Professional Documents
Culture Documents
REVISITING
POSTMODERNISM
© Sir Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman
The rights of Sir Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman to be identified as the Authors of
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CONTENTS
SIR TERRY FARRELL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV
ABOUT THE AUTHORS V
PREFACE VII
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
POSTMODERNISM IN ITS HISTORICAL PLACE 5
CHAPTER 2
THE ‘HIGH STYLE’ PERIOD OF POSTMODERNISM 19
CHAPTER 3
WE ARE ALL POSTMODERNISTS NOW 59
– IMAGE GALLERY –
ADAM NATHANIEL FURMAN
CHAPTER 4
MODERNIST ORTHODOXY CHALLENGED 123
CHAPTER 5
THE POSTMODERN SPIRIT TAKES HOLD 137
CHAPTER 6
BACKLASH AND RESURGENCE 177
REFERENCES 194
IMAGE CREDITS 196
INDEX 197
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is always a pleasure to be invited to write about a subject close to my heart and being asked by
RIBA Publishing to write this book has given me the opportunity to revisit my experience of
Postmodernism, and the chance to highlight people and projects that I think exemplify all that
makes Postmodernism great. This was further enhanced by being able to co-author with Adam
Nathaniel Furman, a young designer whose enthusiasm for the subject has brought an extra
dimension to the book.
My assistant, Emma Davies, has been invaluable in organising research, text and images. My
heartfelt gratitude also goes to Abigail Grater, who edited the text. I would also like to thank
Ginny Mills and Richard Blackburn at RIBA Publishing, whose help and advice was much
appreciated.
As with all books, so many people are involved in varying degrees but I would like to take this
opportunity to thank all the architects and photographers who have contributed.
Sir Terry Farrell, London 2017
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sir Terry Farrell obtained a first class honours degree from Newcastle University (his home town)
and then a masters from the University of Pennsylvania, on a Harkness Fellowship where he
studied under Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown. In 1965 he set up in partnership
with Nicholas Grimshaw and then in his own right in 1980 to the present time where he now has
offices in London and Hong Kong. He has won many architecture and planning awards, including
the RTPI Gold Medal (2017) and a knighthood (2001) for services to architecture and urban
design. From a long career his built achievements include MI6, Embankment Place, and
headquarters for the Home Office in London and in China, Beijing South and Guangzhou stations,
KK100, with The Peak and British Consulate in Hong Kong. He has written and published
extensively, including Shaping London and The City As A Tangled Bank: Urban Design versus
Urban evolution. At the request of the UK government he led the recent ‘Farrell Review of
Architecture and the Built Environment’, described by the culture minister as ‘the most thorough
and wide-ranging exercise that has taken place in this sector for generations.’
Adam Nathaniel Furman is a London-based designer whose practice ranges from architecture and
interiors to sculpture, installation, writing and product design. He pursues research through his
teaching role at Central St Martins, and the research group ‘Saturated Space’, which he co-runs at
the Architectural Association, exploring colour in architecture and urbanism through events,
lectures and publications. He was Designer in Residence at the Design Museum in London for
2013–14, received the Blueprint Award for Design Innovation in 2014, was awarded the UK Rome
Prize for Architecture 2014–15, was one of the Architecture Foundation’s ‘New Architects’ in
2016, and was described by Rowan Moore, architecture critic for the Observer, as one of the four
‘rising stars’ of 2017. He has worked at OMA Rotterdam, Ron Arad Architects, Farrells and Ash
Sakula, and has written for Abitare, the RIBA Journal, Icon, the Architectural Review, Apollo
Magazine, Architecture Today, amongst others. He is the founder of the Postmodern Society, has
actively advocated and lobbied to increase awareness of architecture from the period, and led the
successful campaign to list the UK’s first Postmodern building, Comyn Ching Triangle.
PREFACE
In this book Adam Nathaniel Furman and I will concentrate on re-visiting perceptions of
Postmodernism in architecture (rather than widening our remit to include planning, theory or
philosophy, although these are touched upon), with the aim of sharing a deep appreciation of the
buildings, architects and ideas that made the era such fertile ground for architectural invention.
Both of our sections are broadly divided into three eras: the influential early stages of what grew
to be known as Postmodernism, the high period when the approach came to dominate architecture
around the world, and its apparent decline and incorporation into more recent generations of
practice.
We present two different but complementary perspectives of the same periods. My personal
experience and thoughts about the Postmodern movement as a participant in these times will delve
into the movement from the viewpoint of a participant. I revisit the period and its buildings as a
lived experience, with explanations of the forces and influences that helped me to understand
and frame what was occurring in the world generally at the time, and how it was transforming my
own and others’ approach to architecture. My writing concentrates mainly on the movement in the
UK, although I do touch on international projects that influenced me and colleagues in the UK at
the time.
Whereas I am remembering and recalling, Adam looks back with the perspective of someone for
whom the era is entirely historical, a period he did not experience, but whose content and
international spread he finds inspiring and relevant. With a broad overview and with new eyes
that see the period through the lens of the twenty-first century, his writing covers the development
of Postmodern architecture internationally, with particular focus on Italy and the United States.
This book aims to return to the buildings of this period, sharing their richness, diversity and
brilliance, with an emphasis on what was interesting, beautiful and unique about the architecture
which emerged from this unusually fertile moment in history. We hope that this book will act as a
starting point for those to whom this architectural period is new, encouraging appreciation,
interest, further reading, and hopefully the individual rediscovery of those aspects and architects
that are found to be of particular interest.
There is a vast amount of theory and philosophy on the subject, as well as countless more brilliant
architects and buildings which we would very much like to have cited here, however in order that
we be able to tell a broad introductory story within the limits of this book, we decided to include
only those that directly aided the texts’ narrative arc, and to focus mostly on buildings and
architecture, at the expense of theory and discourse. We hope that the book will encourage those
with such inclination to explore these theories and other architectures.
Sir Terry Farrell, 2017
INTRODUCTION
It is generally accepted that the second half of the twentieth century was
characterised by ‘postmodernity’. But in the world of design and
architecture the term ‘Postmodern’ usually refers to a specific style, and
even to a quite limited and specific period – actually just over a decade
– from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Whilst in the worlds of literature,
music, film, theatre and even philosophy, the term normally reflects a
broad and open sweep of a long-lasting cultural epoch, in design and
architecture it is seen as a narrow, odd, even aberrant and short-lived
passing phase of a ‘style’.
‘Postmodern’ as a term wasn’t born in the 1970s. Indeed it was first used much
earlier and in many fields: in painting in the late nineteenth century; in
philosophy just before the First World War; in art, literature and music in the
1920s and 1930s. Postmodernity was consummated officially and as a broad
cultural entity for all disciplines by none other than the eminent historian
Arnold Toynbee in 1939, when he referred to ‘our own Post-Modern Age’.1
‘Modernism’ was identified primarily by design and architecture as the
enduring thrust of the Bauhaus – and it was in these fields that the Bauhaus
revolution was seen as not only championing designers and architecture
but firmly placing these disciplines within the ‘Avant Garde’. They assumed
a leadership role in this exceptionally creative movement which, in my
view, was a close identification that they tenaciously held on to whilst the
rest of the world moved on. It became an enduring issue of belonging,
particularly for architects. But, as this book will argue, Modernism was
itself partly and importantly – though not of course exclusively – a style,
and lasted for a relatively brief period in our cultural history. The broader
culture of Postmodernism dominated the second half of the twentieth
century such as that, in effect, we are all Postmodernists now. The stylistic
phenomenon that was briefly perceived in design and architecture in the
1980s, generally called ‘PoMo’, was a tangential blip; by no means could
it be said to be the formal expression of, nor encapsulating the totality of,
Postmodernism.
I was reminded of the natural tendency to bias in writing history during a
conversation with a senior curator, in relation to our work remodelling
Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery (now Modern Two) in 1996–1999, when the
concept of the ‘other story’ of the twentieth century in art was discussed.
Facing Modern Two across the road is Modern One (then the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art), which contains the official and accepted
story of Abstraction and the new world of art that changed everything
forever; meanwhile Modern Two was to tell the ‘other story’ of the
twentieth century, of Surrealism, Dada and mavericks – a much more
complex and diverse narrative. What fascinated me was that, as a culture
of grand or meta-narratives, Modernism itself was seen by those committed
to it as a ‘movement’, a collective mind-set to tell one single story of the
shopping centres, housing estates, airports, hospitals – new kinds and new
scales of society’s demands and needs expressed in buildings. The demand
was seen as only answerable through a style of architecture which was based
upon factory-made components that were available universally. It was part of
the pride in the answer that the school, hospital or airport could look the same
wherever it was in the world.
The counter-action to all this modernity – presaged in the early nineteenth
century by painters like Caspar David Friedrich (see left), who said:
Bauhaus School, Dessau. Walter Gropius, (This closely parallels Le Corbusier’s much-quoted idea that ‘a house is a
1926 machine for living in’8).
10 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
were we right to have form following function, when function itself was so
obviously debatable?
From the 1950s onwards the swinging back and forth had already begun. In
architecture, Le Corbusier startlingly changed tack with his Maisons Jaoul
(1956) (see above), which began a return to Brutalism as an earthy, back-to-
roots expressionism: hand-made rather than factory-produced, using natural
timber, traditional bricks, and raw concrete, cast in situ with a roughness that
was the very antithesis of sleek factory components. Internationalism was
replaced by regionalism, as Modernism went through a major transformation
– particularly in Scandinavia, with architects like Alvar Aalto, Sigurd
Lewerentz and Arne Jacobsen building a kind of vernacular version of it,
exploring national/cultural identity instead of anonymity or universality. All of
these were the early parts of Postmodernism: indeed Gordon Cullen first
referred to Postmodernism in architecture in 1961 in his book Townscape,10
and Reyner Banham is claimed to have used the term even earlier. They all
began to question, notably in the UK through the Architectural Review, the
unassimilated benefits and the moral and ethical problems of so-called
technological over-prioritisation. Quite aside from the matter of MAD, it was
revealed that nuclear power still had questions to answer when applied to
peaceful means, because early installations proved to be highly dangerous:
not only if they failed, but in their long-term effects on the environment.
The schism between the designing aspect of architecture and its town planning
aspect was hugely accelerated during this period. When the urbanist
12 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Peter Hall wrote in his book Great Planning Disasters about the failures of
architects in the 1960s and 70s,11 he meant the designers, the inheritors of the
Modern Movement, and particularly focused on the followers of Le Corbusier
and Gropius who tried to apply the technological aspects of the design skills
they developed in componentising fabrication of buildings to doing the same
for cities. There is no doubt that the house, the window, the roof, the kitchen
unit, the bathroom and so many aspects of technology and factory-made
components went through periods of gradual improvement from fairly rickety
beginnings, but that did not happen at all at the larger scale. It was the small
bits that worked, and anything that was larger than bits just didn’t stack up –
in terms of their relevance to towns and cities, as memorably observed by
Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1963); or in
environmental and pollution terms by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962); or
in sociological terms such as Peter Wilmott and Michael Young’s 1950s studies
of dislocation amongst the working class who suffered slum clearance and
major-scale rehousing.12 Jane Jacobs had begun to formulate a philosophy as
to how to see things in a balanced, non-utopian perspective. She is credited
with being the first person to use the term ‘organised complexity’,13 a term
which was to gather rapid acceptance in science and technology – particularly
today in the digital age when great complexity can be handled so readily. But
it was a concept over time that needed to be invented, or at least identified,
and then advocated; things were not as simple as the Bauhaus, and the notion
of architecture as design only, had led the world to believe.
Cedric Price put it very well in the title of his 1966 lecture:
nevertheless eventually goes wrong!); but compare that with the complete
dystopia of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner of 1982, of a living hell set in 2019,
where human emotions dominate all, with even the android robots beginning
to desire the ability to express feelings.
In the late 1970s and during the 1980s the ‘isms’ came crashing down:
communism was already beginning to be unsettled in Russia, while in China
they were experimenting with capitalism, and totalitarianism was giving way
to looking at what the people wanted in the form of free markets and
consumerism and democracy. The world was changing again, and continues
today with crises in 2008 in capitalism and, in 2012–2017, in democracy itself.
A personal perspective
I was born just before the Second World War, so I directly experienced a lot
of these events, and in particular, the cultural compression in terms of time and
the parallel cultural global expansion of communications. I have already
referred to compression in cultural change; and indeed, abstract constructs
such as culture increasingly overlapped and happened simultaneously. Also,
in parallel with global expansionism, exploration and empire building, the
world increasingly became engaged in a common global culture. World wars
intensified this trend, and by the mid-twentieth century the ‘cognitive
revolution’14 – the recognition that we are all one species, with common
global cultures – was firmly underway.
I was two when Manchester, where I then lived, was bombed by planes from
overseas. We spent nights in air raid shelters and woke to find foreign planes
had crashed in nearby gardens. My father was a fire warden at Salford Docks
looking skywards for early warning signs of raids, and my grandfather was a
fire warden and caretaker of buildings, who put out incendiary fires from
overhead planes during the aerial blitz in central Manchester. This was, we
recognised then, a long-distance global war.
Post-war rationing did not finish in Britain until I was 16, so I spent the whole of
my childhood with the economic, social and food supply consequences of the
Second World War. But I also saw and experienced the reaction to that war.
Huge cultural swings became the norm. Whilst technology was astonishing,
expanding exponentially during the war years, social change was astonishing
too. Age-old class divisions were being eroded. Extreme political solutions like
fascism, communism and capitalism coexisted and were set against one
another, ebbing and flowing in strength during the mid-century; but within a
few decades these too had begun to lose their momentum, as coexistence and
global communication encouraged mass disillusionment with the grand
narrative.
I benefited first-hand from the Socialist government’s implementation of the
welfare state and National Health Service, and from going quite
unexpectedly to grammar school. I also experienced first-hand the difference
14 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
other areas of the city developed by Richard Grainger and his architect John
Dobson in the 1820s and 1830s; the bridges and other engineering works of
William Armstrong; and the great industrial-era town halls and city halls, like
those of Leeds (by Cuthbert Broderick, 1858) (see left), Preston (George
Gilbert Scott, 1866) and Manchester (Alfred Waterhouse, 1877). I had also
worked in my school holidays in Blackpool and had seen the Winter
Gardens, the Tower and the Tower Ballroom there. To me, flexibility,
eclecticism and choice were all positive things, and I saw in the Scandinavian
architects, as well as in American architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard
Buckminster Fuller and Richard Neutra, all kinds of reinterpretations of
Modernism in an individual and regional way. In the end, Modernism wasn’t
a universal style, it wasn’t global or Internationalist; but being globally aware
was key.
If I had been in London as a student, I would almost certainly have found a much
more wholesale swallowing of Le Corbusier and the narrower versions of the
Modernist movement. I was shocked when I taught at the Bartlett School of
Architecture, University College London at the end of the 1960s just how far it
had gone (under Richard Llewelyn-Davies, John Weeks and co.) in encompassing
a false scientific or phoney technology foundation for architectural education.
A wider, more aware and tolerant education and cultural milieu was, I realised,
a better way of dealing with the ‘cognitive revolution’.
Leeds Town Hall. Cuthbert Brodrick, 1858
I was always open to many influences. I came to architecture not through
Meccano, as some of my contemporaries did, but through painting and
drawing and nature. I experimented with many styles – I didn’t feel that
university education was a preparation for achieving a style for life, which so
many of my contemporaries stuck with. I was part of a more open art school
tradition and not a Modernist architectural tradition. As such, American
culture, Hollywood, American comics, Disney at his best, consumerism,
meritocracy – all were present and fully accepted in the world of Pop that I
lived in. Andy Warhol began as a commercial artist, and Pop Art was born of
the world of comics and adverts that I had grown up with and welcomed. To
me, Pop Art carried on throughout the Postmodernist era, and the world of
Pop was hugely important, whether I was looking at Archigram’s version of
High Tech, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s ‘Fun Palaces’ for London’s East
End (see page 16, top), or those artists graduating from the Royal College at
that time, in the years around 1960, such as Peter Blake and David Hockney.
I went into High Tech as one of the counter-influences to Internationalism. I
liked the fact that Buckminster Fuller was an oddball. I liked that he had come
from an engineering background and wasn’t an architect pretending to be an
engineer. I think he has been hugely misinterpreted by his admirers and
followers. I met him several times in London and drove him round in 1968 to
speak at a gathering of students (a ‘sit-in’) that had locked themselves into the
Hornsey College of Art. I took him round the first building by my first practice,
Farrell/Grimshaw: the student hostel in Sussex Gardens, where he really liked
the furniture unit that I had designed, because it had a universality, but also,
16 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Fun Palace promotional brochure. Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, 1964
the British one, which was very top-down at that time and indeed for some
time thereafter.
I was also in Louis Kahn’s studio at Penn, but had mixed feelings about it
(I much admired his recently built Richards Medical Centre (see bottom left)).
I liked what he said, but not necessarily what he did. I particularly liked his
reference to thought being a satellite of feeling, and his asking:
Terry Farrell’s Utzon inspired houses for nursing staff at Northampton Hospital, 1965
his mechanised architecture, which I found rather joyless and somewhat Fascist
(it is no accident that he optimistically offered his services when the German
Nazis conquered Paris!). But Ronchamp was another matter altogether and
was in the nature of an expressive, idiomatic, painterly architecture.
I was also influenced from very early on by Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. He
died about three years before I arrived in America, but I saw almost all of his
buildings while I was there, and I fell in love with them. I went into dozens of
his houses before they became too tourist-mobbed and security-conscious. Of
course his later work – particularly the Guggenheim in New York (1959)
(see above) and Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California (1962)
(see left) – was highly mannered. It did not belong to a particular style in quite
the same way as his early buildings: Oak Park, Illinois (1889), for example,
was very decidedly Arts and Crafts, whereas the Guggenheim and Marin
County Civic Center are deliberately idiosyncratic. I remember reading
Wright’s recollection, in his autobiography, of walking with his uncle in the
snowy fields and stopping to look back at their tracks. His uncle had walked
purposefully in a straight line, while he had zigzagged, gathering different
types of flowers and weeds. His uncle was clearly proud of his own, straight
path; but Wright felt that his zigzag was a reflection of the artist’s life, with
direction defined by a series of oscillations.1 Asplund’s work had also hinted at
this, and James Stirling later wrote of how:
while in the Greater London Council. There was, then, a continuity between
Brutalism – which turned away from the factory-made components of
International Modernism to seek raw authenticity – and Archigram, which led
on to Pop and Postmodernism.
Another architect who deserves to be mentioned here is Ralph Erskine. He was
British-born but had gone to Scandinavia just before the Second World War.
He later returned to the UK, and to my hometown of Newcastle, to build Byker
Wall (designed 1968). Again this had elements of the growing tradition of
expression, wilfulness and whimsy, but also of Modernism and heroic, iconic
architecture. It was also a very interesting early example of the then
increasingly popular concept of community architecture: working with an
area’s residents to understand what they wanted. Individual families from
former slum housing were consulted and cared for. This may have been
somewhat paternalistic, but it represented a genuine breakthrough,
particularly considering the authoritarian way that public housing had been
dealt with up to that time in welfare state Britain. A new vernacular, a
Byker Wall, Byker housing redevelopment, regionalism, iconic expression and community architecture were all in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Ralph Erskine, 1974 evidence at Byker Wall (see left).
Vanna House, Philadelphia, Pennyslvania. Robert Venturi, 1964. Taken when I visited in 1963:
Denise Scott Brown on the left and Bob Venturi in doorway
and roadside architecture, and as such, it has elements of Pop Art about it.
Unlike the monumental ‘ultra-sophisticated’ Kahn work, it has accepted the role
of ordinariness, even banality, as being a component of modern architecture.
That for me was the genius of Venturi (see page 24, top right): he looked at
ordinariness and saw beauty in it as ‘great’ architecture, just as Pop artists had
seen artistic merit in comics and soup cans. As he famously wrote: ‘Is not Main
Street almost alright?’5 In a way this attitude is deliberately anti-bourgeois –
unlike Utzon’s or Asplund’s – and challenges the values of society that hitherto
were incorporated in roadside architecture like fire stations.
