From Regionalism to Regionality

The introduction started to explain the move towards regionality as an active, agitating presence, a becoming that deviates from the standard model of regionalism and is, therefore, not an 'order-word' as defined by Deleuze and Guattari that 'marks stoppages or organized, stratified compositions' but rather a 'pass-word' 'to transform the compositions of order into the components of passage' (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110). Passwords get us into places and through barriers, they open up unsuspected worlds to our attention and to wider relations, and this is how I would like regionality to function in this book as a whole, acting as a word of passage, a bridge to different ways of being, seeing, and becoming in our relations to the world. Chapter 1 will, however, deliberately go back further in an effort to understand in more detail the lines of my own thought away from regionalism towards critical regionalism and from there onward to the themes that interest me in this book.

1: ON CRITICAL REGIONALISM

Lawrence W. Speck wrote in 1987 that regionalism 'mines everyday life and perception for messages about a truly progressive future' through its attention to 'the particulars of place and culture ... from experience. It tinkers, crafts, accepts, rejects, adjusts, and reacts' (in Canizaro 2007: 71). Through this he compares regionalism to jazz: being of a place, New Orleans, and yet borrowing from other traditions, nations, expressions and continuing to influence and inflect other new forms and styles beyond its regional roots. As Eleftherios Pavlides has put it, in a progressive view of regionalism 'the past informs the future' (ibid.: 166) through 'a modern phenomenon that criticized modernity by asserting difference ... and proposing alternatives that reversed modern contempt for the old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities' (Fox in Canizaro 2007: 212). Thus, in architecture these more progressive and theoretical concepts became associated with critical regionalism, which Stephen Fox argues was, among other things, a 'negotiation' between styles and traditions rather than a direct absorption into approved metropolitan forms, which meant that regionalism became an 'uncovering and recovering of otherness as a critical practice' (ibid.). But as Fox's point about the 'old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities' suggests, these ideas were never simply contained by architectural theory or practice but always had strong alliances to wider political purposes. It is an early example of what, following the use of the term 'minor' by Deleuze and Guattari (as in the introduction) and developed by Jill Stoner, we might begin to think of as 'minor architecture' (see Stoner 2012) precisely because it remembers the old, the marginal, subcultural, and the local and draws dynamically on these perspectives to challenge 'majoritarian', universalist positions.

Anthony Alofsin, writing as early as 1980, may have been one of the first architectural critics to move towards an actual definition of critical regionalism when he wrote of 'Constructive Regionalism' as 'an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them' (in Canizaro 2007: 370). Alofsin helped explain Lewis Mumford's support for Bay Region Architecture, which, according to Mumford, 'both belongs to the region and transcends the region' (ibid.: 372) and, argues Alofsin, provided 'criteria for criticism' in relation to the principles of regionalism it embodied rather than a slavish following: 'it would embrace traditions and transform tradition; it would be wed to its setting ... it would foster craft and push the limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search for the universal' (ibid.). Alofsin began to formulate an architecture of 'paradox' and of 'contradictions' which would 'embrace native detail and color and at the same time discourage cultural hedonism' (ibid.). Wrestling with its paradoxes, Alofsin saw 'human use', 'local life', and the 'bonding of people' as intrinsic to this constructive but critical regionalism, while refuting the 'imposition of style or visual hegemony' and 'cultural hedonism' (ibid.: 373, 372).

Alofsin formed these ideas while working alongside Lianne Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in the early 1980s, finding a focus in the specific idea of critical regionalism, which was given a name by the latter's 1981 Greek-English essay 'The Grid and the Pathway'. For them, regionalism 'bears the mark of ambiguity', a kind of doublenesss, because it has been used both to 'foster a new sense of identity' and also 'proved a powerful tool of repression and chauvinism' by enclosing and restricting styles or 'abstract universal forms' 'based on the book rather than experience' (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1981: 64, 74). The tendency to hark back through earlier regionalist architectural design to 'a sentimental utopianism' is broken in their analysis through alternative forms of 'critical regionalism' protesting 'against the destruction of community, the splitting of human associations, the dissolution of human contact' so often epitomized by international modernist forms with their 'custodial effects' (ibid.: 76, 72). Thus, in their essay the 'pathway' moves, connects, and humanizes spatial practices to form 'an architecture that grows out of movement and meeting', imitating the local, popular architecture of lived experience with intense 'human associations', such as 'doorsteps, passages, courts', with 'a history ... and a social life' rather than established and 'highly normative architecture' (ibid.: 76, 78, 74). For them, critical regionalism interrupts the 'monumentality recalling another distant and forlorn elite' through 'an investigation of the local', weaving a 'braid of niches' into an intimate 'bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass' (ibid.: 74, 76, 78). Embedded in their language are the earliest ruminations on critical regionalism as bound up with affective relations with place and space: 'movement and meeting', 'experience', 'lived-in spaces', and through their example of Dimitris Pikionis, a belief in the 'rehumanisation of architecture' to create 'a place made for an occasion' rather than just 'abstract space' (ibid.: 76). These traces of affect will be central to the development of critical regionalism as an architectural approach and ultimately as a developing theory or 'critical framework' (ibid.: 78) interested in rethinking regionalism in its relation to the world.

It was this work that provoked Kenneth Frampton to write two essays published in 1983 which both extended and developed their ideas in a more systematic and theorized manner: 'Prospects for a Critical Regionalism' and 'Towards a Critical...