Post Modernism

Based on the Article "When Less was no Longer More" by Jayne Merkel

Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities.

These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety combined with a growing movement towards nostalgia, created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.

Although the most visible and publicly understood signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in a few houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades.

In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones.

And many architects trained in the 1960s and ’70s moved into old houses or prewar apartments themselves. Their renovations showed that it was possible to be creative, modern and historically respectful at the same time. These projects showed up in magazines, creating a taste for inventively remodeled old buildings. Exposed brick interior walls became common, along with decorative moldings, daring color combinations and exposed columns. Very visible, very successful architects, and many less well-known ones, made working in historic styles — or being inspired by them — acceptable practice within the profession.

The home Robert Venturi built for his mother, Vanna Venturi, who is sitting in the doorway.

 

Venturi made his argument in sheet rock and wood framing as well as words. A house he built for his mother near Philadelphia “critiqued” the modern movement’s tendency to reject the past while also showing a playfulness often lost in modernist architecture. With its gabled roof and central entrance, it looks like a child’s drawing of a house, but it is not as simple as it looks. It is small, but spatially complex inside. Unlike Mies’s steel-and-glass jewel boxes, Venturi’s house is full of wit and whimsy as well as clever references to historic buildings - just check out that Romanesque arch reference on the front  of it— while still working as a house for his aging mother.

 

 

Modern architects had built many interesting houses, but these never really caught on with the general public because they looked too unusual. They were also, perhaps, too plain, subtle and modest for American tastes. During the postmodern period, however, knowledgeable, talented architects started designing houses that captured the popular imagination.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Michael Graves, who taught at Princeton, did a series of houses and additions inspired first by Cubist paintings and then by traditional buildings. Despite their size and limited budgets, they were aesthetically ambitious. They not only suggested intriguing alternatives to the modernist box but ways to use art and architectural history to invent new forms. Widely published, they eventually earned Graves commissions for very original and colorful public buildings, inspired by the classical past, that influenced not only architecture but furniture, fashion and product design.

This led to the commission for the Portland Building which we discussed in class. Though often mislabeled the "birthplace of postmodernism" it is hard to argue that this building represents anything less than a significant tipping point in western architectural culture and trends. It opened the floodgates for designers to push with great abandon into the wide world of Postmodern redesign