Moving forward through my own experience, rather than the strict
chronological order of these four key players’ work, the second one that I
became aware of was Hans Hollein. It was 1966, and I was at the Archigram
Retti Candle Shop, Vienna. Hans Hollein, event in Folkestone, which was called ‘IDEA’ (International Dialogue of
1965 Experimental Architecture). The one startling recollection I have is Hollein’s
juxtaposition of an aircraft carrier in a rural landscape. Ship forms had
inspired various architects earlier in the twentieth century – as at Le
Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp or his Convent of La Tourette
(1957) – but it had never been proposed that an actual ship be placed in the
landscape. The aircraft carrier could have been a symbol of war, military
might, efficiency and/or technological achievement, but here it was a
complete thing: it wasn’t a metaphor. It had many of the elements of Pop Art in
that it was real, or as real as an exact copy could be: it spoke a lot about
undermining the preconceptions of Modernism, because the ship itself was
superior to the buildings that imitated ships. It immediately captured the
imagination, to aspire, to question; and at the same time, for me, it exposed
the lie – buildings were not ships.
Around that time Hollein was developing an exquisite language of his own
(Hollein’s unique fusion of various postmodern interests and formal themes is
explored through several works in Chapter 5). I felt his method was by contrast
not so much grandly technological, as with an aircraft carrier, but in the
miniature manner of watch making. He was Austrian but did work in central
Europe, an area that has an exquisiteness almost like that of Mozart or a
Viennese pastry that also appears in the more recent work of Adolf Loos.
Loos’s American Bar in Vienna (1908) (see page 24, bottom right) was, I think,
an inspiration for Hollein’s Retti candle shop (1966) in the same city (see top
left and page 78). This is the first of his buildings that I see displaying the
beginnings of a search for the language of Postmodernism. The Retti candle
shop was an extremely small building, but it achieved international recognition
for its inventive language and the freedom from the polemic of conventional
contemporary Modernism. It relies heavily on more knowingly-shaped graphic
effects, with an aluminium frontage resembling a face, a phallic entrance door,
and a mirrored interior, and is highly elaborated for such a small space.
To my mind Hollein’s first Schullin jewellery store in Vienna (1974) (see page 79)
Schullin II, jewellery shop, Vienna. was even more exquisite, but in the same vein followed by the equally well
Hans Hollein, 1992 designed Schullin II in 1992 (see left). It combined art and sculpture within
26 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Sea Ranch Condominium, Sea Ranch, California. Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, 1965
28 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
The Biennale itself brought together not only the major architects of the time but
also the major critics and commentators, who chose 20 main architects to
exhibit their work on a street façade called the Strada Novissima (see
page 29). It was like a shop window for each of these architects, but also a
general statement about where architecture was at the time; and as a result of
the critics’ selection and the prevailing mood, it was very strongly, but not
entirely, Postmodern. Hans Hollein, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert
Venturi, Arata Isozaki, Robert Stern, Ricardo Bofill, Oswald Mathias Ungers,
Franco Purini, Aldo Rossi. At one level it was a statement about difference, in
that these architects were all challenged to avoid unison. It wasn’t like an
exposition of the 1920s or 1930s where architects were all converging towards
a common style, away from anarchy and towards unity; in 1980, it was about
breaking the mould by moving away from rigidity and towards individual
expression. To walk down the Strada Novissima was an extraordinary
experience: like a shopping mall, with different shops representing different
architects, but all agreeing on at least one thing – that performance,
individuality and theatricality were the right way to show their wares.
From then on, architects either at the exhibition or subsequently emerging
from it acknowledged Postmodernism as a fact, an accepted style, the
predominant form of current architectural language. It was established not
only in the minds of the global architectural community, but also among clients
and the general public. As we all know, architecture relies substantially on
outside commercial and financial commitments to build. Unlike the sculptor
with his clay or stone and chisel, or the painter with his brush and canvas, or
the author with his pen and paper, an architect needs a third party: a client
who has the money, the land, and the community backing to obtain the
permissions to get a project built. In other words, architecture needs much
broader financial and cultural support to be successful. From the 1980 Venice
Biennale onwards, it had that. The high period of architectural Postmodernism
could begin.
Meanwhile in Britain …
As mentioned earlier (see Chapter 1), Modernism had taken a particular hold
in Britain. Whereas Germany, Poland and other European countries started
rebuilding their history in the decades following the Second World War,
Britain embarked on a period of re-inventing the world, and set history and
context aside. City centres were demolished and towns were de-urbanised.
Greenfield universities and other public buildings like hospitals and schools
were moved out from the urban scene, denuding the social and cultural life of
the city in the process; utopian new towns like Milton Keynes were being
planned and built right up to the late 1980s in what might be termed a version
of International Style Modernism that looked like no-place and indeed proudly
claimed it was based upon Los Angeles! The advent of this other way of doing
things was met with resistance at first, but this eventually turned to venom from
the British public.
CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 31
A special brand of late Modernism did develop in the UK, however, in the
form of High Tech. I like to reflect on how the rest of Europe gave up Gothic
long before the British version of ‘Perpendicular Gothic’ emerged, and only
here, on this island culture. And how, centuries later, then a world empire and
looking for their own unique and authentic British style, the Perpendicular
style was voted by Parliamentarians for their new Houses of Parliament
(1840–70) by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. When,
after the demise of mainstream Modernism, the rest of the world embraced
our Postmodernist age, this island race and its cultural identity continued on
and developed the British and unique late Modernist stylistic version – High
Tech. In its own way it is a version of Postmodernist culture – self-aware,
knowing and in its best form as populist as Dan Dare and Star Wars!
Cultivated on visions of American supremacy, it idolised the work of
Buckminster Fuller but turned in particular to Cape Kennedy and Houston
space control centre and everything to do with space travel for its inspiration.
This gave rise initially to a form of communalism and fun iconographical
elements which appear in Archigram’s work, but very quickly led to an
emphasis on commercialism and techno supremacy. Thus the work of Norman
Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, and to a lesser extent Nicholas
Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins, soon led on to grandiose statements about
the new world of technological achievements, with buildings of the late 1970s
and 1980s such as Foster’s Will Faber & Dumas Headquarters in Ipswich
(1975), Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (1978) and
Rogers’s Lloyd’s building in London (1986), which more or less established
High Tech as if it were the national style of the UK. The progression of any
other tendencies – such as Postmodernism, with its awareness of green issues
(such as the our ‘passive solar’ winning entry in collaboration with Ralph
Lebens for the ‘Tomorrow’s New World’ competition in 1980 as well as my
aforementioned lecture and article ‘Building As A Resource’ (see chapter 1)),
its populism and community base, its historical references, and its accent on
art, narrative, colour and eclecticism – all in the long run were not to the taste
of the commissioning patrons in the UK’s more macho cultural and
commercial environment.
The widely accepted notion that Postmodernism is a commercially led
movement is entirely wrong – it was merely a coincidence, and the product of
a sequence of historical events. It was the period of Margaret Thatcher’s
deregulation of financial markets in the UK, when there was a move towards
capitalism and private-sector clients, as opposed to the preceding decades
where most architecture was public sector such as schools, hospitals and
housing. Globally, this coincided with the political and cultural changes in
China, Russia and Germany, which were by and large seen as good things.
People often overlook the fact that there was much Postmodernist social
housing built. Indeed, in the USA it was considered as a movement that added
history and culture to all projects (not only commercial). At the time,
Postmodernism was considered alternative, friendly, feminine, populist and
32 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
fundamentally not big business, in that it elevated the ordinary, with work by
Venturi, Jeremy Dixon, Piers Gough and myself. It is only in the UK that there
is a culture of deriding Postmodernism as solely to the benefit of commerce. It
was never so; one could argue that the Modernist City of London towers by
Foster, Rogers and Piano are far more commercial, corporate and ‘macho’
than the contextual groundscrapers of Charing Cross, MI6 or even Alban
Gate (discussed below).
Unsurprisingly in the UK the first seeds of Postmodernism were manifested in
community reformers, in an architecture which was born out of a resistance to
state-ism, whereby the welfare state and local government were imposing their
top-down order on slum clearances, motorways, and social housing of a
nature that wouldn’t be out of place in East Germany or Russia at that time.
For me it began in London, at Covent Garden, around 1974, where the
proposal had been to demolish the historic market buildings and many other
such fine structures, and to replace them with new ones, as well as constructing
motorways in inner London that reached into Covent Garden. It’s shocking
now to think that this was seriously considered at that time (our own equivalent
to Le Corbusier’s proposals for central Paris), and if it had happened two
decades earlier no doubt it would have been carried out! There was a
bottom-up, grassroots rebellion against this proposal, with the Covent Garden
Community Association and other organisations opposing it. Community
architecture became a way of marshalling resources to look at adaptation and
conversion. It was a little later that I joined English Heritage, and at that time I
attended various Covent Garden meetings and symposiums which were
mainly intended to oppose the brave new world of demolition and rebuild.
I did three buildings in Covent Garden at that time, but for me the most
important one was Comyn Ching that I began in 1976, to which I will return
later in this chapter.
There was also an intense interest in the potential of a vernacular architecture
that was truly British to meet with modern times: practices such as Darbourne
& Darke, Dixon Jones (particularly in their 1970s housing at Lanark Road,
London) and Edward Cullinan (who eventually won the RIBA Royal Gold
Medal) were all leaning towards the vernacular, looking at natural materials
– bricks, timber etc. – and mixing them with varying degrees of Modernism
for inventive new forms of visual expression, combined with community
activism and awareness of popular taste. All of this, far from being
temporarily fashionable, has continued up to and including today.
Lanark Road, Maida Vale, London. Jeremy and Fenella Dixon, 1983
John Melvin’s work illustrates another theme of this period, the exploration of
Edwardian and Arts and Crafts precedents for new forms of urban street
architecture, and this domestic work is particularly robust and sculptural. Both
architects are impressive for their analysis of historic building forms within the
fabric of the city (see bottom left).
The Luxembourgian architect Léon Krier, once an architect in James Stirling’s
office, became a singular architectural force in Britain by the 1980s. The first
intimation I got of his presence was judging a competition in Hull in 1977,
where I was mesmerised by the beautifully crafted drawings that he had
produced in collaboration with Rita Wolff for Blundell’s Corner. For example,
to celebrate the uniqueness of place he had designed monumental telephone
boxes, recognising that Hull was the only UK place that had kept its
independence in terms of the city’s ownership of its own telephonic networking
infrastructure. It registered to me Krier’s thoughtfulness and radicalness in
terms of where British architecture was heading, and was a sign of things to
come, of course. Little did we expect that he would come to be identified
primarily with Prince Charles and Neoclassicism in the late 1980s and 1990s,
as the masterplanner of the model town of Poundbury in Dorset. I have always
believed his work in the British and broader town planning context was much
richer and more important than he has been given credit for.
I entered into the spirit of the iconography of the clients, Charles and Maggie
(Maggie being very much a vocal part of the client body throughout). I
presented to them the idea of the four seasons circling around a central
staircase of 52 steps, 7 days a week; as well as the ‘moon-well’ concept,
which was the inbound heart with mirrors, a light-well that lights the more
private areas of the house: the bedrooms. The rebuilding of the annexe, the
shape of it and the chimneys were a shared work with Charles. As the design
progressed, he was able to overlay his narrative onto it. At the end he was on
his own for the internal decorations, what they represented and the narrative
he wished to tell. It was a kind of reverse of the relationship between Frank
Lloyd Wright and H.F. Johnson during the development of the Johnson Wax
Building in Racine, Wisconsin (completed 1936–39) (see right), in which
Johnson is said to have recalled that at first he came up with all the ideas himself
and was in charge of the project, and Wright worked for him; by halfway
through it was a joint project equally partnered between him and Wright; but
as the project progressed it became Wright’s own, with Johnson at his service.
There was a hybrid period when I was emerging out of High Tech. As Bob
Venturi said to me of my Clifton Nurseries building in London’s Bayswater
Johnson Wax Building, Wisconsin.
(1980) (see below): ‘that’s not Postmodern’ – he said it was more hybrid and Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936–39
eclectic. The two Clifton Nurseries buildings (the other was at Covent Garden
(1981)) (see page 41) were establishing for me a direction and identity, being
the first projects I did in my own name. Like the Hans Hollein candle and
jewellery shops, they were quick to achieve and were short-lived but
nevertheless an extremely good opportunity to experiment. There is something
about smallness, immediacy and temporariness that allows the client and
everyone to accept experimentation.
At the time I was fascinated by alternative energy: I was working with Ralph
Lebens in my office to establish a consultancy that advised on green energy
design, and we had won the ‘Tomorrow’s New World’ competition, run by the
Guardian newspaper and the Town and Country Planning Association. The
Bayswater Clifton Nurseries building demonstrated ventilation and energy
conservation ideas, and that gave it part of its architectural identity: it was the
first such structure to use twin-wall polycarbonate, and ran on passive solar
energy. I played with axiality and stage-set hoardings; it was in essence a
High-Tech-meets-Postmodernism kind of achievement. That is why, at that time,
the British liked it. I was, as Deyan Sudjic proclaimed, ‘The Man Who Took
High Tech Out To Play’,14 and this was the era of that kind of work.
The second Clifton Nurseries pavilion/shop building took its cue, more
traditional at first, from Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s Church (1633), also
overlooking Covent Garden Piazza, and from the market buildings there,
designed in 1830 by Charles Fowler. It strove to be big, to suit its setting and
to hold its own with the other big symmetrical gestures surrounding it. This it
did by having its main façade extended and enlarged on one side as an
empty false façade to complete the grander portico form. There was a hollow
part and a solid part; it was a play on grand urban stage settings, just as Inigo
Jones’s nearby church was. At the same time, it was constructed of a
prefabricated steel frame designed by Peter Rice, the renowned engineer of
42 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Then came a period of adaptations that coincided with the start of the boom in
independent television, where budgets and schedules were tight because of
the risks involved in launching the new companies and the urgency in doing
so. These projects had an immediacy and an ad-hoc nature. They followed in
the vein of the make-believe adaptations drawn by the British cartoonist
Rowland Emett during the 1940s and 1950s – a kind of Second World War
spirit of string and sticking plaster and make-do.
The first of these was the TVam building (1982). The journalist Sutherland Lyall
commented to me that this was ‘full-blown South American Catholic that was
singing and confessing at the same time’ – in contrast to its soon-to-be
neighbour, Grimshaw’s Sainsbury’s supermarket building (1988), which Lyall
qualified as ‘highly Calvinist’; a perceptive and amusing contrast, as I came
from an Irish Catholic background and Grimshaw from an orthodox Anglo-
Protestant one. What became the TVam building had started life as a car
showroom. It had a concrete frame and a back brick wall that we kept as it
was in a conservation area, but most of the front wall was demolished. I set up
three teams to work on the architecture: front wall, interiors and back wall, so
in essence even the working method was a collage. There was an additional
fourth element: the engineering and technical side. The client body, and
particularly the broadcasters David Frost and Peter Jay, kept telling me to
‘turn up the wick’ – meaning more flame, more fun, more brightness – as they
were becoming aware that the building itself was going to have a very strong
on-air presence. It was strange that however much effort I put into the front
wall, it was the egg-cups that we designed as a pop alternative to traditional
roof finials at the back that became the symbol of the building. They gave it its
popular name ‘Eggcup House’, and appeared on screen, as prizes, as props,
in postcard selections, in cartoons … Neither the client nor the contractor
could see the seriousness of them, but I argued that buildings needed to be
popularly iconic to give a face to a physical place that the television
programme came from – just as the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Portland
Place is seen on screen and the ten o’clock news is identified by someone
standing outside Big Ben or, as they do now, in front of our much later new
Home Office.
It was a very rewarding and creative experience, but British Puritanism was
always there haunting me off-stage. At a reception around the time of the
opening of the building, when the issue of the television station not having got
off to a good financial start was on everyone’s minds, I met a financial backer
from the City who had invested in the building, and he said to me something
along the lines of: ‘Oh you’re the architect then, you must have been
responsible for having spent far too much money and broke the bank’; I
replied that actually it was the cheapest and best-value television station that
had been built anywhere in the world at that time. It was £42 per square foot
for land, fees, construction, equipment purchase – everything. (I remember
the figure well: it was extraordinarily low.) The banking man then thought for
a moment and said: ‘Yes, it could well be low budget, it’s just that you made it
44 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
look expensive.’ I found this fascinatingly puritanical because the City had just
finished the Lloyd’s Building, which had been decorated in an earnest
utilitarian ‘style’ of hugely expensive stainless-steel pipes and external toilets
and lifts; whereas TVam had been converted from an old garage and
decorated with eggs and sunrises and fun, all at extremely low cost. It was
only lavish emotionally, undoubtedly exhibitionist and extravagant in
expressiveness, but financially very prudent. Jonathan Glancey captured the
spirit well when he wrote in the Independent in 1995 that ‘Farrell’s decorative
and bravura designs’ could be considered the architectural equivalent of the
Counter-Reformation’s ‘extravagant and gorgeously coloured Baroque garb’,
when 16th-century architects for the Catholic Church sought to undermine the
puritanical aesthetics of Protestant, and particularly Calvinist, reform ‘with
every fanciful confection and visual conceit’. Glancey writes that:
The Counter-Reformation produced a colourful architecture aimed at seducing
the crowd and as a rebuke to hurl at the walls of chaste Protestant chapels –
rather like Farrell’s Post-Modernism.16 Limehouse Studios, West India Docks,
London. Terry Farrell, 1983. Detail of north
The second of these adaptation projects was Limehouse Studios (1983) in facade
London’s Docklands (see right) – a former banana warehouse, in an
abandoned dockside location with empty buildings all around. A long lease
had been purchased from the London Docklands Development Corporation,
and the robustness of the basic building had to be respected, with the
adaptations needing to be equally robust but very different. Our applied
frames, enamel and metal panels in strong colours respected the overall
geometry of the bulky concrete warehouse behind but were lighter and
pyramid-shaped to emphasise that they were separate add-ons. As such, in its
short life, it was respected. Just as with the TVam building (see below,
pages 18 and 19 and page 45, top), we did every detail of the interior as
well, including furniture. It was a very satisfying experience for an architect.
rail tracks below to be relatively free of columns, plus the suspended floors
below dampened the vibration and sounds of the trains. It was an
extraordinary construction process, done entirely at night to begin with,
between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m. to minimise disruption to the trains. It won a
structural steel award at European level, recognising its engineering
achievement; and there is no doubting the structural form of the thing as it is
literally expressed. On the other hand, unlike High Tech, it doesn’t make the
architecture solely reliant – even exaggeratedly reliant as was usually the
norm – upon engineering expression. It was a building that was fanatically
detailed in and out; we designed all the major interiors of the entrance hall,
but not the floors themselves, which were let to commercial tenants. We also
refashioned the station itself, though not the concourse. It was a building of
many parts, like TVam, with a completely different architectural expression on
all sides, particularly to Villiers Street on the north-east. There, it was a
complete piece of urban design in that it was engaged with reordering the
adjacent gardens, Victoria Embankment Gardens, where stands Inigo Jones’s
York Watergate (1626): the bandstand was rebuilt, railings were taken down
and the landscaping was redone. Villiers Street became the first shared street
Alban Gate, City of London. Terry Farrell,
in London, where traffic and pedestrians mingle. We reinstated the lamps,
1992. Wood Street elevation
colonnades and railings based on historical photographs at the Strand station
frontage: everyone assumes they are the original Victorian ones, but these
had been removed for previous road-widening. We also made a walkway
right through the scheme, so you can stroll from the Strand to Hungerford
pedestrian bridge without changing level. Finally, there were two reinstated
theatres, a coin market and various other events housed beneath the arches.
