his cultural sophistication, his shrewd business sense, or
his aspirations to participate as an equal in an internationa l avantgarde.3 8
“Regional or national cultures,” Frampton wrote in 1985,
“must today, more than ever, be ultimately constituted as locally
in ected manifestations of ‘world culture.’”39 The vague universality implied by the phrase world culture makes it sound suspiciously
like another phrase that Frampton treated more skeptically: the
international style.4 0 In fact, both phrases absorb culturally and
geographically situated activities within an overarching, EuroAmerican–generated discourse, one bearing relatively little interest
in local perspectives on local culture. This kind of absorption has
on more than one occasion led to an interpretativ e  attening of
diverse cultural materials, and a misunderstanding or devaluation
of their founding intentions and most immediate meanings.4 1 The
same might be said of critical regionalism. In his writings on the
topic, Frampton cautiously emphasized process over product. He
pointed to the diversity of forms resulting from an equivalent diversity of circumstances. The term did not, he insisted, imply a
style. And yet, in a way it did. Critical regionalism, as Frampton
and others described it, denied formal style while presuming a style
of thought and approach. Among other things, critical regionalist
architects were said to favor “the small rather than the big plan.”
They viewed “the realization of architecture as a tectonic fact.” They
understood light as “the primary agent by which the volume and the
tectonic value of the work are revealed.” Above all, they practiced
architecture as a form of resistance, an expression of an “anticentrist consensus,” “critical of modernization” and the placelessness it promoted.42
That some so-called critical regionalists might understand
their work as operating in ways fundamentally different from this
was not taken into account. As Argentine architect and theorist
Marina Waisman wrote, “the Latin American version [of regionalism] is quite different from that proposed by Kenneth Frampton,
or Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre.” Contemporary regionalist
architecture in Latin America should be understood, she said, as
“divergence,” rather than “resistance.” Such architecture is less a
rejection of the West or modernity—which was, in any event
“never fully achieved in Latin America”—than an afŽ rmation of
local culture within “the general movement of history.”43 In other
words, contemporary Latin American architecture of a regionalist
character is not primarily a reaction to the West, or to “world culture,” as the word resistance would imply, but a response to local
circumstances. It should be seen not as a marginal practice, but as
a development parallel to contemporary architecture in the industrialized West.
A Reluctant Revolutionary
How did Luis Barragán see his own work operating? Is it apt, given
the deŽ nition of critical regionalism laid out here, to speak of Barragán as a critical regionalist?
The case can certainly be made that Barragán’s best work after
World War II, which he described as “placed in and . . . a part of
Mexico,” resisted and critiqued placelessness and globalization.44
The houses and gardens he built around 1950 at the Gardens of El
Pedregal, for instance, emphasized the peculiar vegetation and volcanic rock indigenous to the site, and made discreet references to
Mexican vernacular and historic architecture. These references were
“defamiliarizing” in relation to by-then mainstream notions of
modernist internationalis m and ahistoricism. Subtle and austere,
Barragán’s Pedregal buildings also stood in marked contrast to
more obvious, exuberant, populist notions of modern Mexican
architectural identity—the neocolonial, the neo-prehispanic, the
mural-clad—found elsewhere in Mexico City, especially at the
contemporaneous University City complex. (See Figure 4.)
Yet there is much about Barragán and his work that is strikingly discordant with the critical regionalism that Frampton and
233
4. National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with Main
Library (by Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martṍnez
de Velasco) in the foreground and Humanities Tower (by Enrique
de la Mora, Manuel de la Colina, and Enrique Landa) in the
background, Mexico City, 1950 – 1953 (author photo).
