Stylianos Giamarelos: Four Decades of Critical Regionalism. Theory, History, Historiography

Stylianos Giamarelos: Four Decades of Critical Regionalism. Theory, History, Historiography, VI PER Gallery, Prague, 15 May 2023
What comes to mind when architects hear the words ‘critical regionalism’ today? Usually an opposition. On one side lies the specific cultural identity of a place. And on the other, that which this regional identity is trying to resist: the onslaught of globalisation that threatens to homogenise the world. The subtitle of the most recent and most systematic account of critical regionalism by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre stresses precisely these ‘peaks and valleys’ that still resist the flattening of the world.
But do we need to keep discussing in these terms today? Aren’t all these clashes of the local with the global a bit old and tired? Do they sufficiently cover the complex realities of the world today? It is more than 40 years now since the term ‘critical regionalism’ was first introduced. The world was certainly different then. But this is only half the story. The discourses of critical regionalism were themselves further developed within the process of late-20th-century globalisation. This was also the time when the globalising process became the object of fierce debates. These become especially evident by the antiglobalisation movement at the turn of the millennium. Yet, even that was the tip of an iceberg that gradually developed in the previous decades. From the 1980s already, the global picture was more complex than the schematic representations of Tzonis, Lefaivre and Frampton-the main theorists of critical regionalism.
In this talk, I will show how even critical regionalism ended up inadvertently promoting that against which it was fighting. I will do so by starting from the differences between the worlds of then and now. More specifically, I will skim through three decades to present you with three worlds, three returns, three globalisations, three colonisations, and three challenges for the architectural theory, history, and historiography of critical regionalism in the 2020s.
Dr Stylianos (Stelios) Giamarelos is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL. His research is informed by his multi-disciplinary background in architecture engineering, architectural history and theory, and history and philosophy of science and technology. He is the author of Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation (London: UCL Press, 2022); co-editor of Resilience in Architectural History (Special Collection of Architectural Histories, 2019) and ATHENS by SOUND (Athens: futura, 2008); and co-author of two oral histories of architectural education in Greece (The Postmodern in Architecture (Athens: Nefeli, 2018) and Uncharted Currents (Athens: Melani, 2014)). In 2018, his work on critical regionalism was a was a finalist runner-up for the biannual EAHN Publication Award. Through his roles as executive editor of The Journal of Architecture (RIBA, 2020-22), general editor of Architectural Histories (EAHN, 2017-20), executive editor of P.E.A.R.: Paper for Emerging Architectural Research (Bartlett, 2019-21), editorial collaborator of the second series of The Bartlett Design Research Folios (Bartlett, 2019-20) and co-founding editor of LOBBY (Bartlett, 2013-16), he has also mentored early-career scholars and enabled scientific output on world-leading architectural research platforms. In 2008, he co-curated the National Participation of Greece in the 11th Biennale of Architecture in Venice.