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5. Surplus Experience: Kenneth Frampton and the Subterfuges of Bourgeois Taste
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CHAPTER FIVE Surplus Experience Kenneth Frampton and the Subterfuges of Bourgeois Taste For Kenneth Frampton, making buildings where people could pursue aesthetic experiences was an ethical commitment dependent on, and appropriate to, progressive social politics. However, despite Frampton’s enormous influence in architectural culture around the world, the experiential core of his theory of critical regionalism remains unexamined. Unless we deeply comprehend how Frampton understood aesthetic experience, we will minimize its political thrust and import in architecture. Significantly, Frampton’s critics and commentators have not dealt with his peculiar understanding of experience in any detail. Many members of his generation, such as architect-historian Alan Colquhoun (b. 1921), focused instead on his opposition of the concepts of regional culture and universal civilization, showing them to be indebted to German postromantic theory, which had already differentiated between Zivilization, signifying materialism and superficiality, and the less brilliant but more profound Kultur.1 That by the late nineteenth century Zivilization had already acquired the connotation of technological society—in opposition to the preindustrial, instinctual, and autochthonous social form of Kultur—raised questions about the originality and currency of Frampton’s analysis. Although Colquhoun critiqued the use of the term regionalism as dependent on an essentialist logic whereby all cultures are said to have a core reality that can be discovered, he did not engage Frampton’s more fundamental theorization of aesthetic experience as the prime means of accessing that reality. The critique of K. Michael Hays, summarized in “The Structure of Architectural Phenomenology,”2 is emblematic of the following generation of architect-historians’ attempt to grapple with one of the central questions raised by Frampton’s work: how do the material conditions of postindustrial society 183 OVERLEAF: Kenneth Frampton (center) observes Leon Krier during a sitting session. Photograph by Robert Maxwell. Courtesy of Kenneth Frampton. [54.160.244.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:38 GMT) affect our ability to constitute our notions of Self? Hays took the tack of the historian of the recent past, analyzing his predecessor’s attempts to theorize the relationship between architecture and people as symptomatic of the very phenomenon he was trying to describe. That is to say, he did not concede to Frampton the position of exteriority with regard to present conditions required in order to affirm that he could see above the fray and that critical regionalism was the way out of the contradictions of contemporary life. The idea that immediate bodily experience afforded precisely that position of exteriority was at the foundation of Frampton’s thinking. By undermining that assertion, Hays threatened to take down the entire edifice of critical regionalism. His strategy was to contextualize critical regionalism as one among many architectural responses to the phenomenological description of bodily experience as ontologically primary. In particular, Hays related Frampton’s position to those of Michael Graves, Daniel Libeskind, and, less convincingly, Peter Eisenman. He argued that, far from establishing immediate experience as affording a critical distance to postindustrial society, all these architectural responses actually helped to further late-capitalism’s alienation of our notion of Self from ourselves, in order to sell it back to us in the shape of a commodity. Hays reserved his harshest criticism for Graves and Libeskind. The former’s conception of individual bodily experience as something primordial had “a regressive valence in the production of an ahistorical subject that withdraws into an individualized realm the basic features of which—freedom, autonomy, self-creation—play a crucial role in consumer capitalism.”3 He asked, “Has not his [Libeskind’s] art, in its affirmation of a transcendental experience not yet achieved, also prepared the ground for the ruthless appropriation of all previously marginal and underdeveloped , not-yet states of architecture?”4 Architectural phenomenology, to follow Hays, had done to architecture what the lifestyle press had done to interior decoration: it had articulated an “account of the poetic and the unconscious —in order that capitalism can extend its colonization of life into the very depths of our subjectivity.”5 Hays’s condemnation of architectural phenomenology was based on his analysis of its discursive structure according to the framework of a semiotic square, something developed in the 1960s by Lithuanian linguist and semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992).6 The semiotic square allowed Hays to start from Frampton’s opposition of the concepts of culture and civilization and to derive a set of logically related concepts. Thus Frampton’s definition of culture (with its concomitant concepts like tectonic aesthetic and sensuous bodily...