Best definition I could find...
Postmodernism: The ongoing cultural movement that followed the more optimistic and forward-looking period of modernism. The term came into popular currency in the 1970s. Post modernism is characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference. In particular, the movement has uncovered the presence of source ideas, information and influences. It has therefore challenged the idea of ‘originality’. It has also made artworks resistant to straightforward assumptions about the place of the author and the interpreter.
I would say the Swan building pretty much sucks, though not entirely when viewed in the fantastical context in which it exists, but the rest are pretty important buildings.
You can say they are bad - if one choses. That is a subjective opinion. Though, I agree with LB you can not call them unimportant...within their historical context they are important and interesting works. The Graves and Moore work is NOT good though...not from where I am sitting - and the swan...that leaves me needing to run to a lavatory.
I will agree that pomo gets a generalized bad wrap and is much more complex than the simple statement,"Post modernism is characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference".
Heck, Kipnis places Deconstructivism within Post Modernism. Everyone from Predock to Eisenman could be largely considered to be Post Modern in their work...taking on collage and evolving to projected site lines of influence.
I guess my point is that it can be unfair to judge to whole lot of pomo as what is defined by graves, moore, venturi, etc. There has been lots of great work to come out of responses from those above...both from within and outside of the pomo "movement"
the problem dear architecture students, is that the chances are that you will be working on schlocky buildings that lack any sense of irony, appropriation or self reference.
the word "important" makes me a bit uncomfortable because it seems like it places works on a pedestal where questioning their validity in a context larger than one's personal opinion is taboo or not worth debating.
If I remember right, The Swan use to be painted yellow and mint... or some other color. The red might actually be an improvement.
Ive been inside of it and it is quite nice. The building dimensions are a bit of a source of complaint. If I recall correctly, there's the gigantic enormous hallways that feel very stale.
The Portland city building is atrocious. Someone just paint it white.
In fact, I think about 60% of post-modernist buildings would look better if they were painted white.
I think with post-modernism... a lot of stylistic concerns got set into the ideology. So, basically it was a bunch of architects copying architects. But if we look at some designs from another standpoint, there's a lot of good post-modernism work out there.
I would say that the facade of Abercrombie and Fitch or Hollister is post modern and relatively successful.
i wonder if this same discourse was taking place in the 18th century...
ROCOCO SUCKS embroidered capes...
seeing contemporary works by zumthor, h*dm, ando, and others, i like to think, sometimes, that we are just entering modernism...what we call "post modernism", in historical context, was reactionary to and killed what one could call pre-modernists, or early modernists...
Yes, it sucked. It is like a nasty scar that someone got while learning some fantastic skill. A necessary blemish on a path to a better end.
(I am sure I could find something that didn't turn my stomach. I did like some early graves and he's got pretty drawings, but man, what a bad direction he chose!)
@ jafidler - yes, the comerica tower is gorgeous. i love the feel of the building as a pedestrian (ironic for detroit), it's certainly old-world scale.
fyi, i adore all the buildings i posted above and was not continuing RealLifeLEED's rant, but contrasting it with beautiful, working examples of "post-modernism."
sure theres plenty of bad pomo, but i don't imagine the good:bad ratio is much different from modernism, or whatever else. I don't think all the examples pictured above are particularly bad. The really shocking stuff is the cynical corporate buildings that used the idea of the decorated shed to justify complete rubbish with some stuck on pretty bits.
Aug 14, 09 10:05 pm ·
·
Postmodern Architecture is like Gravity's Rainow meets Cleopatra...
i love classifying styles...can i get some blob roccoco minimalism?
even modernism is a style, yep yep.
but the original posters images and the definition provided are strictly an insider architecture thing...
when I see shit like what's posted above I just laugh, it's hilarious. I like to think the pomo designer is also laughing his ass off, because rich american's want to be historical europeans, so why not give the client something they understand as humerous because deep down you're a modernisth.
unlike %%%%%%%%%% images I can't imagine the architects took themselves seriously.
i remember having this conversation about I believe a Roche & Dinkeldoo project where the design was so ridiculously stupid in every iconic, art language way that surely Roche was sitting in his office going, I wonder if this knuckles heads will build this, 10 mintues later the sketch is going to be built.
