Sustainable Critical Regionalism: Rick Joy and Ethical Architecture

Does Rick Joy’s Critical Regionalistic approach to architecture meet the ethical demands of a humanistic practice, and can it orient itself as a suitable method for combatting the pressing issues of climate change? Responding to the relative placelessness of Modernism and the offhand historicism of Postmodernism, Critical Regionalism aims to find architectural identity through site. First formally outlined by Kenneth Frampton in the early 1980s, Critical Regionalism has maintained its position within the field of architecture up to the present day. One particular architect working in the vein of Critical Regionalism is Rick Joy. Examining four of Joy’s projects—Desert Nomad House, Woodstock Vermont Farmhouse, Amangiri, and Tennyson 205—with Frampton’s scheme in mind, parallels emerge which affirm Joy’s practice as emblematic of Critical Regionalism. From a theoretical standpoint, Christian Norberg-Schulz and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological framework, which places understanding of place at the center of human moral purpose, bolsters Critical Regionalism as more than just an aesthetic method of architecture. Critical Regionalism’s theoretical framework extends into ethical schemes of architecture which call for architecture to bring about an understanding of placeness and provide society with substantial solutions to social crises. As contemporary society works to address the issues of climate change, Critical Regionalistic architecture, like that of Rick Joy, shows that it is poised to tackle these matters by fostering the relationship between humans and nature