A month ago it was announced that the English architect, historian, researcher, critic and educator Kenneth Frampton will be the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (from 26th May to 25th November).
Trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, Frampton has taught since 1972 at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York.
Frampton has inspired generations of students and architects through his works such as the seminal Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Towards a Critical Regionalism, focused on the concept of re-valuating context, place and culture, and Studies on Tectonic Culture, a work that highlights the connection between the language of construction and the language of architecture.
In a press release about Frampton being awarded the Golden Lion, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara stated: "Through his work, Kenneth Frampton occupies a position of extraordinary insight and intelligence combined with a unique sense of integrity. He stands out as the voice of truth in the promotion of key values of architecture and its role in society. His humanistic philosophy in relation to architecture is embedded in his writing and he has consistently argued for this humanistic component throughout all the various 'movements' and trends often misguided in architecture in the 20th and 21st century."
"His experience as a practicing architect has given him a deep understanding of the process of designing and crafting buildings. This makes him both more sympathetic and more critical of the various forms of the practice of architecture. His consistent values in relation to the impact of architecture on society, together with his intellectual generosity, position him as a uniquely important presence in the world of architecture."
The most famous building designed by Frampton - dubbed "a maestro" by Paolo Baratta, La Biennale President - is Corringham, a modernist residential apartment block located in Bayswater, London.
The first design was completed in 1960 and it focused on a building with 45 apartments and 39 maisonettes arranged over six floors; new drawings were presented the following year, but the final design was submitted in January 1962 and eventually approved in June of the same year.
The building comprises eight floors with six apartments each, plus an underground parking garage for residents and a communal garden. Each apartment has an east-facing balcony overlooking the garden and London's West End.
The style is modernist and minimalist and clearly references Le Corbusier in its pure geometrical forms and lines and in its choice of materials - concrete, metal (see the strong window frames) and glass.
The rubbish chute and extractor fans were also a derivation of Le Corbusier's idea that a house is a "machine for living in", even though the site dedicated to the building highlights that Kenneth Frampton claimed the mass of the building owed to the ideas of Atelier 5 in Switzerland.
Though still minimalist, the back of the building included inset balconies and contrasting black railings.
The vertical emphasis of the lift shaft, stair well and boiler flue contributed to turn Corringham into one of the first major structures in the brutalist style ever built in Central London (when it was finished it received mixed reviews and its modernist exterior was considered as rather controversial at the time).
Frampton's connection with fashion? Well, apart from the fact that you can always get inspired by his writings and apply his teachings to fashion design, there is a more practical link as well: the "form follows function" principle that informs Corringham, was indeed behind Ally Capellino's 2014 designs that were inspired by the basic and reduced lines and subtle colour palette of London's brutalist architecture.
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