Modern Architecture and the Critical Present
Kenneth Frampton (Editor)
Architectural Design/Academy Editions, 1982

Paperback | 8-3/4 x 11 inches | 120 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0312536312

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION (excerpted from the Introduction):
This issue of AD is largely devoted to a number of essays which I have written over the last five years. Comprising five separate pieces, the central thesis here is the last chapter of my book Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published by Thames & Hudson in 1980. I had originally intended to end this account of the Modern Movement with the late sixties but, at the request of the American co-publisher, a further chapter was added which ostensibly advanced the history by another decade. The main title of this chapter, "Place, Production and Architecture," was a critical reference to [Sigfried] Giedion's canonical history of 1941 [Space, Time and Architecture]; for I remain convinced that the apparent antipathy between place and production is of more consequence for architecture today than any of the parallels which Giedion once saw as linking built form to supposedly scientific models of the universe. Architecture and building seem to me to have always been bound up with place creation, whereas production ? which is justifiably associated in our minds with industry ? is largely indifferent to place and tends, in the long run, to be destructive of rooted culture. Consumption and planned obsolescence, the...