Before Postmodernism, Modern architects used to argue that their architecture
was enablingly neutral, in that it formed a highly flexible background for a
building’s occupants or users to freely express themselves. Hence so many
architectural perspectives of the time had rather simplistic anodyne
architecture but their illustrations showed endless people in bright clothing
gambolling around with kites and balloons, surrounded by luscious planting,
flags and banners and so on. I believe, however, it is the architect’s job to be
able to raid the dressing-up box when needed, like films, opera sets, musicals
and pop concerts. Architecture itself is on occasion required to be the actual
entertainment, particularly when on a giant scale. At Charing Cross I was
influenced by the great palazzos on the banks of the Thames: particularly the
Houses of Parliament, that dressed themselves up in Perpendicular Gothic; the
County Hall (1911–33) by Ralph Knott in an exuberant Edwardian Baroque;
the original New Scotland Yard (1887–1906) in monumental Arts and Crafts
style by Richard Norman Shaw (see page 47); Giles Gilbert Scott’s two
powerful Art Deco power stations (Battersea, 1929–35, and Bankside
(now Tate Modern), 1947–60); and in recent times the extraordinary
spectacle of the High Tech London Eye (by Frank Anatole, Nic Bailey, Steve Alban Gate, City of London. Terry Farrell,
Chilton, Malcolm Cook, Mark Sparrowhawk, Julia Barfield and David Marks, 1992. Residential accommodation beside
1999) – all have made the Thames bank a gateway place of architecture as Monkwell Square
CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 47
the tracks as it approached the river – genuflecting to the scale of the river,
but orchestrated so that you could see the back arch and the front arch
together as one piece.
The structure of Alban Gate is again largely a reflection of engineering
necessity. It was over a road, and so had very little grounding for natural
stability. Internal bracing and spanning of the road were deliberately made
very strong elements of the architecture of the tower, and the transfer structure
appears boldly in the public walkways below. It was a triumph of Arup’s
engineering, every bit as much as many a High Tech building was, and indeed
more so because this wasn’t engineering as superfluous decoration but was a
genuinely needed part of the architecture, reintegrated into it in a formal and
disciplined way.
This was a project that went through many iterations and took a long time to
evolve. It was a slow marrying of stylistic and functioning gestures. I like this
creative method: as with TVam and Charing Cross, incremental improvements
and responses to structure and spatial opportunities enriched and layered in
an extremely crafted solution. Unlike the river palazzos of Charing Cross and
Vauxhall Cross, it is a very compact piece of architecture, and deliberately so,
because this part of London had once been very dense and urban but, with
post-war development at the Barbican and along London Wall, had become
uncomfortably open, almost engendering a sense of agoraphobia. The urban
gestures drove the architecture, which was designed in several parts. One
sought to close the vista and compose Wood Street with the Christopher Wren
church of St Alban (1685) and the police station (1966) by Donald
McMorran. It was additionally a gateway that relied upon the Barbican
entrance to this part of the London Wall. This 1950s–60s road went quite
contrary to the traditional urban narrative. We turned it all back and returned
to the enclosing elements of streets and squares.
A significant part of the building complex faced Monkwell Square. Here we
re-planned the central garden and designed the Lutyensesque brick and stone
terraced houses, where we repaired the square after the 1960s scheme had
exploded it apart and had ignored the potentialities for enclosing and
placemaking characteristics.
But returning to the front building, the language throughout was a fairly
stripped-back architecture of banded red stone, in the vernacular of modern
offices, but arranged heroically and symmetrically. The particular hero in this
composition was the formidable and extraordinarily structural composition
designed with Arups as engineers. As mentioned earlier, because it was
above a road it lacked ground stability and had to be braced, and this
bracing became part of the architecture of two four-storey atriums. These also
acted as passive solar barriers that reduced the heat-gain to the offices
behind. But this whole composition of the cradle structure and the walkways
below, the south-facing cross bracing in the atriums and then the front and
back two towers clearly and separately identified by an arched top, was
CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 49
all work in conjunction formally with terraces and bay windows. Even more than
Charing Cross had done, it formed the basis for occupants to look out directly
on the river bend from all angles. It was rectilinear and gridded in plan but the
windows and various terraces were angled as they stepped down to the river.
At the time, we assumed it was for the Department of the Environment, but this
was a guess as we were actually unaware of whom the building was meant
for. This has not stopped people post-rationalising its perceived much-reduced
classical architectural expression as representing secrecy and repression. In
fact, it is of a lighter touch and more Art Deco than classical revival. It is
decidedly not the language of orthodox Postmodernism in a stylistic sense that
Graves and even Stirling represent; rather, it was a kind of ‘kleptomaniac’ or
‘magpie’ style, taking recognisable motifs from Raymond Hood’s Rockefeller
Center in New York (1937) and the Gilbert Scott power stations and
reproducing them in pre-cast concrete and four different colours of green
glass. In the end it is a theatrical river palace in no more extreme a way than
Norman Shaw’s New Scotland Yard, or the Houses of Parliament, or even the
Whitehall buildings adjoining Embankment Place. It takes its place with all
these buildings as a recognisable stand-alone palazzo monument,
architecturally performing on the very public stage of the wide River Thames.
There were aspects of all three schemes that were generally thought of as
Postmodernist, and I accept this insofar as it is the spirit of Postmodernism.
They weren’t consciously styled as Postmodernist. There were elements of
Botta and High Tech; there were elements of literal Art Deco in the MI6
building; there were elements of Edwin Lutyens in the housing around
Monkwell Square, part of Alban Gate. It was more of a British melange or
collage than evidence of a coherent overarching style. I believed that the
more architecture tried to have an overarching style, the less successful it was.
For me, to replace one institutionalised way of doing things with yet another
was anathema. I felt that the institutionalised nature of Modernism caused it to
fail, because it had become so stuck, so full of self-regard, so introverted and
so basically alienated from not only the general public but also the other arts
that it often failed in its own terms. But then, to my mind, Postmodernism had
the desired effect in that it began to loosen and open up architecture in much
more divergent and creative ways.
Piers Gough wrote in Blueprint Extra:
and I like that: there is something grandly Wagnerian but also popular – an
element of opera but also of great Hollywood musicals such as by Rodgers &
Hart, Leonard Bernstein and Busby Berkeley.
The fact that I did these three large-scale buildings didn’t mean I did not
continue to do smaller or less contentious projects. I spent 10 years (1976–
86/7) on Comyn Ching, a conservation-led regeneration of an island site in
Seven Dials, Covent Garden that included 37 eighteenth-century buildings
(see below). The existing historical buildings were restored for the owner-
occupiers around a new, central, paved courtyard, and we designed and built
two infill corner buildings. This complex project incorporated shops, housing
and offices. In 2016 the area was listed by Historic England, and the listing
proposal prompted many letters of support.
The Midland Bank building at 76 Fenchurch Street (1986) was a much more
Michael Graves-ian adventure, now sadly severely altered. In an attempt to
prevent the proposed alterations, the architectural journalist Jonathan
Glancey wrote to Historic England in 2015:
The Terry Farrell design is one of the most convincing Post-Modern buildings in the
City of London. 76 Fenchurch Street shows just how good a neighbour Po-Mo
architecture could be in the hands of skilled and astute architects.
We also designed the headquarters, clubhouse and boat store for Henley
Royal Regatta (1985), which was part ‘carnival’ Neoclassical and part Arts
and Crafts. The site was a semi-rural setting on the banks of the Thames facing
Comyn Ching. Terry Farrell, 1985. Courtyard Comyn Ching. Terry Farrell, 1985. Door detail
52 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Club house headquarters, Henley. Terry Farrell, 1985. View from Thames
the town of Henley (see above). Our design was symmetrically planned at right
angles to the river, in the Thames timber boathouse tradition. The three-storey
building had a different use on each level: the top floor served as the club
secretary’s residence, in the middle was the administration level, and the
ground floor was the boathouse at river level. But after the flurry of new
commissions at the end of the 1980s, during the 1990s we didn’t have any new
work at all in London, where up to that point my practice had been almost
entirely confined. There was a feeling of underlying hostility towards anything
regarded vaguely as Postmodern in London, and I faced resentment from the
architectural establishment, which also extended to envy that I had been
relatively successful in obtaining some commissions. Style, I began to realise,
had a commercial aspect, as its fashionableness (or otherwise) had financial
value. My last two projects in a similar vein were to be outside of London: the
International Conference Centre in Edinburgh (1995) (see page 53) and
The Peak Tower (1997) in Hong Kong (see page 54), but the style of both of
these had begun to evolve and merge back into a more integrated mainstream.
CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 53
experimented with the way colour was applied: there is a painted, textured,
synthetic, patterned surface to a lot of Postmodern work, often in a cartoonish
way, so that in the hands of Sottsass and other Milanese designers it
frequently imitated tiger stripes or leopard skin.
James Stirling was one British architect whose approach to Postmodernism
inclined more towards the international type, and indeed he did most of his
work in the USA or Europe, with only one or two minor works in the UK. Like
Graves, he developed a version of Postmodernism that had an inner
consistency from one scheme to the next; but he had an element of deliberate
rogue eclecticism as he mixed the language with High Tech bits, particularly in
the Neue Staatsgalerie at Stuttgart (1984; this project is contrasted and
compared with a work by Hollein of the same period in Chapter 5). I was full
of admiration for what he and Graves were doing, but did not want to follow
that stylistic path myself.
Here in Britain, Postmodernism was mainly manifested as a sort of
Neo‑Eclecticism that had to do with individualism, non-conformity and
contrarianism – a far more personal interpretation. It was grasped as an
opportunity for more freedom of expression in a painterly way. It was the
eccentrics and oddballs that kept it going – and indeed they have continued,
adapting and changing but retaining their inventiveness to this day.
The moment when the sense that High Tech was a national style began to
adjust was in 1990, when Will Alsop beat Norman Foster in the competition to
design the Hôtel du Département des Bouches-du-Rhône (seat of the regional
government) in Marseille, France. Alsop’s scheme – nicknamed Le Grand Bleu
(‘The Big Blue’) – was where individualism and expressionist architecture by a
more populist follower and co-worker of Cedric Price beat the formalist and
straight High Tech. A fun architect beat the efficient Modernists’ last stand. The
future became clear: iconic exuberance was now in fashion at an official level;
and the world followed.
The see-sawing of the official narrative and historical view in the UK is
interesting: it shows the nation’s contrariness at work. Recent listings by
Historic England (previously English Heritage) of buildings from the 1970s,
80s and 90s show that historians have bought the official line that the true
story of the British style in this period is one of continued Modernism; that this
is the one to be most revered retrospectively. Rogers’s Lloyd’s building is listed
at Grade I, Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at Grade II*, Grimshaw’s
Western Morning News building in Plymouth likewise. I am, however,
heartened to see that James Stirling’s No.1 Poultry was finally listed in
November 2016 (see pages 110 and 111); when commenting on my Midland
Bank building on Fenchurch Street, which was not considered eligible for
listing and which is as a consequence vulnerable to alterations, Historic
England have said:
CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 57
and in fashion, Chanel, Versace, Chloé and Dior. I would confidently argue
that these iconicists are the true beneficiaries of the Postmodern movement.
One of their characteristics is that they are primarily of a generation, whether
by age or through personal history and development, that emerged in the
Postmodern period and didn’t generally have a history of practising
Modernism before that.
In this group I would place Herzog & de Meuron as being absolutely
pre‑eminent in their success. They have a freedom of expression and a diverse,
flexible architectural language that they take from project to project – small,
medium and large – and they interpret it as a painter or sculptor, each brief
astoundingly and professionally successful. They come from Basel, a major
art hub – and it is no accident that the two principles grew up surrounded by the
contemporary art world, both the financial aspect as well as one of curating
exhibitions, storage and commercial/professional valuation. Their best-known
works are the ‘Bird’s Nest’ Stadium in Beijing (see below) (built for the 2008
Olympics); the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern
art gallery (2000); and the Allianz Stadium in Munich (2005). I particularly like
their VitraHaus (2009), a furniture showroom in Weil am Rhein – a daringly
original work, but contextual and very commercial at the same time.
Others that have gained a huge following in this period include Frank Gehry
(I am particularly fond of his Guggenheim Museum building in Bilbao
(see page 65, top)), Daniel Libeskind, Coop Himmelb(l)au and of course Rem
Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid (an interesting residential project in Milan saw her
collaborate with Libeskind and Isozaki (see page 65, bottom)). The last two of
these I find particularly fascinating because they epitomised for me an interest
in essential postmodern context and historicism, as they both began their
careers exploring very early Modernism as style – that is, pre-war Modernism.
Koolhaas in New York and Hadid in the Russian Deconstructivists, which was a
kind of plundering of history, but brought right up to date. They had watched
the classicists raid the dressing-up box of classicism, they had seen Michael
Graves taking from Art Deco, but it’s almost as if they took and reinvented a
period in Modernism and then went on to develop their own iconic languages
– which is very close to branding and commercialisation in the best sense of the
word. It is no accident that all these iconicists were continuously commissioned
for the design of major art galleries, museums and opera houses, like
Koolhaas’s work at the Hermitage in St Petersburg (2014), and Hadid’s
Guangzhou Opera House (2010, for which the design competition also
featured entries by Koolhaas and by Coop Himmelb(l)au). There has been a
great tendency for others to follow, notably Foreign Office Architects and Enric
Miralles, as well as Paul Andreu, Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, Toyo Ito, Bjarke
Ingels Group (BIG) … and the list goes on. They are the true beneficiaries of all
that was released by the Postmodernist revolution.
Portcullis House, Bridge Street, London. Michael Hopkins & Partners, 2001
nevertheless that their work has mellowed and adapted, and above all,
become much more responsive to tradition, history and context.
Renzo Piano, Nicholas Grimshaw and even ex-Archigram Peter Cook and
Colin Fournier (their art museum in Graz, Austria stands out amongst the
historic city and rejects the white box aesthetic with which we are so familiar
(see right)) have developed contextual and placemaking responses in their
work. Piano had fun with a bold box of colours at the Central St Giles Court
mixed-use development in central London (2010), and his Jean-Marie Tjibaou
Cultural Centre in French Polynesia (1998) is almost Frank Lloyd Wright-ian in
its expressionism and stylisation.
Toyo Ito has played with functionalist fractals as a way of formulising
architecture, but also his TOD’s building in Omotesando, Tokyo (2004) takes
fractals in a figurative way and starts to experiment with more playful,
painterly forms.
I would also place David Chipperfield in this category, with his contextual
Neues Museum in Berlin (2009) playing with an old building, rather like Gae
Aulenti did at the railway station art gallery in Paris – the Musee D’Orsay
(1986). Also, Santiago Calatrava’s constructional expressionism, such as the
Gare do Oriente in Lisbon (1998), which has a Baroque exuberance that is a
long way away from Pier Luigi Nervi’s and Robert Maillart’s bridges:
Maillart’s Salginatobel Bridge (1930) and Schwandbach Bridge (1933) Kunsthaus Graz art museum. Peter Cook and
changed the aesthetics and engineering of bridge construction, but in a Colin Fournier, 2003
CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 69
book (the Communist manifesto of Mao), there was a coming together of two
worlds and a recognition that both had changed beyond measure from their
original fiercely ideological positions. We are heirs to the meta-narratives of our
grandparents; but we did change, and we have to create our own future. To
merely look backwards and react, to be post-anything, is not enough. There has
to be something much more positive to fill daily life.
The Postmodern era can be seen as contributing to a re-evaluation of our
institutions and social structures and their evolution to new forms, so that
change is accepted more and more as absolutely normal. It has been said that
we now live in an age of super-modernity, but that is not to say that the
institution of Modernism eventually succeeded. The super-modern world would
not have existed if it hadn’t had the re-evaluation and turbulence of
Postmodernism. In that sense, whatever the name of the world we live in now
– whether it is super-modern or Post-Postmodern – we are all successors to the
cultural revolution that was Postmodernism.
Among the things that have convinced me that Postmodernism was a force
for good are its pluralism and fairness. Architecture had become – and
probably always was in its taught and institutionalised senses – a privilege
for middle- and upper-middle-class people to indulge in. The
democratisation and the widening of interest in urbanism have increasingly
preoccupied me. By urbanism and urban planning I do not necessarily
mean ‘new urbanism’ or ‘the urban renaissance’ – although they are
related to it. The premier arguments that emerged from the UK
government-commissioned Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built
Environment (2014) were that:
we need to start teaching architecture and urbanism from an early age, from
schoolchildren and then on through to adults, and that we need to address the
ordinary and everyday through people’s own places – the house, the street, the
neighbourhood, the district, the city – in ‘urban rooms’ accessible to all.2
With the UN having proclaimed that over half the world’s population lived in
cities as of 2008,3 and current estimates of population increase are to be
believed, then over 7 billion people – about 70 per cent of the predicted
global population – will be urban-dwelling by the end of the century. To meet
this demand, city making is going to be the biggest endeavour of the times –
economically, physically, and socially. Yet cities are growing in spite of
architects, designers, planners and engineers rather than because of them. At
best it is a process of self-ordering, but at worst one of anarchy and disorder,
such is the scale. So where do we, the designers and planners, place ourselves
in this? Particularly when the growth is beyond precedent and the changes in
lifestyle likewise. Not only are we increasingly marginalised professionally,
but these very cities and their massive increase in populations are the main
cause of what are rapidly becoming the biggest challenges the human race
has ever faced: global warming, climate change and the pollution of our
planet. The post-Postmodern world has to face this reality, whether through
72 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
IMAGE
GALLERY
De Piramides, Amsterdam.
Soeters Van Eldonk, 2006
120
marked out for them to follow. Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul in Paris (1956),
and Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1939) and his Muuratsalo holiday home (1953) in
rural Finland, amongst other works, introduced into Modern architecture
forms that had no technological explanation for their presence, but were
instead utilised because of their atavistic qualities and sense of specific, local
belonging.
By demanding, with differing degrees of emphasis, a return to regional
identities, and for this to be radically embodied in their architectures,
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Giancarlo de Carlo and Ralph Erskine created a rift
at the 1960 CIAM Congress in Otterlo, Norway that was to rapidly tear apart
the Modernist consensus. They began to explicitly theorise the demand for the
incorporation of regional identities that had already been implicitly explored
in the works of some of the great masters, and which would soon shake the
foundations of Modernism’s claim to supremacy over contemporary
architecture. The claim that architecture was progress, that progress was
technological and universal, and that buildings could only be of their time if
they expressed universal values and technology and nothing else, would soon
be undermined first by the return to history and tradition, and later by the
return of the individual, the arbitrary, the eclectic, the expressive and the
ambiguous, and more besides – all key features of what would become
Postmodernism.
The issue of continuità (continuity) in architecture, as the Italians put it, lost the
grandiose classical aspect it had attained under Piacentini et al, broadening
after the war into a more nuanced and playful understanding of the past and
what constituted the ‘local’. Gio Ponti, a hugely important figure in Italy’s
post-war design scene, was editor of Stile magazine from 1941 to 1947, in
which he brought together all the arts, design and architecture in a search for
new syntheses, for a richness that was mostly absent from international
Modernism. A little later, in 1953, Ernesto Nathan Rogers became editor of
Casabella and immediately renamed it Casabella Continuità, turning the
national magazine into a hotbed for the propagation of debates around the
opening up of modernity to history.
Luigi Moretti’s 1950 Casa Girasole is a perfect example of how these ideas
were already coming together architecturally by the late 1940s. One of the
thousands of ‘palazzinas’, or small apartment blocks that were going up in
Rome after the war, it takes Modernist tropes like the horizontal strip
window and the free façade and incorporates them within an exceptionally
complex design that is pregnant with Roman architectures of the past. The
building is crowned by a barely abstracted split pediment, whose division
runs through the whole structure, leaving it dramatically cleft in a
Michelangelesque act of mannered expression. The strip windows and
façade over-sail the building behind, directly recalling the stone façades
propped up in front of brick churches that one sees all over Italy. The base is
a Renaissance-palazzo-derived plinth replete with stone rustication, some of
the individual blocks within which have sections of figures embedded in
them: a clear reference to the continuity and necessary intermingling of all
things from all eras in Rome.
As documented in Heinrich Klotz’s The History of Postmodern Architecture,
it was an Italian project that acted as the lightning rod for the CIAM 1960
debates: the Torre Velasca in Milan (1958) (see left), by Ernesto Rogers’s firm
BBPR. A radical departure from the expectations of what constituted a timeless,
progressive Modernist edifice, it is to all intents and purposes a Lombardian
fortified belvedere that looks simultaneously ancient and of-its-place, and
incomparably distinct and contemporary. As Klotz points out, it:
structure; was functional and efficient; was an unrepentant new tower in the
city; utilised the latest construction technologies – and yet its design strained
every single one of its elements to be as expressive as possible of
characteristics the architects felt derived from the regional vernacular.
