"Like many others of my generation, I have been influenced by a Marxist interpretation of history, although even the most cursory reading of this text will reveal that none of the established methods of Marxist analysis has been applied. On the other hand, my affinity for the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has no doubt coloured my view of the whole period and made me acutely aware of the dark side of the Enlightenment which, in the name of an unreasonable reason, has brought man to a situation where he begins to be as alienated from his own production as from the natural world.

The development of modern architecture after the Enlightenment seems to have been divided between the utopianism of the avant garde, first formulated at the beginning of the 19th century in the ideal physiocratic city of Ledoux, and that anti-Classical, anti-rational and anti-utilitarian attitude of Christian reform first declared in Pugin's Contrasts of 1836. Ever since, in its effort to transcend the division of labour and the harsh realities of industrial production and urbanization, bourgeois culture has oscillated between the extremes of totally planned and industrializes utopias on the one hand, and, on the other, a denial of the actual historical reality of machine production."

"The finite city, as it had come into being in Europe over the previous five hundred years, was totally transformed in the space of a century by the interaction of a number of unprecedented technical and socio-economic forces, many of which first emerged in England during the second half of the 18th century. [...]"

"No account of recent developments in architecture can fail to mention the ambivalent role that the profession has played over the past decade - ambivalent not only in the sense that while professing to act in the public interest it has sometimes assisted uncritically in furthering the domain of an optimized technology, but also in the sense that many of its more intelligent members have abandoned traditional practice, either to resort to direct social action or to indulge in the projection of architecture as a form of art. As far as this last aspect is concerned, one cannot help regarding it as the return of a repressed creativity, as the implosion of utopia upon itself. [...] Meanwhile, as Manfredo Tafuri has suggested, the aim of the latterday avant garde is either to validate itself through the media or, alternatively, to redeem its guilt by executing the rite of creative exorcism in isolation. The extent to which this last may serve as a subversive tactic (Archigram's 'injecting noise into the system') or as an elaborate metaphor with critical implications depends on the complexity of ideas involved and on the intent underlying the whole enterprise."

"The pages of this last chapter [‘Place, Production and Architecture: Towards a Critical Theory of Building'] testify to Frampton's passionate commitment to cut through the ‘thicket' of Modernism not by rehearsing the latter's polemical declarations but rather by interrogating its silenced alliances with industry, the State and production. Archigram, Milton Keynes, Learning from Las Vegas and the Rossi/Grassi/Krier chain loom up as the paradigmatic contradictions of late twentieth-century industrialised society. In exemplifying respectively the utopia of consumption, the destruction of both country and city, the cynicism resulting from the infatuation with reality and the nostalgia for reason, these four strategies of late twentieth-century industrialised life become for Frampton the inexorable ideological predicaments with which the historian will hope to cut his way through the labyrinthian alleys of modern architecture."

"[...] It is hardly accidental that Frampton's critical sensibility enter into tension with the ethos that he has himself inherited from ‘the tradition of the new'. Benjamin and Heidegger, in truth, are not irreconcilable. Yet still, a work of historical reconstruction is needed in order to open up a dialogue between them, the kind of work that hasty readers of Lyotard would barely be able to handle.

Frampton's book quite correctly stimulates a re-tracing of the stages that the Angelus Novus passes through on his accidental and unforeseeable flight. But it is necessary to interpret the concept of ‘poverty' - the one know by Loos and Mies - in a non-reductive manner. [...]"

"Frampton: Pop largely came out of This Is Tomorrow, especially with the work of Richard Hamilton. My contact with Hamilton in the early 1960s also came through Architectural Design. I found Hamilton a very interesting figure, and I still do. As for Banham, his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) was extremely influential. It was patently a model for my Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980).

Foster: In what sense?

Frampton: Banham organized his book in clear sections, with each one related to a specific avant-garde movement; he also cited the protagonists themselves. Those two aspects struck me as very effective, and I emulated them.

Foster: What about his particular revision of the canon of modern architecture produced by first-generation historians like Nikolaus Pevsner and Siegfried Giedion - his claim that by leaving out Futurist and Expressionist architects, they had failed to articulate what was truly modem about modern architecture, that is, its expression of ‘the machine age'? That emphasis appears somewhat alien to you.

Frampton: It's a complex issue. As you say, Banham's book is energized by his rediscovery of Futurism, and I found that reappraisal very important. ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism' (1909) is earlier and in certain respects more radical than subsequent Russian manifestoes, and it's always seemed to me to be the quintessential expression of avant-garde culture, above all rhetorically, in terms of its aggressive euphoria about modernity. It is this opening with Futurism that drives the book and remains impressive. What is disturbing about Theory and Design in the First Machine Age - this relates to Colquhoun again, who made an important critique of the book, but it was also evident to me through my experiences at Architectural Design - is its total advocacy of Buckminster Fuller, a position I found untenable, and still do. Banham ends with Fuller as the new deus ex machina of the scene. Also the effects of the States on Banham and on myself were completely different. The United States politicized me in a way..." [p. 38-39]

"Allen: Beyond publicity, there was also an atmosphere of experimentation at the Institute, a laboratory-like feel that was very productive. Because nothing was getting built, there was an intense exploration of forms, sources, and means of representation. That was the positive side of the period, and it was very much incubated at the Institute.

Foster: It was in this climate that you wrote Modern Architecture: A Critical History. How did that come about?

Frampton: I was commissioned to write that book in 1970; it took me ten years to finish. The person who commissioned it was Robin Middleton, who was then an acquisitions editor at Thames and Hudson. As it happens, Middleton had succeeded me as technical editor of Architectural Design. The book was much longer than what the publisher wanted, so there was a constant struggle to write as economically and laconically as possible - that perhaps explains part of its density.

Foster: You've talked about its relation to Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. What other points of reference existed for you, especially in terms of how you developed your canon of twentieth-century architecture? How calculated was the book in its recoveries and revisions?

Frampton: Certainly Leonardo Benevolo was an influence, first his Origins of Modern Town Planning (1963; translated 1967) and then his History of Modern Architecture (1960; translated 1971). Tony Vidler was also an important influence, in particular in the chapter ‘Tony Garnier and the Industrial City,' which was informed by many conversations with him.

Foster: But did you feel, as Banham did in 1960, that Pevsner, Giedion, and Bruno Zevi had somehow got the history wrong?

Frampton: I never found Pevsner's book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), particularly interesting. I still find Giedion stimulating, when returning casually to the pages of Space, Time, and Architecture (1941). But Banham's book was my model."

"A disturbing Eurocentric bias has been evidente in almost all received histories of modern architecture, from Gustaf Adolf Platz's Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit of 1927 to Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age of 1960, to which this account has always been indebted. Despite the ideological discretion with which both Platz and Banham managed to exclude from their titles any mention of either architecture or modernity, they would nonetheless both become party to that polemical historiography tradition that the Marxist historian Manfredo Tafuri characterized as ‘operative', that is to say, as ideologically instrumental. In this regard, it has to be conceded that the latest edition of this work remains as operative as ever, with all the arbitrary weakness that this entails."