Kenneth Frampton and Jeff Kipnis In Conversation

Join distinguished professors Jeffrey Kipnis (Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture) and Kenneth Frampton (Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University) for an engaging conversation on Frampton’s highly influential and still-evolving architectural thought. Among other topics, the talk will explore how Frampton’s thinking responds to the mediated, manipulated, and dematerialized world we live in today, with all of its apparent competitions for (if not assaults on) the kind of attentions and sensations that architecture once could take for granted, and that seem to underwrite the value structures of Frampton’s formulations, arguments, and evaluations.

That Frampton has begun collecting various lifetime achievement accolades faster than a speeding bullet, most recently the Golden Lion at the 2018 Venice Biennale, should come as no surprise. So inculcated is his architectural thought today in the minds of those working in any aspect of the field, from student to practitioner to professor, that most hardly know that their thought had a beginning, not to mention an author. Yet ask any of them almost any question about architecture today, no matter how specific or wide-ranging: on the relationship between local conditions and global forces for example, or on the nature of the poetics and aesthetics of architecture, or on the social and political responsibilities of architecture, or on the powers of architecture to build a better future, and it is almost certain that the answer you will receive will reflect more of Frampton’s influence than that of any his more illustrious predecessors, such as Manfredo Tafuri, Colin Rowe, or Reyner Banham.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture.

Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London; has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic; and is now Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. He has taught at a number of leading institutions in the field, including the Royal College of Art in London and the ETH in Zurich. In addition to numerous essays on modern and contemporary architecture, Frampton is the author of Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Oxford University Press, 1980); Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1995); Labour, Work and Architecture (Phaidon Press, 2002); A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015); and Wright’s Writings: Reflections on Culture and Politics 1894–1959 (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017). Frampton has served on many international juries for architectural awards and building commissions.

Jeffrey Kipnis is professor of architectural design and theory at the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University and distinguished visiting professor at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles. His writings on art and architecture have appeared in such publications as Log, Hunch, Harvard Design Magazine, Quaderns, 2G, El Croquis, Artforum, Art in America, Assemblage, and his books and edited collections include Philip Johnson: The Glass House (with David Whitney; Pantheon Books, 1993); Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (with Thomas Leeser; Monacelli Press, 1997); Stone and Feather: Steven Holl Architects/Nelson-Atkins Museum Expansion (Prestel Pub, 2007); A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture (MIT Press, 2013); and By Other Means: Notes, Projects, and Ephemera from the Miscellany of Peter Eisenman (cocurated with Matthew Ford; Global Art Affairs Publishing, 2017). Kipnis was the Wexner Center’s curator of architecture and design, working on such exhibitions as Mood River and Perfect Acts of Architecture.