Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik

Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik presents seven interviews with the architectural historian reflecting on the long arc of his rich and influential career in the discipline. Spanning Frampton’s early years as an architecture student at the Guildford School of Art to his nearly fifty years as a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, the interviews trace not only the development and implications of his work but also the cultural, political, and discursive terrain surrounding it. Here Frampton outlines the formation of his seminal ideas of “critical regionalism” and “tectonic culture,” and also ruminates on how he understands his own role as a writer on architecture. The book includes an essay by Mary McLeod, which takes stock of Frampton’s “criticality” and his enduring impact on architectural practice. As a whole, Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik is as much a portrait of a thinker as a record of the books, buildings, and ideas that have inspired such profound architectural thought.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor Emeritus at Columbia University GSAPP, where he taught from 1972–2020. He was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has worked as an architect and as an architectureal historian and critic. In addition to Columbia, Frampton has taught at a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne, and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. Frampton is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015), and L’ Altro Movimento Moderno (2015), published in English in 2021 as The Other Modern Movement. The expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History was published in January 2020.

Daniel Talesnik is a teaching associate at the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University. He is an architect from the Universidad Católica de Chile and holds an MSAAD and a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP. At the Architekturmuseum der TUM, where he worked between 2017–2022, he curated Access for All: São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures (2019), and Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities (2021–2022), and is the co-editor of both exhibition catalogues. He has published numerous essays and book chapters, and is a contributing author and editor of the book, Santiago de Chile 1977–1990: arquitectura, ciudad y política (2020).

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University GSAPP, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (2003), as well as the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology (1985) and the website "Pioneering Women of American Architecture."