The early twentieth-century Burmese monk, Ledi Sayadaw, said meritorious deeds should not be done for moral reasons. That is, they should not be done to fulfill an idea of the good or the right. If performed for an ideal, a meritorious deed is meritorious but not most meritorious.

The most meritorious deed is performed, not for virtue, well-being, or a better existence in some sense, but for truth, ultimate truth. It is done for enlightenment, not for practical consequences, moral or otherwise. It may have such consequences, but it is not done for that reason.

The Buddha was a relational philosopher in its true sense. Relational philosophy is popular, academically. Connection is popular, culturally. But emphasis on connection is often, still, ultimately about oneself. I gave examples in the last chapter of how it is possible to respect relations intellectually and supposedly value connection, and nonetheless assume that living well requires a story, or a formula for how to get such a story, about oneself as a discrete entity.

The direction of such stories is individual, not human. The distinction is between what is best for me as a human being as opposed to what is best given my idiosyncratic desires, preferences, and life plans, when humanness is recognized as an objective property. It is a distinction between the human condition and what we or I believe about it. A ‘journey into the human condition’ is often a journey into beliefs about the human condition, as if that's all there is – beliefs, not truth.

One contribution of the Dhamma to relational philosophy is truth about existence and what that truth means. I will explain how this is so. I argue in this chapter that the ‘law of dead ends’, used by Cuban philosopher Cintio Vitier to connect early independence thinkers in Cuba with the Cuban Revolution, indicates a different direction. And it must be understood within this broader framework.

It involves Marx, as philosopher, not just economist, who rejected the thingish self and advanced a philosophy of existence.

He had a view of knowledge and rationality that drew on insights from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, about the connectedness of all things. Hegel gets a bad reputation but in this regard Hegel was right.

Susan E. Babbit passed away at 3 a.m. on the 18 September 2021, in Ottawa, Canada. To those who got to know her well, she was a great example of the benefits of practising vipassana meditation. She maintained a peaceful demeanour in spite of the vicissitudes of life.

In her own words (from her obituary):

Inflation: World Architecture

As I sat to write the following pages, I received an email from Kenneth Frampton saying that he had completed the fifth edition of A Critical History, published late in 2020. In an earlier personal conversation, when asked how a fifth edition would relate to the critical concept as formulated in the introduction to the first edition of the book, his response was something like “It's gone!” Would he have given the same answer if the question was raised when the book's fourth edition was published? In any event, our interest here centers on the content of these editions and the fact that a departure from the book's first edition was already anticipated in the third, with the last chapter of part III titled “World Architecture and Reflective Practice.” Before taking up the notion of “world architecture,” it should be emphasized that the leading title of part III has not changed since the publication of the first edition of the book (1980). It reads “Critical Assessment and Extension into the Present,” followed by different cycles of periodization depending on which edition of the book you pick: from 1925–78 (first edition) to 1925–84 (second edition) to 1925–91 (third and fourth editions). Noteworthy is the double connotations of the phrase “extension into the present”: it could mean either that there will be future sequels to the book or/and that modern architecture has been an “incomplete” project since 1978, the decade roughly comprising the rise of the postmodern condition. Accordingly, only parts I and II of the book have remained focused on “modern architecture. In ”contrast, the subjects discussed in part III explicitly announce the end of the canon of the International Style architecture. Still, while the lead title of part III has remained the same, a new chapter has been added to the end of each subsequent edition of the book.

