10/12/2015 La Strada Novissima: The 1980 Venice Biennale

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La Strada Novissima: The

1980 Venice Biennale
In anticipation of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition Common Ground,
we revisit a text by Charles Jencks on The Presence of the Past, the first Venice
Architecture Biennale, directed by Paolo Portoghesi.
 
From the archive / Charles Jencks

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10/12/2015 La Strada Novissima: The 1980 Venice Biennale

Author Sections Network

Charles Jencks From the archive
Like on Facebook Share on Twitter
Published Keywords
25 August 2012 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, Arata Pin to Pinterest
Isozaki, Arsenale, Charles Jencks, Common
Location
Ground, Frank O. Gehry, La Strada Novissima,
Venice
Michael Graves, Paolo Portoghesi, Rem
Koolhaas, Scott Brown, Venturi

This article was originally published in Domus 610 / October 1980

The Presence of the Past

There are many misunderstandings concerning Post-Modernism
no doubt caused by the success of the term, and its various,
indeed erratic, usage. Possibly this ambiguity and the success are
connected since the vagueness leads Modernists and anti-
Modernists alike to read what they like into the labeI. The fashion
can be liberating, and the vagueness and pluralism of the term
equally so, especially as Modernism (and perhaps Late-
Modernism?) becomes more doctrinaire and exclusivist. For such
reason I used the term in 1975 to cover six departures from
Modernism (The Rise of Post-Modern Architecture, Eindhoven
1975) — departures from a shared tradition not reaction against
it. The six schools of post-modernism (lower case) - historicism,
neo-vernacular, adhocism, contextualism, metaphorical and
metaphysical architects, and those who develop an ambiguous
space — are distinguishable from each other, but they also have a
commonality: they "double-code" their buildings. They all are
partly Modern (because of the tradition from which they depart)
and partly Other. Hence Post-Modernism defined means this
double-coding, a stricter definition I understood only after the
first edition of my book in 1977. The definition opposes this
heterogenous group with that which they are often confused —
Late-Modernists.

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Top: Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Above: Strada Novissima installation
view

Today one still finds that journalists, editors and the

public at large confuse these two basic approaches. They imagine
that anything that is playful, strange, more Modern than Modern,
is Post-Modern — and hence Peter Eisenman becomes a Post-
Modernist. Clearly the ambiguity and surprise of his spaces puts
him in that category, but just as clearly his anticonventional and
antisymbolic position are Late-Modern. We must conclude that
the ambiguity in the term is then shared by public, journalists
and practicing architects, sometimes to positive effect, but that,
as I have defined it in a more limited way, it has a coherence and
refers to a commonly shared approach (double-coding).

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st

International Architecture Exhibition, The
Presence of the Past. Michael Graves' façade
under construction

With these distinctions in mind several further points

become clear: the main school of Post-Modernism (Venturi,
Moore, Stern, and now Hollein, Stirling, Philip Johnson, Bofill)
should be distinguished from the other departures just as a
conscious movement is distinguished from a wider cultural shift.

Furthermore, Post-Modern Classicism, the new synthesis which

now unites practitioners around the world as the International
Style did in the twenties, is an identifiable style and
philosophical approach (gathering fragments of contextualism,
eclecticism, semiotics, and particular architectural traditions into
its hybrid ideology). Leon Krier, even Aldo Rossi, has started to
move towards this consensus (although they keep a suspicion of

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all things American). When an historian of the year 2000 looks at

our period he might distinguish the Post-Modern Classicists from
the post-modern practitioners — those in the other traditions
such as Kroll and Erskine who have also left Modernism but not
necessarily embraced the Free Style Classicism.

 
Post-Modern Classicism is the new synthesis which
now unites practitioners around the world as the
International Style did in the twenties
 

Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Left, a drawing by Robert A.M. Stern; right, a
drawing by Michael Graves

By the same token he might look at the entries to the

1980 Biennale and see them as comprising only one part of the
post-modern movement — the historicist part. Naturally Paolo
Portoghesi and the committee (Scully, Norberg-Schulz, myself
etc.) favoured those who conformed with Portoghesi's Biennale
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modernists were excluded — the metaphysical school, some

urbanists — and that the Post-Modern School was emphasized.

Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Proposal by Rem Koolhaas (OMA)

A preference for historicism overcame a preference for

communication in general. Characteristically the term was co-
opted into the subtitle of the exhibition to serve a partly sectarian
polemic. Should one object? Does one object when Modernism is
defined as "structural rationalism" (Viollet-le-Duc) or "social-
responsibility" (William Morris) or any one of its twenty or thirty
possible definers? Because of this ambiguity and pluralism of
usage I have attempted, in Late-Modern Architecture, to
disentangle the thirty main definers of Modern, Late-Modern and
Post-Modern architecture and place them together in a
comparative table. (I should add parenthetically that while the
Biennale's selection is indeed limited to the historicist wing of
Post-Modernism it shows a fairly acute application of standards,
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and a most welcome spread across different countries). Charles

Jencks

Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Oswald Mathias Ungers' façade

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Left, façade by Thomas Gordon Smith; right,
façade by Venturi, Rauch & Scott-Brown

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Hans Hollein's façade

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Left, the Arsenale's Corderie before
renovation; right, a drawing by Stanley Tigerman

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Left, a drawing by Franco Purini and Laura
Thermes; right, a drawing by Massimo Scolari

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Domus 605 / April 1980 page details. 1st International Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past. Left, a drawing by Arata Isokazi; right, drawing
by Frank O. Gehry

Author Sections Network

Charles Jencks From the archive
Like on Facebook Share on Twitter
Keywords
13th Venice Architecture Biennale, Arata Pin to Pinterest
Isozaki, Arsenale, Charles Jencks, Common
Ground, Frank O. Gehry, La Strada Novissima,
Michael Graves, Paolo Portoghesi, Rem
Koolhaas, Scott Brown, Venturi

Location
Venice

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