Critical Regionalism

Critical regionalism is an approach to architecture that strives to counter placelessness and lack of identity in modern architecture by using the building's geographical context. The term "critical regionalism" was first used by the architectural theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre and, with a slightly different meaning, by the historian-theorist Kenneth Frampton.

Critical regionalism is not regionalism in the sense of vernacular architecture, but is, on the contrary, an avant-gardist, modernist approach, but one that starts from the premises of local or regional architecture. The idea of critical regionalism emerged at a time during the early 1980s when Postmodern architecture, itself a reaction to Modernist architecture, was at its height. However, the writer most associated with Critical Regionalism, Kenneth Frampton, was in fact critical towards postmodernism. Part of the reason for the confusion over the term Critical Regionalism is that Frampton's famous essay "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance" was first published in the book "The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture" (1983) edited by Hal Foster. In the Preface to the book, Foster begins by asking whether postmodernism exists at all and what it could even mean. He then states that what nine of the ten authors in the book have in common - the exception is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas - is the common belief that "the project of modernity is now deeply problematic".