Frampton's arriere-garde and avante-garde

The Avant-Garde architecture ventures into unknown territory. It is often shocking and is at the heart of the modernist movement. The Avant-Garde must do something that no one else has done before. Frampton sees Avant-Garde as a movement that risen and fallen in the 20th century. He eqates the importance of Avant Gaurde with the liberation, and the ability for Avante-Garde to make architecutre think out of the box, freeing design choices and style. He see the fall of avant-garde when it became rational and used to destory cultrue. Progress can either revolitionize or retard society. He sees Avant-Garde progress as retarding the soceity and destorying the culture that makes places unique. Frampton present a qoute from Andreas Huyseen: “The American postmodernist avant-garde, therefore, is not only the end game of avant-gardism. It also represents the fragmentation and decline of critical adversary culture.”

Frampton's defines arriere-garde as an architectural style that distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from the reactionary impluse to return to pre-industrial styles. He presents it as a possible way to counteract the damages of avant garde styles. Through arriere-garde he says that resistance to universalism can be achieved while at the same time "having a discreat recours to universal technique" This hybrid technique that does not look at architectural style as either fundamentals looking back to past ideal or embracing technology and optimization. This presents a way to move forward without retarding the society and generalizing it to a point of universalism throughout all the regions of the world.