Architecture and the Public World: Kenneth Frampton

This book brings together Kenneth Frampton’s essays from the 1960s to today which epitomize his reflections on the historical-theoretical entanglements of architecture with place, the public realm, cultural identity, urban landscape and environment, and the political question of the ＂predicament＂ of architecture in the new Millennium.
The essays explore Frampton’s contention that architecture’s imperative is to assume a significant responsibility for the edification and stewardship of the Arendtian ’public world.’ One of the most theoretically sophisticated and politically committed architectural thinkers, Frampton’s work breaks emphatically with the limits and norms of much contemporary practice and restores a sense of richness and social consequence of architecture’s ’unfinished project, ’ while offering abiding lessons not only for architecture but for social, cultural, and design criticism alike.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, USA. He is the author of, amongst other works, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980: 4th edition, 2007; 5th edition in preparation), Modern Architecture in the World of Art series (5th edition, 2020), Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction (1995), Labor, Work and Architecture (2002), A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015) and The Other Modernism (2016: in Italian).

Miodrag Mitrasinovic is Professor of Urbanism and Architecture, and Co-Chair of Parsons Graduate Urban Programs, at Parsons School of Design, The New School, USA. He is the co-editor of Public Space Reader (2020), Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion: Contemporary Urban Practices and Design Strategies of the Greater Bay Area (forthcoming 2021), ’Cooperative Cities’ (Journal of Design StrategiesVol. 8, 2018), editor of Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion (2016), co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (2009), and author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (2006).