post MODERN ARCHITECTURE_

RELATIONSHIP to previous STYLE

New trends be­came ev­i­dent in the last quar­ter of the 20^th cen­tury as some ar­chi­tects started to turn away from mod­ern Functionalism which they viewed as bor­ing, and which some of the pub­lic con­sid­ered un­wel­com­ing and even un­pleas­ant. 

These ar­chi­tects turned to­wards the past, quot­ing past as­pects of var­i­ous build­ings and meld­ing them to­gether (even some­times in an in­har­mo­nious man­ner) to cre­ate a new means of de­sign­ing build­ings. A vivid ex­am­ple of this new ap­proach was that Postmodernism saw the come­back of columns and other el­e­ments of pre­mod­ern de­signs, some­times adapt­ing clas­si­cal Greek and Roman ex­am­ples (but not sim­ply recre­at­ing them, as was done in neoclassical architecture).

Ru-Yi symbol as an architectural motif on Taipei 101 in Taipei

In Modernism, the tra­di­tional col­umn (as a de­sign fea­ture) was treated as a cylin­dri­cal pipe form, re­placed by other technological means such as cantilevers, or masked com­pletely by curtain wall façades. The re­vival of the col­umn was an aesthetic, rather than a tech­no­log­i­cal, ne­ces­sity. Mod­ernist high-rise build­ings had be­come in most in­stances monolithic, re­ject­ing the con­cept of a stack of var­ied de­sign el­e­ments for a sin­gle vo­cab­u­lary from ground level to the top, in the most ex­treme cases even using a con­stant »footprint« (with no ta­per­ing or »wedding cake« de­sign), with the build­ing some­times even sug­gest­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of a sin­gle metal­lic ex­tru­sion di­rectly from the ground, mostly by elim­i­nat­ing vi­sual hor­i­zon­tal el­e­ments – this was seen most strictly in Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center build­ings.

Another re­turn was that of the «wit, or­na­ment and reference” seen in older build­ings in terra cotta dec­o­ra­tive façades and bronze or stain­less steel em­bell­ish­ments of the Beaux-Arts and Art Deco pe­ri­ods. In Post­mod­ern struc­tures this was often achieved by plac­ing con­tra­dic­tory quotes of pre­vi­ous build­ing styles along­side each other, and even in­cor­po­rat­ing fur­ni­ture styl­is­tic ref­er­ences at a huge scale.

Contextualism, a trend in think­ing in the later parts of 20^th Cen­tury, in­flu­ences the ideologies of the post­mod­ern move­ment in gen­eral. Con­tex­tu­al­ism is cen­tered on the be­lief that all knowl­edge is «context-sensitive”. This idea was even taken fur­ther to say that knowl­edge can­not be un­der­stood with­out con­sid­er­ing its con­text. While note­wor­thy ex­am­ples of mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture re­sponded both sub­tly and di­rectly to their phys­i­cal con­text (an­a­lyzed by Thomas Schu­macher in »Contextualism: Urban Ideals and De­for­ma­tions,« and by Colin Rowe and Fred Koet­ter in Collage City), post­mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture often ad­dressed the con­text in terms of the ma­te­ri­als, forms and de­tails of the build­ings around it – the cul­tural con­text.

ROOTS of POSTMODERNISM

The Post­mod­ernist move­ment began in America around the 1960s – 1970s and then it spread to Eu­rope and the rest of the world, to re­main right through to the pre­sent. The aims of Post­mod­ernism or Late-modernism begin with its re­ac­tion to Modernism; it tries to ad­dress the lim­i­ta­tions of its pre­de­ces­sor. The list of aims is ex­tended to in­clude com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas with the pub­lic often in a then hu­mor­ous or witty way. Often, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion is done by quot­ing ex­ten­sively from past ar­chi­tec­tural styles, often many at once. In break­ing away from mod­ernism, it also strives to pro­duce build­ings that are sen­si­tive to the con­text within which they are built.

Postmodernism has its ori­gins in the per­ceived fail­ure of Modern Architecture. Its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with func­tion­al­ism and eco­nom­i­cal build­ing meant that or­na­ments were done away with and the build­ings were cloaked in a stark ra­tio­nal ap­pear­ance. Many felt the build­ings failed to meet the human need for com­fort both for body and for the eye, that mod­ernism did not ac­count for the de­sire for beauty. The prob­lem wors­ened when some al­ready mo­not­o­nous apart­ment blocks de­gen­er­ated into slums. In re­sponse, ar­chi­tects sought to rein­tro­duce or­na­ment, color, dec­o­ra­tion and human scale to build­ings. Form was no longer to be de­fined solely by its func­tional re­quire­ments or min­i­mal ap­pear­ance.

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