Topographic Architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s Interest in the Ground

Being the Mountain, Designing Matter, Essay, Low Density, Territory and mobility, Véronique Patteeuw

Aesthetics, Agriculture, Architecture, Architecture&nature, Concept, Context, Cultural legacy, Dealing with Nature, Earth, Environment, Essay, History of Architecture, Hybridization, Landscape, Local Awareness, Materials, Modernism, Natural materials, Swimming Pool, Technical systems, Tectonic grounds, Tectonics, Topography, Transformation, Vernacular

This essay is an excerpt of Being The Mountain by PRODUCTORA, published by Actar Publishers and the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture Press.

This text was written in parallel to the preparation of “Critical Regionalism Revisited,” OASE 103, ed. Tom Avermaete, Véronique Patteeuw, Léa-Catherine Szacka, and Hans Teerds (2019).

As such, Frampton aimed to rescue architecture from the many manipulations of history by providing it with a solid rootedness. But how did Frampton apprehend this rootedness? Was it essential to the architecture he promoted, a mere provocation against the so-called “presence of the past,” or a mechanism in his attempt to reposition architecture ideologically?