What Does Post-Modernism In Architecture Mean?

WHAT DOES POST-MODERNISM IN ARCHITECTURE MEAN?
Paper presented by Architecture Profesor Jorge Espinel, at the Royal College of Art, London

Early Views of Post-Modernism
Post-modernism is a concept which has had a variety of interpretations. At a very general level most people would agree that it refers to a shift away from the modern movement; in more specific terms, however, differencesarise as to what this change involves. Within the field of architecture, perhaps its most significant early usage was that made by Pevsner in 1966, to label the work of those neo-expressionists whom he was attacking for deviating from the "party line" of the modern movement. In this he was referring to an architecture which was beginning to manifest a high degree of associative values because of itsallusion to architectural forms of an earlier period in history. While in this case the concept had a very limited usage, its focus was nevertheless on formal issues in referring to the shift away from "modernism”. This degree of specificity was to change in the following years, although the characterization of post-modernism in terms of formal manifestations different from the modern aestheticwas to remain relatively the same. In effect it was to be applied, as Jencks has observed, "to almost any building with funny kinks in it or sensuous imagery different from the rectilinear boxes of the International Style" - "a very convenient phrase", in the words of Goldberg, "for those critics who seemed to see in it a safely vague refuge from any sort of narrow definition of a current style, asit at once confidently asserts a break with modernism, but commits its user to little in the way of an alternative.

By the middle 70s, however, a number of attempts were being made to reduce this degree of vagueness. Charles Moore for example proposed that

post-modernism be defined in chronological terms: "If modernism covers the work of such disparate architects as Le Corbusier or Wurster,then the term ought by right to cover everything since; especially the latter day revisitations of Corbusier by Graves, Meier et al." Implicit in this view was the idea that the concept should refer to an end product, that is, the sort of work produced by the architects he mentions, as different, say, from an underlying set of propositions or a philosophical position with respect to architecture.Robert Stern's interpretation of post-modernism in 1977, on the other hand, hinted that there was something more fundamental to it than simply the characteristics of the architecture produced, although here again a great deal of emphasis was made on formal issue. principles, or at least attitudes, "Three

characterize

post-modernism: Contextualism: the individual building as a fragment of alarger whole. Renouncing what Colin Rowe has called the 'object fixation' of the modern movement. Contextualism is an affirmation that buildings that refer and defer to buildings around them gain strength over those that do not. Among other things contextualism holds out the possibility that the form, color and scale of a building may be closely. related to that of an old building. Allusionism:architecture as an act of cultural and historical response. Allusionism suggests that there

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are lessons to be learned from the history of architecture; that the history of. buildings is the history of meaning in architecture. Post-modernist allusion can take many forms: the recapturing of an entire mood scenographically or the incorporation in new work of recognizable fragments from thepast/for semantic and/or emphathetic purposes. Ornamentalism: the wall as a medium of architecture meaning; the decorated wall responds to an innate human need for elaboration and an instinct to measure building size in relation to human size. " In these terms post-modernism is a turn-around on the modern movement's rejection of history and its attempt to create a new world free from the taints of...