9. LABOUR, WORK & ARCHITECTURE
In his article Labour, Work and Architecture, Kenneth Frampton uses Hannah Arendt’s definitions of public & private, labour & work, and the political in his damning judgment of the state of contemporary culture. Alluding to the disappearance of the public realm (and hence a true ground for architecture), he writes, “Where in the nineteenth century the public institution was exploited as an occasion on which to reify the permanent values of the society, the disintegration of such values in the twentieth century has had the effect of atomizing the public building into a network of abstract institutions.” He then decries the effect of our utilitarian world on architecture: “Art … - and this of course includes the non-functional aspect of architecture – is rendered worldless in such a society, insofar as it is reduced to introspective abstraction or vulgarized in the idiosyncratic vagaries of the kitsch. In the first instance it cannot be easily shared and in the second it is reduced to an illusory commodity.” Frampton cites Robert Venturi’s assertion that “Americans don’t need piazzas, since they should be at home watching television.” In conclusion, Frampton states: “Whether architecture, as opposed to building, will ever be able to return to the representation of collective value is a moot point. At all events its representative role would have to be contingent on the establishment of a public realm in its political sense.”