Exploring similar themes and under construction at the time (though designed
in 1952–7) was the Palazzo ENPAS in Bologna by Saverio Muratori
(see page 126). Less strident on the skyline, but an equally ground-breaking
disruption of the Modernist ethos, it sits on massive brick piers and has a
castellated broken-pediment crown, a base close to a traditional Bolognese
arcade, and vertical slot windows set within what appear to be masonry
openings. It embodied Muratori’s search for essential forms deriving from a
building’s context that could be creatively synthesised into new kinds of
construction. Similarly of interest is Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s Convento di
Sant’Antonio dei Frati Francescani in Milan, built between 1959 and 1963
(see below, left). Another tower, although this time brick, squat and small, it is
reminiscent of a modest provincial church’s bell tower, perforated by
strangely ornamental openings and fitting into its street as if it had always
been there.
As a figure within Italy’s post-war INA-Casa housing programme who had
sought to incorporate local contexts into designs for new apartment blocks in
a contemporary manner, Luigi Vagnetti designed the Palazzo Grande in
Livorno (1952) (see opener pages 122–3), a large mixed-use structure in
which Rationalist and Modernist elements were transfigured through a
composition that had everything to do with traditional Italian civic
architecture. The windows are arranged with a strong vertical emphasis, the
ground floor as an arcade with rustication, a first-floor loggia echoes the
Doge’s Palace in Venice, and the whole is topped off with small pitched roofs,
echoing the ornamental crenellations on some historical structures.
The young Paolo Portoghesi’s Casa Baldi in Rome (1962) (see page 128, top)
clearly references the Baroque forms of Francesco Borromini (1599–1667)
and the classical ordering of the architecture in his beloved city. Portoghesi
recalls his works from this period as explicit reactions to the stifling conventions
of the Roman architecture schools of the time, with their emphasis on diagrams
and function and little else. He was beginning to formulate the idea that the
architect could be the unifier of traditions from diverse places and historical
periods, bringing them together into singular compositions that were infinitely
richer than those the architecture schools allowed their students to produce.
What he referred to as:
This craze of mine to contaminate, to put vastly removed and sometimes highly
contradictory things together, convincing them to love each other2
– an almost heretical position to hold at the time – would eventually flower
Convento di Sant’Antonio dei Frati
into his curating of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled ‘The Presence
Francescani, Milan. Luigi Caccia Dominioni, of the Past’, a veritable carnival of international eclecticism (see Chapters 2
1963 and 5).
128 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Whilst the academies and much corporate building of the 1950s and 60s in
the US might have strictly adhered to the orthodoxy of High Modernism, the
country in fact had a highly varied and vibrant architectural scene that did not
fit the orthodox narrative. Much of this was simply ignored by the Modernist
academic elite, and has continued to be somewhat sidelined in the re-telling of
the story of post-war American architecture; but it was never ignored by the
media or the public at the time.
New Formalism
At the more traditional end of this world of not-strictly-modern architecture that
filled the US in the period was New Formalism, which had been flourishing
throughout the 1950s and 60s, with Edward Durell Stone, Minoru Yamasaki,
Philip Johnson and others introducing an aspect of classical proportion,
material richness, order and gravitas to new public buildings. Often confused
now with High Modernism, these projects were highly distinct, and embodied
a concerted effort to return select elements of historical architecture into
Modernity, in order to imbue it with a more profound feeling of timelessness,
a quality that clients felt was lacking in the Modernist offer.
Beginning with Durell Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi (1959)
(see below), with its clear references to subcontinental architecture and
classical proportion, the style spread across the US, defining numerous
cultural and civic commissions, including the high-profile and contentious
Lincoln Center in New York City (Johnson, Max Abramovitz, Wallace
Harrison et al, opened 1962). Buildings like Minoru Yamasaki’s McGregor
Trade Center in New York City (1971) (see above) by Minoru Yamasaki, with
its stratospherically stretched Gothic ogee-arches and ribs, and the gleaming
white marble monolith of the Amoco Tower in Chicago (1973) by Stone. By
this point the arches, stones and implied columns that had successfully imbued
theatres and other public buildings with a sense of pomp and formality began
to disappear, left effectively illegible when applied to the massive bulk of
skyscrapers. The New Formalists opened up the possibility of history’s return
to the composition of rigorous architecture, but because they never questioned
more fundamentally the Modernist approach to public space, urban form,
figure and ground, their input could only go so far.
An architecture of excess
Morris Lapidus was representative of a more liberated and freely creative vein
within American post-war architecture, one that wilfully mixed Baroque,
classical and modern. His distinct architecture of excess came to define post-war
Miami (later followed in the 1980s by Arquitectonica – see Chapter 5). His
132 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Fontainebleau Miami Beach (1954) (see above) was the epitome of both this
eclectic approach to design and of American notions of high glamour in this
period in general. The sweeping concave curve of its elevation uses Modernist
elements, but in such a way as to give absolutely primary importance to its
theatricality and effect, as did Italian Baroque master Gianlorenzo Bernini
(1598–1680) with his deformations of the classical elements.
But it was perhaps on the interior, or rather the extreme difference between
interior and exterior, where Lapidus really embodied the synthetic and
contrasting tendencies that were at play in the period. Swirling Baroque
ceilings, patterned marble floors, neoclassical trompe l’oeils on sweepingly
modern curved walls, stone spiral staircases with Aalto-like handrails and
bulging Michelangelesque treads. Every style under the sun seemed to come
together in his interiors in a manner that must have chimed with the America
which had loved the richness of Art Deco and the exuberance of the
Beaux‑Arts.
Lapidus allowed American vacationers to enjoy the luxuriousness of theatrical
space without resorting to an historicism that would have been frowned upon.
CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 133
Architecture as experience
Indeed, in the 1940s and 50s there evolved an occupant-centred approach to
design related to what is known as ‘architectural phenomenology’5 Studying
techniques of camouflage and the visual language of advertising, students
were told to analyse, understand and then deploy in their own work the
powerful ways in which these modes of design profoundly affected the viewer,
moulding their experience of space. The source of the material the students
worked with did not matter; what mattered was the effect it would generate on
the occupant or viewer when used. This was a very different approach to the
Modernist idea that certain materials and structures had inherent qualities.
Value lay not in the buildings themselves, but in the contingent feelings and
reactions they elicited, much as Lapidus had intuitively done in his Miami hotel.
One of Lapidus’s many students was Charles Moore, a figure who influenced
generations of architects through his lifelong teaching career and his body of
built works (see Chapter 2). With a photographic memory for architecture, he
illustrated his ideas to students using his large archive of photographs, mixing
examples from different eras, styles and locations. His approach to space
focused on the user’s experience, the private world of imagination,
contemplation and sensory stimuli, and his relationship with history was
similarly oriented. As architect and theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos explains:
Drawing for Orinda House, California. Moore’s houses illustrate the development of his experience-oriented
Charles Moore, 1962 methodology. His Orinda House in California (1962) (see left) was
134 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Googie architecture
Another immensely rich thread in American architecture after the war, far
more geographically spread, which also involved the fusion of multiple stylistic
New Haven House, Connecticut.
inputs, was what has collectively come to be termed ‘Googie’ architecture
Charles Moore, 1966
(see below for an exemplar of this type of architecture). Where New
McDonald’s, Los Angeles. Stanley Clark Meston, 1953. An iconic example of the bold, futuristic, highly communicative Googie architecture of
post‑war commercial America
CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 135
Formalism looked to the past, and Lapidus blended Modernism into an eclectic
pot with historical ornament, Googie was all about the celebration of the
contemporary, of a dream of the future, of a consumer culture that was by the
1950s burgeoning with an unprecedented confidence throughout the US.
It was an explosion of colour and form in which the popular imagery of
space‑age futuristic design, graphics and comic books mingled with the
architectural forms of High Modernism and even aspects of Art Deco,
blending them together in the built environment to make engaging, fresh
architecture for boom-time America. Coming from a commercial origin, this
was a new vernacular architecture, native to the US, whose volume and level
of abandon could never be matched by academic architecture, even when it
decided that the phenomenon of commercial buildings and their related signs
and interiors were worth studying and emulating. Googie was architecture for
effect writ large.
By the 1960s, in particular in Italy and the US, the rebellious energies and
emerging interests of architects, and the contexts in which they found
themselves working, had altered dramatically, and soon the profession would
follow suit. The seeds of what would later be recognised as Postmodernism
had been sown.
CHAPTER 5:
THE POSTMODERN SPIRIT TAKES HOLD
History, complexity, memory, the richness of contemporary commercial
streetscapes: these concerns which were so completely at odds with the
rarefied, future-facing stasis of the International Modern consensus, began
increasingly to take hold of architects’ imaginations from the late 1960s
onwards. The story of Postmodernism’s journey from outsider eccentricity
to mainstream appeal can be attributed to the work and influences of a
number of key groups & individuals, including the ‘Grays’ and the
‘Whites’, and the Santa Monica School in the US, the Tendenza, Radicals,
and Memphis in Italy, Ricardo Bofill in Spain, Hans Hollein in Austria, and
Arata Isozaki in Japan, amongst others. This chapter will explore how
these architects worked both alongside and independently of each other,
their particular interests and motivations, and the influential projects they
produced in which they began to lay down the roots of Postmodernism and
proclaim its relevance.
Preserving heritage
The turn towards context and history in architecture was part of a broader
cultural shift, and was supported and enriched by widely discussed books
like Jane Jacobs’s (see page 138) The Death and Life of Great American
Cities (1961) and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects
(1964). Both in their own way helped to further broaden the idea of what
constituted the concern of architecture, expanding it out from all things that
were designed from scratch, based on a unitary vision, towards an
appreciation of things that had evolved slowly, passed through many
authors’ hands, or perhaps not had any discernible authors at all.
Rudofsky championed local vernaculars: buildings that had evolved out of
site and tradition, often over millennia, which had never seen the
overweening hand of an architect with a vision, and which were
nonetheless perfectly fit for purpose and even imbued with a powerful
sense of dignity. Jacobs had, for the first time, methodically studied how
the exact disposition of cities’ fabric interacts with and affects the life of
their inhabitants and communities. She illustrated how the old
working‑class areas built mainly in the nineteenth century, many of which
were being cleared after having been labelled ‘slums’ by planners, were
in fact intimate, perfectly scaled ecosystems of human interaction. She
showed the world that the mix of old and new, crumbling and average
quality, large and small buildings which architects decried as unplanned
chaos, was in fact the very soil out of which grew successful cities. Small
companies could afford to be in the older, worse-quality premises, which
placed them in the proximity of larger companies that could benefit from
the closeness of a variety of low-cost services, and so on. Jacobs explained
all this with a scientific rigour that came from the eye of an economist, and
humanist, who believed in factual study – unlike the Modernist architects of
the time who spoke only of unproven, almost platonically abstract principles
and ideals, in the name of which they would raze whole quarters of cities.
An awareness had arisen that the existing fabric of cities, messy as they
were, and even the individual buildings that made up that fabric, un-
masterful as they appeared in the eyes of traditional architects, were hugely
valuable. They were not to be swept away, but rather studied, preserved and
celebrated. The cause célèbre around which these debates came to be
focused in the 1960s was actually a resounding physical loss – that in the
long run turned into a decisive victory – for those interested in a more
sensitive approach to city planning. Completed in 1910, Penn Station was a
grand re-imagining of the ancient baths of Caracalla in Rome as a railway Mrs. Jane Jacobs, chairman of the Comm. to
terminus. Its vast vaults were much loved by New Yorkers, and there was save the West Village holds up documentary
evidence at press conference at Lions Head
significant resistance, spearheaded by Jacobs, to its planned demolition and Restaurant at Hudson & Charles Sts, 1961
replacement with an office tower and a new home for the events venue,
Madison Square Gardens. The imperial railway station and its concourses
were to be squirrelled underground into tunnels and low-ceilinged vestibules.
The forces of comprehensive redevelopment won, old Penn was demolished
in 1964, and passengers have since been relegated to the cramped and
airless spaces below ground, whose placeless banality was the sad theatre
of Louis Kahn’s last living moments before he passed away in the station’s
toilets in 1974.
The shock of its loss, however – in a parallel to what had occurred in London
with the loss of the Euston Arch in 1961–2 – was such that the preservation
movement and its principles gathered popular momentum. This culminated in
such victories as the saving of London’s Covent Garden from the Greater
London Council’s wrecking ball in 1973 (see Chapter 2). There were further
significant losses including the demolition of Les Halles in Paris in 1971, but
these served by the 1980s only to cement the popular view that such acts were
simply not acceptable, and that progress must occur in ways that respected
the existing.
In the same year that Covent Garden was spared, an architect in Barcelona
called Ricardo Bofill began a two-year transformation project to create a new
home for himself and his office, Taller de Arquitectura (see pages 80–1), out
of a large complex of abandoned nineteenth-century cement works. His
approach exemplified the powerful relationship between place, heritage, the
imagination and creative endeavour that flourished in postmodern practice at
an architectural as well as urban scale. The buildings were progressively
turned from an industrial wasteland into a strange, timeless, part-occupied
romantic ruin. Large areas were demolished, with unexpected moments
caused by the previous degradation being retained for their intriguing allure.
Inside the cavernous, textured spaces were inserted bold, contemporary
interiors, as though a futuristic nomadic race were inhabiting the traces of past
grandeur. Slices were made into the concrete and brick of the massive walls to
accommodate new windows, but these did not look new in the way the
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 139
interiors did; they are Gothic, pointed arches with trefoils, or narrow like
arrow slits, or Romanesque arches in tight compression. They look ancient,
purposefully confusing the observer; and vegetation permeates every corner.
Recalling the spirit of the great Romantics (see Chapter 1), the project is a
towering manifesto by Bofill on an architecture that unites the future, the past,
nature, ruination and the skilful triggering of the imaginative faculties, and that
can awe and impress through an appeal to an idea of the sublime, rather than
to that of order, beauty or progress.
All these examples are to one degree or another complex and intriguing. Even
when an architect’s stated aim is to reach for an essential core of his or her
architecture, there is a tendency to become expressive with the medium. This
was not something Giorgio Grassi, a colleague of Aldo Rossi, ever had
trouble with. As evinced by his now lost Student Residences in Chieti, Italy
(1976, demolished 2009), his commitment to a rigorous exploration of
essential architectural form lasted his entire career, and can find a parallel in
the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers.
A huge amount of discussion, drawing, and some building was being
generated by the Italian Tendenza, involving the great critic Manfredo
Tafuri and numerous practitioners; but it was one project that brought
their activities and ideas to an international audience, perfectly
embodying the scope of their interests, and still today capturing the
imagination like few other projects from the period. Together with Gianni
Braghieri, Aldo Rossi won the competition for the expansion of the San
Cataldo Cemetery in Modena (see page 74–5) in 1971. As with GRAU’s
Parabita, it was the perfect vehicle for the ideas of the Tendenza
architects. A form of architecture with inhabitants who are only present
through their conspicuous absence, in which architecture takes centre
Millenovecento Settantasei, drawing. stage, and in which the use of primary forms, or essential ‘typologies’,
Franco Purini & Laura Thermes, 1976 takes on a potent, incredibly expressive aura. These forms, also
appearing in Rossi’s earlier monument in Segrate, would later be taken
up by other Postmodern architects and used in other contexts; though
when deployed without Rossi’s eloquent sobriety, they would come to be
seen as formulaic and puerile – a ‘children’s toy’ look. Though still
unfinished, the Modena cemetery embodies the uncanny balance
between abstraction, stripped-back timelessness, evocative force, and
paradoxical sense of place that became the hallmark of La Tendenza.
Pesce’s Project Habitat for Two People, the Period of Great Contamination
(1972) (see right) was a dystopian, immersive installation that created the
intense, claustrophobic interior of a future that was at the time being hinted at
with the period’s dire warnings regarding the consequences of rampant
industrialisation and over population. The work’s purpose was not to offer
solutions, but to shock, critique and generate effect, implying an elemental,
primary method of dwelling in the bowels of the earth; as Pesce put it, the
installation ‘demonstrated the true function of architecture, to provoke
emotional responses from people.’1
The participants who have perhaps remained with the greatest vigour in the
popular imagination were Superstudio (founded in 1966). Throughout the
work they had done up to that point, they espoused a radical critique of
consumer culture – and the drive for novelty – through exploring various kinds
of extreme neutrality, or the beginnings of what became known as anti-design. Habitat for Two People, the Period of Great
This was expressed so successfully through their collages that the images still Contamination, Gaetano Pesce, MoMA,
1972
capture the imagination of rebellious young architecture students today. Their
Continuous Monument (see below) showed various places, from New York
City to coastlines to deserts to mountains, bisected by a vast piece of gridded,
rectangular form that united landscape and architecture through extreme
juxtaposition; whilst their film Supersurface, also displayed at the exhibition,
illustrated a world without architecture where all human needs were catered
for on a vast grid-surface on which people navigated as free nomads,
unburdened by belongings or property.
With Superstudio, the grid – the organising principle of modernity and the
superstructure of a rational ordering of the world from the Renaissance
onwards – became a tool of communication devoid of any real function. It
became an ironic method of simultaneously being modern and indicating
rationality whilst being in clear rebellion, and was used by the group to adorn
of sublime, atavistic qualities that were entirely missing from the rationalism of
traditional Modernism, let alone the extreme almost ludicrous positivity of
Archigram and later High Tech.
By the time of the Italian MoMA show, Hollein had made the transition from
designing critiques to creating actual architecture for clients. Several of the
Italians would make this transition, though it was highly problematic for them
after their decade of vicious denunciations of the capitalist, consumerist system
that they would need to work for to develop their careers. Hollein was never
as explicit in his critiques as Archizoom, Pesce, Sottsass or Superstudio were,
Sunglasses for American Optical Corps.
Hans Hollein, 1973
and so the leap was not a hard one. The same year as the MoMA show he
designed a range of sunglasses for American Optical Corps (see left) that
pushed the ideas of uselessness and extreme fashion to an absurd degree
– almost to the point of Archizoom’s 1967 ‘Dream Beds’ series, which
simultaneously parodied bourgeois ideals of good taste as well as the
excesses of fashion and consumerism.
Hollein was already building strange, clearly non-modern architecture at the
same time as Robert Venturi and Rossi. In 1966 he completed the Retti candle
shop in Vienna (see Chapter 2). Difficult to place in terms of form, its highly
articulated, symmetrical aluminium façade, with a deep, cleft opening at its
centre and peeled apertures to either side, simultaneously resembled an
ancient symbol, a face, and a futuristic piece of technology. Tiny (14.8 square
metres), but with the same potency and unexpected allure as his collages of
scaled-up objects, the shop is the realisation of a statement he had made in
1963:
‘A BUILDING IS ITSELF.
ARCHITECTURE IS WITHOUT PURPOSE.
WHAT WE BUILD WILL FIND ITS
USEFULNESS’.3
It was the first in a series of Vienna shops that Hollein designed, the most
intriguing of which is the first Schullin jewellery store, opened in 1974 (see
page 79). The exterior reads as a solid granite block that has been carved
into and eroded, revealing rivulets, a landscape of brass plates, a hidden
infrastructure of tubes (the vent for the shop’s air-conditioning), and on
entering, a highly crafted space that completely disregarded the Modernist
notion of truth to materials, mixing marble laminates, bronze, stone and
plastic, in no particular hierarchy or order, guided only by the desire to create
an effect. This was an architecture that was as autonomous, as apparently
function-free as the Tendenza’s cold tomb-like spaces, and as artistic as the
Radical movement’s propositions, but it was entirely at ease with its
commerciality. Here, a shockingly new form of design – one that mixed high
146 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
and low, referencing geology, history and technology – was built for about as
bourgeois and traditional a client as you could imagine: a jewellery company.
Vienna, where the radical and the profoundly conservative have always
intermingled and fed off each other, was perhaps the ideal location for such
deeply poetic ambiguity.
careers, they all stayed true to what they called Formalism, or the idea that
architectural form was independent of external factors.
exploration of cities. New York City was at the end of its largest construction
boom since the 1930s, having seen much of Manhattan’s fabric transformed by
Modernist slabs, losing landmarks like Penn Station (as mentioned above) and
in some places whole neighbourhoods. Jane Jacobs had already laid the
ground for a profound understanding of why the rich and mixed fabric of a city
was a social and economic boon, while Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the
City (1966) had precipitated the rediscovery of the importance of monuments,
and large urban forms, as containers of shared memory.
