post MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Harold Washington Library, Chicago

Postmodern architecture began as an in­ter­na­tional style the first ex­am­ples of which are gen­er­ally cited as being from the 1950s, but did not be­come a style until the late 1970s and con­tin­ues to in­flu­ence present-day architecture. Postmodernity in ar­chi­tec­ture is said to be her­alded by the re­turn of »wit, or­na­ment and reference« to ar­chi­tec­ture in re­sponse to the for­mal­ism of the International Style of mod­ernism. As with many cul­tural fash­ions, some of Postmodernism's most pro­nounced and vis­i­ble ideas can be seen in ar­chi­tec­ture. The functional and for­mal­ized shapes and spaces of the modernist style are re­placed by di­verse aesthetics: styles col­lide, form is adopted for its own sake, and new ways of view­ing fa­mil­iar styles and space abound. Per­haps most ob­vi­ously, ar­chi­tects re­dis­cov­ered the ex­pres­sive and sym­bolic value of ar­chi­tec­tural el­e­ments and forms that had evolved through cen­turies of build­ing which had been aban­doned by the mod­ern style.

Influential early large-scale ex­am­ples of post­mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture are Michael Graves' Portland Building in Port­land, Ore­gon and Philip Johnson's Sony Building (orig­i­nally AT&T Build­ing) in New York City, which bor­rows el­e­ments and ref­er­ences from the past and rein­tro­duces color and sym­bol­ism to ar­chi­tec­ture.

Postmodern ar­chi­tec­ture has also been de­scribed as »neo-eclectic«, where ref­er­ence and or­na­ment have re­turned to the fa­cade, re­plac­ing the ag­gres­sively un­or­na­mented mod­ern styles. This eclec­ti­cism is often com­bined with the use of non-orthogonal an­gles and un­usual sur­faces, most fa­mously in the State Gallery of Stuttgart (New wing of the Staats­ga­lerie Stuttgart) by James Stirling and the Piazza d'Italia by Charles Moore. The Scottish Par­lia­ment Building in Ed­in­burgh have also been cited as being of post­mod­ern vogue.

Modernist ar­chi­tects may re­gard post­mod­ern build­ings as vul­gar, as­so­ci­ated with a pop­ulist ethic, and shar­ing the de­sign el­e­ments of shopping malls, clut­tered with »gew-gaws«. Post­mod­ern ar­chi­tects may re­gard many mod­ern build­ings as soul­less and bland, overly sim­plis­tic and ab­stract. This con­trast was ex­em­pli­fied in the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the »whites« against the »grays,« in which the »whites« were seek­ing to con­tinue (or re­vive) the mod­ernist tra­di­tion of purism and clar­ity, while the »grays« were em­brac­ing a more mul­ti­fac­eted cul­tural vi­sion, seen in Robert Venturi's state­ment re­ject­ing the »black or white« world view of mod­ernism in favor of »black and white and some­times gray.« The di­ver­gence in opin­ions comes down to a dif­fer­ence in goals: mod­ernism is rooted in min­i­mal and true use of ma­te­r­ial as well as absence of ornament, while post­mod­ernism is a re­jec­tion of strict rules set by the early modernists and seeks mean­ing and ex­pres­sion in the use of build­ing tech­niques, forms, and styl­is­tic ref­er­ences.

de-la-gauchetiere

One build­ing form that typ­i­fies the ex­plo­rations of Post­mod­ernism is the tra­di­tional gable roof, in place of the iconic flat roof of mod­ernism. Shed­ding water away from the cen­ter of the build­ing, such a roof form al­ways served a func­tional pur­pose in cli­mates with rain and snow, and was a log­i­cal way to achieve larger spans with shorter struc­tural mem­bers, but it was nev­er­the­less rel­a­tively rare in mod­ern houses. (These were, after all, »machines for liv­ing,« ac­cord­ing to LeCor­busier, and ma­chines did not usu­ally have gabled roofs.) How­ever, Postmodernism's own mod­ernist roots ap­pear in some of the note­wor­thy ex­am­ples of »reclaimed« roofs. For in­stance, Robert Venturi's Vanna Ven­turi House breaks the gable in the mid­dle, deny­ing the func­tion­al­ity of the form, and Philip Johnson's 1001 Fifth Av­enue in Man­hat­tan ad­ver­tises a mansard roof form as an ob­vi­ously flat, false front. An­other al­ter­na­tive to the flat roofs of mod­ernism would ex­ag­ger­ate a tra­di­tional roof to call even more at­ten­tion to it, as when Kallmann McK­in­nell & Wood's American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, lay­ers three tiers of low hipped roof forms one above an­other for an em­phatic state­ment of shel­ter.

(source: http://eng.archinform.net)