Eggener
Tzonis and Lefaivre outlined. First, there is probably no major modern architect of the twentieth century who was more given to “sentimental embracing” than Barragán. He insisted that “the architect
must listen and heed his nostalgic revelations.” He called his own
architecture “autobiographical” and with the help of several sympathetic critics, he wrapped around it a highly selective and not
entirely genuine tissue of memories and lore. Tales of his distant,
privileged, pre-Revolutionary boyhood on the Barragán family
ranch in Mazamitla (the ancien régime, in effect), and of his youthful voyages around the Mediterranean (a privileged provincial returning reverently to the source), took on an almost fetishistic
presence in post-1976 accounts of his mature work.4 5 His bestknown works would seem to pulse with a bittersweet remembrance
of things past.
At the same time, Barragán’s architecture was far more international in its scope, and rather less autochthonous, than is generally supposed. Formally and conceptually, it was directly informed
by the work of Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright,
and other Europeans and North Americans, as much or more than
it was by any Mexican vernacular examples.46 Economically, a
project such as El Pedregal was tightly bound, through its elaborate Ž nancing and its extensive advertising campaign, to an international web of capital. Even before its Ž rst houses were built,
El Pedregal was promoted to potential clients in the United
States. Here the question emerges as to how much of the project’s “sense of place” was generated by local concerns and conditions, and how much of it was intended to appeal to foreign
(mis)conceptions of Mexico.
Finally, in a place with post-Revolutionary Mexico’s staggering social, environmental, and economic problems, what architectural action could be less conscience-pricking, less opposed to
hegemonic power, than building exclusionary subdivisions and
walled gardens and villas for the rich, that is, Barragán’s very stock
in trade? Lending support to his notion of critical regionalism as
an essentially radical project, Frampton argued that Barragán “had
both the desire and the will to go beyond the elite that he had
served throughout his life.”4 7 There is little evidence to support this
assertion and much to counter it. While Mexican modernist contemporaries such as Juan O’Gorman, José Villagrán Garcí́a, and
Mario Pani built the low-cost, utilitarian schools, housing, hospitals, ofŽ ces, and factories that were so badly needed in their developing and recently war-torn nation, the aristocratic, elitist,
aggressively capitalistic Barragán speculated in real estate. He built
private refuges in which privileged people of means and sophistication might share in his Proustian meditations on memory, nosMay 2002 JAE 55/4
talgia, and loss. While his colleagues advocated architecture’s role
in their country’s attainment of economic, political, and cultural
autonomy, Barragán made condescending remarks about the colorful lives of Mexico’s poor and the “bad taste” of its middle
classes.4 8 If indeed Barragán’s projects of the 1950s and 1960s
sought to counter an emerging and still ill-deŽ ned globalism, they
fought more stridently still against the erosion of privilege and private life in a technologically driven, popularly oriented (the architect might have said “unappealingly democratized”) modern age.
His elegant walled compounds, elite subdivisions, and equestrian
enclaves may, as Frampton suggested, mark a kind of critique, but
it is worth keeping in mind just what sort of critique this was: hardly
radical or progressive, but romantic and reactionary.
Resisting Regionalism
InsufŽ ciently recognized is the fact that critical regionalism is, at
heart, a postcolonialist concept. This is worth noting because it
provides a broader intellectual basis than otherwise exists for
understanding critical regionalist language and ideas. Like postcolonialist discourse in general, critical regionalist writing regularly
engages in monumental binary oppositions: East/West, traditional/
modern, natural/cultural, core/periphery, self/other, space/place.49
Frampton made evident the postcolonial underpinning s of his work
via his frequent references to Ricoeur’s “Universal Civilization and
National Cultures” essay. Like the postcolonialist project Ricoeur
described, Frampton’s version of critical regionalism revolved
around a central paradox, a binary opposition: “how to become
modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant
civilization and take part in universal civilization.”5 0 It is the tension
arising from this problem—the struggle to resolve it more than its
eventual resolution—that fuels critical regionalist discourse. This
fact underlies Frampton’s emphasis on issues of resistance and process over product.
Critical regionalism’s fault lines stand most clearly exposed
in these emphases. “It is,” Jacobs writes, “a revisionary form of
imperialist nostalgia that deŽ nes the colonized as always engaged in
conscious work against the ‘core.’”51 In stressing place, identity, and
resistance over all other architectural and extra-architectural considerations, critical regionalist rhetoric exempliŽ es the “revisionary
form of imperialist nostalgia” described by Jacobs. It makes paramount a struggle where no struggle might otherwise have been said
to exist. It routes to the margins an architecture that might not
otherwise be imagined standing there.
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In that ur-text of critical regionalism, The South in Architecture (1941), Lewis Mumford urged readers to be cautious with
labels: “People think that a slogan, a catchword, a formula will, if
we are lucky enough to Ž nd the right one, solve our problems.”5 2
This, despite the best intentions of its leading theorists, is how
critical regionalism too often came to function: as a fashionable
formula,53 as a catchword to describe a range of difŽ cult and diverse
architectures arising from markedly different circumstances. Even
so subtle and sophisticated a label as “critical regionalism” could
not help but devolve into a relatively facile and misleading mechanism. As architectural historian Anthony King has warned, “these
global theories . . . enable those who produce or adopt them to
view the world of others from one particular place, from one point
of authority, from one particular social and cultural position. They
produce a totalizing vision or overview which is likely to be at odds
with the meanings which the inhabitant s . . . place on the buildings
themselves. In looking for ways in which to think about buildings
‘internationally ’ we need to be sure that we’re not creating a new
intellectual imperialism.”54
Although critical regionalism’s conceptual contradictions
were openly acknowledged, the case of Luis Barragán raises signiŽ cant questions about the term’s ultimate value. Has its application
to his and others’ work done more harm than good? As an interpretative strategy, how do we weigh its insights versus it distortions?
More generally, does a system bearing so many exceptions and contradictory impulses, a system bracketing such a diversity of local
examples within such a broad, universal framework, tell us much
of anything? Or does it collapse under the weight of its own incongruities? As a concept, critical regionalism sought to be both
general and particular. It ended by reinforcing the former at the
expense of the latter; that is, it became a general theory of the particular. Perhaps it was but another symptom, or victim, of the inevitable universalizing tendencies it warned against.
The North American architect Harwell Hamilton Harris,
whom Frampton quoted in his discussions of critical regionalism,
wrote in 1958 that regionalism is “a state of mind.”55 Yet it is
attention to this aspect—to the particular intellectual and cultural
landscapes from which its sometimes reluctant individual exemplars
emerged—that has been most lacking in the literature of critical
regionalism. By attending more directly to these “states of mind,”
by heeding the voices of those responsible for building particular
cultures, architects among many others, rather than imposing formulas upon them, we might come to understand better the richness
of internal, local discourses in their full range and complexity.
Acknowledgments
For their insightful comments, I would like to thank Luis Carranza,
Richard Ingersoll, and an anonymous reader at JAE. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium “Self, Place, and
Imagination: Cross-Cultural Thinking in Architecture,” The Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, Univ. of Adelaide
(Australia), Jan. 22, 1999. Thanks to Samer Akkach, Stanislaus
Fung, and Peter Scriver, who organized this excellent event and
provided many helpful suggestions regarding my original paper.
Among the other presenters there were Alexander Tzonis and Liane
Lefaivre; I am grateful to them for the thoughtful, gracious comments they provided on my work and their own.
Notes
1. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on PostModern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 21; “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 148; and Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 2nd
ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 327. See also Alexander Tzonis and
Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981): 164 –
78; and William J. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 331 –343. Although Curtis wrote here of “modern regionalism,” this was essentially the same phenomenon that Frampton, Tzonis, and
Lefaivre called “critical regionalism.” See also Curtis’s “Towards an Authentic Regionalism,” Mimar: Architecture in Development 19 ( Jan./March 1986): 24 –31.
