Post-Modernism

Post-Modernism. Style or styles in architecture and the decorative arts that was or were a reaction to the Modern Movement, Modernism, International Modernism, and the dogmas developed especially at the Bauhaus. Some have held it began in 1972 when Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe Modernist housing, St Louis (1958), was destroyed after its inhabitants refused to live there any more. Essentially, Post-Modernism (known variously as P-M, PoMo, or the Post) has been connected with a loss of faith in what were once regarded as certainties (e.g. so-called progress, supposed rationality, and ‘scientific’ approaches to design (in reality a search for an appropriate image to suggest all this) ) and with a growing acceptance of a bewilderingly large palette of images, signs, and products promoted on a scale never experienced before in the history of the world, which some (e.g. Venturi) welcomed as offering ‘complexity’ and ‘contradiction’ in design. In the 1960s Pop architecture began a tendency away from so-called Rationalism towards Pluralism, and later architecture drew on elements that were not themselves archaeologically or historically accurate, but made vague references to once-familiar motifs such as the Orders, cornices, pediments, etc., often brashly and crudely used. Post-Modernism seems to have heralded a major change in Western culture, even a new condition permeating every walk of life, involving cynicism, fragmentation, ill-digested eclecticism, and what some (e.g. F. Jameson) have called the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. The label has been loosely stuck to various architects moving away from the Modern Movement and High Tech architecture, even though their various responses widely differ. Among architects identified with Post-Modernism were Bofill, Farrell, Graves, Hollein, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore, and Stern, but these have all produced work of great individuality, and the label is far too comprehensive to have much meaning other than to refer to architecture of the late C20 that has rejected the certainties of the International Modern style. In Italy, for example, architects such as Rossi argued that as cities were organic works of art, their grain, history, and context must be responded to in any architectural intervention, the complete opposite of the International Modernist position. Architects who subscribed to this paradigm included Botta, Grassi, Kleihues, the Kriers, Reichlin, Ungers, and many others, but their work was of a much higher order than the sort of commercial PoMo associated with the vulgarity of advertising and ignorant nods towards a supposed Classicism which was nothing of the sort, and was firmly rejected by the beginning of C21. Such PoMo pseudo-Classicizing should be distinguished from scholarly Classical architecture produced by a few practitioners. See also neo-rationalism; tendenza; ticinese school.

Bibliography

Appignanesi (ed.) (1986);
Jencks (1977, 1980, 1980a, 1982a, 1987, 1988a, 2002);
Jencks (ed.) (1992);
Klotz (1984, 1988);
Lampugnani (ed.) (1988);
M. Larson (1993);
Lyotard (1984);
Portoghesi (1983);
Rowe & and Koetter (1984);
Sim (ed.),(2001);
Jane Turner (1996);
R. Venturi (1966, 1996);
R. Venturi et al. , (1977)