Preamble

Starting with the cover page of part III of Kenneth Frampton's A Critical History (1980), this chapter proceeds to unpack the semantics of the title of the last part of the book, “Critical Assessment and Extension into the Present 1925–78,” a period ending two years before the publication of the first edition of the book. The argument presented in this chapter benefits from the cover page of part III of the book, a photo of the Willis-Faber & Dumas Building by Foster Associates (1974) (Figure 5.1). The chosen angle of the daytime image of this project draws attention: Was it intended to mirror the building's surroundings on the surface cladding at the expense of masking the architecture's vitality? However, like an X-ray, the nighttime image of the same project reveals the building's skeleton. The dual representative nature of these two images suggests a critique of postmodern architecture wherein quotations from historical languages camouflage the building's structural system. On the other hand, the daytime image highlights an atectonic interpretation of Miesian steel and glass architecture. Considering Frampton's definition of the “product-form,” the dual nature of the coverpage image suggests the decline of craft in favor of utilizing a Taylorized process of making that had been in the mind of modernists as early as the 1920s. We are reminded of Walter Gropius's Torten Seidlung Dessau (1926– 28), among other examples, that Frampton enumerates in another manuscript where he unpacks the concept of product-form. The title and the suggested two interrelated readings of the cover-page image set the stage for the present exploration of the themes and architects discussed in the four chapters compiled in part III of Frampton's book. Special attention will be focused on several works necessary for the stakes involved in postwar architecture and on how Frampton's analysis sharpens his critical agenda. The discussion begins with chapter 4, “Place, Production, and Architecture: Towards a Critical Theory of Building.” This chapter reads like a postscript to “Mies contra Aalto conundrum” and a prelude to Frampton's signature essay “Critical Regionalism,” much discussed then and now. These two subjects are discussed in the last two chapters of the present volume.

Kenneth Frampton is one of the few historians who has used an epigraph at the start of each chapter of his/ her work, in his case the famous volume Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980. Throughout the book, each epigraph either sets the basic theoretical tone of the chapter or plots the premise of Frampton's take on a subject, which is further elaborated on in other relevant chapters. Following Walter Benjamin, we could say that Frampton's appropriation of quotation intends to rob from the traditions of the historiography of modern architecture: an interventionist strategy and one in lieu of dismantling a linear vision of time central to the preceding historiographies of modern architecture. If we do not reduce historiography to the factual presentation of data, dates and building types, then historiography proper involves a philosophy of history by which the historian maps a constellation of architects’ work abreast of available textual interpretations, critical or otherwise. This definition of “historiography” was not popular a century ago, and the absence of such a perspective along various discursive formations necessitated the emergence of different approaches to the formation of modern architecture during the 1960s. Frampton's book, among a few others, is a case in point: it was written with an eye on the suggested theoretical vacuity. However, it would be premature at this point to reflect on the word “critical,” which has particular sociopolitical connotations for most of what Frampton has written to date, not to mention its implications for the history of modern architecture discussed throughout A Critical History. Considering the epigraph Frampton chose for the introductory chapter, it is appropriate to recall Benjamin's dream project: to write a book compiled from quotations! A brief discussion of a few writings that also influenced Frampton's positions on architectural history and criticism will shed light on his appropriation of the discursive differences between Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, especially the issue of technology. In reflecting on the work of these figures, this book hopes to provide the reader with a retrospective view of Frampton's book, casting light on his short introductory text to the first edition of the book.

Even though architecture's engagement with modernization was momentarily interrupted by the outbreak of war in the late 1930s, the sociopolitical outcomes of the war had drastic consequences for the building art. As noted in previous chapters, since the advent of modernity, architecture had to revise its lexicon according to the emerging new building types, most of which had no precedent in the premodern era. This development reached a decisive point in the architecture of postwar years, and Frampton outlines its profile in a chapter of A Critical History (1980) with the telling title “Architecture and the State: ideology and representation 1914–1943.” At stake was, among other issues, architecture's civic purpose under the auspices of a state apparatus, at least in America, the accelerative engine of which left almost no room for ideas such as civitas. Not only was the prospect of returning to the ideals of the Roman Republic shattered a long time ago but the postwar sociopolitical map differed from that of the 1920s and was in many ways colorful like a kilt. By the end of World War II, the thematic of the culture of building, discussed alongside the modernist notion of autonomy, for example, had been redefined. This was not according to the exigencies of a single and coherent totality (res publica) but rather according to diverse sociopolitical and cultural regimes tagged “advanced,” “developing” and “underdeveloped,” each with a specific understanding of the stakes involved in nation-state ideals. The question haunting most committed architects was: to what extent and at what price can architecture and the city be, once again, part of a totality that plans its path to success and failure within a network of decision-making with no constructive role assigned to architecture? Mostly considered as a means toward definitive ends, architecture faced a situation that had the least relevance to its disciplinary history, speaking relatively. Despite the unfavorable conditions of the 1950s, architects and historians did try to reenergize tropes such as civic architecture and monumentality.