thank you %%%%% for reminding us that semantics are only one branch of postmodernism... The heart of postmodernism is (in my view) the embracing of multiplicity as opposed to singularity. I enjoy the singularity of modernism, but can't imagine the world if that was where architecture ended. Yes, I agree that the mannerism which the semantic approach to postmodernism promoted hurts my eyes a bit, but it certainly took us to a better place eventually. I can't remember the last time that I saw a contemporary building that wasn't influenced by postmodern thought.
i would argue that the good vs. bad ratio in modernism is not even similar to what was produced in pomo as a "style", although bad buildings are the norm everywhere regardless the period
I'll say this for pomo, it was addressing things most architects nowadays dont seem willing or able to acknowledge. I mean you do know what the next generation is going to say about you right? That you were so confined in your little boxes and geometries and generative doohickeys and this beyond neurotic obsession with composition you never actually addressed real human beings. Theres a reason peoples houses look the way they do, all encrusted in little nicknacks and bad paint and heaps of plants and old bottles and pet-toys. People live. It may have been a ham-fisted attempt, but I think it was prescient, to give some effort to address culture and symbols and linguistics and all of the actual things people deal with in their day to day lives, to bring architecture into that realm, rather than being permanently locked outside as some vacant backdrop.
not to mention, could we possibly take ourselves more seriously? That smell of self-importance is starting to sink in. God forbid we have the courage to experiment ;)
So let me make another very honest critique of all this sleek minimalist stuff people round these parts seem so ready to worship, besides the work is sterile and devoid of content; dont you think the kind of fixative nostalgia for one specific little movement a hundred years ago is a tiny bit facile? I mean I get discipline, I do. Its elegant, sure. I'll even give you its efficient in principle, (even if, lets be honest now, in actual practice its really only hiding a new kind of conceit of luxury, of lavish materials, presented immaculately to Neighbor Jones as if to say "Just look how bleak I can afford to be!".) I think its embarrassing, and contrived, and not new. I mean who even remembers the 80s? Helmut Jahn? What are we doing differently from that? Using more wood now? Thinking about perception? Like the suede-wearing hipster counterpart of some stuffy well-dressed prude at a cocktail party that just so drips of "Im so in love with myself, I couldnt possibly acknowledge anyone else," that no one can stand to be around them.
does regionalism enter in this discourse?! minimalism's vernacular is accepted more readily in japan, for example...brutalism succeeded in brazil in some ways...europe seems to be more accepting to contemporary architecture than the US...
is this another facet we could be discussing?! the link of local socio-culture and aesthetics...vernacular x style x movement, is something else to go into...
ps. i just spent the last 4 hours, working on the yard, under the 90F weather, being hydrated by nothing buy beer...i tried to make sense!!!
Jameson wrote that "schizophrenia" was an appropriate "aesthetic model" for postmodernism (or "the cultural logic of late capitalism"). His definition of "schizophrenia" was that of Lacan's, a psychoanalyst like Freud. Like many postmodernists who used the term "schizophrenia," his understanding of schizophrenia came from reading psychoanalytic theory (most of which is a fancy sort of autobiographical creative nonfiction). He did make it a point to state that his model was only an aesthetic one, and that he made no claims about medicine or epidemiology (if I remember correctly from reading it in a dozen years ago).
Anyway, in his aesthetic model, a schizophrenic person lacks the temporal awareness of himself as a self, an entity that persists over time (the argument is a linguistic one from that psychoanalytic influence and i don't feel like writing it all out because it's bs anyway). He goes on to say that victims of late capitalism (sesame street/mtv/sound byte generations) have a similar sensation of fragmentation/loss of a self entity persisting over time (because of the lacanic mirrors and other interesting garbage). it captivated me as a confused teenager.
Anyway, back to simples' point: Jameson described "cognitive mapping" as a reaction to that sensation of loss of self over time. If modernism was so concerned about time, moving forward in time, moving from one point in history to another, postmodernism backlashed by becoming interested in geographical mapping, individuals becoming more aware of their surroundings and the rest of the planet.
