Léa-Catherine Szacka

Léa-Catherine Szacka – Criticism From Within: Kenneth Frampton and the Retreat from Postmodernism ‘The Presence of the Past’, the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 1980, was characterised by an opposition within the curatorial team. The advisory committee, preparing the Biennale’s content, included Paolo Portoghesi, Charles Jencks, Robert Stern, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Vincent Scully and Kenneth Frampton. The latter re signed from the committee only a few months after the initial meetings out of critique with the intention of the other curators, namely the postmodernism celebrated by ‘The Presence of the Past’. Exactly this opposition towards the biennale’s curatorial team would lead Frampton, as Lea-Catherine Szacka shows, to develop his version of ‘critical regionalism’. Frampton’s retreat from the Biennale marked his engagement with architecture after modernism and enabled him to open a path distinct to postmodernism.