Designers of Buildings: Postmodernism in Architecture

DESIGNERS OF BUILDINGS: POSTMODERNISM IN ARCHITECTURE

What Would Happen to Postmodernism?

In the late 1970s the postmodernist movement had made a tremendous impact on American architecture. Observers wondered whether the postmodernist architectural upstarts of the 1970s, such as Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi, would effect a wholesale architectural revolution in the 1980s. A hint of what was to come in the 1980s could be discerned in Philip Johnson and John Burgee's postmodernist design for the AT&T Building in New York City (1978). A white neoclassical skyscraper capped by a cornice borrowed from eighteenth-century furniture, Johnson's "Chippendale skyscraper" portended a shift from the modernist ethos of austere, sterile, form-follows-function minimalism to a new postmodernist eclectic, playful, and accessible style. Johnson's shift to postmodernism signaled a sea change; he had been among the most influential architects in introducing modernism to America in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1980s almost the entire profession followed suit.

Postmodernism Eclipses Modernism

In the 1980s the founding leaders of postmodernism—Venturi, Denise Scott, Charles Moore, and Michael Graves—continued to design, integrating historical forms with new decorative and functional designs. They had established the movement that brought ornamentation, history, and contextuality back into American architecture. Even firms that received much attention in the decade and preferred exploring abstract styles, such as the Miami-based Arquitectonica, were influenced by postmodernism, as seen in their site-sensitive buildings and their playful use of color. In 1982 Paul Goldberger, an architectural critic, wrote that there was at this point in the decade "no clear sense of style at all." During the rest of the decade postmodernism clarified American architectural style, triumphing over modernism.

Michael Graves and the Portland Building

Not until the AT&T and Portland Buildings did postmodernists venture into designing commercial or government structures; during the 1970s they had worked on private homes. The award-winning Portland Building, finished in 1982, was one of the most influential buildings of the 1980s and helped to establish Graves as one of the most inventive designers of the day. Like the AT&T Building, it was a rejection of the cool, unadorned style of modernism. Also like the AT&T Building, it was controversial: the public was still warming to postmodernism early in the decade. Graves won the commission in a competition held by the city of Portland, Oregon. His design was a fifteen-story building containing office, rental, and commercial space. Because it would be flanked on one side by the city hall and on the other by the county courthouse, both in the neoclassical style, one of Graves's challenges was to create a building that suited the surroundings while also possessing its own distinct character. His solution was to use classical references but to give them a new, fresh look that relied on warm colors both inside and out. The building is classically arranged in three tiers, in equally traditional rectangular shapes; the unexpected comes in Graves's use of color—blue and ivory on the facade and green ceramic tiles on the base, widely spaced windows on the facade framed in red, and blue-ribbon garlands to balance the geometric shapes. The interior is equally colorful, with ample views. With complexity, wit, and warmth, Graves evoked past styles from eighteenth-century French to Art Deco. Graves later designed the Humana Building (1985) in Louisville, Kentucky, in which he continued to use historical allusions, ornamentation, and conspicuous colors.

Historical Allusions and Decadence

As it became evident that historical allusions, such as arches, columns, and cornices—the darlings of postmodernist style—were the trend of the decade, developers decided to cash in on the fad. Gerald Hines, who built high-rises—such as the Transco Tower (1983) in Houston—from coast to coast, hired the hip architects of the AT&T Building, Johnson and Burgee, to design buildings with borrowings from periods such as Art Deco and the 1930s. Der Scutt's $93 million Tramp Tower in New York City, the talk of the town early in the decade, is one of the lavish buildings that combined America's shopping frenzy and extravagant tastes with the historical quality that characterized postmodernism. Here people could shop in expensive boutiques in surroundings—from the marble atrium to the live piano player in a tuxedo—that recalled another corporate heyday, the Jazz Age. They could then ascend to an equally opulent apartment, with Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump as their upstairs neighbors. Georgetown Park was the equivalent in Washington, D.C., with its elite stores and condominium apartments catering to the rich in mock-Victorian surroundings.

Environmentalism

Another influence of postmodernism was a renewed respect for the place that surrounds the building. Whereas modernists boasted that their functional glass-box buildings could be built anywhere, postmodernism was concerned with creating distinctively shaped buildings that were expressive of their locale. One example of this concern was Antoine Predock's Nelson Fine Arts Center in Tempe, Arizona (1989), a lavender stucco building that resembles the structures built by the Pueblo Indians. Similarly inspired by the environmental consciousness of Native Americans, Steven Holl created in Martha's Vineyard a private home that recalls not only seafaring legends but also the shorelines and shrubland that surround it. The skeletal look of the wood evokes images of local Native Americans who built their houses by stretching skins around skeletons of beached whales, and the weathered gray color blends with the surroundings and conforms to local laws concerning color of homes that were developed to preserve the look of Martha's Vineyard's serene, noncommercial environment.

Revitalizing American Downtowns

The postmodernist emphasis on locale and regional character also lent itself to the preservation and urban-planning revolution in America. Whereas in the previous two decades the trend was slum removal, or tearing down of buildings and neighborhoods, the 1980s humanistic goal was neighbor-hood renewal. Architects were hired to investigate, in collaboration with the members of the community, ways to revitalize their neighborhood or town. These revitalization projects often led to the use of environmental assets such as bodies of water or unique regional characteristics. This trend also meant a preservation of historic sites and old buildings. For instance, by the mid 1980s approximately one hundred old hotels had been restored from coast to coast. Architect Graham Gund's Church Court Apartments in Boston were another example of preservation.

