Reading Kenneth Frampton: A Commentary on ’’Modern Architecture’’, 1980

Gevork Hartoonian presents a retrospective reading of the first edition of Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published in 1980. He provides novel insights into the significance of Frampton’s historiography of modern architecture and beyond. In exploring selected themes from Frampton’s ongoing criticism of contemporary architecture, this book leads us to a critical understanding of the past, the modernity of architecture’s contemporaneity. It unpacks classificatory modes governing the three-part organization of Frampton’s book, the constellation of which allowed him to hold on to an anteroom view of history amidst the flood of temporalities spanning the period 1980-2020. Contemplating Frampton’s book as an artifact stripped of temporality, this original work reads Frampton’s historiography in the intersection of selected epigraphs and three images illuminating the book’s classificatory mode. Hartoonian presents a valuable companion to Frampton’s A Critical History for readers interested in the successes and failures of contemporary architecture’s philosophical and theoretical aspirations.

Gevork Hartoonian is a professor of the history of architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia.