Unit 2

AFTER MODERNISM I
Unit II - AFTER MODERNISM I
Outline of changes in society after the 1960s characterised as condition of postmodernity, to include
the realms of economics, technology, culture, society and environment. Critique of modernist cities by
Jane Jacobs. Theories and works of Christopher Alexander. Aldo Rossi’s ideas on the city.
Neorationalism. Semiology and Postmodernism. Writings of Venturi. Works of Venturi Scott Brown,
Graves and Moore.
MICHAEL GRAVES
Michael Graves (born July 9, 1934) is an
American architect. Identified as one of The New York
Five, Graves has become a household name with his
designs for domestic products sold at Target stores in
the United States.

Graves was born in Indianapolis, Indiana.

In 1962, Michael Graves accepted a teaching position at

Princeton University. Michael Graves is currently the
Schirmer Professor of Architecture at Princeton. The
courses that Graves teaches in architectural theory
and composition address various thematic topics
including the relationship of buildings to landscape,
the traditional elements of architecture, the idea of
metaphor in architecture, the contrast between
open space and the making of rooms, and the origins
of furniture.
 Michael Graves generates an ironic, vision
of Classicism in which his buildings have
become classical in their mass and order.

Although influenced by the fundamentalists

in developing an architectural language,
Graves has become an opponent of
modern works who uses humour as an
integral part of his architecture.

Indeed, many of his recent designs seem to

celebrate architectural pastiche and kitsch.

The Portland Building in Oregon

The Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida
NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Steigenberger Hotel in El Gouna, Egypt, in association with
architect Ahmed Hamdy
The International Finance Corporation Building in Washington, D.C.
ROBERT CHARLES VENTURI
Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. (born June 25, 1925
in Philadelphia) is an American architect, founding
principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and
Associates, and one of the major figures in the
architecture of the twentieth century.

Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott

Brown, he helped to shape the way that architects,
planners and students experience and think about
architecture and the American built environment.

Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings and

teaching have contributed to the expansion of
discourse. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker
Prize in Architecture in 1991. He is also known for
coining the maxim "Less is a bore" as antidote
to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum
"Less is more".
Vanna Venturi house
• The firm's influence was first felt through the writings of Robert Venturi and
Scott Brown, beginning with Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture widely regarded as the seminal document of the postmodern
movement.
• Published in 1966, it is still in print and has been translated and published in
nine languages.

• In Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi issued his "gentle

manifesto" against what he termed "the puritanically moral language" of late
modernism.
• Robert Venturi asserted that the modernists had, in their revolutionary zeal,
simplified and clarified architecture to the point of separating it "from the
experience of life and the needs of society" While this simplification resulted
in some beautiful buildings, the major result in the later years of modernism
was a pervasive blandness or, as Robert Venturi put it in his rewording of
Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum, "Less is a bore".
• Perhaps the most influential aspect of the book was its
exuberant embrace of historical example as a source for
contemporary inspiration.

• Modernism had eschewed historical reference, asserting

that the past was irrelevant to modern architectural
concerns.

• Robert Venturi, however, found rich lessons in the full range

of the world's architecture, and illustrated Robert Venturi's
theories using examples from many periods and styles.

• This acknowledgment of the continuity of architectural

experience helped bring about the rapprochement with the
past that has been a major characteristic of architecture in
the 1980s.
• The architecture of Robert Venturi,
although perhaps not as familiar today
as his books, helped redirect American
architecture away from a widely
practiced, often banal, modernism in
the 1960's to a more exploratory, and
ultimately eclectic, design approach
that openly drew lessons from historic
architecture and responded to the
everyday context of the American city.

• Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose

architectural systems, elements and
aims, to acknowledge the conflicts
often inherent in a project or site.
Allen Art Museum Addition
Gordon Wu Hall
CHARLES WILLARD MOORE
• Charles Willard Moore (October 31, 1925 – December 16, 1993) was
an American architect, educator, writer, Fellow of the American Institute of
Architects, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991.
• Moore graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947 and earned both
a Master's and a Ph.D at Princeton University in 1957, where he remained for
an additional year as a post-doctoral fellow.
• During this fellowship, Moore served as a teaching assistant for Louis Kahn, the
Philadelphia architect who taught a design studio. During the Princeton years,
Moore designed and built a house for his mother in Pebble Beach, California,
and worked during the summers for architect Wallave Holm of
neighboring Monterey.
• Moore's Master's Thesis explored ways to preserve and integrate Monterey's
historic adobe dwellings into the fabric of the city. His Doctoral dissertation,
"Water and Architecture", was a survey of the presence of water in shaping the
experience of place; many decades later, the dissertation became the basis of a
book with the same title.
• Moore preferred conspicuous design features, including loud color
combinations, supergraphics, stylistic collisions, the re-use of esoteric
historical-design solutions, and the use of non-traditional materials
such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs.
• As a result, his work provokes arousal, demands attention, and
sometimes tips over into kitsch. His mid-1960s New Haven residence,
published in Playboy, featured an open, freestanding shower in the
middle of the room, its water nozzled through a giant sunflower.
• Such design features (historical detail, ornament, fictional treatments,
ironic significations) made Moore one of the chief innovators
of postmodern architecture, along with Robert Venturi and Michael
Graves, among others. Moore's Piazza d'Italia (1978), an urban public
plaza in New Orleans, made prolific use of his exuberant design
vocabulary and is frequently cited as the archetypal postmodern

project .
Sea Ranch Condominium
Hood Museum of Art