Before getting to the bottom of these observations, a few words about the organization of Frampton's book, particularly its general ordering principle and the chapters compiled in part II, are in order.

In the 1980s, Ivan Illich declared, ‘To hell with life’. He was referring to an idea that denies death or, when referring to death, sets it apart from life, in opposition. Death has been banished and ‘life is an idol’: We expect life without death, suffering, decay, loss or disruption.

But thinking of life as idol brings misery.

Misery resulting from anger, resentment and envy affects others. And how we think has other consequences, and Illich identified one. When we deny death, we don't think well. We expect intellectual development through the amassing of propositional knowledge, by which is meant sentences that can be true or false. It is a view, mentioned in the last chapter, which the Cuban philosopher, José Martí, named as a bigger barrier to Latin American independence than United States power.

It ignores the well-known insight, expressed by Proust, that ‘we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them.’ That process of reasoning includes beliefs about who we are. It makes certain people invisible, as discussed last chapter. If we expect death as part of life, we think better because we are more open to contingencies.

We are more capable of finding new truths, giving them importance, and indeed living them.

Illich argues that ‘life as idol’ arose in Europe. It is well known that Western culture denies death but Illich argues that such denial informs a view of knowledge. His argument is consistent with Theravada Buddhism and with Marx, especially as argued by Lenin, whose views on knowledge were taken up by anti-imperialist intellectuals in the South. This is explained in the next chapter.

I make these connections, as already mentioned, to acknowledge a larger philosophy. It includes a view of rationality, which contradicts what is commonly assumed. The larger philosophy, argued in this book, is human beings as part of nature, subject to cause and effect, in mind and body. It is a sensible view and has been recognized as such throughout history. A relatively small group came up with the view of human beings facing an ‘epistemological abyss’, a popular view – philosophical liberalism.

Opening

Under the umbrella title of “A Critical History,” part II of Kenneth Frampton's Modern Architecture (1980) comprises 27 chapters, each of which focuses on the work and contribution of a particular architect or architects and thinkers associated with a tendency or a movement. The present chapter neither presents a detailed discussion of each chapter of this section of Frampton's book nor examines the extent to which the two major architectural trajectories of modernism outlined in the introduction to the book inform Frampton's take in each chapter. What it does instead is to present a close reading of the ways that a few protagonists cast light on the proposed “Aalto contra Mies” paradox. Central to this inquiry is the ideology of architecture, especially in the politics of public space, the Arendtian “space of public appearance,” that Frampton has even pursued its dialectical relevance for the private nature of domestic space. Following this line of consideration, ample attention is given to Frampton's discussion of Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (Figure 3.1), a project charged with civic and political connotations—and this concerning the concept of “monumentaliazation” introduced in connection with the late work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, discussed in the next chapter. What is involved here is a constellation of themes, if you wish, that anticipate Jürgen Habermas's annunciation of “Modernity—an Incomplete Project.” To start with, the historicity of the annotated period is mapped at the expense of exceeding the scope of disciplinarity, keeping in mind that autonomy is a grey zone informed by history and the contingencies of the present time, the Benjaminian “now-time” (Jeztzeit).

At the outset, the importance of the epoch-making decade of the 1930s is highlighted. During this time, the revolutionary specter haunting Europe since the end of World War I culminated in crisis, aspects of which Walter Benjamin unpacks in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” first published in 1936. Conversely, this is also the moment when the architecture of Europe and America cultivated the formative ethos of modernism. In retrospect, the ideological apparatus of the contingencies of the project of modernism did foreground various stages of contemporary architecture.

Kenneth Frampton's historiographic taxonomy is essential for the project pursued in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980. The previous chapter demonstrated the extent to which a well-known passage from Walter Benjamin's “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” (1940) set the theoretical premises of Frampton's brief introductory remarks, notable aspects of which he elaborates on in the subsequent chapters of the book. It is to Frampton's credit that he writes the history of modern architecture while criticizing the Enlightenment idea of progress. His text also critiques the stakes involved in the avant-gardist failed attempt to catch up with the wind of progress (in artistic terms) that pushes Benjamin's angel of history forward. This “failure” speaks to the ideology of modernity, wherein “reality persisted independent of that sentimental and romantic ‘sphere of culture.’ “ Accordingly, it took almost half a century, Fredric Jameson contends, to face the vanishing stage of the suggested mode of separation, at least in the regions of the world that were the bedrock of early modernism. Call it the postmodern condition or the full-moon visibility of an ideology when alternative views are almost nullified, if not tossed to the dark orbit of history, at least for now.

At issue for a historian, among other things, was/is the possibility of maintaining a strategic distance from the Real without isolating historiography from the objective and subjective conditions of the everyday life that capitalism has successfully managed since the middle of the past century. Frampton maps the historicity of the formation of modern architecture in three chapters of the book's part I. He argues that what makes modernity distinct from the Classical are transformations implanted in the cultural, territorial and technical areas, which are discussed under the rubric of the “trilogy” below. These transformations run the historical gamut extending from 1750 to 1939. In addition to witnessing the emergence of architectonic expressions motivated by technical changes, the last years of the decade of the 1930s designate the end of modernity. This does not mean the literal end of modernity, a singular historical event that has attained global currency since the end of the Cold War (ca. 1990), but the loss of the theoretical currency of the modernity versus Classical paradigm.

Early (Theravada) Buddhism is philosophy of existence. Many practitioners are not ‘Buddhist’. They practise vipassana meditation as art of living, a way of knowing and realizing human potential. It is a way of thinking about freedom and death. These ideas are the focus of this book. They matter to how we live, day by day, as individuals. And they matter for global justice.

They matter for truth – about existence. The Buddha's view of morality is different from commonly assumed. He understood the moral order as the necessary fixed result of good or bad action. For instance, expression or even thought of anger is loss of beauty – for oneself. Every good or bad action affects us and remains with us. It means that morality is in the first instance existential.

The Buddha said, ‘All beings own their deeds, inherit their deeds, originate from their deeds; are tied to their deeds; their deeds are their refuge. As their deeds are base or noble, so will be their lives.’

An epidemic of loneliness rages and some blame social media. Others urge connection to nature, including wild animals. It is a popular theme. But connecting with nature is not a matter of will. It can't simply be chosen any more than one can choose to run a marathon. The mind needs training as the body needs training. Connection to nature is learned, and it has to do with thinking.

The way we think, being self-centred, opposes the essential truth of nature, which is constant change. The idea of an enduring, transparent self alienates us from nature, which is in flux, always ephemeral. It prevents us from understanding the sort of effort required to know nature as it is.

The universe contains mostly dark energy. Yet we think of ourselves as secure, enduring entities, enthralled by ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. The beauty of darkness, which after all explains health, is metaphorically challenging.

This book is neither a biographical investigation of Kenneth Frampton, a renowned historian, architect and architecture critic, nor a study of his oeuvre in its entirety, a huge task that would take into consideration many volumes, including the five editions of his Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in addition to the numerous published books, essays and forewords that he has written for scholarly books to date. Instead, it is a modest-yet-timely project: focusing on the first edition of A Critical History (as it will be referred to throughout this volume), published in 1980, it is a search for clues and positions that will provide the reader with a partial view of the significance of Frampton's historiography of modern architecture— “partial” because, in this volume, each chapter of the first edition of his book has not been examined. Although particular attention has been accorded to Frampton's work, the scope of this book is comprehensively narrow. Rather than reading the first edition of A Critical History through the lens of contemporary fashionable ideas and transient themes, the approach here is somewhat archeological: zooming into his book and simultaneously building out, an attempt has been made to historicize Frampton's positions, with a critical eye on the contemporary state of architectural praxis. The following reading of Frampton also offers a “prism” for comprehending architecture in global capitalism. Critically significant to this retrospective reading of Frampton's book is the fact that in the course of its subsequent editions, the first two parts of the first edition have remained almost unchanged, and also that its content comprises the core of the Modern Architecture movement, which still influences the course of future actions. For instance, among the many themes discussed in the second part of Frampton's book, his interpretation of events from 1930 to 1945—a watershed in the developmental process of modern movement architecture—is highlighted.