Following his research with Fred Koetter in the 1970s, Rowe brought this
burgeoning awareness of the importance of the accumulated wealth of cities
together into Collage City (1978). This powerfully eloquent manifesto-like book
elaborated on how the creation of successful cities is a process of continual
fragmentation, discontinuity, layering and slow transformation. It argues that
architects needed to finally let go of the pursuit of Utopia and adopt the role of
the bricoleur, or somebody who works with material that he finds around him
rather than dreaming up new concepts ex-nihilo. The notion of the bricoleur
was derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological study The Savage
Mind (1962 French, 1966 English), a book that proved influential to many who
were seeking alternative models to the Modern tabula-rasa mindset.
Rowe’s time teaching at Cornell overlapped with Oswald Mathias Ungers, an
architect whose work had influenced Rossi and Grassi in its internal,
autonomous rigour, and who also turned his eye to the form of the city. In
1977, with Rem Koolhaas, he published The City in the City – Berlin: A Green
Archipelago, an analysis and propositional document that explored the
shrinking of Berlin around islands of specific interest where urban and
architectural character are strongest, passing the spaces in between back to
nature. Where Rowe and Koetter enunciated an urbanism of collage,
juxtaposition, layering and growth, Koolhaas and Ungers proposed a form of
city with islands of extreme difference, in mutual competition and cooperation
with one another: an urbanism of creative reduction, reflecting Ungers’s
architectural sensibility, which was in line with the Italian Tendenza.
architectural scene. Loosely gathered around the hip new architecture school
SCI-Arc in Santa Monica, their practices began building in LA’s endless
sprawl. Moss built the supergraphical, product-like Triplex apartments in Playa
del Rey in 1976, followed by the 708 House (see above and page 151) in
1982. Morphosis built their 2-4-6-8 House (see page 88) in 1978, and Frank
Gehry built his own residence over a period of time concluding in 1978, a
personal journey that started with a standard suburban house which he slowly
transformed. In the Gehry residence the architecture became the very
embodiment of the story of the family and the architect who lived in and
created it. Its materials were cheap, rough and basic, but were deployed in
shocking, unexpected ways.
The Chicago Seven (really Eight with the later inclusion of Helmut Jahn) were
a group of architects that formed in 1976 to oppose the dead hand of Mies
followers who had become the dominant school in the Windy City, as well as
to assist each other in gaining publicity and work. Stanley Tigerman is
perhaps the most intriguing of these characters: he developed his own mystical
theories about architecture, which often interrelated with his identity as a
Jewish man, and explored the overtly symbolic aspects of form, as seen in his
wonderfully rich ‘architoon’ drawings. In his highly diverse practice with
Margaret McCurry he has built numerous projects. Their 1976 Daisy House
(see left) was designed for a terminally ill client with cancer, who wanted the
building to be a celebration of life. Tigerman organised the plan as a diagram
of a phallus to one side, and a vagina to the other, with the ejaculate being
the steps up to the entrance of the house. The ‘Tigerman Takes a Bite out of
Keck’ Keck House Extension in Highland Park (1979) is more like a giant
speech bubble that has been dropped onto an existing house than what we
would think of as a house extension. On its sides are what seem to be giant
bolts, which makes the building look like a scaled-up kitchen appliance of
some kind, the whole thing having strong reminiscences of Pop imagery. The
Plan of Daisy House. Stanley Tigerman, Pensacola Apartment Complex (1981) organises the semicircular balconies of
1976. Ground Floor Plan a large, apparently Modernist slab apartment building so that they read as if
154 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
they are the front columns of a hexastyle temple, with three quarter-circle and
one quarter-square windows flanking them at the top, indicating columns in
the Ionic order. A paper-thin entablature crowns the building, and at its base
there are two levels of set-back town houses, so that the whole composition is
an intriguing layering of different building types: vernacular Chicago house,
large Modernist block and classical temple.
Having seen its own unique form of highly colourful Art Deco flourish in the
1930s and then being host to the un-categorically glamorous and genre-
mixing works of Morris Lapidus, which presaged the playfulness of
Postmodernism so well (see Chapter 4), Miami became host to another
defining set of buildings from late 1970s on. Arquitectonica’s Pink House
(1979) (see above) partially took its cues from the city’s Art Deco heritage,
but more than anything resembled a union between the New York Five’s
commitment to the mannerist reuse of High Modern form, and a sense of
colour and surface play derived perhaps from Luis Barragán, the great
Mexican sensualiser of Modernism. Like the Whites, and most architects
working in the period covered by this book, Arquitectonica strongly denied
being Postmodern, allying themselves firmly to a continuity with Modernism.
Looking back with a broad view – not seeking specific stylistic tropes as a
method of categorisation but rather observing the spirit in which the architects
were practising – we can see that, much like the Whites, despite employing
Modernist elements, they were very much Postmodern in the manner that they
used them. There is also a total abandonment of rhetorical language of
functionalism, and elements are used as a clearly visual, linguistic game. In
their aptly named, ziggurat-like Babylon Apartments (1982), the end walls are
treated as a wafer-thin surface that signifies solidity, history and permanence,
but then immediately dissolved behind into voids and Modernist detailing.
Also by Arquitectonica in Miami, the Atlantis Condominium (1982) (see right
and pages 94 and 155) is – along with Terry Farrell’s MI6 building (see
Chapter 2) which appears in the James Bond films – one of the pieces of Drawing of Atlantis Condominium, Miami.
Postmodern architecture that are best known by the wider public, because of Arquitectonica, 1982
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 155
its use in the 1980s series Miami Vice. Perhaps the best realisation of their
early large-scale proposals, which were often radically watered down in
construction, it featured elements that would be copied much around the
world for the next two decades. The building has bright, boldly incongruous
elements tacked on to it: a red pyramid on its top, three angular lemon-yellow
balconies floating in the middle of the glazing, and its most iconic move – a
square void punched through the structure. In the void are placed a bright red
spiral staircase, an undulating yellow wall, a raised blue Jacuzzi-pool and,
with a surreal touch, a lone palm tree. It was the inexplicable purposelessness
and yet wholly intriguing qualities of these elements that caught the popular
imagination.
Delirious New York posits that the more dense and the more intense a city gets
– with Manhattan being the test case – the more architectural diversity is
engendered. In a fascinating twist, Koolhaas proposes that modernity resided
not in Europe with its white Modernism, theories and dreams of Utopia, but in
Manhattan, where it was made flesh before the Europeans had even thought
to dream of it. In its making he proposes that a world stranger than the
Surrealists could have imagined was unleashed. Using Salvador Dalí’s
Paranoid-Critical Method of analysis – a form of irrational knowledge based
on a ‘delirium of interpretation’,8 in which the mind wanders between
normally unrelated and incommensurable images and impressions, and draws
Antigone, Montpellier, France. Ricardo Bofill, them together, making connections and logics where before there were none
1979–97
– Koolhaas unearthed the city’s irrational subconscious, and held it up to
architects as a worthy driving force for their architecture. This approach made
Rowe’s rebellious relationship with traditional architectural history look
positively reactionary.
This poetic form of reasoning and content development was allied in the
office’s architectural proposals with designs that recuperated the formal
languages of past avant-gardes, notably Russian Constructivism, deployed in
their new incarnation to indicate a rediscovered vigour and confidence, rather
than any revolutionary zeal. This can be seen in their designs for Hotel Sphinx
(1976), for the redevelopment of Roosevelt Island (1975) and the Egg of
Columbus Circle (1975) (see page 87) – all speculative, unbuilt projects for
New York – and in their Boompjes tower in Rotterdam (1980). The IJ-Plein
Masterplan in Amsterdam (1980–82) was OMA’s first chance to design at an
heroic, urban scale, and they used the technique of collage, which was to
define their practice at every level in the following years, creating two distinct
zones of completely different housing and urban typologies. Long, continuous
slabs alternate with villa-type standalone apartments in one half of the site,
while on the other there is a bold triangle of more traditionally scaled streets
reminiscent of town houses, with a square at the centre, the longest side of
the triangle consisting of two superblocks that define the edge of the
development.
The largest built projects exploring the urban scale in this period were a series
of social-housing-led schemes by Ricardo Bofill in France: giant new city
districts based on a free interpretation of Roman, Greek and Baroque spatial
arrangements, populated by buildings that used the classical language in an
entirely novel, prefabricated manner. Antigone (named after a heroine in
Greek tragedy) in Montpellier (see page 157), initiated in 1979 and finally
works are a turn to the past that are a unique combination of the romantic
sublime and totalitarian awe, whose end results are so successfully
disconcerting that they regularly feature as the backdrop for dystopian
feature films.
It is worth noting that these projects, perhaps the largest built in the
Postmodern idiom, are social housing. It has been commonplace to associate
the Postmodern approach with the economic and political policies of Thatcher
and Reagan, in whose period in office the greatest number of projects were
constructed in the US and the UK. Yet the sensibility, evolving in related but
unique ways in various countries, was in no way tied to any specific political
creed: it was used as the iconographic vehicle for a huge drive by an
interventionist government to build affordable housing, just as it furnished
Disney with hotels and banks with headquarters later on.
In the US there was a strong sense of this new architecture being more
democratic, open and able to speak in the varied languages of different
communities. Charles Moore and Perez Architects’ Piazza d’Italia in New
Orleans (1978) (see Chapter 2 and pages 76–7) was a public space meant
both to rejuvenate an area that had been emptied by 1960s redevelopment,
and to celebrate and acknowledge the Italian community of New Orleans.
The plaza is an exercise in pure architectural joy and spectacle at the service
of a distinct group with its own rich history, as well as perfectly illustrating
Moore’s various architectural interests. Here architectural history is very
much at the service of effect, and of narrative and the imagination, being the
vehicle for an almost hallucinogenic polychromatic scheme. A fountain in the
shape of Italy ends with Sicily, from where radiates all the paving and the
geometry of the space, in concentric circles (the community mostly originated
from the Southern Italian island). A clock tower, colonnades of various sizes,
a triumphal arch and a Serliana all jostle with each other in bright colours.
Columns and their capitals glint in stainless steel or glow in neon, and water
falls and splashes in unexpected places, including out of the mouth of a
reproduction of the architect’s face. The nostalgia for the Italian homeland is
dizzyingly blended with Americana, with the exuberance of the shared
popular aesthetics of a country whose very foundation is immigration, the
mixing of stories.
Its focal point was the ‘Strada Novissima’ (see page 29), which picked up
on the notion of building immersive environments explored earlier in 1956’s
‘This is Tomorrow’ and in 1972’s ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’.
Using the extended, linear nature of the Corderie dell’Arsenale – the
former ropeworks where the exhibition was held – as a street, Portoghesi
invited a selection of architects representing the breadth of the turn away
from strict Modernism to design façades and the spaces behind them,
promoting a direct sense of competition between the participating
architects akin to that which existed in the Renaissance and Baroque
period. Craftsmen who usually built sets for films at Rome’s Cinecittà
fabricated the 20 full-scale designs for, amongst others, Frank Gehry,
OMA, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Bofill, Léon Krier, Hans Hollein and
Massimo Scolari.
The Biennale’s chosen theme – ‘The Presence of the Past’ – was a divisive
one, and had been settled on after it was decided not to use the term
Postmodern, leading Kenneth Frampton, one of the organisers, to walk out.
Charles Jencks, another member of the organising team, has admitted that
‘a preference for historicism overcame a preference for communication in
general’.9 This meant that much of the richness in the Postmodern sensibility
– its interest in communication, the contemporary condition, community,
alternative taste cultures, cultural critique, Pop imagery, consumer culture
and more besides – was not emphasised. Despite conspicuous absences in
the likes of James Stirling and Peter Eisenman, the exhibition nonetheless
captured the plurality of approaches even towards the past, and the
communal desire to tell stories, to end once and for all the mute
technological silence of late Modernism. As architect and architectural
historian Léa-Catherine Szacka explains, three basic attitudes stood out:
those who were interested in ‘promoting the past within the present’, those
for whom architecture was poetic and timeless, ‘atemporal… where neither
past nor present were emphasised’, and those for whom irony and
communication were a chief concern, and who promoted both the past and
the present.10
Visited by roughly 40,000 paying visitors, and redisplayed in Paris after its
closure in Venice, the Biennale had a profound effect on the architectural
community around the world. It generated a wave of discussion, including
weekly debates in Paris that were aired on television, and cemented
Postmodernism as the most vital force in contemporary architecture in the eyes
of the profession.
The original members of Memphis Milano in the Tawaraya Boxing Ring designed by
Masanori Umeda, 1981
The group’s founder Ettore Sottsass, an important and complex figure in the
development of Italian design and architecture, had been a part of the Radical
architectural circle of the 1970s, critiquing modernity and consumerism with
wit and cynicism. While most designers from the Radical milieu struggled to
compromise with the capitalism they disliked so much in order to get their
works built, Sottsass came to a unique reconciliation that paved the way for
the Memphis Group. Travels to the US had introduced him to the excitement
and vitality of American consumerism, its visual language and sense of
promise, but also to its incredible waste and the superfluous nature of things as
they were rapidly replaced in the drive for constant consumption. From
spending time in India he was introduced to the notion of the endless cycle of
creation, and that all things pass, in the context of which consumerism need
not be viewed as an evil but simply another aspect of the natural cycle of
creation and destruction. Objects, things, even if they were not to last for long,
could be instruments of repose and intellectual and spiritual contemplation –
yantras (Hindu aids to meditation) of sorts. Viewing consumerism in this light,
harnessing its creative potential could be a tool for introducing objects,
designs and buildings that were uplifting and beneficial. His attitude to
globalisation had a similarly forthright optimism, viewing the free exchange of
forms, inspirations and ideas between distant places – city and suburb, high
and low, wildly different cultures – as a form of invigorating cross-pollination
that could help keep architecture and design fresh. As Memphis Group
founder-member Barbara Radice writes:
When a culture reaches the point of boredom, when one begins to want to say other
things, and especially when, according to Sottsass, ‘one is not able to say the things
one thinks must be said’, then a ‘change of air’ is necessary. New supports must be
found in the ‘no-man’s land’ of germinal cultures, where signs still have a sexy
charge, a bittersweet flavour, and arouse shivers of surprise or pleasure.11
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 163
Isozaki’s particularly free use of historical form rapidly developed into what Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. James Stirling,
Charles Jencks described as his ‘radical eclecticism’ that drew upon an 1984
encyclopaedic knowledge of western architectures past and present.13 This
reached its most complete expression in the Tsukuba Civic Centre (1983)
(see above and page 163), the heart of a new town built in the outskirts of
Tokyo. The project is a collection of public buildings organised around a
sunken courtyard that is a direct replication of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in
Rome (1536–46), set within a large plaza paved in a motif of overlayed and
shifted grids in the vein of Eisenman or perhaps Superstudio (with whom
Isozaki was personally acquainted). As Jencks points out, Isozaki combines
the American, Venturian technique of flat ornament with the more sculptural
approach of the Italians to make for a hyperactive composition that combines
references to the heavily expressive rustication of visionary eighteenth-century
French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, a Greek
amphitheatre, some Richard Meier, and much more besides, all unified in a
greyish-blue palette that gives a High Tech, futuristic edge to this celebration of
quotation.14 The global past is treated more freely in Japan, where it is more
of a revelation; as Herbert Muschamp puts it:
When Mr. Isozaki uses traditional Western forms, he is not so much appealing to the
past as he is embracing a present in which the Japanese have become global
explorers. A trip to the Campidoglio in Rome is modernity to him.15
Like Tsukuba, two other highly influential projects have an articulated
relationship to the public realm at their heart. James Stirling’s Neue
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1984) (see top and bottom right and page 96) is an
extension to the city’s neoclassical art museum. Stirling chose a classical
organisation on plan, with a drum at the centre, and wings arrayed to either Model of Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.
side. Rather than creating a monumental presence, he took the site’s dramatic James Stirling, 1984. Model
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 165
structures that set new precedents for the articulation of large-scale structures
since his Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles (1975) (see page 170 top left).
This vast, bright blue (it is known locally as the ‘Blue Whale’) building contains
showrooms, a market and offices for the city’s design industry, all within a
complex profile that looks like a small vaulted building sitting on a large
structure with a prominent cornice, albeit highly abstracted, which is extruded
to generate the façade. Pelli took a usually nondescript, unwieldy programme
and turned it into a single grand gesture, a supersized icon that lodged itself in
the popular imagination.
170 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
His World Financial Center in Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan (1988)
(see top and bottom, right) provided a telling contrast with Yamasaki’s World
Trade Center to its rear, highlighting the difference in approach between the
New Formalist meeting with supersized development, which retained a
Modernist abstraction and tower-in-a-plaza approach, and the Postmodern
impulse towards fragmentation. The WFC has four towers and two pavilions that
sit on a highly articulated, shared podium. The towers are distinct in their heights
and massing, with varying, irregular setbacks that change materials with each
return, recalling 1930s precedents. Each tower has a distinct crown representing
a formal type: in order of descending height, a pyramid, a dome, a pitched roof
and a ziggurat. The podium follows the towers around the irregular site, the
smaller pavilions act as gateway markers to the access road, and each
building’s lobby is open to the public. The project’s internal focus is a huge palm
court, with an amphitheatre-scaled array of semi-circular steps under a glass
roof recalling the 19th-century age of grand engineering works. Distinctly
corporate, the complex nonetheless implies an accumulation of different
architectures on the skyline whilst creating spectacular privately owned, publicly
accessible interiors that have kept it popular as a destination to this day.
Helmut Jahn combined High Tech, Pop references and historical allusion in a
series of glitzy projects and became the most sought-after commercial architect
of the period. His State of Illinois Center in Chicago (1985) (see page 171 top
left and right), unusual in his oeuvre for being a civic structure, is an incubator
containing all the techniques he deployed in other projects. Paul Goldberger World Financial Center, Battery Park City.
describes it as ‘one part Pompidou Center, one part Piranesi, and one part Cesar Pelli, 1988
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 171
State of Illinois Center (since renamed the State of Illinois Center (since renamed the James R. Thompson Center), Chicago.
James R. Thompson Center), Chicago. Helmut Jahn, 1985. Exterior
Helmut Jahn, 1985. Atrium
kitsch 1950s revival. It mixes high tech and high camp’.18 A city-block-sized
cascading cylinder of tiered, striped, sloping glass sliced by the street, it is a
glittering volume that could just as well have been spinning in space in a
science-fiction movie. It is a most brilliant example of Postmodernism in the way
it combines so many differing and contradictory architectural languages in one
utterly singular, dazzlingly complex whole. It sits on an abstracted classical
arcade of red and white squares that face a plaza edged by a ‘ruined’ granite
colonnade that dissolves towards the furthest point away from the entrance.
The arcade mediates between the plaza and the interior, one of the most
spectacular anywhere, an enormous drum in bright red and blue steel and
glass, as if the Pompidou Centre had been turned inside out and stacked up to
19 storeys high. The floor of this urban room, or indoor plaza, is a baroque
radial pattern in stone. Everywhere the future – used as a tool for thrilling
effect – crashes into the popular, which is piled up on top of the classical, all
united in a sense of joy at the new possibilities offered by large‑scale
commissions combined with aesthetic freedom. Goldberger describes it as:
hyperactive; it might be called architecture on amphetamines, and just as such
substances can be exhilarating when consumed, so can the sensibilities of an
architectural gourmand unleashed with delicious abandon be intoxicating when
experienced.19
172 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Far more controlled and carefully calibrated, but still fully indicative of the
pizazz Jahn was able to bring to large commercial buildings, are his One and
Two Liberty Place schemes in Philadelphia (1987, 1990). Using a similar trick
as Johnson at PPG, or Pelli at the Norwest, he based his designs on a well-
known predecessor, abstracted its form, and combined it with contemporary
material treatments. The reference is that most exuberant of Art Deco
skyscrapers: the Chrysler building in New York (1930, by William Van Allen).
In this instance, though, the reference is transcended, and something entirely
new emerges. It is a composition – using Jahn’s trademark banding of
reflective glass and granite – that merges historical memories, the futuristic,
the contemporary, the commercial and the romantic in seamless unity.
KPF and Roche Dinkeloo were producing equally interesting corporate
architecture at the time, but those architects from the Postmodern vanguard
of the 1970s who were not averse to working with big money were similarly
building much of note in the 80s. Michael Graves, who was the first to
divide from the Whites in their restrictive frame of architectural references,
rapidly developed an extremely coherent but eminently flexible formal One and Two Liberty Place schemes,
Philadelphia. Helmut Jahn, 1999
language that would come to define architectural Postmodernism as much
as Memphis Group’s designs came to define Postmodernism in related
areas of design. Retaining his belief in the autonomy of architectural form
for the rest of his career, he opened up his frame of reference to include
classical and ancient architecture, as well as vernacular and regional
architectures, all transformed through a process of drawing and
reimagining. Elements would be wildly rescaled, details abstracted, diverse
references combined together. In 1960 Graves won the Rome Prize and
spent two years at the American Academy in Rome, and like Venturi and
Kahn before him, the experience had a profound effect on him, in terms of
appreciating both the timelessness of architectural forms and the liberty
with which one could use them.
In Graves’s view:
His interest in poetic form that spoke to the imagination of those who were
to occupy and live around his buildings, combined with his formal and
compositional virtuosity and incredible ability to engage clients, meant that
we have been left with a wealth of exemplary projects by him. The Humana
Building in Louisville, Kentucky (1985) (see left), a corporate headquarters,
stands comparison with the other large-scale buildings going up at the time.
There is no clear transference of historical form here, no visual pun, nor any
clear-cut union of a precedent and the contemporary. It is rather a product
of the perfectly synthesised world of forms that Graves had been
accumulating and recombining in endless compositions in his sketchbooks,
and projects, since the early 1970s. It is corporate architecture of a
completely new kind, a stacked-up-high aggregation of architectural forms
and inspiration.
that sit somewhere between Egyptian temples, giant pieces of furniture and
toys, but which manage, in their forthright use of primary forms – a triangle
and descending wings on one side, and a segmented arch on the other – to
achieve a powerful effect of monumentality. It is a monumentality at the
service of Americana, of communal recreation and escape, painted bright,
cheerful colours, festooned with gigantic statues of swans and dolphins.
Graves recalls that:
The design began with Bernini as a guide, but also with a fictional tale that Graves
and his team wrote about a Swan and a Dolphin, which helped steer the narrative
behind each design decision, meaning the complex is a constant balance between
the monumental and the mythic.21
Built by a commercial developer together with Disney, and highly successful as
an enterprise, these hotels, and the other various projects at the time, were the
most visibly spectacular coming together of what was seen as popular, or low,
culture, and the high art of architecture to date. But for most it was too much.
Disney represented, and still does represent for many, an easy target for
snobbery and cultural critique. It is seen as encapsulating all that is false,
illusory, commercialised and reductive about consumer culture. Michael
Sorkin, in his book Variations on a Theme Park (1992), saw the progressive
erasure of a true public realm and its replacement by controlled, exclusive
places of anaesthetised perfection – malls, theme parks, private squares
CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 175
turn to have its broad richness rejected because of the coming ubiquity of
lesser examples.
In a catalogue text for the 2011 ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion’
exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Denise Scott Brown ‘came
out’ as a Postmodernist after several decades of denial. She explained that
Robert Venturi’s infamous statement ‘I am not now and never have been a
Postmodernist’ was a quasi-ironic, quasi-exasperated rejoinder to the couple’s
incessant post-1980s hounding by critics, architects and students in a fervid
atmosphere of denouncement that reminded them of the McCarthy-era
Communist witch-hunts. It was the architectural equivalent of the statement
‘I am not now and have never been a member of the Communist Party’ that
was forced as a sign of conformity upon intellectuals, artists and celebrities in
post-war America in return for their professional survival.
The very figures who had helped to create the intellectual foundations for and
the atmosphere within which the previous two decades of architecture had
flourished with new-found interests, goals and freedoms were grouped
together with those like Philip Johnson, whom they had always vigorously
criticised and worked hard to distance themselves from, as well as with the
flood of nondescript buildings that aped the image of their work, and were
rejected as a unit by the new generation of critics and architects.
intriguing contrast to the World Trade Center pair by Yamasaki in New York
(see Chapter 4). Timeless abstraction was replaced by a glittering formal
complexity inspired by Islamic precedent, and recalling everything from
minarets to muqarnas. Similarly, SOM’s Jin Mao Tower in Lujiazui, Shanghai
(2013) (see page 178) creates a coruscating silhouette of great formal
complexity that combines Chinese geometries, and variations on the number 8
(a lucky number in China), with a strong reminiscence of Art Deco towers, a
style that had been prevalent in the city in the 1930s.
The Taiwanese architect C.Y. Lee was exploring the application of local motifs,
at expanded scales, to large projects in the late 1980s, with his Hung Kuo
Building in Taipei (1989) and its massive evocations of traditional Chinese
wooden construction elements. His Grand 50 Tower in Kaohsiung (1993)
stepped up in scale, but by the late 1990s he was building projects like
Fangyuan Mansion in Shanyang (2001), a giant Chinese coin evoking the
square embedded in the circle as the balance of Yin and Yang, and Tuntex Sky
Tower in Kaohsiung (1997–2004), which is like a supersized East Asian
riposte to Johnson’s AT&T (see Chapter 5), but here with the added thrill of a
vast void at its centre (a recurring motif since Arquitectonica’s Atlantis
Condominium in Miami (1982; see Chapter 5)). His run of large-scale
commissions eventually culminated with Taipei 101, the building that stole the
crown of tallest in the world from Pelli’s Petronas Towers. Its stacked shape
was intended to recall the repeating eaves of Chinese pagodas, but it is often
referred to as a tower of Chinese take-out boxes of the kind that are common
in the US. Lee also worked on religious buildings, completing the Chung Tai
Chan Temple in Taiwan (1990–2001) (see opener pages 176–7), a building
that gives Graves’s Swan and Dolphin resorts (see Chapter 5) a run for their
money in terms of symmetrical grandeur; and the New Famen Temple in Xi’an,
China (2009), a highrise-scaled abstracted praying hand, holding a replica
traditional temple high above the ground.
Poland, a very religious Catholic country, was erecting a large amount of
churches throughout the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s, in total more post-war
churches than any other country in Europe (over 1000 were built in the 80s
alone), despite being under Communist rule.2 These were built by local
communities, often over extended periods of time, and in a dizzying array of
forms and styles; Iza Cichońska and Karolina Popera’s ‘Architecture of the VII
Day’ project, documenting these churches throughout the country, even
includes the category ‘12 Churches Resembling Spaceships’. According to
Vladimir Gintoff, there was great interest from the architects involved in the
discussions surrounding Postmodernism, and many of them display unusual
combinations of stylistic techniques, merging vernacular elements with High
Modernist structural gymnastics, and Postmodern collages of symbolic
references. A good example is the Church of God’s (Divine) Mercy in Kielce
by M. Sztafrowski (1986–96) (see page 180). Here, a dynamically sweeping,
unornamented volumetric form worthy of the bombastic abstractions of late
Brutalism contains the main space for worship, which then transforms towards
180 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Aside from the Far East, it is the Middle East that has built on the largest scale,
utilising techniques like those of C.Y. Lee – most notably, and with genuinely
terrifying effect, in Mecca, a city that has been razed and rebuilt in the past
decade under the aegis of the government-run King Abdulaziz Endowment
Project. The Abraj Al-Bait (2004–11), by Dar Al-Handasah Architects – a
cluster of giant conjoined hotel towers, culminating in a 600-metre-high
pinnacle containing the world’s largest clock – is designed to reference
traditional Islamic architectural and symbolic forms, but illustrates quite
brilliantly how far architectural techniques can evolve in their use away from
the intentions of those who originally developed them. Whether it be
sophisticated and multiple, ambiguous allusions to the past, or historical
revivalism, none of the architects exploring these routes in the 1960s and 70s
would ever have imagined opening the door to the Abraj Al-Bait. That said,
the same project built in neo-Modern or High Tech garb would have been just
as intrusive, and devoid of the small amount of resonance this manages to
achieve.
Mubarak’s Egypt built the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt in Cairo
(2000), designed by Ahmed Mito in Ricardo Bofill-does-Egyptian-Revival style,
as well as one of the most extreme examples of literal historical collage – of
entire buildings from different periods pressed together – in the Future
University in Egypt Administration Building in New Cairo, by Elgabaly
Architects, completed in 2006. The Central Library of the University of Cairo
(2008) by Dr Aly Raafat exemplifies how the recombination of formal
elements explored elsewhere can continue to generate results that have the
shock of novelty.
Dubai, the second city of the United Arab Emirates, and an almost entirely
new construction of the past 25 years, is unique as an architectural
playground. In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas imagined Coney Island as
the place where dreams come true, the impossible happens, a pure
counterpoint to that rigorous machine of metropolitan complexity,
Manhattan.3 Dubai functions in the same way, but in counterpoint to, and as
an escape from, the entire West, and from the UAE’s neighbouring countries.
Everything in Dubai is the world’s biggest, tallest, most expensive, most
luxurious, and fastest. The architecture is the same. If the competition between
the skyscrapers of 1920s New York seemed intense, the lengths to which
architects and developers have gone in Dubai to differentiate their towers
goes much further, using the stylistic liberties and formal plurality that had
spread around the world during the 90s to create a city and skyline
previously restricted to science-fiction movies. The Al Yaqoub Tower (2006–13)
(see page 183) by Adnan Saffarini emulates the Elizabeth Tower of London’s
Houses of Parliament, although without a clock; while the Rose Tower
(2004–7) by Khatib & Alami, with its ornamental futurism, recalls the wilful
geometries of Googie architecture (see Chapter 4). Also by Saffarini, the
Princess Tower (2006–12) sports a domed crown, and its neighbour the Elite
Residence (2006–12) has a giant pergola at its summit. But the pinnacle of the
CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 183
city is provided once again by SOM with the tower that eclipsed C.Y. Lee in
Taipei, the 829.8-metre-high Burj Khalifa (2004–10), a building which in
shining stainless steel realises the most soaringly romantic of 1920s visions of
the stepped tower of the future.
To this day this spread of strange buildings continues around the world,
moving from country to country as they undergo rapid economic
development. Perhaps the most intriguing of these efflorescences of stylistic
waywardness, and definitely the most consistent, is the New Andean
Architecture that has emerged in Bolivia, specifically the city of El Alto
(although it has spread as far as Peru and Argentina), in the past decade. By
vigorous trade of goods from China, the Aymara ethnic group who comprise
the vast majority of El Alto’s population have become economically
empowered over the past 15 years under the rule of the president Eva
Morales, himself Aymara. On the back of the new local wealth, and demand
for venues for communal celebration and events, the architect Freddy Mamani
Silvestre developed an architectural language that would embody the
newfound community pride. As observed by Elisabetta Andreoli, it features:
motifs inspired by the Tiwanaku culture from which the Aymara descend, such as the
Andean Cross or zoomorphic figures, reduced to their geometrical elements.
Combined in stepped and gabled elevations, they result in intriguing combinations
further enhanced by the use of reflective glass and strident colours ... referring to the
Andean tradition of using bold colours for festive garments.4
184 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
These buildings (see above and page 185), whose interiors are even more
exuberant and singular than their already unique exteriors, have inspired a
whole new approach to architecture in the region. Rather than being a few
ornaments on your typical vast mall or tower, they are completely specific
– both in terms of their purpose, and their entire ornamental and architectural
programme – to the people who designed, commissioned and made them.
become (no matter how superficially) the accepted norm. Consultation with
the local community is necessary on all major projects. It is exceptionally rare
to come across a building that does not explain itself and its design in terms of
context and local history. Masterplans speak of ensuring the creation of
‘places’, and emphasise the figure-ground relationship in which streets are
defined, with active frontages. More often than not, traditional building types
are emulated. Even with major infrastructure projects it is rare for significant
demolitions to be acceptable, as it has become received wisdom that
preservation is the best strategy.
The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
Short & Associates, 2005
coloured mural called Cornucopia by artists Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam,
depicting an abundance of edible items.
In 2010 Delft studio WAM Architecten built what is no doubt the most surreal
of the recent Dutch examples of the new wave of Postmodernism, the Inntel
Hotel in Zaandam (see below), an entire village of traditional gabled Dutch
houses piled on top of one another in a manner that makes it a direct and
slightly lonely descendent of Ricardo Bofill’s Xanadu in Calp, Spain (1971).
In Australia, the Melbourne practice Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM) led a
wave of regional creativity, creating an architectural approach of complex
geometries, wilful transformations and popular polychromy that has formed
something of a school in the city. Their Swanston Square tower in Melbourne
(2014) (see above) uses its balconies to create an 85-metre-high portrait of
William Barak, an Aboriginal elder, which can be seen from all over the city;
and next to their astonishing National Museum of Australia in Canberra
(2001) is the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander
Studies (2001) (see page 191), an inverted black version of Le Corbusier’s
Villa Savoye near Paris (1931), whilst the museum contains a courtyard
garden layered with Australia’s different histories represented by various
maps, including a standard English-language map and a map of the linguistic
boundaries of Indigenous Australia. The museum as a whole is constructed
from many layers of symbolic content and meaning, from a new lay line taken
directly from Uluru, to a rainbow serpent from an Aboriginal Dreamtime story,
Boolean strings, knots flags, text, Braille and more. The complexity of ARM’s
work can at first seem similar to the Deconstructivists, but at the heart of their
project is an ability to directly stimulate and communicate in abstract,
figurative, sensual and visual ways with their occupants.
Prominently in the countries mentioned, but also in France, the US, Brazil,
Japan and others, the fascination with communication, incorporating history
and wider culture, symbolism and complexity, has been continued in varying
ways, in the Postmodern spirit of richness and ambiguity, by a few practices.
CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 191
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies. ARM, 2001
In the years since the early 1980s the world has gone through yet another
bout of profound change. Postmodernism exploded in reaction to the
suffocating weight of an atrophied interpretation of Modernism, but also in
response to the emergence of globalisation, decolonisation, civil rights, gay
rights, new media, new technologies, all aspects of modernity that have
accelerated into an unprecedented rate of change, disruption and innovation.
MTV heralded a revolution in 1982, but there are now millions more ways of
accessing content. Countries that were only recently independent in the 1960s
and 70s are now our equals on the world stage, with their own cultures
influencing us as much as us theirs. The rights of minorities, sexual and ethnic,
are finally coming to parity with the mainstream, and we live in a society that
is teeming with widely accessed minority narratives, replete with their own
formal traditions.
Postmodernism was the spirit of an architecture that strove in innumerable
ways, in a parliament of competing approaches, to embody and participate in
the complexities of a contemporary state that was saturated in images and
operated through a multiplicity of medias. It understood that through style,
form could become active and communicative in manifold ways, speaking to
audiences and occupants, clients and communities in a manner that abstract
codes of meaning could not. Never has such a spirit been so needed as it is
today, at a moment of portentous upheaval; and yet, rather than finding ways
of harnessing the vital energies of current paradigmatic technological and
cultural change, we have mostly retreated into an austere form of nostalgia
for simpler times.
So what is Postmodernism now – now that its urban tenets have been taken on
board by the big developers, by planners, and its forms seem destined to
impotently furnish 1980s design revivals every few years? It is not necessarily
flatness, or billboards, or cartoonish writing, or the profile of vernacular
buildings in bright colours. These are just formal tactics that have somehow
survived from the 70s and 80s – interesting, but not up to embodying the
contemporary condition.
Postmodernism is at its heart an architecture that embraces the chaos and
mediated, saturated, complex and global nature of the contemporary world,
and embodies and acts within it with a vigorous belief in the visual, sensual,
communicative nature of architectural form as a vehicle of narratives,
meaning, pleasure and freedom. It is perhaps above all an open environment
of vigorous diversity, forceful but respectful disagreements, and constant
debate.
Just as the explosive arrival of the incredible array of approaches we now
refer to as Postmodernism was in many ways a return to the fiery diversity of
an early Modernism, a race to find ways in which architecture could embody
society and culture as it stood in a moment of transformation, so now there is
the potential for a contemporary return to a diverse spread of architectures.
Architectures that vigorously pursue new formal agendas, that interbreed with
CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 193
other areas of cultures, and that treat the apparently monstrous range of new
media and visual stimuli and their novel aesthetics as opportunities and mines
of material and tactics, rather than as objects of fear and items of vulgarity.
It could mean a generation of architects who, with a belief in the visual,
stylistic and representational power of built form, throw themselves giddily into
the whirlwind of the contemporary human condition and its twenty-first-century
economic, technological and cultural habitat.
‘Gateways’, designed by Adam Nathaniel Furman, commissioned by Turkishceramics for Designjunction, London Design Festival 2017
194 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
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5 See Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Successes of New Design, 1982, quoted on magazine/disney-deco.
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6 Ibid, p. 107. 12 Ibid.
7 Ibid, p. 118. 13 Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Chapter 6
Architecture: The Language of Post-
Modernism, Yale University Press (New 1 Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in
Haven, Connecticut and London), p. 131. Architecture: The Language of Post-
Chapter 5 Modernism, Yale University Press (New
14 Ibid.
1 Pete Collard, ‘Italy: The New Domestic Haven, Connecticut and London), p. 9.
15 Herbert Muschamp, ‘Review/Architecture;
Landscape’, Disegno No 2, London, 28 Isozaki Postwar World’, New York Times, 2 Vladimir Gintoff, ‘The Curious Case of
November 2013 17 December 1993, http://www.nytimes. Poland’s Communist-Era Church Boom’,
2 Quoted in Diebold Essen, ‘Bye-Bye, BEST com/1993/12/17/arts/review-architecture- Metropolis, 10 March 2016, http://www.
Products: An Architecture Fairy Tale’, isozaki-s-designs-for-an-insecure-postwar- metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/
Magellan’s Log, https://web.archive.org/ world.html (accessed 12 February 2017). March-2016/The-Curious-Case-of-Polands-
web/20060827012947/http://www. Communist-Era-Church-Boom/ (accessed 12
16 Jonathan Glancey and Peter Cook,
texaschapbookpress.com/ February 2017).
‘December 1982: Stirling and Hollein’,
magellanslog54/indeterminatefacadeintro. Architectural Review, 12 May 2014, 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A
htm (accessed 11 February 2017). http://www.architectural-review.com/ Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan,
3 Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, ‘Forms archive/december-1982-stirling-and- Monacelli Press (New York), pp. 29–80.
and Designs’, Arts and Architecture, hollein/8662468.fullarticle (accessed 12 4 Elisabetta Andreoli, ‘Party Halls in El Alto,
August 1963. February 2017). Bolivia by Freddy Mamani Silvestre’,
4 Reyner Banham, ‘Who Is This “Pop”?’, 17 Denise Scott Brown, ‘Our Postmodernism’, Architectural Review, 13 July 2015, https://
Motif, Vol. 10 (1962–3), p. 12. in Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, www.architectural-review.com/today/
5 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, we-have-money-and-can-build-in-a-way-that-
Villa and Other Essays, The MIT Press London, 2011, pp. 106–12. represents-us/8682724.article (accessed
(Cambridge, MA and London), 1976. 12 February 2017).
18 Paul Goldberger, ‘Futurist State Office
6 ‘The Obligation Toward the Difficult Building Dazzles Chicago’, New York 5 Alejandro Zaera-Polo, ‘The Hokusai
Whole’, chapter 10 in Robert Venturi, Times, 22 July 1985, http://www.nytimes. Wave’, Perspecta, Vol. 37: Famous, 2005,
Complexity and Contradiction in com/1985/07/22/arts/futuristic-state- p. 80.
Architecture, Museum of Modern Art office-building-dazzles-chicago. 6 Soeters Van Eldonk website, http://www.
(New York), 1966. html?pagewanted=all (accessed 12 soetersvaneldonk.nl/en/visie/visie.html
7 See Nadia Watson, ‘The Whites vs the February 2017). (accessed 12 February 2017).
Grays: Re-examining the 1970s Avant- 19 Ibid. 7 Joseph Rykwert, ‘Postmodernism
Garde’, Fabrications, Vol. 15, Issue 1, 20 Michael Graves, ‘A Case for Figurative Post-Mortem’, Architects Journal,
2005. Architecture’, in Vincent Scully (ed.), 6 October 2011, https://www.
8 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Michael Graves, Buildings and Projects, architectsjournal.co.uk/postmodernism-
Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 1966–1981, Random House (New York), post-mortem/8620814.article (accessed
Monacelli Press (New York), p. 237. pp. 11–17. 12 February 2017).
196 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
IMAGE CREDITS
Cover image: Reid & Peck / RIBA Collections Page 66 Eric Firley / RIBA Collections Page 138 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Page viii–1 John Outram Page 67 Duccio Malagamba / RIBA Collections Division, New York World-Telegram & Sun
Page 1 Reid & Peck / RIBA Collections Page 68 Janet Hall / RIBA Collections (top); Newspaper Photograph Collection
Page 3 Photograph courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown © Peter Durant / Arcaid (bottom) Page 139 © Arduino Cantàfora
and Associates, Inc. Page 69 © Timothy Soar Page 140 top right; MAXXI Museo nazionale delle
Page 4–5 Danielle Tinero / RIBA Collections; Page 70 © Morley Von Sternberg arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI
Page 6 top and bottom Alastair Hunter / RIBA Page 73 Photograph courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown Architettura – Archivio Alessandro Anselmi;
Collections and Associates, Inc. AND top left; © Eredi Aldo Rossi; AND bottom
Page 9 top Bpk Hamburger Kunsthalle Elke Walford; Page 74–75 © Photography Laurian Ghinitoiu right; Massimo Scolari
bottom Roland Halbe / RIBA Collections Page 76–77 RIBA Collections Page 141 Francesco Purini
Page 11 © FLC / DACS / ADAGP, Paris and DACS Page 78 Keith Collie / RIBA Collections Page 142 top right; © Gaetano Pesce AND bottom
London 2017 Page 79 © Privatarchiv Hollein left; © Superstudio; A. Natalini, C. Toraldo di
Page 15 Edwin Smith / RIBA Collections Page 80–81 Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill Francia, R. Magris, G. P. Frassinelli, A. Magris,
Page 16 (above) Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Page 82–83 © La Biennale di Venezia A. Poli (1970–2)
Centre Canadien d’Architecture / Canadian Page 84 © Ezra Stoller / Esto Page 144 top left and right; © James Wines / SITE
Centre for Architecture, Montreal; (below) Page 85 © Privatarchiv Hollein AND bottom; © The Museum of Modern Art,
Photograph courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown and Page 86 © Charles Correa Foundation New York / Scala, Florence
Associates, Inc. Page 87 © The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Page 145 © Privatarchiv Hollein
Page 17 © Terry Farrell New York / SCALA, Florence / Copyright Rem Page 148 top; Dick Frank; AND bottom; © Ezra
Page 18–19 © Terry Farrell Koolhaas Stoller / Esto
Page 20 top left © Andrew Putler; top right Page 88 © The Estate of Marvin Rand Page 149 Courtesy of Michael Graves
© Terry Farrell; bottom © DACS, Picture by Page 89 © Dixon Jones / photo: Martin Charles Page 150 top; © Robert A.M. Stern Architects; AND
Paul Kozlowski Page 90 © Natalie Tepper / Arcaid bottom; Photo courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown &
Page 21 Danica O. Kus / RIBA Collections (top); Page 91 © Courtesy of Michael Graves Architecture Associates, Inc . Designer, Robert Venturi;
© Terry Farrell (bottom) & Design project director, John Chase
Page 22 © Terry Farrell Page 92–93 Courtesy of Michael Graves Page 151 © Eric Owen Moss
Page 23 RIBA Collections Architecture & Design Page 153 top; © Eric Owen Moss; AND bottom;
Page 24 © Terry Farrell (top left); top right Page 94 © Norman McGrath © Tigerman McCurry Architects
Photograph by Stephen Hill, courtesy of Venturi, Page 95 David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons Page 154 top; and bottom both; © Arquitectonica
Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.; ORCH Page 96 Richard Bryant / Arcaid Page 155 © Norman McGrath
Chemollo / RIBA Collections (bottom) Page 97 © Dixon Jones, Photo: Bob Burley Page 157 top and bottom; Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill
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Page 26 Hans Jan Durr / RIBA Collections Page 99 © Morley von Sternberg Page 159 Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill
Page 27 Damien Blower / RIBA Collections Page 100 © Nigel Young Photography Page 162 Courtesy of Memphis s.r.l., Milano
Page 29 © La Biennale , ASAC, Fototeca Page 101 © Nigel Young Photography Page 163 top; Aldo Ballo, Courtesy of Memphis s.r.l.,
Architettura, Il Teatro del Mondo, Strada Page 102–3 © Xinai Liang Milano AND bottom; © Arata Isozaki &
Novissima Page 104–5 © Xinai Liang Associates
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Peck (bottom) Page 107 © Richard Bryant / Arcaid (top right); AND bottom; RIBA Collections
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© Dixon Jones / Jo Reid & John Peck (bottom) Page 109 © Mario Botta Page 167 © Derek Jensen
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Collections courtesy Richard Bryant / Arcaid Page 111 Janet Hall / RIBA Collections Page 169 Courtesy of SOM © Jon Miller, Hedrich
(top); © John Melvin (bottom) Page 112 © Dirk Lindner Blessing
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Page 40 © Terry Farrell (top); © Jo Reid & John Peck Page 114 © Adrian Taylor right; © Jeff Goldberg / Esto; bottom; Photo by
(bottom) Page 115 © Jack Hobhouse Adam Nathaniel Furman
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Page 42 Richard Bryant / Arcaid Page 118 © Ossip van Duivenbode, Design: Rainer Viertlböck
Page 44 Richard Bryant / Arcaid (top); Richard © MVRDV Page 172 Rainer Viertlböck
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Page 45 Richard Bryant / Arcaid (top); © John E Page 120 Agnese Sanvito / RIBA Collections Design
Linden (bottom) Page 121 © Gareth Gardner Page 174 Courtesy of Michael Graves Architecture &
Page 46 Martin Charles (top); © Anthony Weller Page 122–23 © Roberto Rubiliani Design
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Page 47 Martin Charles / RIBA Collections Page 126 © Xavier de Jauréguiberry Design
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Page 53 © Keith Hunter Photography Page 129 Copyright 2017, Hicks Stone, All Hedrich Blessing
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Page 60 Tim Benton / RIBA Collections Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State Page 183 © Els Alphenaar
Page 61 © Birds Portchmouth Russum Architects (left); University Page 184 Noah Friedman-Rudovsky
© Tim Croker (right) Page 131 Ned Paynter / Friends of San Diego Bloomberg / Getty Images
Page 62 © Andrew Putler (top); © Nelson Garrido Architecture Page 185 © Hubertus Schlaudraff
(bottom) Page 132 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Page 187 © C Alan Short, photo by Peter Cook
Page 63 © Peter Aaron / OTTO for Robert A M Stern Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Page 189 Photo by Peter Barnes
Architects (top); © Colin Wade (bottom) Collection / Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. Page 190 Courtesy of ARM Architecture, photo by
Page 64 © Colin Wade (top); Richard Page 133 © Charles Moore Foundation John Gollings
Bryant / Arcaid (bottom) Page 134 top left; © Charles Moore Foundation; Page 191 Courtesy of ARM Architecture
Page 65 Jeremy Harrison / RIBA Collections (top); bottom; James Horecka Page 193 © Gareth Gardner
© Simon Garcia / Arcaid (bottom) Page 136–37 Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill
Index 197
INDEX
Note: page numbers in italics refer to Austrian Travel Agency, Vienna 26 Canada Water Library, London 61 Comyn Ching, Seven Dials, Covent
illustrations. Canary Wharf, East London 55 Garden 32, 51
Babylon Apartments, Los Angeles 154 Cantafora, Arduino 139 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
2–4–6–8 House, Los Angeles 88, 153 Bailey, Nic 46 Cardiff Castle, South Wales 33 Moderne (CIAM) 123, 124, 125
708 House, Los Angeles 151, 153 Banham, Reyner 11, 146 Carson, Rachel 12 Constructivism 157
Bank of America Corporate Center, Cartwright Gardens Student Housing, consumerism 8, 143–4
Aalto, Alvar 11, 123, 124 Charlotte, North Carolina 168 King’s Cross, London 186 Contact Theatre, Manchester 186
Aalto Muuratsalo holiday home, Finland Bank of England, City of London 165 Caruso St John Architects 70, 114 Continuous Monument 142
124 Bankside (now Tate Modern) Power Casa Baldi, Rome 127, 128 Convento di Sant’Antonio dei Frati
ABK 64 Station 46, 50, 66 Casa Girasole, Rome 125 Francescani, Milan 127
Abraj Al-Bait, Mecca 182 Barber, Peter 70, 116–17 Casa Zanaboli, Rome 140 Cook, Malcolm 46
Abramovitz, Max 129 Barbican, City of London 48 Casabella Continuità 125 Cook, Peter 68
Adam, Robert 64 Barfield, Julia 46 Castell Coch, South Wales 33 Coop Himmelb(l)au 66, 67
adaptable housing 38, 39 Baroque 5, 44, 127, 128, 132 Castle Lelienhuyze estate, Den Bosch, Correa, Charles 84, 165–6
Ahrends, Peter 64 Barragán, Luis 154 The Netherlands 188 County Hall, London 46
Al Yaqoub Tower, Dubai 182 Barry, Charles 31, 166 Central St Giles Court, London 68 Covent Garden 32, 41, 138
Alban Gate, City of London 32, 45, 46, Bartlett School of Architecture, Chalk, Warren 22 Coventry University, Lanchester Library
48–9 University College London 15 Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, 186
Alexandra Palace pavilion, Haringey, Battersea Power Station, London 46, Ronchamp 20–1, 25 Crane, David 16
London 42 50 Charing Cross, London 32, 45–8, 100 Cullen, Gordon 11
Allianz Stadium, Munich 66 Baudelaire, Charles 7 Chase Tower, Dallas 168 Cullinan, Edward 32
Alsop, Wil 35, 56 Bauhaus 1, 8, 9, 10 Chiat/Day Building, Los Angeles cultural change 13, 14
Alton Estate, Roehampton 39 BBPR 125 102–3, 146 CZWG 33, 61, 96, 97, 186
Ambasz, Emilio 146 Bedford, Eric 65 Chicago Seven 153
American Bar, Karntner Passage, Beeby, Thomas H. 64 Chichester Car Park 61 Daisy House, Chicago 153, 163
Vienna 24, 25 Belfort Municipal Theater, France 35 Chieti Student Residences, Italy 141 Dalí, Salvador 157
American Embassy, New Delhi 129 Benacerraf House, Princeton, New Chilton, Steve 46 Dar Al-Handasah Architects 182
Amoco Tower, Chicago 131 Jersey 148 China 178, 179 Darbourne & Darke 32
Amsterdam IJ-Plein Masterplan 157 Berlin, Isaiah 5 China Wharf apartments, Bermondsey, Davidoff, Paul 16
Anatole, Frank 46 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 132 London 34 De Barones shopping centre, Breda,
Andreoli, Elisabetta 183 BEST stores, United States 143–4, 150 Chipperfield, David 68 The Netherlands 61, 99
Andreu, Paul 67 Betty Abrams House, Pittsburgh, PA Chiswick Park, West London 64 De Carlo, Giancarlo 124
Antigone, Montpellier, France 157, 149–50 Chrysler buildiing, New York City 172 De Chirico, Giorgio 27, 139
158–9 Bielecki, Czeslaw 181 Chung Tai Chan Temple, Taiwan 179 De Piramides, Amsterdam, The
Archigram 16, 22, 25, 31, 146–7 Billingsgate fish market 53 Church of God’s (Divine) Mercy, Kielce, Netherlands 119, 188
Architectural Association, London 38 Birds Portchmouth Russum 61 Poland 179–80 De Stijl 26
Architectural Design 33, 39 Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 67 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux De Young Museum, San Francisco 186
architectural phenomenology 133 Blake, William 6 d’Architecture Moderne) 123, 124, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh 1
architectural press 33, 151 Blanning, Tim 10 125 The Death and Life of Great American
Architectural Review 147 Blue House, Hackney, London 114, 187 Cichoñska, Iza 179 Cities 12, 137
architecture as experience 133–4 Blundell’s Corner, Hull 37 cinema 12–13 Deconstructivism 54, 67, 190
The Architecture of the City 152 Bofill, Ricardo The Circle, Bermondsey, London 34, 98 Delirious New York 54, 156–7, 182
Architecture of the VII Day project 179 Antigone, Montpellier, France 157, Citroën Warehouse, Runnymede, Surrey Denver Public Library 108
Architecture Without Architects 38, 137 158–9 42 Disney resorts 173–5
Archizoom 145 Les Espaces D’Abraxas, Noisy-Le- Citta Analoga 139 Disney World, Orlando, Florida see
ARM Architecture 69 Grand, France 136–7, 158, 159 The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Walt Disney World, Orlando,
Armstrong, William 15 Taller de Arquitectura 138–9 Archipelago 152 Florida
Arquitectonica 92, 154, 156, 179 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 City of London police station 48 Dixon, Fenella 35, 36, 87
Art Deco 34, 46, 49, 50, 54, 154, 168, 30, 161 city planning 12, 14, 28, 64–5, 137–8, Dixon, Jeremy 32, 33, 35, 36, 87
172, 179 Xanadu, Calp, Spain 190 152, 156–7 Dixon Jones 32, 35, 63
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Bolivia 183–4 Citylife Milan Residential Complex 65 Dobson, John 15
University, Cambridge, Boompjes tower, Rotterdam 157 classicism 22, 34, 37, 50, 54, 64–5, Dominioni, Luigi Caccia 127
Massachusetts 60 Borromini, Francesco 127, 128 124–5, 128–30, 132, 151, 158–9 Downley House, Hampshire 61
artists 9, 15, 187–8 Botta, Mario 26, 50, 107 Clifton Nurseries building, Bayswater, Dubai 182–3
Arts and Crafts 5, 21, 37, 46, 51 Braghieri, Gianni 141 London 40, 41
Arup 48 Bramante, Donato 159 Clifton Nurseries building, Covent One Eagle Place, Piccadilly, London
Ashmill Street housing, Maida Vale 35 British Consulate, Hong Kong 63, 64 Garden, London 40, 41 112
Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM) 190, British Embassy, Berlin 60 ‘cognitive revolution’ 13, 15 Edinburgh International Conference
191 Brodrick, Cuthbert 15 Coleridge 8, 10 Centre 52, 53
Asplund, Gunnar 19, 21 Brutalism 11, 22–3, 185 Collage City 28, 152 Egg of Columbus Circle, Manhatton,
AT&T Building (now Sony Building), Bryanston School, Dorset, CDT building Collège Anne Frank, Hauts-de-Seine, New York 87, 157
Manhattan 55, 95, 166, 167, 179 34, 61 France 63 Egypt 182
AT&T Corporate Center, Chicago 168, Buchanan, Colin 14 colour 26, 56 Egypt Administration Building, New
169 Buckminster Fuller, Richard 15–16, 31 2 Columbus Circle, Manhatton, Cairo 182
Atelier Bow-Wow, Japan 70 Budzynski, Marek 181 New York 84, 130 Ehrenkrantz, Ezra 16
Atlantis Condominium, Miami 94, Burgee, John 93, 166–7 commercialisation 31, 55, 67 Eisenman, Peter 67, 147, 148, 151
154–5, 179 Burges, William 5, 33 community architecture 23, 32, 185 Eisner, Michael 173
Aulenti, Gae 68 Burj Khalifa, Dubai 183 Community in a Cube, Middlesbrough Elgabaly Architects 182
Australia 190 Byker Wall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 23 187 Eliot, T.S. 9
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Compass Point, Isle of Dogs 35, 36 Elite Residence, Dubai 182
Torres Straight Islander Studies, Calatrava, Santiago, Spain 68 Complexity and Contradiction in Emett, Rowland 43
Canberra 190, 191 Cambridge Judge Business School 34, Architecture 23, 128, 147, 148, Epping Civic Offices 35, 37
Austria 144–6 111 149 Eric Parry Architects 110
198 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Erskine, Ralph 23, 124 Googie architecture 134–5, 182 Retti Candle Shop, Vienna 25, 40, Radical Postmodernism 59
Les Espaces D’Abraxas, Noisy-Le- Gouda City Hall, The Netherlands 188 78, 145 on Richard Reid and John Melvin
Grand, France 136–7, 158, 159 Gough, Piers 32, 33, 50, 55, 61 Schullin jewellery shop, Vienna 35–6
Euston Arch, London 138 Grainger, Richard 15 25–6, 40, 79, 145 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980
Expressionism 22 Gramercy Park Apartment, New York Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 161
City 149 30, 161 Jencks house, Lansdowne Walk, West
Fangyuan Mansion, Shanyang 179 Grand 50 Tower, Kaohsiung, Taiwan Holmes, Andrew 38, 39 London 29, 39–40
Farrell, Terry 37–52, 63–5 179 Holmes Road Studios, Kentish Town, Jin Mao Tower, Lujiazui, Shanghai 121,
Alban Gate, City of London 32, 45, Grassi, Giorgio 141, 152 London 116–17 178
46, 48–9 Graves, Michael 55, 56, 172–3 Home Office, London 64, 65 Johnson, Philip 166–8
Charing Cross, London 32, 45–7, 100 Denver Public Library 108 Hood, Raymond 50, 168 AT&T Building (now Sony Building),
MI6 building 32, 45, 49–50, 101 Dolphin and Swan Resort Hotels, Walt Hopkins, Michael 31, 67 Manhattan 55, 95, 167, 179
Northampton Hospital, houses for Disney World, Orlando, Florida Horizon Hill Center, San Antonio, Texas criticism of 55
nursing staff 20 60, 90–1, 173–4, 179 156 New Formalism 129
TVam building, Camden, North Humana Building, Louisville, Kentucky Hôtel du Département des Bouches-du- PPG Place, Pittsburgh 166–7, 172
London 26, 43–4, 45, 146 173 Rhône, Marseille 56 the Whites 148
FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) 58–9, influence of 35, 51 Hotel Sphinx, New York City 157 Johnson Wax Building, Racine,
69, 112, 113, 187–8 Portland Building, Oregon 91 A House for Essex 113, 187–8 Wisconsin 40
Festival of Britain 14 Snyderman House, Indiana 148, 149 House II, Hardwick, Vermont 148 Jones, Edward 33, 35, 95
Fire Station Number 4, Columbus, Venice Architecture Biennale 1980 House of the Future 146 Jones, Inigo 41, 46, 147
Indiana 24 30 House VI, Cornwall, Connecticut, 148 Judge Institute of Management Studies,
Fobney water treatment centre, the Whites 147–8 Houses of Parliament, Westminster 31, Cambridge, England 34, 113
Reading, Berks 42 The Grays 148, 149–51 46, 50, 55, 65, 166, 182
Fogo, Peter 64 Great Planning Disasters 12 Humana Building, Louisville, Kentucky Kahn, Louis 23, 128, 138
Fontainebleau Miami Beach 132 Greenberg, Allan 148, 150–1 173 comparisons with 24, 26, 163
Fordism 8 Greene, Herb 22 Hung Kuo Building, Taipei, Taiwan 179 Richards Medical Centre,
Foreign Office Architects (FOA) 67, Greene King Brewery, Bury St Edmunds Philadelphia 17
185 67 iconic architecture 185–6 Kaplicky, Jan 64
Foster, Norman 32, 45 Grimshaw, Nicholas 31, 42, 43, 56, 68 IDEA (International Dialogue of Keck House Extension, Highland Park,
Chiswick Park, West London 64 Gropius, Walter 8, 9, 19, 126 Experimental Architecture) 25 Illinois 153
High Tech 55, 56, 67 Gruppo Romano Architetti Urbanisti Imperial War Museum North, Trafford, Khatib & Alami 182
Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy of (GRAU) 140 Manchester 186 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Arts 53 Guangzhou Opera House, China 67 Independent Group 146 163
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Guerrini, Giovanni 130 Inntel Hotel, Zaandam, The Netherlands Kings Place, London 63
