Visual Rhetoric uses the issues of Architectural Design (AD) produced under the editorial direction of Kenneth Frampton between September 1962 and December 1964 to explore both the rhetoric of the image and the early formation of Frampton, who is widely recognized as the foremost critical voice in the field of architecture. 

Following Theo Crosby, and preceding Robin Middleton, Frampton served as the technical editor, under editor Monica Pidgeon, of the London-based magazine, AD. When he joined AD in 1962, Frampton was 32 years old and simultaneously working as a practicing architect with Douglas Stephens & Partners. History reveals his tenure at the magazine as the origin of the trajectory that led him away from the design-side of the profession and toward the career he realized as a critic and theorist. Frampton left the magazine, England, and the practice of architecture for the Untied States in January of 1965, after being invited to Princeton University by Peter Eisenman.

The exhibition centers about the covers Frampton designed for the magazine and integrates select advertisements, news content, and features that are represented in photographs and critically considered drawings selected or constructed by Frampton. Together, the content—including Leicester University Engineering building by Stirling and Gowan, The Economist Group by the Smithsons, Scharoun’s Philharmonie in Berlin, Constant’s New Babylon, Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, the Metabolist Tokyo Bay Plan, and the Sin Centre by Archigram’s Mike Webb—represents a cross-section of trends, architects, buildings, urban plans, and ideas that have played a significant role in the evolution of architectural thought and expression over the last 60 years. 

The tactile and the tectonic are recognized as fundamental and necessary characteristics of Architecture by Frampton.  Visual Rhetoric reveals the subtle means by which these qualities are translated to the printed realm and coheres into a genealogy of Frampton’s values for architecture. The architectonic character of the featured projects, and the content that posits the news sections of the issues produced under Frampton, collectively generate a catalog of international architectural production during a critical moment in the history of the field when doubt in the idealized hope for a universal architectural language took hold and incited a search for new methods to distinguish between built form and Architecture. 

At one scale, the exhibition content reveals how images and graphics hold rhetoric and convey architectonic meaning. At another scale, the content sheds light on the formation of a critical voice and the early application of Frampton’s method for defining the criteria by which built form is rendered Architecture: tectonic expression, environmental and social consciousness, sensitivity to regional means, methods and materials, and to humanistic sensibilities.

The intent is production of an exhibition, which is on hold due to COVID-19. The contemporary significance of the topic is two-fold, captions and narratives will be used throughout the exhibition to communicate these points: 

Representation and architecture has been at the center of critical discourse in the field of architecture for some time. Social media and the proliferation of images that are produced by the uncritical eye have compromised the conveyance of cultural value—in the Bourdieuean sense—within the field of architecture. The exhibition is intended to raise awareness of the image as a strategic tool for communication by showing, through a historical record, how images can convey architectonic meaning. The exhibition will bring Barthes’ theory of the rhetoric of the image to the foreground by exhibiting the editorial production of Kenneth Frampton, a critic in the field whose opinion lends or withholds the legitimate conveyance of cultural value.

Kenneth Frampton is the foremost architectural critic and theorist in the world. He will turn 88 this year. I have been in dialogue with him about this project for a couple years now and intend to produce it with his involvement. Frampton is a living record, he holds institutional knowledge about the AD publication that he is able to talk through when looking at the issues. It is my intention to transcribe some of our discussions and use the material to support the exhibition content.