Critical Regionalism for our time

摘要

There are many reasons for diving into old archives, dusty closets and faded smelly books. But what could it mean to reactivate a text which, it seems, never really died in the first place? In the age of Greta Thunberg and digital activism, a rising interest in 'degrowth' and a taste for cultivating the slow and the local are invading all spheres of Western culture. Architects are no exception and several practices currently position themselves in response to the age of transition that is ours. This is not without recalling the plea of the Anglo-American critic and historian Kenneth Frampton who published 'Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance' in Perspecta in 1983, a text that defended an alternative to the threat of universalisation he witnessed at that time.