On the Public and the Human: Kenneth Frampton’s References to the Space of Appearance

Abstract

The term “the space of appearance,” which originates from the writings of Hannah Arendt, resonated strongly within the writings of Kenneth Frampton. In this article, I trace how Frampton understands this notion. As he has been mostly concerned with the democratic necessity to establish a public realm, he laments the loss of architecture’s ability to establish such a realm. Arendt’s notion informs him to turn to the local and thus can be understood as informative with regards to his engagement with “critical regionalism” and his attempt to define an architecture resisting neocapitalist urbanisation and its inherent placelessness. By introducing Martin Heidegger’s distinction between space and place, he connects Arendt’s “appearance” to bounded spaces and the notion of proximity. Frampton, I claim, nevertheless does not align the “space of appearance” with particular spatial typologies, but develops his understanding of the potential (or lost potential) of architecture through the reflection on specific projects.