Towards a Critical Regionalism 29
Alvar Aalto, Saynarsalo Town Hall, 1952.
In this way, Critical Regionalism seeks to complement our normative
visual experience by readdressing the tactile range of human perceptions. In
so doing, it endeavors to balance the priority accorded to the image and to
counter the Western tendency to interpret the environment in exclusively
perspectival terms . According to its etymology, perspective means rational-
ized sight or clear seeing, and as such it presupposes a conscious suppression
of the senses of smell, hearing and taste, and a consequent distancing from a
more direct experience of the environment. This self-imposed limitation
relates to that which Heidegger has called a "loss of nearness." In
attempting to counter this loss, the tactile opposes itself to the scenographic
and the drawing of veils over the surface of reality. Its capacity to arouse the
impulse to touch returns the architect to the poetics of construction and to the
erection of works in which the tectonic value of each component depends
upon the density of its objecthood. The tactile and the tectonic jointly have
the capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical in much the
same way as the place-form has the potential to withstand the relentless
onslaught of global modernization.
30 The Anti-Aesthetic
References
I. Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National Cultures" (1961), History and Truth,
trans. Chas. A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 276-7.
2 . That these are but two sides of the same coin has perhaps been most dramatically
demonstrated in the Portland City Annex completed in Portland, Oregon in 1982 to the
designs of Michael Graves. The constructional fabric of this building bears no relation
whatsoever to the "representative" scenography that is applied to the building both inside
and out.
3. Ricoeur, p. 277.
4. Fernand Braudel informs us that the term "culture~ hardly existed before the beginning of
the 19th century when, as far as Anglo-Saxon letters are concerned, it already finds itself
opposed to "civilization" in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge-above all, in
Coleridge's On the Constitution ofChurch and State of 1830. The noun "civilization" has
a somewhat longer history, first appearing in 1766, although its verb and participle forms
date to the 16th and 17th centuries. The use that Ricoeur makes of the opposition between
these two terms relates to the work of 20th-century German thinkers and writers such as
Osvald Spengler, Ferdinand Tennies, Alfred Weber and Thomas Mann.
5. Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
p. 154.
6. Clement Greenberg, .. Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Gillo Dorff es, ed. , Kitsch (New
York: Universe Books, 1969), p. 126.
7. Greenberg, "Modernist Paintingt in Gregory Battcock, ed., The New Art (New York:
Dutton, 1966), pp. 101-2.
8. See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli ,
1977).
9. Andreas Huyssens , "The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the
1970s," New German Critique, 22 ( Winter 1981), p. 34.
10. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for rhe Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow
Quill, 1978). p. 134.
11. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) , p. 156.
12. Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre, "The Grid and the Pathway. An Introduction to the
Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis," Architecture in Greece, 15 (Athens: 1981),
p. 178.
13. Ricoeur, p. 283.
14. Aldo Van Eyck, Forum (Amsterdam: 1962).
15. Hamilton Harwell Harris, " Liberative and Restrictive Regionalism." Address given to the
Northwest Chapter of the AJA in Eugene, Oregon in 1954.
16. J¢rn Utzon, "Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect," Zodiac, 10 (Milan:
Edizioni Communita, 1963), pp. 112-14.
17. Jean Gottmann , Megalopolis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961).
18. Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought (New
York: Harper Colophon, 1971), p. 154. This essay first appeared in German in 1954.
19. Arendt, p. 201.
20. Melvin Webber, Explorations in Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1964).
21. Robert Venturi , Complexity and Contradiction in Architec111re (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1966), p. 133.
22. Stanford Anderson, "Modern Architecture and Industry: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and
Industrial Design," Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980), p. 83.
