(Covers of some of the books discussed in this post)
If your first reaction to the title of this post is something along the lines of, "Wait, isn't critical regionalism just 40 years old"," then everything you think know about critical regionalism is partial, in both senses of the term: incomplete and biased. Yes, Kenneth Frampton's "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" was published in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture in 1983, exactly 40 years ago, but the term "critical regionalism" was coined two years earlier by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their article "The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis" in Architecture in Greece. But as the term took hold in architectural circles that decade, and to a lesser but still lasting degree in the decades since, it has more often been associated with Frampton's essay, even though he acknowledged the earlier essay at the time and that acknowledgment brought Tzonis and Lefaivre a good deal of attention beyond their native Greece. Yet, if critical regionalism is some sort of ?ism, then should it be defined by just one critic" Is it unfair, in other words, that Frampton's take should take precedence over Tzonis and Lefaivre's" First thing's first: what is critical regionalism" If we take a step back and look at the more general term "regionalis...