The Ideology of Critical Regionalism As A Teaching and Design Resource For The Next 100 Years of Cela
The Ideology of Critical Regionalism As A Teaching and Design Resource For The Next 100 Years of Cela
Hopman, David D.
The University of Texas at Arlington, [email protected]
1 ABSTRACT
Since its introduction as a term by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre (Tzonis and Lefaivre,
1981), Critical Regionalism has emerged as a significant ideology in contemporary landscape
architectural discourse worldwide that continues to merit closer attention as a framework for creative
regional design. Kristine Woolsey wrote that the only constant in the process of Critical Regionalism is the
quality of the ideological position of the architect that evolves over time through practice, experience, and
the international debate of the profession (Woolsey, 1991). Looking towards the next 100 years of CELA,
it is worth reflecting on where we are ideologically as a profession in relation to Critical Regionalism.
Critical Regionalism can be broadly summarized as an embrace of contemporary and historical
world culture as an indispensable part of a creative and expressive regionalist design process, a desire to
provoke both intellectual (critical thinking) and sensual reactions to a design by the end user, and a
broadening of the experience intended by design to embrace the importance of non-visual experience.
Personal ideological positions related to Critical Regionalism are informed and modified by influences of
region, contemporary culture, and aesthetic components such as environmental psychology, cultural
rules, personal growth and creativity, and the appropriation of regional ecology and environmental forces.
The author has used research into Critical Regionalism as a guiding ideology for both practice,
research, and education for the past 25 years. This research is informed by continuing and extensive
literature reviews, interviews with dozens of regionalist practitioners throughout The United States,
criticism and documentation of regionalist built projects in 11 countries, and the use of Critical
Regionalism as the overarching theme of a graduate landscape architecture design studio taught yearly
since 2004.
This essay proposes a future viability of a Critical Regionalism that is resilient, continuously
adaptive, open to continuing influences from throughout the world and made relevant by the creativity of
individual designers that anchor it in the present.
1.1 Keywords
Critical Regionalism, landscape aesthetics, postmodernism, regionalism, creative landscape
architecture
2 INTRODUCTION
Critical Regionalism is a term applied to regionalist trends that have been evolving since
regionalism became an important feature of the design debate at the beginning of the modernist period.
As with other productive areas of intellectual ferment, Critical Regionalism was a logical culmination of the
best ideas by the most committed writers dedicated to the greatest good for the greatest number of
people—the type of thinking that funnels design insights into a resonant relationship with each other at a
particular point in time.
Critical Regionalism is a flexible and adaptable ideological framework and aesthetic construct that
can be used to guide underlying design methodologies—an ideology that will productively produce future
viable landscape architects and landscape designs. Landscape architects are always thinking ahead as
we project our design ideas first mentally and then physically onto the landscape. We work to make our
designs as durable and adaptable as we can to provide value for our clients and to integrate our visions
with the end-users who lead their lives in our creations.
The design fashions and the barrage of technical innovations of the day force us to seek verities
that will guide our work into a future that is only partially knowable at best. As educators, the problem is
compounded. We are teaching future designers of future landscapes. When considering the long career
of someone graduating in their early twenties and the projected longevity of the designs that they will
participate in over the course of a career, it is not unreasonable to start thinking in terms of the next 100
years of CELA—even as we look back at the first 100.
A hallmark of the theory of Critical Regionalism is its constant reinvention. This is true for the
theory and for the original principles as they are clarified and amplified to respond to the priorities of
various design disciplines. It is also true for new priorities that layer onto the many design parameters that
have created successful landscapes of the past. This paper will discuss some of the key original
elements of Critical Regionalism considering current and speculative future priorities of landscape
architects, a nuanced evolution, in some cases, diverging from the ideas of architects and historians who
originally developed the term.
One of the most rewarding things concerning research into regionalism is the opportunity it
affords to inform and to accelerate our evolution as designers and as educators. Many of the people who
write about regionalism have a deep commitment to creating “habitat for humanity” that facilitates a future
viable flourishing for both people and the bio regions in which we dwell. Tracing the evolution and
persistence of the ideas of regionalists breeds confidence for projecting the evolution of their core
principles forward to our students and to our clients as adaptable verities that are worthy of perpetual
renewal.
Critical Regionalism can be broadly summarized into a few concepts that offer profound insights
when their ramifications are applied to the planning, design and development of regions. These ideas
include an embrace of contemporary and historical world culture as an indispensable part of a creative
and expressive regionalist design process, a desire to provoke both intellectual (critical thinking) and
sensual reactions to a design by the end user, and a broadening of the experience intended by design to
embrace the importance of non-visual experience. These and many more elements of the theories of
Critical Regionalism will be explained and expanded in this essay.
“Our record of local history and achievement is…a perpetual renewal of certain
recognizable elements… It is of the very essence of our growing sociological re-interpretation of
the past to see its essential life as continuous to the present… and so to maintain the perennation
of culture, the immortality of the social soul” (Geddes quoted in Welter, 2002, p.47).
His interest in typologies led him in 1909 to develop the idea of the “valley section” that follows a
river course from its inception in the mountains to the sea. The section connected the various topographic
regions and demonstrated the interconnected occupations that benefit from regional relationships, such
as the miners and woodsmen in the mountains, the hunters and the shepherds in the grassy lower
hillsides, and the farmers and fishermen in the valleys closer to the sea. The occupations join together to
form a cooperative society of people in the same way that communities of plants form mutually beneficial
relationships (Welter, 2002, p. 60). 2 Geddes’ regional ideas were originally inspired by regional plant
associations which he studied during his academic tenure as a biologist. This conceptual connection of
biological and cultural organization has found continuing resonance with regionalist thinking. It has
elevated the influence of Geddes in contemporary discourse beyond his peers, and his historical
influence with such regionalist luminaries as Lewis Mumford.
The American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic Lewis Mumford
(1895-1990) was a strong supporter of Geddes’ ideas and equally influential in the development of Critical
Regionalism theory. He believed that we should never consider regional ideas without mentally “adding to
it the idea of the universal”—a prime tenet of Critical Regionalism (Mumford, 1947, p. 101). The universal,
both contemporary and historic, is seen as an indispensable tool for regionalist thinking in order to gain
the perspective necessary to understand and develop the best ideas that will help a region celebrate
itself.
Mumford criticized the pervasive functionalism prevalent during the modernist period for making
engineering an end in itself rather than a foundation for a more humanized form by stating that “the
brotherhood of the machine is not a substitute for the brotherhood of people”(Tzonis and Lefaivre, 2012,
p. 20). Unlike many of the contemporary modernists of his day, Mumford always included the local in
conjunction with the universal in his design theory and criticism. According to Mumford, by rejecting
traditional architecture, modernists “... also rejected the human needs, interests, sentiments, and values
that must be given full play in every complete structure” (Mumford, 1952, p. 86).
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is a seminal figure in the ongoing evolution of environmental and
ecological thinking in the United States and more important to the regionalist thinking of landscape
architects than to the early iterations of the theory of Critical Regionalism as espoused by architects.
Leopold was very well known as a professor during his lifetime but is best known today for his work and
writing on natural aesthetics, environmental ethics, wildlife management, wilderness preservation,
conservation economics, ecology, the land ethic, and agriculture.
His career as a thoughtful professional gradually evolved from its beginnings in forestry as he
looked more and more deeply into the root causes of the environmental and ecological dysfunction that
he saw around the world in the early 20th century. His huge influential work, A Sand County Almanac
(published posthumously in1949), shows us that most of the issues, aesthetics, and ethics of land use
that are still considered environmentally and ecologically forward thinking have been with us at least since
the Great Depression era of the 20th century. It also makes clear that these imperatives are another area
that requires constant nurturing and renewal by thoughtful design professionals and educators today.
As Aldo Leopold wrote, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel,
understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” (Leopold, 1986, p. 251). Leopold understood that the “death
of nature”, which began with the enlightenment and continues to this day with the ethos and professional
practice of many design professionals, can be addressed by increasing both ecological and aesthetic
appreciation of plants and other biota. Critical Regionalism in landscape architecture, particularly as
applied to planting design, can be a very productive tool in that process as the human relationship to all
biota and the resulting reconceptualized landscape designs and methodologies are added to a new
definition of Critical Regionalism.
Another seminal figure, involved in the evolution of the experiential aesthetics that are an
important component of Critical Regionalism, is John Dewey (1859-1952), a philosopher, educator, and
founder of The New School for Social Research. Dewey described aesthetic experience as a
combination of desire and thought, the sensuous and the intellectual. He was an early proponent of the
tri-partite aesthetic construct of environmental psychology (which he referred to as human nature),
cultural influences, and personal growth and creativity. These three key elements of landscape aesthetics
were used very compellingly by Steven Bourassa in his book The Aesthetics of Landscape to shift the
primary focus of Critical Regionalism away from its original concentration on form and to properly situate it
within experiential landscape aesthetics (Bourassa, 1991).
Dewey summarizes experiential aesthetics as the enhancement and intensification (emphasis
mine) of everyday experience. This broad and comprehensive definition is meant to encompass both
sensory and intellectual components, key elements of Critical Regionalism. The intellectual engenders a
prolonged contemplation of the object as the object triggers ideas that are beyond the landscape, or other
design, that is readily perceptible. The sensuous aspects, however, facilitate an immediate and powerful
emotional engagement and provide the psychological benefits of bringing people mentally into the
present (Meyer, 2016, pp. 136-137). 3
Dewey’s ideas are also important for an understanding of how the creativity encouraged by
Critical Regionalism moves culture forward through the dissemination of innovation. The natural fit of a
creative designer and a culture that is ‘ripe’ for appropriation of his ideas was described by Dewey and is
a key issue in Critical Regionalism.
Dewey divides artistic innovation into three stages:
1. Experimentation that is generally condemned by the public. Ricoeur describes this initial
stage as bringing forth “something which will be shocking and bewildering at first” (Ricoeur,
1965, p. 51);
2. The new style is used to modify previous styles and so is given a “classical” validity; and,
3. “Technique is borrowed without the urgent experience that at first evoked it. The academic
and the eclectic result” (Dewey, 1980, p. 42).
The third stage above is the one that is most relevant to the constant reinvention that is a salient
component of Critical Regionalism. This reinvention is as important to the original innovators as it is to the
designers under their sphere of influence or to the culture that stays vital because it is in a constant
process of renewal. The continued flood of new ideas created by a sensitized experience of region and
the transformation of regional influences into creative design solutions helps prevent designers from
repeating themselves and becoming creatively “switched off.”
By the first third of the 20th century, the trajectory was set for what would evolve into Critical
Regionalism in the early 1980s. Many influential writers amplified and reinvented the ideas about region
and districts, combining the local and the universals, bioregions and ecology and experiential aesthetics,
and how all of these relate to environmental design in a rapidly developing and commodifying world. The
early principles of Critical Regionalism are a snapshot in time created by people with specific professional
biases and the trajectory of these ideas has continued and will continue far into the future. It is productive,
therefore, to consider in greater detail the principles of Critical Regionalism and how adaptable they might
be to future circumstances in the next 100 years of CELA.
“History is not ended with our historian’s “periods”; the world is ever beginning anew,
each community with it, each town and quarter…. How then shall we continue the past tradition
into the opening future?” (Patrick Geddes quoted in Welter, 2002, p. 82).
5.3 The postmodern emphasis on place, rather than primarily forms and space
Figure 1. Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island near Seattle provokes critical thinking by
juxtaposing intense and carefully maintained expressions of local nature with rigorously crafted geometry.
The reflection garden (on right) was designed by Thomas Church. Photos by Author (2019)
Buildings, other cultural artifacts, un-designed areas, and people contribute to a “sense of place.”
This is a term that is often applied by designers in many professions as an important criterion of beauty or
aesthetics. Geographer John Agnew describes place as “the local structure of feeling” that pervades
being in a particular place (Moore, 2005, p. 435). The structure of feeling is another way of describing
experiential aesthetics. Other people would refer to it as the character of a place or even as the “vibe.”
Professor of architecture (now emeritus) Steven Moore proposed a conception of place as “a dynamic
process that links humans and nonhumans in space at a variety of scales (Ibid).” The scale that is most
important to the ideology of Critical Regionalism is a small enough area that the human poetics of space
are experienced directly. The scale of direct experience can reflect and trigger thinking about larger areas
than those that are immediately perceptible. However, it is the direct experience that is the most important
focus of Critical Regionalism.
As the ever-increasing billions of humans on earth exert greater and greater control of the
environment, educated resistance to physical and cultural entropy should continue to rise as a priority of
design. Using both natural and cultural history as key building blocks in the design process will both keep
the design process fresh for designers in diverse locations, and also keep the landscape and structures
emotionally accessible to inhabitants. This ethos is especially important with the advent of advanced
manufacturing, artificial intelligence and the ever-accelerating waves of engineered design tools and
components. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin wrote that “in 2011, Americans took in five times as
much information as they did in 1986”, a symptom of what has been called “the quickening” that is
accelerating and outstripping our ability to adjust (quoted in Spirn, 2016, p. 66). The pace of change and
the sense of place that facilitate appropriation by a local community will need to be very conscious
parameters for designers and decision makers when pursuing large-scale parametric interventions. The
acceleration of change will require continuing psychological research for us to understand how we can
keep designs both innovative and psychologically accessible. We will also need to increase the focus on
celebrating particular geographical locations with their attendant population groups, biota, weather,
topography etc.—a celebration that goes beyond creating a completely or primarily invented or
transferred experience of place.
Places are moving towards a universal economy and common way of living involving such items
as transportation, human relationships, comfort, leisure, and news programming. Designers have an
opportunity to bring lessons learned from the excesses of consumer culture in developed economies to
developing areas. One of these lessons is the imperative to celebrate the vastness and richness of
cultural diversity that enhances human existence by pushing back hard against cultural homogenization.
“As with a human being, every culture must both be itself and transcend itself: it
must make the most of its limitations and must pass beyond them: it must be open to
fresh experience and yet it must maintain its integrity. In no other art is that process more
sharply defined than in architecture” (Mumford, 1941, p. 101).
The quote above from Lewis Mumford shows his belief that it was impossible to produce a design
that was in tune with the needs of its time by exaggerating “the local at the expense of the universal
(quoted in Alofsin, 2005, p.371).” He stressed that it was much more important to study and learn the
ideas and conditions that were the genesis for historical forms than merely to imitate those forms. This
understanding will lead to new creative design solutions that address and contribute to continually
evolving contemporary conditions.
In Critical Regionalism practice, universal civilization is not primarily seen as an alien force
proceeding without our control or something that is being done to us. It is a continually transforming
design parameter, based on the ethos of the day, which provides an important global experiential frame
of reference for travelers and migrants, and unites all people on the planet. At the same time, however,
the most important theorists of Critical Regionalism recognize that significant opportunities for regional
expression are frequently lost when technology (universal civilization) replaces older regional responses
to building technique, climate control, expressions of local ecology, etc.
One of the difficulties in defining modern technology in terms of landscape design is that the most
advanced and forward thinking technical solutions can turn out to be a return to the natural systems that
were in place before they were replaced by ‘modern’ mechanical systems. For example, a concrete
culvert might be removed and replaced with “softer” vegetative erosion and flood control measures, or
bioremediation could replace a complex mechanical system of sewage treatment in the postmodern
search for future viable design and infrastructure solutions. Another example is ethnobotanists who study
historical agricultural practices that created productive farms without irrigation in areas, such as Spain,
with very low rainfall. The forms and techniques of these vernacular technical solutions can then become
‘contemporary technology’ as sustainable responses to the imperative to reduce the carbon footprint of
agriculture and address changing rainfall patterns caused by global warming and the climate crisis. An
ideology that continually questions the ideal balance of local and universal influences is one of the
strongest arguments for using Critical Regionalism as an overarching framework for future design
philosophies.
5.61 Defamiliarization
“Any product that is not of the very ‘easy’ sort exhibits dislocations and dissociations of
what is usually connected…It brings to definite perception values that are concealed in ordinary
experience because of habituation. Ordinary prepossession must be broken through if the degree
of energy required for an esthetic experience is to be evoked” (Dewey, 1980, p. 173).
Designers must mitigate personal aesthetics with contemporary cultural modifiers, or they may
grow too aesthetically distant from the users of landscapes and become marginalized in the ability to
create expressive designs in the same way that many avant-garde artists are. The relative degree of
defamiliarization required to make a landscape expressive and not overly eccentric, and hence alienating,
or invisible to notice, will be entirely dependent on the local context and the conditions of a future time. As
such, defamiliarization will continue to be a viable means of anchoring people into the experience of the
present and for triggering reflections about their region as the world adapts to changing circumstances in
the future.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and other influential pre-modernist thinkers promoted a
minimalism that evolved into modernism and the international style as an antidote to what they perceived
as overly chaotic cities at the turn of the 20th century. They saw the need for an architecture that
minimized distractions by the senses and encouraged people to turn inward for reflection and happiness
(Welter, 2002, p. 221). 4 The emphasis here on an intensification of experience through defamiliarization
that brings people mentally into the present turns this idea on its head with more recent research findings
based on environmental psychology and happiness studies (Widdicombe, 2015; Chaykowski, 2017).
5.81 Resistance
The idea of resistance is very useful and appealing to landscape architects and architects who
must deal with a wide variety of influences that come between the first flash of design inspiration and the
final completion of construction that realizes that inspiration. Resistance is an important element of a
rigorous Critical Regionalism design process that will help prevent a design from devolving into something
trivial, overly sentimental, or merely functional. The resistance that is a characteristic of Critical
Regionalism is in concert with a growing movement that seeks to mitigate the excesses of technologically
enabled cultural globalism. The resistance advocated here is not necessarily radical or heroic with
“bellicose visual rhetoric (Cassidy 2000, p.418).” Rather, it is a resistance that is appropriate to a region,
at a certain point in time and against specific problematic influences.
Frampton provides a very comprehensive description of resistance that encapsulates both Critical
Regionalism and the ethos of post-modernism.
“Resistance against the domination of positivistic technology and its involvement in the
maximization of production and consumption, wherein the dominant attitude towards nature is
always violent and exploitive…, the resistance of locally grounded cultural form as opposed to the
phenomenon of universal technology, ...the way in which bounded form can be brought to resist
the space endlessness of megalopolitan development, …a resistance to an emphasis on the
visual experience of place over the senses of hearing, touch and smell …and the establishment
of bounded domains and tactile presences with which to resist the dissolution of the late-modern
world” (Frampton, 1987).
The path to direct experience afforded by all the senses (tactile presence = experiential
aesthetics) and not just vision will also help resist the focus on information over experience, the cognitive
over the affective, that is a feature of formalist designs.
The cultural geographer and educator Chris Wilson writes of a resistance to “the tendency to turn
culture and the environment into exploitable commodities,” a corollary to preconceived or overly
sentimental thinking such as is found in romantic regionalism (Wilson, 1997). This resistance encourages
the designer to rethink past regional experiences, without dismissing them, in order to imagine the
landscape in new ways. The result can be a new creative design that will not be purely personal,
academic, or derivative, but rather an honest creative expression of the sensibilities of the designer linked
to a creative expression of the regional context and the zeitgeist.
Critical Regionalism provides a valuable framework for a future resistance that facilitates “learning
how to change in order not to be changed” (Brian Walker quoted in Lister, 2016, p. 314). Each designer
and design team must continually and consciously assess both the categories and the intensity of
resistance that will be most productive to moving their design vision forward as conditions and priorities
evolve over time.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Looking back at regional trends around the time of the founding of CELA and at the original
ideology and subsequent theories of Critical Regionalism as set forth almost 40 years ago in the early
1980s, demonstrates the durability and the evolutionary potential of the concepts. The ideology of Critical
Regionalism will continue to be a very productive means to shape new emergent design ideas for
practice, criticism, research, and education.
The guiding principles of Critical Regionalism have deep and broad implications for the many
polarities that will be a part of current and future design debate by members of CELA and their students.
Many of these polarities are already part of the literature surrounding Critical Regionalism such as
local/universal, affective/cognitive, creative/expressive, inner form/outer form, creative regional
seeing/non-visual regional cues, etc. Many more unforeseen propositions that are also not either/or will
emerge within the flexible ideological framework that is Critical Regionalism.
As a landscape architect and a professor in the United States, I have personally found Critical
Regionalism to be a very helpful framework for understanding and guiding our purpose as designers and
educators in society at large. This useful and flexible “ism”, that helps designers resolve the myriad claims
on the design process beyond the primarily utilitarian, has been embraced by many luminaries of the
practitioner realm of landscape architecture as well as the writers who study and critique their work. In the
next 100 years of CELA, Critical Regionalism will require ongoing advocates who can research the
concepts and apply them to contemporary conditions in both practice and academia. The new evolving
ideology and theory derived from this ongoing research and philosophical reflection will provide enduring
benefits to world-wide regionalist designs on the land.
8 REFERENCES
9 ENDNOTES
1 For a critical review of Geddes contributions to the evolution of regional thinking and to city and regional
planning, see Welter, V. M. (2002)
2 For an image of the valley section, see Welter, V. M. (2002).
3 This expands on the idea that beauty is only arrived at through an intellectual process, a critical
analysis, as promoted by art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto and others. Environmental psychology
shows us that we can experience beauty in a subconscious or pre-conscious way, before critical analysis
or moral judgement. See Meyer (2016).
4 See “Architecture for Thinkers” in Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom in Welter, V.M. (2002).
Media Statement:
This essay addresses the future viability of Critical Regionalism as an ongoing ideology and aesthetic
construct. Regionalist trends in the early 20th century, around the time that CELA was founded, and the
theory of Critical Regionalism as originally proposed in early 1980s are explained and proposed as
flexible ongoing frameworks for teaching and design. Tracing the evolution and persistence of the ideas
of regionalists breeds confidence for projecting the evolution of their principles forward to students of
landscape architecture and to clients as adaptable verities worthy of perpetual renewal.