I haven't read enough to agree with Jameson. I still feel that modernism never ended and postmodernism is just another subcategory of modernism.
vado retro : the problem dear architecture students, is that the chances are that you will be working on schlocky buildings that lack any sense of irony, appropriation or self reference.
mmm,yes. i remember the luxury of pointing out the shit until i started working on it and making myelf get used to its stench.
the again, i didn't like architecture for its buildings. the distance between consciously designing a bulding and consciously experiencing it is banality unconscious. but in practicing shit, it banality conscious.
correction: "i remember the luxury of pointing out what i thought (or pretended) to be shit"
big difference.
Aug 16, 09 5:18 am ·
·
It is within the unpublished manuscripts of O. George Bruder where we see Postmodern architecture related to the growing trend of realism in film (including cinematic pornography). Not exactly a parallel development, but more where realism in films opened up designers/architect's minds to a more realistic approach to designing buildings/environments. Prior to realism, most films were an adapted form of theater/stage production. Realism in film presented 'real' situations within 'real' settings. [Yes, there is the omnipresent irony of films themselves not being real to begin with.]
aside: Does anyone else remember the paparazzi catching Jackie O. after she saw I am Curious (yellow).
Outside the stage directions of the Modern Movement there is the quickly found serendipity of everyday living/experience, and this realm of no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation made it easy for (what Portoghesi called) 'the end of prohibitionism'.
Postmodern architecture would not have happened without a certain frame of mind, and that frame of mind was becoming more and more prevalent within films of the later 1960s and 1970s.
Strickly within architecture itself, Scully, in 'How things got to be the way they are now', finds the genesis of Postmodern architecture with Kahn and Kahn's Beaux Arts education and Roman-ness [wrapped together via Piranesi's plan of the Campo Marzio (O. George Bruder)].
It seems worth noting that the two most significant architects to come out of the 'Strada Novissima' are Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas/OMA.
Well, among other things, the application of content and forms and motifs that are deliberately identifiable in cultural and historical terms, as well as compositions that are transparently applied as stage sets. If "Dont reveal that architecture is a stage set." is a rule, why did we stop breaking that rule?
Im skeptical of the whole analysis. Wouldnt, for instance, films by people like jon sales and will friedkin (I assume thats the realism youre talking about?) inspire trends more like the ones we have now, with a more honest and visceral attention to materials and how they effect the user? And wouldnt you expect a generation like ours watching charlie kaufman and peter greenaway and quentin tarantino to make buildings that are more postmodern? more irreverent, more self-referential, looser and more transparent in its nostalgia?
Aug 16, 09 3:04 pm ·
·
Many of the architects who utilized "the application of content and forms and motifs that are deliberately identifiable in cultural and historical terms" 30 years ago still design that way today (if they are still active and/or alive).
The first Greenaway film I saw was The Draughtsman's Contract in 1983, 27 years ago, and that's the kind of murder mystery I'm talking about.
The first Tarantino film I saw was Pulp Fiction in 1994 and soon after that architecture started becoming very virtual.
They may be alive, but if theyre doing anything like whats been posted above I dont think its controversial to say they certainly arent widely considered cool anymore.
I havent seen the Draughtsman's Contract, but if its anything like his other work Id be pretty hard pressed to see that as 'film realism'. Theyre highly structural, highly symbolic, and involved very deeply in the resurrection and analysis of historical forms.
And theres definitely an interesting relationship between pulp fiction and the work that it takes inspiration from, but I dont know if 'virtual' is really the most descriptive word for it. In fact I kind of tend to think the whole 'virtual architecture' thing was bullshit. Or at least I didnt see it. Like a lot of hype that no one actually followed through on. I mean sure, the design methods became 'virtual', in the most literal sense, but I dont see much evidence that the end products seemed to become anything of the kind.
I dont mean to harp, Im just saying I dont see it. Architecture and film have a lot of similarities, and certainly architects are out there watching films and thinking about what the directors are doing, but I dont see evidence the relationship is in anyway causal or bound the way youre implying. In fact I see plenty of evidence to the contrary, that things are able to evolve in the two fields quite independently.
Aug 16, 09 5:24 pm ·
·
Of course architecture and film evolve for the most part independently, as I already referenced Scully and Kahn above.
The relation between film and postmodern architecture I'm here discussing is not one where the architecture emulates the films, rather architects took on the 'realist' frame of mind of 60s and 70s films, again where there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
Architecture today is still very eclectic, diverse even, and, perhaps more now that ever, there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
Im just not so sure "no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation." is actually describing whats going on in those buildings. In fact I think its quite different. They seem very obviously to be taking from systems and forms and organizational principles very much from outside the immediate situation, and deliberately so. Maybe I just disagree with bruder on this one.
