Greece, the modern margin in the classical centre: seven points for critical regionalism as historiography

Abstract

This article adopts a long-term historical perspective to explicate the emergence and significance of critical regionalism as the most celebrated moment of Greek architecture in the history of twentieth-century modernism. It argues that Greek architectural historiography echoes the double bind that conditions the centuries-long relationship between Europe and modern Greece. This bind supports a dual self-image of Greece as the founding classical centre of modern Europe, and as a peripheral site whose endeavours are only validated by their adherence to modern European developments. Starting from Western Europe, the article explores the intertwined historical construction of the margin/centre duality from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and from geopolitics to architectural historiography. It argues that it was local architects’ adoption of this dual margin/centre vision that historically led to the development of critical regionalism. Critical regionalism has been criticised as a colonialist discourse that actively marginalises the regions it addresses. But in the Greek case it also restored the already marginalised modern architectural production of the country. A close reading of Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s first theorisation of critical regionalism and its eventual recuperation by Kenneth Frampton shows how a discourse that allegedly promoted the focused return to the region ignored local nuances to answer only to the Western European and North American architectural concerns of the time. As such, critical regionalism remains an unfulfilled project. No longer viewed as a manifesto for a humanistic architecture of the future, it can now develop as a historiographical agenda for the twenty-first century, moving beyond existing dualities of modern margins and classical centres.