Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History

Abstract

Since its first publication in 1980, Modern Architecture has been recognized as an essential book on the modern movement in architecture. Kenneth Frampton’s latest fifth edition is a significant improvement from its earlier fourth edition in 2007, employing a much more open and comprehensive approach both geographically and theoretically. The author’s sharp observations on critical works in the modern movement have inspired generations of students for an ethical and intellectual approach to architecture. Profoundly influenced by the phenomenology of Hannah Arendt and the critical theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Frampton recognizes the constraints on building culture by the economic and political structure of capitalism and examines each building as a phenomenological experience of the human subject. His texts and selection of images weave deep sociological and philosophical insight with keen spatial, formal, and material observations. In doing so, he advocates for an architecture of resistance, which is based on the intrinsic uniqueness of the bodily experience of the human subject.