But I agree with you on Kahn and Piranesi.
Hey so heres a question for people, when do you think architects will stop obsessing over sculpture and start thinking about human beings again?
postmodernism doesn't suck, it is the architect who interpret that suck.
Aug 16, 09 11:06 pm ·
·
Took the time to look through Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) and read a little from Part Three: 'Post-Modern Architecture:
"There articles and attacks, lasting from 1959 to 1962, were meant to wipe out these heresies with a little critical weed-killer, but in the event the Italians fought back at this Puritanism, the refrigerator school of criticism.
The kind of buildings which were provoking this debate all had vague or repressed historical allusions..."
"Here is the schizophrenic cross between two codes [like Liz and 'realism' above] that is characteristic of Post-Modernism..."
"Saarinen couldn't quite go the next step and design conventional decoration."
"The historicism is attenuated, embarrassed, half-baked--a problem for many of the architects who left Mies setting out for decoration (and never quite arrived."
"'We can not know history'.
So by 1961 we have at least a camp, laconic statement in favor of eclecticism."
"What, might be asked, is really wrong with the decorative use of traditional elements--indeed straightforward ornament and the Trad styles? No one was prepared in the sixties to pose these questions in a radical way, and so the vague modernist suspicion of ornament and convention remained.
I suppose the first Modernist architect to use the decorative moulding and traditional symbol (such as the doorway arch) in an aggressive way was Robert Venturi. His Headquarters Building (1960)..."
Considered in the way outsiders see it (ie as an aesthetic style), then pomo as a rule makes me want to barf. But I'm not a real fan of modernism, either.
Anyway, despite my own opinions on the matter, the only building I've designed and built is decidedly pomo (a 100 square foot shed I did for free...). I wanted it to be self-referential and I purposely designed it so people would laugh at it, hopefully getting the joke even if they know nothing about modernism, postmodernism, or any other theory. I wanted people to smile when they saw it, and I think that's probably a pomo idea, too.
(my current bathroom reading is Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture....)
Dustin : I wanted it to be self-referential
like fractals?
re: self referentiality, i don't see why venuri saw the modernist architectural referencing of technology as being implicit and self-referential in contrast to the architectural referencing of historical tropes deemed explicit and referentially 'open'. to phrase it semiotically, in both cases of techology and history, the signification necessitates an external and explicit signature of signified and signifier and an bilaterally internal and implicit ana-logic binding signifier to signified.
it seemed to me that this viewpoint really stems from a dualistic morality pitting humanistic generalism embodied in the agency of literary and audio-visual folklore against the technocratic specificity of science and technology rather than from any referential proclivities as claimed. although very perceptive on many other accounts, this one, i believe, was a dishonest appraisal of his bias. i.e, although venturi argues that it is the modernist implicit contra the postmodern explicit that he had issues with, his issue might really have been his post modernist explicit contra the modernist explicit.
anyway of course it does take more than extraneous referencing to inhabit a post modern moment. referencing itself, through deliberation i.e though a change in the ordering principles (scale, location, size, syntactical...), must be referenced explicitly,as above. therefore, postmodern referencing is not so much a substantially syntagmatic self-referencing or substantially paradigmatic otherly-referencing as it is an erratic referencing-referencing. neither additions nor historical changes, but simply ironic eruptions, secular chuckles echoing divine chuckles of past gods playing tricks on foolish humans.
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Best definition I could find...
Postmodernism: The ongoing cultural movement that followed the more optimistic and forward-looking period of modernism. The term came into popular currency in the 1970s. Post modernism is characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference. In particular, the movement has uncovered the presence of source ideas, information and influences. It has therefore challenged the idea of ‘originality’. It has also made artworks resistant to straightforward assumptions about the place of the author and the interpreter.
I would say the Swan building pretty much sucks, though not entirely when viewed in the fantastical context in which it exists, but the rest are pretty important buildings.
OK, maybe not important, But definitely not bad, and definitely thought-provoking.
You can say they are bad - if one choses. That is a subjective opinion. Though, I agree with LB you can not call them unimportant...within their historical context they are important and interesting works. The Graves and Moore work is NOT good though...not from where I am sitting - and the swan...that leaves me needing to run to a lavatory.
i am a past modernist.