2. For texts on regionalism and critical regionalism in architecture published
before 1988, see Michael Steiner and Clarence Mondale, Region and Regionalism in
the United States: A Source Book for the Humanities and Social Sciences (New York:
Garland, 1988), pp. 9–78. Major symposia on regionalist architecture were held in
Seville, Spain, in 1985, in Pomona, California, in 1989, in Delft, The Netherlands,
in 1990, and in Milan, Italy, in 1991. Of these, only the proceedings of the Pomona
meeting have been published; see Spyros Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism: The
Pomona Meeting, Proceedings (Pomona: College of Environmental Design, CSP
Univ., 1991). When entered, on Oct. 10, 2001, into the online search engine Google
(www.google.com), the term critical regionalism received 740 hits.
3. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 14.
4. The reception of critical regionalism until now has been largely uncritical.
Most of the publications discussing it have centered on explication, elaboration, or
illustration of its concepts. Among the few previous essays to question these concepts
directly are Alan Colquhoun, “Critique of Regionalism,” Casabella 630– 631
( Jan./Feb. 1996): 51–55; “The Concept of Regionalism,” in Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai, eds., Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1997), pp. 13 –23; Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in
the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” Assemblage 8 (Feb.
1989): 36; and Richard Ingersoll, “Conference Review: Context and Modernity,”
Journal of Architectural Education 44/2 (Feb. 1991): 124 –125. Ingersoll notes that,
at this conference, held at Delft Technical Univ., June 12–15, 1990, substantial
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critiques of critical regionalism were raised by Fredrick Jameson, Marshall Berman,
Ingersoll himself, and others; the proceedings of this event have never been published.
Worth noting is the fact that, as a concept, critical regionalism has often
proven more agreeable to critics than to the designers said to be its representatives.
Architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, for instance, recalled that, at a conference on the
subject held in Spain in 1985, “the architects [in attendance] felt insulted when . . .
described [as regionalists].” Luis Fernández-Galiano, “Ten Aphorisms on Regionalism,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism, p. 31. According to one American
editorial published a few years later, “architects who seriously regard themselves as
regionalists now resent the very word.” Deborah K. Dietsch, “Regionalism Lost and
Found,” Architecture 80 (Aug. 1991): 13.
5. “Since, then, it is climate which causes the variety in different countries,
and the dispositions of the inhabitants, their stature and qualities are naturally dissimilar, there can be no doubt that the arrangement of buildings should be suitable
to the qualities of the nations and people, as nature herself wisely and clearly indicates.” Vitruvius, De Architectura (online version edited by Bill Thayer: www
.ukans.edu/history/index/europe/ancient_rome/E/Roman/Texts/ Vitruvius/6.html),
book VI, chapter 1, paragraph 12. For a historical overview of regionalist writings,
see Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism, pp. 2 –23.
6. See, for example, Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern
Architecture in Germany and the Scandanavian Countries (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
7. Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1941), p. 30.
8. Tzonis and Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” pp. 164 –178.
9. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” p. 162
10. Since the early 1980s, Frampton has discussed the topic in numerous
published essays and interviews. In addition to those already noted, see “El Regionalismo Crí́tico: Arquitectura Moderna e Identidad Cultural,” Proa 354 (Sept. 1986):
20– 23; “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic,”
Center 3: The New Regionalism (1987): 20–27; “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,”
in John Thackara, ed., Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1988), pp. 51–66; “Some Re ections on Postmodernism and Architecture,” in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Postmodernism: ICA Documents (London: Free
Association Books, 1989), pp. 75–87; “Critical Regionalism Revisited,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism, pp. 34–39; and “Universalism and/or Regionalism:
Untimely Re ections on the Future of the New,” Domus 782 (May 1996): 4–8.
11. Paul Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” in History
and Truth, Charles A. Kelbley, trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1965), p. 276. The essays quoting Ricoeur are those appearing in The Anti-Aesthetic,
edited by Hal Foster, Perspecta, and Frampton’s Modern Architecture.
12. Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 315.
13. Ibid, p. 314; “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” pp. 16–30.
14. Frampton, Modern Architecture, pp. 314 –327.
15. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” p. 149, and Modern
Architecture, p. 315.
16. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” p. 149.
17. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” p. 19. For related critiques of postmodern architecture in the
1980s, see McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” pp. 22–59, and Diane Ghirardo, “The Deceit of
May 2002 JAE 55/4
Postmodern Architecture,” in Gary Shapiro, ed., After the Future: Postmodern Times
and Places (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 231 –252.
18. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” p. 21, and “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” p. 149.
19. Tzonis and Lefaivre: “Critical Regionalism,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical
Regionalism, pp. 3, 20–21, and “Why Critical Regionalism Today?” A + U 236
(May 1990): 31.
20. Frampton, “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” pp. 63–65, and Tzonis
and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism, p. 20.
21. Classic texts posing these sorts of questions include Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage, 1978); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983). A related book focusing on architecture is Lawrence J. Vale’s Architecture,
Power, and National Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
22. Curtis, for instance, in setting up his laudatory remarks on Barragán’s
work, rather lightly dismissed designs by Barragán’s compatriots Carlos Lazo and
Juan O’Gorman. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, p. 333. His discussion of
Mexican architecture was expanded after the book’s Ž rst editing. See also Vale,
Architecture, Power, and National Identity, p. 54.
23. Emilio Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1976). Sales Ž gures come from a telephone interview with Kim Tyner
of MoMA’s OfŽ ce of Publications, Oct. 1, 1993.
24. The jury’s citation emphasized Barragán’s “commitment to architecture
as a sublime act of the poetic imagination.” It used words and phrases like haunting
beauty, metaphysical landscapes, meditation, solitude, passion, desire, and faith. My
thanks to Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker Prize jury, for sending me a
copy of this citation.
25. Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán, p. 5.
26. Anibol Figueroa, “The Context of Luis Barragán’s Mexican Architecture,” Center: The New Regionalism, 3 (1987): 48
27. Figueroa, “The Context of Luis Barragán’s Mexican Architecture,”
p. 46. O’Gorman’s remarks about Barragán and El Pedregal are recorded in Seldon
Rodman, Mexican Journal: The Conquerors Conquered (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1958), pp. 21, 84.
28. Jorge Alberto Manrique, “Luis Barragán ¿Arquitectura Nacionalista?”
La Semana de Bellas Artes ( July 6, 1980): 6 –7.
29. Legorreta speaking about Barragán’s in uence on his work: “I am proud
to be copying him.” James Steele, “Interview: Ricardo Legorreta,” Mimar: Architecture in Development 12/43 ( June 1992): 62.
30. For more on postwar architectural diversity in Mexico, see Fernando
González Gortázar, ed., La Arquitectura Mexicana del Siglo XX (México: Consejo
Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), and Keith Eggener, “Contrasting Images
of Identity in the Post-War Mexican Architecture of Luis Barragán and Juan
O’Gorman,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 9/1 (March 2000): 27–45.
31. Quoted by Alberto Moreiras, “Afterword,” in Amaryll Chanady, ed.,
Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 208. Also see Vale, Architecture, Power, and National
Identity, pp. 272 –293.
32. Octavio Paz, “The Uses of Tradition,” Artes de México 23, New Series
(spring 1994): 92.
33. Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Amourgis, ed., Critical
Regionalism, p. 23.
34. Frampton, “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” p. 55.
236
35. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, pp. 331 –333.
36. Ann Binkley Horn, “Modern Mexico,” Architectural Record 102 ( July
1947): 70, 72.
37. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” pp. 152 –153; Curtis,
Modern Architecture Since 1900, p. 333, and Ambasz, Architecture of Luis Barragán,
pp. 105, 107. Barragán took his civil engineer’s diploma from Guadalajara’s Escuela
Libre de Ingenieros on Dec. 13, 1923. In a 1962 interview, he recalled that civil
engineering graduates needed only to take a few more classes—drawing, composition, and art history—and submit a thesis to receive an architectural degree. He
remembered completing his coursework, submitting his thesis, and gaining his mentor’s approval. The Escuela Libre, however, closed while Barragán was traveling in
Europe, and so he did not receive the diploma he deserved. See Alejandro Ramí́rez
Ugarte, “Entrevista con El Arq. Luis Barragán,” in Enrique de Anda, ed., Luis Barragán: Clásico del Silencio (Bogatá, 1989), p. 221.
