An ex-military horseman, Philip Astley, founded the modern circus in the second half of the 18th century in Lambeth, England. A proficient trick-rider (which was a popular pursuit at the time), Astley discovered that if he stood on the horse’s back and had it gallop in a circle, centrifugal forces would keep him in place. Astley cordoned off a ring on a piece of urban waste ground, and so began the circus.
Architecture’s foundation story, as told by Heidegger, begins with hewing a clearing; a subtraction which establishes a bounded precinct. This is the underlying assumption of Kenneth Frampton’s writings on critical regionalism, a polemic much discussed by architects in the ‘80’s and 90’s. In contrast, Astley’s circus ring is a tempory boundary placed (ridden?) upon an unpunctuated wasteland— a tabulae rasae. The site becomes legible because of an event, not because of the frame.
The pocket or “bounded domain” of critical regionalism has proved harder to define and implement as modern globalization placed geographical and cultural boundaries into play. Predicated on the fixed limit, both Heidegger and Frampton share the dilemma of action when the forest has already been cleared. Seeing architecture as a medium (as opposed to an entity), opens up an alternative to conventional paradigms of context which, despite labels such as “new” or critical, end up in various degrees of nostalgia.