I will agree that pomo gets a generalized bad wrap and is much more complex than the simple statement,"Post modernism is characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference".
Heck, Kipnis places Deconstructivism within Post Modernism. Everyone from Predock to Eisenman could be largely considered to be Post Modern in their work...taking on collage and evolving to projected site lines of influence.
I guess my point is that it can be unfair to judge to whole lot of pomo as what is defined by graves, moore, venturi, etc. There has been lots of great work to come out of responses from those above...both from within and outside of the pomo "movement"
the problem dear architecture students, is that the chances are that you will be working on schlocky buildings that lack any sense of irony, appropriation or self reference.
you pomo
what are we loosely defining as pomo? i'm glad you cleared all the filth in the first post!
the word "important" makes me a bit uncomfortable because it seems like it places works on a pedestal where questioning their validity in a context larger than one's personal opinion is taboo or not worth debating.
Postmodernist plasticity sucks. Unproportioned volutes specially.
i think the fact that we can say that 'postmodern sucks' is, in itself, intrinsically postmodern.
Nice, Steven!
4arch, can one even form an opinion based on nothing more than one's personal opinion?
"I do/don't like it; I don't know why but I just do/don't" isn't exactly stimulating for a discussion!
If I remember right, The Swan use to be painted yellow and mint... or some other color. The red might actually be an improvement.
Ive been inside of it and it is quite nice. The building dimensions are a bit of a source of complaint. If I recall correctly, there's the gigantic enormous hallways that feel very stale.
The Portland city building is atrocious. Someone just paint it white.
In fact, I think about 60% of post-modernist buildings would look better if they were painted white.
I think with post-modernism... a lot of stylistic concerns got set into the ideology. So, basically it was a bunch of architects copying architects. But if we look at some designs from another standpoint, there's a lot of good post-modernism work out there.
I would say that the facade of Abercrombie and Fitch or Hollister is post modern and relatively successful.
humana building doesn't suck. but, then, it's in louisville, so that 'splains it...
the comerica building posted above was actually a welcome addition to the detroit skyline. i like it in context. (how very postmodern of me.)
yea, and so does Reagan....boy, he's the worst.........wait, what decade is this?
i wonder if this same discourse was taking place in the 18th century...
ROCOCO SUCKS embroidered capes...
seeing contemporary works by zumthor, h*dm, ando, and others, i like to think, sometimes, that we are just entering modernism...what we call "post modernism", in historical context, was reactionary to and killed what one could call pre-modernists, or early modernists...
Yes, it sucked. It is like a nasty scar that someone got while learning some fantastic skill. A necessary blemish on a path to a better end.
(I am sure I could find something that didn't turn my stomach. I did like some early graves and he's got pretty drawings, but man, what a bad direction he chose!)
@ jafidler - yes, the comerica tower is gorgeous. i love the feel of the building as a pedestrian (ironic for detroit), it's certainly old-world scale.
fyi, i adore all the buildings i posted above and was not continuing RealLifeLEED's rant, but contrasting it with beautiful, working examples of "post-modernism."
sure theres plenty of bad pomo, but i don't imagine the good:bad ratio is much different from modernism, or whatever else. I don't think all the examples pictured above are particularly bad. The really shocking stuff is the cynical corporate buildings that used the idea of the decorated shed to justify complete rubbish with some stuck on pretty bits.
Postmodern Architecture is like Gravity's Rainow meets Cleopatra...
...with a generous pinch of The Mirror Crack'd.
Yes, it's one of the best unsolved murder mysteries on the books!