38. For a view of Barragán as both artist and entrepreneur, see Keith Eggener, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2001).
39. Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 315. Frampton’s use and discussion
of the term world culture proceeds directly from Ricoeur’s essay “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” p. 271.
40. Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 248.
41. Anthony D. King, “Vernacular, Transnational, Post-Colonial,” Casabella
630 –631 ( Jan./Feb. 1996): 71.
42. Frampton, Modern Architecture, pp. 314 –315, 327.
43. Marina Waisman, “An Architectural Theory for Latin America,” Richard Ingersoll, trans., Design Book Review 32– 33 (spring/summer 1994): 28. An
earlier version of these ideas appeared in Waisman’s “Cuestión de ‘Divergencia’:
Sobre el Regionalismo Crí́tico,” Arquitectura Viva 12 (May/June 1990): 43. See also
Zeynip Çelik, “Cultural Intersections: Re-Visioning Architecture and the City in
the Twentieth Century,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., At the End of the Century: One
Hundred Years of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), pp. 190 –227.
44. Quoted in Esther McCoy, “Jardines del Pedregal de San Angel,” Arts
and Architecture 68 (Aug. 1951): 24.
45. Luis Barragán, “Barragán on Barragán,” Archetype 2 (fall 1980): 31;
Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán, pp. 9, 108.
46. Keith Eggener, “Postwar Modernism in Mexico: Luis Barragán’s Jardines
del Pedregal and the International Discourse on Architecture and Place,” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historian 58/2 ( June 1999): 122 –145.
47. Kenneth Frampton, “Luis Barragán: The Mexican Other,” unpublished
typescript of a lecture delivered at Columbia Univ., Feb. 1993, p. 6 (my thanks to
Kenneth Frampton for sending a copy of this to me); “The Legacy of Luis Barragán,”
Columbia Architecture, Planning , Preservation Newsline (Nov./Dec. 1992): 4.
48. Rodman, Mexican Journal, p. 97. Clients, colleagues, and friends even
characterized Barragán as a snob and an elitist. See, for example, Yukata Saito,
“Interview with Francisco Gilardi,” Luis Barragán (México: Noriega Editores, 1994),
p. 132.
49. Nalbantoglu and Thai, “Introduction,” Postcolonial Space(s), p. 8. Note,
for instance, the section headings in Frampton’s essay, “Ten Points on an Architecture
of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic.” These include “Information and Experience,” “Space/Place,” “Typology/Typography,” “Architectonic/Scenographic,” “ArtiŽ cial/Natural,” and “Visual/Tactile.”
50. “The Ž ght against colonial powers,” Ricoeur wrote, “and the struggles
for liberation were, to be sure, only carried through by laying claim to a separate
personality.” The nation emerging from colonialism “has to root itself in the soil of
its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication
before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization,”
to be economically and politically viable, the new nation must also embrace “scientiŽ c, technical, and political rationality.” That is, Ricoeur says, it must embrace
“universal world civilization.” Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” pp. 271, 277
51. Jacobs, Edge of Empire, pp. 14– 15.
52. Mumford, The South in Architecture, p. 120.
53. In October, 1984, The Architectural Review devoted an issue to regionalism (its second in a year and a half ), because, its editors claimed, “so many architects see Regionalism as the salvation of modern architecture.” Architectural Review
176 (Oct. 1984): 23.
54. King, “Vernacular, Transnational, Post-Colonial,” p. 71.
55. Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture,” The Texas Quarterly 1 (Feb. 1958): 116. See also Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 320.
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