Edge Cities

In the meantime, outside the cities and in competition with these struggling downtowns, a new urban landscape called edge cities was rapidly developing. These newly populated areas shaped Americans' lifestyles and also determined the kind of building that was done. During the 1960s and 1970s Americans increasingly moved away from small towns or from noisy, crime-ridden cities. This transformation was gradual, taking place in three stages: first, suburbs were built increasingly after World War II; second, malls sprang up to provide convenient shopping for the people living in the suburbs; finally, in the 1980s, these areas that had been only places to live and shop were also becoming places to work-—creating a whole new urban center, the edge city. Office parks, megamalls, hotels, parking garages, and planned communities made up the edge cities that became as common in the West as on the East Coast.

Mainstreamed Postmodernism

Edge-city buildings featured postmodernist qualities: imposing facades that recalled Greek or Victorian architecture were used for middle-class shopping centers, medical office parks, and even chain drugstores. Office parks, like postmodernist office buildings, reflected the new corporate ethos of the decade. Many buildings—such as the General Foods Corporation headquarters (1984) in Rye, New York, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkerloo and Associates of Hamden, Connecticut—that were meant to be "corporate homes" were given a residential quality by the use of plants and natural lighting. Office buildings became known as "corporate campuses," with low-rise structures linked by a circular path. They were more personal and worker-friendly than the previous modern high-rises, in which workers met only in elevators on the way to their cubicles. The postmodernist, worker-friendly office buildings did not, however, result in user-friendly corporations: by the end of the 1980s many firms had increased in size because of mergers, alienating their workers in the process.

From Innovation to Repetition

A prominent feature of edge cities were huge shopping malls with megaplex movie theaters. These malls were built with such references to history as pastel-colored facades, pediments, and colonnades. By the end of the decade such facades had become repetitive rather than contextual, lending nothing to the surroundings but a front for yet another place to shop. This tendency, and the general excess of un-imaginative postmodernist design, led some critics to condemn the movement for failing to keep innovation alive and for being too preoccupied with surfaces. One critic said that postmodernism had become an "exercise in image-making, in promotion, in decoration." With its glitzy exteriors and emphasis on flashy facades, some felt, it had become a design for large businesses, greedy developers, and the rich yuppies who worked and shopped in the buildings.

VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL

In 1981, when Chinese American Maya Ying Lin's plan was selected from 1,421 nationwide contest entries for a memorial in Washington, D.C., commemorating the soldiers who had served in the Vietnam War, she was still a twenty-one-year-old architecture student at Yale. Her design, meant to be a pensive place where people could contemplate the war, consisted of two two-hundred-foot-long black granite walls carved with names of the more than fifty-eight thousand Americans who had died in the war (a required feature). Lin lent even more meaning by listing the names in the order they were killed, rather than alphabetically. The black granite creates a mirrorlike surface, and the walls form a "V" with a gently sloping plot of ground in between, so that visitors have the sensation of walking down into the earth.

Her seemingly simple design resulted in a politically and emotionally driven two-year battle between Lin and the committee of the American Institute of Architects who had chosen her plan, on one side, and Vietnam veterans, who saw the design as too cool and abstract, on the other. Supporters of the design considered it moving and fitting, given the controversy surrounding the war, but the veterans thought the funereal black color (the veterans wanted a white monument) and sloping earth were disrespectful and degrading. The design was initially regarded as apolitical, but by the climax of the dispute one decorated marine was calling it a "wailing wall for antidraft demonstrators" that was meant to symbolize a "black spot in American history." The Texas businessman H. Ross Perot personally paid to fly in veterans to lobby against the design. The battle between the veterans and the supporters of the design became representative of the conflicting feelings Americans had about the war itself.

Finally, the sculptor Frederick Hart was commissioned to create a realistic sculpture to add to the existing plan. His larger-than-life-size statue of three rifle-carrying soldiers, one black and two white, to be placed 120 feet from the walls, came to represent the military establishment, and Lin's design the antiwar movement. Lin called the addition a "trite" illustration that "destroy[ed]" the meaning of her original design. In 1983, almost three years after Lin's design won the contest, the statue and a fifty-foot flagpole were added to the original design. In 1984 Lin and Cooper-Lecky Partnership won an AIA award for the memorial. Since its opening in November 1982, thousands of people have visited it, leaving personal mementos of the soldiers on the ground near the names. Lin went on to design a memorial to the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama (1989).

Sources:

Paul Goldberg, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Postmodern Age (New York: Penguin, 1983);

Elizabeth Hess, "A Talc of Two Memorials," Art in America. 71 (April 1983): 120-126.

Sources:

Peter Blake, "The Case against Postmodernism," Interior Design, 58 (October 1986): 324-325; (November 1986): 276-277; (December 1986): 276-277;

Douglas Davis, "Raiders of the Lost Arch," Newsweek, 107 (20 January 1986): 66-68;

Joel Garreau, Edge City (New York: Doubleday, 1991);

Paul Goldberg, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Postmodern Age (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 20-36, 161-162;

William Dudley Hunt Jr., Encyclopedia of American Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990);

Spiro Kostof, History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);

Sydney LeBlanc, 20th Century American Architecture (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1993);

Ann Lee Morgan and Colin Naylor, eds., Contemporary Architecture (Chicago: St. James Press, 1987);

Beverly Russell, Architecture and Design 1970-1990: New Ideas in America (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 30-60.