"Oh, it's only a movie set."
i love classifying styles...can i get some blob roccoco minimalism?
even modernism is a style, yep yep.
but the original posters images and the definition provided are strictly an insider architecture thing...
when I see shit like what's posted above I just laugh, it's hilarious. I like to think the pomo designer is also laughing his ass off, because rich american's want to be historical europeans, so why not give the client something they understand as humerous because deep down you're a modernisth.
unlike %%%%%%%%%% images I can't imagine the architects took themselves seriously.
i remember having this conversation about I believe a Roche & Dinkeldoo project where the design was so ridiculously stupid in every iconic, art language way that surely Roche was sitting in his office going, I wonder if this knuckles heads will build this, 10 mintues later the sketch is going to be built.
who said architect's aren't powerful?
irony isn't necessarily a joke.
thank you %%%%% for reminding us that semantics are only one branch of postmodernism... The heart of postmodernism is (in my view) the embracing of multiplicity as opposed to singularity. I enjoy the singularity of modernism, but can't imagine the world if that was where architecture ended. Yes, I agree that the mannerism which the semantic approach to postmodernism promoted hurts my eyes a bit, but it certainly took us to a better place eventually. I can't remember the last time that I saw a contemporary building that wasn't influenced by postmodern thought.
i would argue that the good vs. bad ratio in modernism is not even similar to what was produced in pomo as a "style", although bad buildings are the norm everywhere regardless the period
Man guys. So conservative! ha ha
I'll say this for pomo, it was addressing things most architects nowadays dont seem willing or able to acknowledge. I mean you do know what the next generation is going to say about you right? That you were so confined in your little boxes and geometries and generative doohickeys and this beyond neurotic obsession with composition you never actually addressed real human beings. Theres a reason peoples houses look the way they do, all encrusted in little nicknacks and bad paint and heaps of plants and old bottles and pet-toys. People live. It may have been a ham-fisted attempt, but I think it was prescient, to give some effort to address culture and symbols and linguistics and all of the actual things people deal with in their day to day lives, to bring architecture into that realm, rather than being permanently locked outside as some vacant backdrop.
not to mention, could we possibly take ourselves more seriously? That smell of self-importance is starting to sink in. God forbid we have the courage to experiment ;)
it's that brutalism stuff that really gets my cheese...all that exposed concrete...why, just look at........oh, never mind.
Yea?
So let me make another very honest critique of all this sleek minimalist stuff people round these parts seem so ready to worship, besides the work is sterile and devoid of content; dont you think the kind of fixative nostalgia for one specific little movement a hundred years ago is a tiny bit facile? I mean I get discipline, I do. Its elegant, sure. I'll even give you its efficient in principle, (even if, lets be honest now, in actual practice its really only hiding a new kind of conceit of luxury, of lavish materials, presented immaculately to Neighbor Jones as if to say "Just look how bleak I can afford to be!".) I think its embarrassing, and contrived, and not new. I mean who even remembers the 80s? Helmut Jahn? What are we doing differently from that? Using more wood now? Thinking about perception? Like the suede-wearing hipster counterpart of some stuffy well-dressed prude at a cocktail party that just so drips of "Im so in love with myself, I couldnt possibly acknowledge anyone else," that no one can stand to be around them.
does regionalism enter in this discourse?! minimalism's vernacular is accepted more readily in japan, for example...brutalism succeeded in brazil in some ways...europe seems to be more accepting to contemporary architecture than the US...
is this another facet we could be discussing?! the link of local socio-culture and aesthetics...vernacular x style x movement, is something else to go into...
ps. i just spent the last 4 hours, working on the yard, under the 90F weather, being hydrated by nothing buy beer...i tried to make sense!!!
'just look how bleak i can afford to be' - ha!
simples has a good point.
Jameson wrote that "schizophrenia" was an appropriate "aesthetic model" for postmodernism (or "the cultural logic of late capitalism"). His definition of "schizophrenia" was that of Lacan's, a psychoanalyst like Freud. Like many postmodernists who used the term "schizophrenia," his understanding of schizophrenia came from reading psychoanalytic theory (most of which is a fancy sort of autobiographical creative nonfiction). He did make it a point to state that his model was only an aesthetic one, and that he made no claims about medicine or epidemiology (if I remember correctly from reading it in a dozen years ago).
Anyway, in his aesthetic model, a schizophrenic person lacks the temporal awareness of himself as a self, an entity that persists over time (the argument is a linguistic one from that psychoanalytic influence and i don't feel like writing it all out because it's bs anyway). He goes on to say that victims of late capitalism (sesame street/mtv/sound byte generations) have a similar sensation of fragmentation/loss of a self entity persisting over time (because of the lacanic mirrors and other interesting garbage). it captivated me as a confused teenager.
