Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.

Architecture, as everybody knows, is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of forms in light. Le Corbusier himself said so. He should perhaps have added that architecture is a lot of other things too, like space, and function, and language, and tradition, and society, and politics. But you won't find much discussion of any of these aspects of architecture in Kenneth Frampton's new book. The importance of the book lies as much in what it pointedly ignores as in what it actually examines. While other critics and theorists have been busy analysing the immaterial and ideological aspects of architecture, Frampton has chosen to reassert that simple truth that, as well as all the things listed above, architecture is also construction.

This is a book about the relationship between architecture and the inescapable primary conditions of its existence: the qualities of building materials and the various ways that they can be combined to resist gravity and the elements. The relationship is never a simple one. Frampton dismisses naive determinism in a single sentence: 'Needless to say, I am not alluding to the mere revelation of constructional technique but rather to its expressive potential'. This 'expressive potential' is summed up in the word tectonics, from the Greek tekton, meaning carpenter. The idea is pursued through 200 years of architectural history, from the Greco-Gothic debates of the early nineteenth century, through the writings of theorists like Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to its manifestation in the work of a selection of twentieth-century architects: Frank Lloyd Wright, Auguste Perret, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Jorn Utzon and Carlo Scarpa. If there are some big names missing from this list (Le Corbusier, for one, who is consigned to a kind of left-overs chapter near the end) it is because the tectonic theme is deemed to be a secondary aspect of their work.

Frampton's scholarship is impressive to the point of being intimidating. His knowledge, both of the buildings themselves and of the texts relating to them, is surely unrivalled. There is enough historiographical material here to support a dozen doctoral theses. The prose style is sometimes (no, always) pompous and convoluted. The repeated use of a kind of retrospective future tense instead of the simple past tense is particularly irritating. The very first sentence of the book for example states that 'Viollet le Duc would compile his magnum opus of 1872, his Entretiens sur l'Architecture, without once using the term space in the modern sense'. But this is just Frampton's way of insisting on the elevated, philosophical status of his subject matter, even when he is talking about the technicalities of reinforced concrete or the difference between English bond and Flemish bond.

But what is it all for? Why is it necessary to consider these questions now? The answer comes so late in the book, in a final unnumbered chapter entitled, mysteriously, The Owl of Minerva, that you might easily miss it. The point is that tectonic culture is threatened by the forces of universal commodification and is in danger of being swept away. The delicate, humane balance between the ontological and representational aspects of construction, which has produced so many great buildings from the Altes Museum to the Sydney Opera House, is becoming an irrelevance in a world of spectacle and mere simulation. It is happening in the building industry, which increasingly distances the architect from the techniques of construction, in the schools, where image matters more than substance, and in politics, which can only make sense of architecture through the matrix of market forces. This is a powerful argument and a timely correction to the course of architectural criticism. The danger is that the message will be lost in the welter of historical detail. Frampton the architect and historian could learn something from Le Corbusier the architect and propagandist.