Two recently published books offer some insight into these1 complex questions: Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Frampton (2020), expertly edited by Karla Cavarra Britton and Robert McCarter, along with the new edition of Frampton’s 1980 classic Modern Architecture: A Critical History. Both these books make evident Frampton’s extraordinary analytical talents and scholarly brilliance. They also speak volumes about what is missing from the academic training of architectural historians and theorists today.

Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld brings together the voices and perspectives of Frampton’s contemporaries: architects whose careers he influenced, historians whose scholarship he admires, and colleagues and sparring partners whose friendship he still values. It also situates Frampton’s historiographical and theoretical achievements in relation to his life and times: the writings of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Edward Said, which shaped Frampton’s conception of the public sphere; the student protests of 1968, which stirred his engagement with Critical Theory, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School; the Venice Biennale of 1980, which instigated Frampton’s forceful critiques of postmodernism; Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), which gave Frampton occasion to theorize Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis’s notion of critical regionalism anew.

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• 1. Architectural history has a tendency to cross the line into boosterism. Such was the famous contention of the historian Manfredo Tafuri, who chastised his peers for using their platform to promote various stylistic developments. Tafuri originally termed this phenomenon “operative criticism,” effectively damning the practice for decades to come. But one scholar, Kenneth Frampton, has bucked this trend, adopting the phrase for his own ends.

  In the estimation of his peer Mary McLeod, Frampton is “arguably the most influential architectural historian since Sigfried Giedion.” His writings and teachings have shaped generations of architects and theorists, including myself. Still, one is given to wonder why Frampton would describe his work as “operative criticism” or “operative history.” Does this not undermine his authority as a historian and critic? Why embrace a label that carries negative connotations?