Anyway, back to simples' point: Jameson described "cognitive mapping" as a reaction to that sensation of loss of self over time. If modernism was so concerned about time, moving forward in time, moving from one point in history to another, postmodernism backlashed by becoming interested in geographical mapping, individuals becoming more aware of their surroundings and the rest of the planet.
I haven't read enough to agree with Jameson. I still feel that modernism never ended and postmodernism is just another subcategory of modernism.
Oh, and some of it sucks and some of it doesn't.
That was basically the best conclusion to a literature review ever, n400.
vado retro : the problem dear architecture students, is that the chances are that you will be working on schlocky buildings that lack any sense of irony, appropriation or self reference.
mmm,yes. i remember the luxury of pointing out the shit until i started working on it and making myelf get used to its stench.
the again, i didn't like architecture for its buildings. the distance between consciously designing a bulding and consciously experiencing it is banality unconscious. but in practicing shit, it banality conscious.
and most of these buildings shown above are at least interesting. and postmodernism is at least rather about making the interesting explicit.
correction: "i remember the luxury of pointing out what i thought (or pretended) to be shit"
big difference.
It is within the unpublished manuscripts of O. George Bruder where we see Postmodern architecture related to the growing trend of realism in film (including cinematic pornography). Not exactly a parallel development, but more where realism in films opened up designers/architect's minds to a more realistic approach to designing buildings/environments. Prior to realism, most films were an adapted form of theater/stage production. Realism in film presented 'real' situations within 'real' settings. [Yes, there is the omnipresent irony of films themselves not being real to begin with.]
aside: Does anyone else remember the paparazzi catching Jackie O. after she saw I am Curious (yellow).
Outside the stage directions of the Modern Movement there is the quickly found serendipity of everyday living/experience, and this realm of no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation made it easy for (what Portoghesi called) 'the end of prohibitionism'.
Postmodern architecture would not have happened without a certain frame of mind, and that frame of mind was becoming more and more prevalent within films of the later 1960s and 1970s.
Strickly within architecture itself, Scully, in 'How things got to be the way they are now', finds the genesis of Postmodern architecture with Kahn and Kahn's Beaux Arts education and Roman-ness [wrapped together via Piranesi's plan of the Campo Marzio (O. George Bruder)].
It seems worth noting that the two most significant architects to come out of the 'Strada Novissima' are Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas/OMA.
So why is it you think that architects have retreated so precipitously from that?
oe, I think you have to first define what 'that' is.
Otherwise, architecture still pretty much operates within the 'realm of no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation'.
Well, among other things, the application of content and forms and motifs that are deliberately identifiable in cultural and historical terms, as well as compositions that are transparently applied as stage sets. If "Dont reveal that architecture is a stage set." is a rule, why did we stop breaking that rule?
Im skeptical of the whole analysis. Wouldnt, for instance, films by people like jon sales and will friedkin (I assume thats the realism youre talking about?) inspire trends more like the ones we have now, with a more honest and visceral attention to materials and how they effect the user? And wouldnt you expect a generation like ours watching charlie kaufman and peter greenaway and quentin tarantino to make buildings that are more postmodern? more irreverent, more self-referential, looser and more transparent in its nostalgia?
Many of the architects who utilized "the application of content and forms and motifs that are deliberately identifiable in cultural and historical terms" 30 years ago still design that way today (if they are still active and/or alive).
The first Greenaway film I saw was The Draughtsman's Contract in 1983, 27 years ago, and that's the kind of murder mystery I'm talking about.
The first Tarantino film I saw was Pulp Fiction in 1994 and soon after that architecture started becoming very virtual.
They may be alive, but if theyre doing anything like whats been posted above I dont think its controversial to say they certainly arent widely considered cool anymore.
I havent seen the Draughtsman's Contract, but if its anything like his other work Id be pretty hard pressed to see that as 'film realism'. Theyre highly structural, highly symbolic, and involved very deeply in the resurrection and analysis of historical forms.
And theres definitely an interesting relationship between pulp fiction and the work that it takes inspiration from, but I dont know if 'virtual' is really the most descriptive word for it. In fact I kind of tend to think the whole 'virtual architecture' thing was bullshit. Or at least I didnt see it. Like a lot of hype that no one actually followed through on. I mean sure, the design methods became 'virtual', in the most literal sense, but I dont see much evidence that the end products seemed to become anything of the kind.
