Postmodern Architecture

Postmodern Architecture: Less Is a Bore
Owen Hopkins
Phaidon, February 2020



Hardcover | 10 x 11-1/2 inches | 224 pages | 200 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0714878126 | $49.95

Publisher's Description:

This unprecedented book takes its subtitle from Postmodernist icon Robert Venturi's spirited response to Mies van der Rohe's dictum that ‘less is more'. One of the 20th century's most controversial styles, Postmodernism began in the 1970s, reached a fever pitch of eclectic non-conformity in the 1980s and 90s, and after nearly 40 years is now enjoying a newfound popularity. Postmodern Architecture showcases examples of the movement in a rainbow of hues and forms from around the globe.

dDAB Commentary:

What is Postmodern architecture (PoMo for short)? If we go the Wikipedia route — and why not? — it is "a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture." Later, it "flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s" and then "in the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, modern classicism and deconstructivism." This definition is a broad one, with PoMo encompassing the "styles" that splintered from it. But for me, somebody trained in architecture in the first half of the 1990s, PoMo was simply the historically ironic architecture that was produced in those flourishing years before it "divided" into -isms that didn't have the same embrace of history.

So one view of PoMo sees it as a style with well-defined boundaries — from the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, if we ascribe to Charles Jencks' exact marking of the end of Modernism, to the completion of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao (1997, the same year as the Longaberger Building), which ushered in something else: let's call it the era of the icon. The other view sees PoMo continuing to this day, alive and well. I side with the first definition, partly because of my education and partly because applying PoMo to recent work means applying it to just about anything that departs from strictly Modernist tendencies. And because of this, I find Phaidon's new Postmodern Architecture book equally illuminating and frustrating.

Let's start with the illuminating. I'm a (non-practicing) architect who writes about architecture, so I feel like I know a good deal about the buildings of the last few decades, jus as I try to keep abreast of what's happening now. Regardless, there's a number of surprises in this book, particularly those in the UK, the home turf of Owen Hopkins, whose excellent five-page essay prefaces the 200 pages of color photos that follow. It's always great to be subjected to more architecture, even if it's just one image per building. The frustrating: There's just too many buildings that veer outside of what I consider PoMo. Ricardo Bofill's 77 West Wacker in Chicago (third spread below) is suitably PoMo, but is Cesar Pelli's Petronas Towers, completed in 1996, just four years later? I think not; and there are numerous other cases. In place of such buildings, it would have been great to have even more obscure PoMo buildings from the 1970s through the 90s. But that approach would have embalmed the style (and probably made it harder for the Phaidon editors to dig up good photos). In its broad view, Less Is a Bore lifts Postmodern architecture from its past, makes it a colorful, living part of our present, and makes an argument for its continuation into the future.

Spreads:


Author Bio:

London-based Owen Hopkins is the Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Education at Sir John Soane's Museum where he curated ‘The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture' in 2018. He was also the editor of Conversations on Postmodernism, a book of interviews with eight figures associated with the movement.

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