post MODERN ARCHITECTURE__

the Vanna Venturi house

Robert Venturi was at the fore­front of this move­ment. His book, Complexity and Con­tra­dic­tion in Architecture (pub­lished in 1966), was in­stru­men­tal in open­ing read­ers eyes to new ways of think­ing about build­ings, as it drew from the en­tire his­tory of architecture – both high-style and ver­nac­u­lar, both his­toric and modern – and lam­basted overly sim­plis­tic Functional Modernism. 

The move away from modernism’s func­tion­al­ism is well il­lus­trated by Venturi’s adap­ta­tion of Mies van der Rohe’s fa­mous maxim «Less is more” to »Less is a bore.« The book in­cludes a num­ber of the architect's own de­signs in the back, in­clud­ing struc­tures such as Guild House, in Philadel­phia, that be­came major icons of post­mod­ernism. He sought to bring back or­na­ment be­cause of its ne­ces­sity. He ex­plains this and his crit­i­cism of Mod­ernism in his Complexity and Con­tra­dic­tion in Architecture by say­ing that:

Architects can be­moan or try to ig­nore them (re­fer­ring to the or­na­men­tal and dec­o­ra­tive el­e­ments in build­ings) or even try to abol­ish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, be­cause ar­chi­tects do not have the power to re­place them (nor do they know what to re­place them with).

Venturi's sec­ond book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972) fur­ther de­vel­oped his take on mod­ernism. Co-authored with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas ar­gues that or­na­men­tal and dec­o­ra­tive el­e­ments «accommodate ex­ist­ing needs for va­ri­ety and communication”. Here Ven­turi stresses the im­por­tance of the build­ing com­mu­ni­cat­ing a mean­ing to the pub­lic, a value shared by post­mod­ernists in gen­eral. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion how­ever is not in­tended to be a di­rect nar­ra­tion of the mean­ing. Ven­turi goes on to ex­plain that it is rather in­tended to be a com­mu­ni­ca­tion that could be in­ter­preted in many ways. Each in­ter­pre­ta­tion is more or less true for its mo­ment be­cause work of such qual­ity will have many di­men­sions and lay­ers of mean­ing.

National Gallery London

This plu­ral­ism of mean­ing is in­tended to mir­ror the sim­i­lar na­ture of con­tem­po­rary so­ci­ety. The plu­ral­ism in mean­ing was also echoed in the Post­mod­ern ar­chi­tects striv­ing for va­ri­ety in their build­ings. Ven­turi rem­i­nisces in one of his es­says, A View from the Campidoglio, to that ef­fect when he says that:

When [he] was young, a sure way to dis­tin­guish great ar­chi­tects was through the con­sis­tency and orig­i­nal­ity of their work…This should no longer be the case. Where the Mod­ern masters' strength lay in con­sis­tency, ours should lie in di­ver­sity.

Postmodernism with its di­ver­sity pos­sesses sen­si­tiv­ity to the building’s con­text and his­tory, and the client’s re­quire­ments. The post­mod­ernist ar­chi­tects often con­sid­ered the gen­eral re­quire­ments of the urban build­ings and their sur­round­ings dur­ing the building’s de­sign. For ex­am­ple, in Frank Gehry's Venice Beach House, the neigh­bor­ing houses have a sim­i­lar bright flat color. This ver­nac­u­lar sen­si­tiv­ity is often ev­i­dent, but other times the de­signs re­spond to more high-style neigh­bors. James Stirling's Arthur M. Sack­ler Museum at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity fea­tures a rounded cor­ner and striped brick pat­tern­ing that re­late to the form and dec­o­ra­tion of the poly­chro­matic Vic­to­rian Memo­r­ial Hall across the street, al­though in nei­ther case is the el­e­ment im­i­ta­tive or his­tori­cist.

Dartmouth College campus

AIMS AND CHARACTERISTICS

The aims of Post­mod­ernism, in­clud­ing solv­ing the prob­lems of Mod­ernism, com­mu­ni­cat­ing mean­ings with am­bi­gu­ity, and sen­si­tiv­ity for the building’s con­text, are sur­pris­ingly uni­fied for a pe­riod of build­ings de­signed by ar­chi­tects who largely never col­lab­o­rated with each other. The aims do, how­ever, leave room for var­i­ous im­ple­men­ta­tions as can be il­lus­trated by the di­verse build­ings cre­ated dur­ing the move­ment.

