UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 3 September 2012 at 1.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR JOHN TUOMEY, UCD School of Architecture, University College Dublin on 3 September 2012, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa on KENNETH FRAMPTON
President, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Graduating Students
It is my privilege to introduce Professor Kenneth Frampton here this afternoon, and to warmly welcome him to the community of University College Dublin.
I hope Kenneth might not object to being described as a critical friend, respected as he is here in Ireland, as a critic, and friendly, as he has shown himself to be over the past thirty years, to the ways of Irish Architecture.
He has made occasional, but always memorable, visits to Dublin for public lectures and has returned several times to the School of Architecture for conference discussions and thesis reviews.
Kenneth, Tá Fáilte Romhat Ar Ais - Welcome Here Again!
Three relatively recent events spring to mind.
In September 2011 he spoke to the RIAI annual architects’ conference, reflecting back almost thirty years to the 1983 publication of his seminal essay
Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.
It is, quite simply, not possible to discuss what Frampton’s friend Rafael Moneo might regard as the “theoretical anxieties and design strategies” of contemporary Irish architecture without reference to the continuing relevance of that short essay. Those three key words - “Critical” and “Regionalism” and “Resistance” - have been taken up as a moral call to conscious action by architects in many different places around the world and also provoked some position-taking for certain Irish architects swimming against the tide, including some of those involved in the closely related worlds of practice and teaching here at UCD.
In March 2010, Kenneth came to UCD, not for the first time, for thesis reviews. Students spoke afterwards of his enthusiastic generosity and of his eagerly attentive reading of their ideas in development. One student told me she just couldn’t believe that he was here, and actually discussing her work.
(And he even seemed to approve of the spindly trees on her site model!)
Eric Parry, chairman of our most recent panel of external examiners, still refers back to his memories of one particular two-day UCD thesis review in 1997, with Frampton and the late Kevin Kieran. Eric describes that brilliantly sustained dialogue as the final crit par excellence.
In October 2005, Frampton was invited to Dublin on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the AAI Awards, and recorded a lengthy lunchtime conversation in the library of Royal Irish Academy. The text of this discussion, since published in our School Yearbook, summmarises something of the intellectual openness, self-questioning enquiry and authoritative scope of the mind of this remarkable man.
One characteristic of these, and other flying visits, is that ordinary jet-lag does not seem to delay his extraordinary human energy, nor does it seem to sour his good humour. He is cheerfully serious, perhaps sometimes severe, but never solemn. And always ready to look around, to notice what is going on at the edges.
Kenneth Frampton was born in 1930 and studied architecture in Guildford School of Art and at the Architectural Association in London. His studies were followed by two years military service in the Royal Engineers. He went into practice for a short time, working in the London office of Douglas Stephen, where he designed an eight-storey apartment building, which is now a listed building.
He left this position to turn to a life engaged as a writer on architecture, but his writer’s voice is of more than academic interest. Through his research, writing and teaching he has contributed to scholarship and to the wider culture. His work, sympathetic as it is to critical practice, and paying close attention to the built reality of architecture, has had a formative influence on architectural thinking in teaching and practice all over the world.
It is a telling detail of his childhood biography that before he could write, he used to pretend to write, scrawling over sheets of paper in a personalised, if illegible script. That is to say, he would write before he could read, surely an early sign of a compulsive writer on the road to his destiny.
He was technical editor of Architectural Design magazine, the most influential architecture magazine of the London sixties’ scene, and later, in New York, he was a founding co-editor of Oppositions, a new kind of periodical that published theoretical and polemical works of architecture.
He is now Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University, New York. He has taught at the Royal College of Art, London, where he made a few Irish friends, and at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland, where he introduced a few Irish colleagues to the European circuit.
A useful way to begin to read between the densely constructed lines and to penetrate the fugal cadences of Frampton’s writing, is to look to the subtitles and to the dedications that he provides as keys to unlock his most important books.
The first book, and still a bestseller, is the Thames and Hudson, World of Art, classic, Modern Architecture: A Critical History – the clue is in the explanatory alternate title that comes after the colon - A Critical History
– And also in this introductory sentence:
“Many unbuilt works feature in this account, since for me the history of modern architecture is as much about consciousness and polemical intent as it is about buildings themselves”.
Published in 1980, after ten years in the writing, this book brought the culture of architectural history a long way from the comparative method of Bannister Fletcher and the Post-Modern battle of the styles.
Moving on from historical survey to the trickier question of form and intentions;
Studies in Tectonic Culture, published in 1995, carries the subtitle,
The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.
And on the frontispiece, a poetic quotation taken from Saint Exupéry, author of
The Little Prince, - a motto, to paraphrase Frampton’s own sense of purpose:
“We don’t ask to be eternal beings.
We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning”
This book is dedicated to the artist Silvia Kolbowski, his life’s companion.
Silvia, I’m happy to say, is also here today, to join us for this special occasion.
My own favourite Frampton book is the volume of 25 collected essays and articles, spanning thirty years writing, and published in 2002, is
Labour, Work and Architecture.
This book is dedicated to Hannah Ahrendt, author of The Human Condition, and believer in the human need of common sense, who Frampton acknowledges as a guiding philosophical influence on his own view of the world.
Two more books, and their subtitles, to mention before I conclude:
Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism - in which he champions the civic aspects of a topography that connects individual works of architecture to the wider world, and registers how Aalto’s buildings are anchored to the ground.
Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century – in which he heroically wrestles with the monumental complexity of Le Corbusier’s legacy.
To finish, and with apologies to the author here present, I would like to borrow one quotation from this book.
It will be a long time before we shall free ourselves from the fertility of his vision and the range of his influence. In fact as the new century unfolds and as our knowledge of his overall achievement continues to grow… we have all the more reason to feel that we will never quite finish with the labyrinthine scope of his production.
He was writing then about the lasting effect of this work of Le Corbusier - but I am talking today about the legacy of this other remarkable figure, Kenneth Frampton, himself warmly recognised as an inspirational mentor by a whole generation of architects, not only all around the world, but also, here, today.
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Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus Scientiae; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.