Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’