The char­ac­ter­is­tics of post­mod­ernism allow its aim to be ex­pressed in di­verse ways. These char­ac­ter­is­tics in­clude the use of sculp­tural forms, or­na­ments, anthropomorphism and ma­te­ri­als which per­form trompe l'oeil. These phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics are com­bined with con­cep­tual char­ac­ter­is­tics of mean­ing. These char­ac­ter­is­tics of mean­ing in­clude plu­ral­ism, dou­ble cod­ing, fly­ing but­tresses and high ceil­ings, irony and paradox, and contextualism.

The sculp­tural forms, not nec­es­sar­ily organic, were cre­ated with much ardor. These can be seen in Hans Hollein’s Abteiberg Museum (1972–1982). The build­ing is made up of sev­eral build­ing units, all very dif­fer­ent. Each building’s forms are noth­ing like the con­form­ing rigid ones of Modernism. These forms are sculptural and are some­what play­ful. These forms are not re­duced to an ab­solute min­i­mum; they are built and shaped for their own sake. The build­ing units all fit to­gether in a very or­ganic way, which en­hances the ef­fect of the forms.

After many years of ne­glect, or­na­ment re­turned. Frank Gehry’s Venice Beach house, built in 1986, is lit­tered with small or­na­men­tal de­tails that would have been con­sid­ered ex­ces­sive and need­less in Modernism. The Venice Beach House has an as­sem­bly of cir­cu­lar logs which exist mostly for dec­o­ra­tion. The logs on top do have a minor pur­pose of hold­ing up the win­dow cov­ers. How­ever, the mere fact that they could have been re­placed with a prac­ti­cally in­vis­i­ble nail, makes their ex­ag­ger­ated ex­is­tence largely or­na­men­tal. The or­na­ment in Michael Graves' Portland Mu­nic­i­pal Ser­vices Build­ing (»Portland Building«) (1980) is even more promi­nent. The two ob­trud­ing tri­an­gu­lar forms are largely or­na­men­tal. They exist for aes­thetic or their own pur­pose.

Postmodernism, with its sen­si­tiv­ity to the building’s con­text, did not ex­clude the needs of hu­mans from the build­ing. Carlo Scarpa's Brion Cemetery (1970–72) ex­em­pli­fies this. The human re­quire­ments of a ceme­tery is that it pos­sesses a solemn na­ture, yet it must not cause the vis­i­tor to be­come de­pressed. Scarpa’s ceme­tery achieves the solemn mood with the dull gray col­ors of the walls and neatly de­fined forms, but the bright green grass pre­vents this from being too over­whelm­ing.

Postmodern build­ings some­times uti­lize trompe l'oeil, cre­at­ing the illusion of space or depths where none ac­tu­ally exist, as has been done by painters since the Romans. The Port­land Build­ing (1980) has pil­lars rep­re­sented on the side of the build­ing that to some ex­tent ap­pear to be real, yet they are not.

The Hood Mu­seum of Art (1981–1983) has a typ­i­cal sym­met­ri­cal façade which was at the time preva­lent through­out Postmodern Build­ings.

Robert Venturi’s Vanna Ven­turi House (1962–64) il­lus­trates the Post­mod­ernist aim of com­mu­ni­cat­ing a mean­ing and the char­ac­ter­is­tic of sym­bol­ism. The façade is, ac­cord­ing to Ven­turi, a sym­bolic pic­ture of a house, look­ing back to the 18th cen­tury. This is partly achieved through the use of sym­me­try and the arch over the en­trance.

Perhaps the best ex­am­ple of irony in Post­mod­ern build­ings is Charles Moore’s Piazza d'Italia (1978). Moore quotes (ar­chi­tec­turally) el­e­ments of Italian renaissance and Roman Antiquity. How­ever, he does so with a twist. The irony comes when it is noted that the pil­lars are cov­ered with steel. It is also paradoxical in the way he quotes Ital­ian an­tiq­uity far away from the orig­i­nal in New Orleans.

Double coding meant the build­ings con­vey many mean­ings si­mul­ta­ne­ously. The Sony Building in New York does this very well. The build­ing is a tall skyscraper which brings with it con­no­ta­tions of very mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. Yet, the top con­tra­dicts this. The top sec­tion con­veys el­e­ments of classical antiquity. This dou­ble cod­ing is a preva­lent trait of Post­mod­ernism.

The char­ac­ter­is­tics of Post­mod­ernism were rather uni­fied given their di­verse ap­pear­ances. The most no­table among their char­ac­ter­is­tics is their play­fully ex­trav­a­gant forms and the hu­mour of the mean­ings the build­ings con­veyed.

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