I dont mean to harp, Im just saying I dont see it. Architecture and film have a lot of similarities, and certainly architects are out there watching films and thinking about what the directors are doing, but I dont see evidence the relationship is in anyway causal or bound the way youre implying. In fact I see plenty of evidence to the contrary, that things are able to evolve in the two fields quite independently.
Of course architecture and film evolve for the most part independently, as I already referenced Scully and Kahn above.
The relation between film and postmodern architecture I'm here discussing is not one where the architecture emulates the films, rather architects took on the 'realist' frame of mind of 60s and 70s films, again where there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
Architecture today is still very eclectic, diverse even, and, perhaps more now that ever, there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
Im just not so sure "no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation." is actually describing whats going on in those buildings. In fact I think its quite different. They seem very obviously to be taking from systems and forms and organizational principles very much from outside the immediate situation, and deliberately so. Maybe I just disagree with bruder on this one.
But I agree with you on Kahn and Piranesi.
Hey so heres a question for people, when do you think architects will stop obsessing over sculpture and start thinking about human beings again?
postmodernism doesn't suck, it is the architect who interpret that suck.
Took the time to look through Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) and read a little from Part Three: 'Post-Modern Architecture:
"There articles and attacks, lasting from 1959 to 1962, were meant to wipe out these heresies with a little critical weed-killer, but in the event the Italians fought back at this Puritanism, the refrigerator school of criticism.
The kind of buildings which were provoking this debate all had vague or repressed historical allusions..."
"Here is the schizophrenic cross between two codes [like Liz and 'realism' above] that is characteristic of Post-Modernism..."
"Saarinen couldn't quite go the next step and design conventional decoration."
"The historicism is attenuated, embarrassed, half-baked--a problem for many of the architects who left Mies setting out for decoration (and never quite arrived."
"'We can not know history'.
So by 1961 we have at least a camp, laconic statement in favor of eclecticism."
"What, might be asked, is really wrong with the decorative use of traditional elements--indeed straightforward ornament and the Trad styles? No one was prepared in the sixties to pose these questions in a radical way, and so the vague modernist suspicion of ornament and convention remained.
I suppose the first Modernist architect to use the decorative moulding and traditional symbol (such as the doorway arch) in an aggressive way was Robert Venturi. His Headquarters Building (1960)..."
...where the colors have been homogenized, the windows changed, and only faint traces of the mouldings remain.
Considered in the way outsiders see it (ie as an aesthetic style), then pomo as a rule makes me want to barf. But I'm not a real fan of modernism, either.
Anyway, despite my own opinions on the matter, the only building I've designed and built is decidedly pomo (a 100 square foot shed I did for free...). I wanted it to be self-referential and I purposely designed it so people would laugh at it, hopefully getting the joke even if they know nothing about modernism, postmodernism, or any other theory. I wanted people to smile when they saw it, and I think that's probably a pomo idea, too.
(my current bathroom reading is Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture....)
Dustin : I wanted it to be self-referential
like fractals?
re: self referentiality, i don't see why venuri saw the modernist architectural referencing of technology as being implicit and self-referential in contrast to the architectural referencing of historical tropes deemed explicit and referentially 'open'. to phrase it semiotically, in both cases of techology and history, the signification necessitates an external and explicit signature of signified and signifier and an bilaterally internal and implicit ana-logic binding signifier to signified.
it seemed to me that this viewpoint really stems from a dualistic morality pitting humanistic generalism embodied in the agency of literary and audio-visual folklore against the technocratic specificity of science and technology rather than from any referential proclivities as claimed. although very perceptive on many other accounts, this one, i believe, was a dishonest appraisal of his bias. i.e, although venturi argues that it is the modernist implicit contra the postmodern explicit that he had issues with, his issue might really have been his post modernist explicit contra the modernist explicit.
anyway of course it does take more than extraneous referencing to inhabit a post modern moment. referencing itself, through deliberation i.e though a change in the ordering principles (scale, location, size, syntactical...), must be referenced explicitly,as above. therefore, postmodern referencing is not so much a substantially syntagmatic self-referencing or substantially paradigmatic otherly-referencing as it is an erratic referencing-referencing. neither additions nor historical changes, but simply ironic eruptions, secular chuckles echoing divine chuckles of past gods playing tricks on foolish humans.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.