Norwich 31, 56 Guggenheim, New York City 21 189–90 Kirby, Alan 70
30 St Mary Axe, London (Swiss RE Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 65, 66, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris 63 Kitakyushu Central Library, Japan 163
Building), London 186 186 International Dialogue of Experimental Klampenborg housing, Denmark 19, 20
Fournier, Colin 68 Guild House, Philadelphia, PA 24, 73, Architecture (IDEA) 25 Klotz, Heinrich 125
Fowler, Charles 41 128 International Postmodernism 55–6 Knott, Ralph 46
Frampton, Kenneth 161 Gwathmey, Charles 148, 173 International Style 8–9, 26, 30, 123, Koetter, Fred 28, 152
Franchini, Gianfranco 42 126, 177 Koolhaas, Rem 54, 66–7, 85, 152,
Friedrich, Caspar David 9 Hadid, Zaha 54, 59, 65, 66–7, 70, 186 Isle of Dogs pumping station 1, 34 156–7, 182
Fujimi Country Club, Japan 163 Hall, Peter 12 Islington Square, Manchester 58–9, Kowloon Ventilation Building, Hong
Fuksas, Massimiliano 55 Hamilton, Richard 146 187 Kong 64
Fun Palaces 15, 16 Harari, Yuval Noah 2 Isozaki, Arata 163–4 Kozlowski, Dariusz 180
Furman, Adam Nathaniel 120 Harrison, Wallace 129 Memphis Group 163 KPF 172
Future University, New Cairo, Egypt Harvard University, Cambridge, Qatar National Convention Centre, Krier, Léon 37, 161
182 Massachusetts, Arthur M. Sackler Doha, Qatar 62–3 Kultur und Kongresszentrum, Lucerne,
Museum 60 Team Disney Building, Orlando, Switzerland 63
Gare do Oriente, Lisbon 68 Les Hautes-Formes, Paris 55 Florida 55, 62, 104–5, 173 Kunsthaus Graz art museum, Austria 68
Gas Company Tower, Los Angeles 168 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 128 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980
‘Gateways’, Granary Square, King’s Hayward Gallery, London 22 30 La Padula, Ernesto Bruno 130
Cross 121, 193 Hejduk, John 148 Italy 124–7, 139–43 La Tourette 25
Gaudí, Antoni 9, 34 Helsingør courtyard housing, Denmark Italy: The New Domestic Landscape LAB Architecture Studio 69
Gehry, Frank 19 exhibition, MOMA, New York Lanark Road, Maida Vale 32, 35, 36
Chiat/Day Building, Los Angeles Henley Royal Regatta, Club House 1972 141–2, 145, 146 Lang House, Washington, Connecticut
102–3, 146 51–2 Ito, Toyo 67, 68 149, 150
Disney resorts 173 Herman Miller factory, Runnymede, Izenour, Steven 24 Lapidus, Morris 131–3, 154
Guggenheim Bilbao 65, 66, 186 Surrey 42 Late Modernism 54
Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 Hermitage, St Petersburg 67 Jacobs, Jane 12, 23–4, 28, 137, 138, Le Corbusier
161 Herron, Ron 22 152 Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut,
Gehry’s house, Santa Monica, Herzog & de Meuron 66, 186 Jacobsen, Arne 11, 19 Ronchamp 20–1, 25
California 35, 90, 153 High Modernism 129, 156 Jahn, Helmut 153, 168, 170–2 comparisons with 9, 25, 55, 147
General Electric Building, Manhattan, High Tech 15, 16, 31, 35, 41, 42, 50, James Stirling Michael Wilford & influence of 148
New York City 168 55, 56, 67, 147 Associates 108, 109 Maisons Jaoul, Paris 11, 124
Gibbs, James 6 Hill Hall Women’s Dormitories, Japan 22, 163–4 Villa Savoye 190
Gibson, Sidell 64 University of Pennsylvania 19–20 Jarzabek, Wojciech 180–1 Villa Stein, Garches 147
Gintoff, Vladimir 179 Historic England 51, 56 Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Ville Radieuse 14, 20, 28
Giurgola, Romaldo 148 The History of Postmodern Architecture French Polynesia 68 Learning from Las Vegas 24, 149
Glancey, Jonathan 44, 51, 165 125 Jencks, Charles 17, 28, 29 Lebens, Ralph 31
Glass Farm, Schijndel, The Netherlands Holl, Steven 67 on Arata Isozaki 164 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 164
188 Hollein, Hans 25, 144–6 criticism of International Modernism Lee, C.J. 179, 182
global culture 13 Memphis Group 163 177 Leeds Town Hall 15
Goff, Bruce 22 Museum Abteiberg, on Hans Hollein 26 Les Halles, Paris 138
Goldberger, Paul 170, 171 Mönchengladbach 85, 165 influence 33 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 152
Index 199
Lewerentz, Sigurd 11 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape Outram, John 1, 33, 34, 55, 111 Qatar National Convention Centre,
Libero, Adalberto 124 exhibition, 1972 141–2, 145, Doha, Qatar 62, 63
Libeskind, Daniel 66, 186 146 Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles 169,
Lieb House, Barnegat Light, Long Island, Modern Architecture exhibition, 1932 170 Raafat, Aly 182
NJ. 24 123 Palazzo dei Congressi, Rome 124 Radical Postmodernism 59, 141–3,
Limehouse Studios, West India Docks, The New York Five exhibition, 1969 Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Rome 162
London 44 148 130 Radice, Barbara 162
Lincoln Center, New York City 129 Moore, Charles 133–4 Palazzo ENPAS, Bologna 126, 127 Rationalism 6–7, 8, 124, 139
Littlewood, Joan 15, 16 Daisy House, Chicago 153, 163 Palazzo Grande, Livorno 122–3, 127 RCA Building, New York 168
Llewelyn Park, NJ, Residence and Pool the Grays 148, 149 Palladio, Andrea 147 regionalism 11, 19, 124, 178
House 106, 149 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans 27–8, Papadakis, Andreas 33 Reichstag building, Berlin 67
Llewelyn-Davies, Richard 15 76–7, 160, 164 Parabita Cemetery, Apulia 140 Reid, Richard 35, 37
Lloyd’s building, London 31, 44, 56, 67 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 Parry, Eric 69 Retti Candle Shop, Vienna 25, 40, 78,
Locke, John 8 30 passive solar design 31, 41 145
London Bridge City 55 Moretti, Luigi 125 Paternoster Square, City of London 64 Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
London County Council (LCC) Architects Morphosis 86, 152, 153 Pawley, Martin 42 (RBTA) 80, 81, 138–9
Department 39, 47 Moss, Eric Owen 151, 152–3 Peak Tower, Hong Kong 52, 54 Rice, Peter 41, 42
London Eye 46 Muratori, Saverio 126, 127 Peckham Library, South London 35 Richard Reid Architects 37
Loos, Adolf 24, 25, 26 Muschamp, Herbert 28, 164 Pelli, Cesar 168–70, 172, 178–9 Richards Medical Centre, Philadelphia
Los Angeles 152–3 Musee D’Orsay, Paris 68 Pennsylvania Station, New York City 17
Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 138 Rietveld, Gerrit 26
Pudong, Shanghai 178 85, 165 Pensacola Apartment Complex, Florida Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht 26
Lutyens, Edwin 2, 10, 48, 50 MVRDV 118, 188–9 153–4 Riverbay, Miami 156
Lyall, John 35 Perez Architects 27, 160 Riverside Studios, Hammersmith,
Lyall, Sutherland 43 National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing, Perpetual Savings and Loan Building, London 35
London 33, 107 Los Angeles 130 Robertson, Jaquelin T. 148
Maccreanor Lavington 186 National Museum of Australia, Perry, Grayson 187–8 Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London
Madrid Barajas airport, Madrid 67 Canberra, Australia 190 Pesce, Gaetano 142 39
Maillart, Robert 68 National Portrait Gallery, Ondaatje Peter Barber Architects 116–17 Robot Order 34
Maisons Jaoul, Paris 11, 124 Wing, London 35 Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Roche Dinkeloo 172
Maki, Fumihiko 22 National Stadium, Olympic Green, Malaysia 178–9 Rockefeller Center, New York City 50,
Malaysia 178–9 Beijing 66 Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg, 168
Manchester Town Hall 15 Neoclassicism see classicism Germany 186 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 124, 125
Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, Nervi, Pier Luigi 68 Piacentini, Marcello 124 Rogers, Richard 32, 45
California 21 Netherfield housing, Milton Keynes 35 Piano, Renzo 31, 32, 42, 45, 68 Billingsgate fish market 53
Marks, David 46 The Netherlands 188–90 Piazza del Municipio e Monumento Chiswick Park, West London 64
masterplanning see city planning Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart 56, 96, ai Partigiani, Segrate, Italy 140, High Tech 31, 55, 67
Mathematics of the Ideal Villa 147 164–5 141 Lloyd’s building, London 31, 44, 56,
Maunsel Housing Society 38 Neues Museum, Berlin 68 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans 27–8, 67
Mayne, Thom 152 Neutra, Richard 15 76–7, 160, 164 Pompidou Centre, Paris 42, 67, 171
McCurry, Margaret 153 50 New Bond Street, London 69 Pink House, Miami 154 Urban Taskforce 53
McDonald’s, Los Angeles 134 New Castle County, Delaware, House Place du Nombre D’Or, Antigone, Romano, Giulio 128
McGregor Memorial Conference 150 Montpellier 157, 158–9 Romano, Mario 130
Center, Detroit 129–30 New Famen Temple, Xi’an, China 179 Poland 179–81 The Romantic Revolution 10
McHarg, Ian 16 New Formalism 129–31 political narratives 7–8, 13 Romanticism 6–7, 8, 10
McMorran, Donald 48 New Haven House, Connecticut 133–4 PoMo 1, 168 Roosevelt Island redevelopment 157
Meier, Richard 148, 164 New House, Sussex 34 Pompidou Centre, Paris 42, 67, 171 Rose Tower, Dubai 182
Melvin, John 35, 37 New London Vernacular (NLV) 186 Ponti, Gio 125 Roseberry Mansions, King’s Cross,
Memphis Group 161–3 New Scotland Yard, Victoria Pop architecture 146–7 London 186
Mendini, Alessandro 163 Embankment, London 46, 47, 50 Pop Art 15, 24, 25, 146 Rossi, Aldo
Mercedes Benz Museum, Stuttgart 186 New York Five 148, 154 Popera, Karolina 179 The Architecture of the City 152
Mercers’ House, Essex Road, London Newton, Isaac 6 Porphyrios, Dimitri 65 Piazza del Municipio e Monumento ai
37 Northampton Hospital 20 Portcullis House, Bridge Street, London Partigiani, Segrate 140
Meston, Stanley Clark 134 Northamptonshire County Hall 35 67, 68 San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena,
meta-narratives 7–8, 13 Norwest Center, Minneapolis 168, 172 Portland Building, Oregon 91 Italy 26–7, 74–5, 141
MI6 building, London 32, 45, 49–50, Nouvel. Jean 35, 63 Portmeirion, Gwynedd, North Wales Teatro del Mundo, Venice Biennale
101 33 27, 82–3
Miami 154–5 Oak Park, Illinois 21 Portoghesi, Paolo 127, 128, 160, 163 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980
Michael D Eisner Building, Team Disney, Oakwood, Warrington New Town 38, Portzamparc, Christian de 55 30
California 173 39 Postmodernism: Style and Subversion Rotterdam Market Hall, The
Michelangelo 164 occupant-centred approach 133 exhibition, V&A Museum, London Netherlands 118, 188–9
Midland Bank building, Fenchurch Office for Metropolitan Architecture 178 Rowe, Colin 28, 42, 147–8, 151–2,
Street, City of London 51, 56 (OMA), Rotterdam 156 Post-Postmodernism 59 165
Mies van der Rohe 19, 22, 126 Oldenburg, Claes 100, 146 No.1 Poultry, City of London 56, 60, Royal Academy of Arts, Sackler
Milan Fiera 1981 161–3 Olympia Center, Chicago 168 110, 111 Galleries, London 53
Miralles, Enric 67 OMA 156, 157, 161, 188 Poundbury, Dorset 37 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,
Mississauga City Hall, Toronto, Canada Ondaatje Wing, National Portrait PPG Place, Pittsburgh 166–7, 172 London 35
35, 97 Gallery, London 35 prefabrication 14, 42 Royal Society 6
Mito, Ahmed 182 One and Two Liberty Place, Preston Town Hall 15 Rudofsky, Bernard 38, 137
Modern One and Two, Edinburgh 1 Philadelphia 172 Price, Cedric 12, 16, 56 Ruined Megastructure – Incubation
Modernism 1–2, 6, 8–9, 12, 15, 17, Oppositions 151 Princess Tower, Dubai 182 Process 163
19, 22, 63, 123, 155–6 ‘organised complexity’ 12, 24 Pruitt-Igoe housing estate, St. Louis, Rykwert, Joseph 191
MOMA, New York Orinda House, California 133–4 Missouri 177
Architecture and Design exhibition Otero-Pailos, Jorge 133 Pugin, Augustus 31, 166 Saarinen, Eero 19–20
143 Oude Stadhuis, The Hague 34 Purini, Franco 30, 140, 141 Saarinen, Eliel 20, 24
200 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM
Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy of Southeast Financial Center, Miami 168 Torre Velasca, Milan 125 Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland
Arts, London 53 Sparrowhawk, Mark 46 town planning see city planning 124
Saffarini, Adnan 182, 183 Spijkenisse City Centre, The Netherlands Triplex apartments, Playa del Rey, Los Villa Savoye, near Paris 190
Sagrada Família, Barcelona 9 188 Angeles 153 Villa Stein, Garches, France 147
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, St Catherine’s College, University of Tsukuba Civic Centre, Japan 163, 164 Ville Radieuse 14, 20, 28
Norwich 31, 56 Oxford 19 Tuntex Sky Tower, Kaohsiung 179 Villiers Street, Charing Cross, London
Sainsbury’s supermarket, Camden, St Mark’s Road, Kensington 35, 89 TVam building, Camden, North London 46
London 43 St Martin-in-the-Fields, London 6 26, 43–4, 45, 146 VINEX housing programme, The
Salginatobel Bridge, Switzerland 68 30 St Mary Axe, London 186 TVP Building, Warsaw, Poland 181 Netherlands 188
Salk Institute, La Jolla, California 128 St Thomas’ Hospital, London 47 TWA building, JFK Airport, New York VitraHaus, Weil am Rhein 66
Samuel Properties 42 St Vincent Street Church, Glasgow 5, 6 19 Vriesendorp, Madelon 85, 156
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy starchitects 185 Twardowska, Maria 181 Vyazemsky, Andreyevich 7
26–7, 74–5, 141 State of Illinois Center, Chicago 170–1
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art statutary listing 56 Umeda, Masanori 162 Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida
109 Stern, Robert 63, 150–1 UN Studio 186 173
SAS Royal Hotel, Copenhagen 19 Disney resorts 173 Ungers, Oswald Mathias 30, 141, 152 Dolphin and Swan Resort Hotels 60,
The Savage Mind 152 Eisner Manhattan apartment 173 Union Carbide Building, New York 126 90–1, 173–4, 175, 179
Saxon Court, King’s Cross, London Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, Residence United Arab Emirates 182–3 Team Disney Building 55, 62, 104–5,
186 and Pool House 106, 149 United States 21–2, 128–35 173
Scandinavia 11, 19–20 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 University of Cairo, Central Library 182 WAM Architecten 189–90
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 5 30 University of Pennsylvania 16, 19, 23, Wang Building, New York 168
School Construction Systems the Whites 148 128 Warhol, Andy 15
Development project 16 Stile 125 University of Warsaw Library, Poland Waterhouse, Alfred 15
School of Slavonic and East European Stirling, James 21, 33, 56, 60 181 Weeks, John 15
Studies, University College London comparisons with 45, 61 urban design see city planning Weill Hall, Ford School of Public Policy,
186–7 Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart 56, 96, Urban Taskforce 53 Ann Arbour, Michigan 63
Schullin jewellery shop, Vienna 25–6, 164–5 Utzon, Jørn 4–5, 19, 20 Welsh National Assembly building,
40, 79, 145–6 No.1 Poultry, City of London 56, 60, Cardiff 67
Schwandbach Bridge, Switzerland 68 110, 111 V&A Museum, London, Postmodernism: West Kowloon Cultural District, China
Schwartz Center for the Performing rejection of Disney commissions 175 Style and Subversion exhibition 67
Arts, Cornell University 60 Stockholm Public Library 19 178 Western Morning News building,
SCI-Arc, Santa Monica 153 Stone, Edward Durell 115, 129, 130, Vagnetti, Luigi 122–3, 127 Plymouth 56
Scolari, Massimo 140, 161 131 Van Allen, William 172 Westferry Studios, Limehouse, London
Scott, George Gilbert 15 Strada Novissima, Venice 29, 30, 161 Van der Salm, Frank 188 61, 62
Scott, Giles Gilbert 46, 49, 50 Street-Porter, Janet, house, Clerkenwell. Vanbrugh, John 128 The Whites 147–8
Scott Brown, Denise (see also Venturi, London 34 Vanna Venturi House,, Philadelphia 24, Wilford, Michael 60–1, 108, 109
Scott Brown and Associates) Sudjic, Deyan 41 24, 128 Will Faber & Dumas Headquarters,
coming out as a Postmodernist 178 Superstudio 142, 164 Variations on a Theme Park 174–5 Ipswich 31
critique of PoMo 168 Supersurface 142 Venice Architecture Biennale 1979, Williams-Ellis, Sir Clough 33–4
the Grays 148, 149 Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Teatro del Mundo 27, 82–3 Wilmott, Peter 12
influence of 16 Cairo 182 Venice Architecture Biennale 1980 Wines, James 143, 150, 187
Learning from Las Vegas 24, 149 Swanston Square tower, Melbourne, 29–30, 127, 146, 160–1 Wittkower, Rudolf 147
Sculpture in the Environment (SITE) Australia 190 Venturi, Robert 16, 23–5 Wolff, Rita 37
143–4, 187 Swiss RE Building. London 186 American Academy in Rome 128 Wood Green, north London, factory
Sea Ranch, California 27 Sydney Opera House 4–5, 19 comparisons with 26, 143, 148 units 42
Seminary of the Resurrection, Krakow, Szacka, Léa-Catherine 161 Complexity and Contradiction in Wood Lane house, Highgate, London
Poland 180 Sztafrowski, M. 179–80 Architecture 23, 28, 128, 147, 61
Shaw, Richard Norman 46, 50 148, 149 Woodland Cemetery, Stockhom 19
Shelterspan 42 Tafuri, Manfredo 141 denial of being a Postmodernist 178 Worland Gardens, Newham 70
Short and Associates 186–7 Taipei 101, Taiwan 179 the Grays 148, 149 World Financial Center, Battery Park
Silent Spring 12 Taiwan 179 influence of 16 City, Lower Manhattan 170
Silvestre, Freddy Mamani 183–5 Tange, Kenzo 22, 163 Learning from Las Vegas 24, 149 World Trade Centre, New York City 63,
Simpson, John 64 Tate Britain, Millbank, London 70, 120 National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing, 130–1, 170, 179
SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) Tate Modern 66 London 33, 107 Wren, Sir Christopher 48
143–4, 187 Teatro del Mundo, 1979 Venice on Terry Farrell 40 Wright, Frank Lloyd 10, 15, 21, 40, 68
Smith House, Darien, Connecticut 148 Biennale 27, 82–3 Venice Architecture Biennale, 1980 Writer’s House, Clapham, London 187
Smithson, Alison and Peter 39, 146 Techno-Pop 22 30, 161
Snyderman House, Indiana 148, 149 La Tendenza 139–41 Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates 3, Xanadu, Calp, Spain 190
Soane, Sir John 33, 165 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 7 24, 73, 105, 149–51, 173, 187
social change 13, 14 Terry, Quinlan 64 vernacular architecture 11, 19, 23, 32, Yale University ice rink 19
Soeters Van Eldonk architecten 119, Thermes, Laura 140 137 Yamasaki, Minoru 129, 131, 170, 177,
188 This is Tomorrow 146, 161 Victoria Embankment Gardens, London 179
Solpol Department Store, Wroclaw, Thomson, Alexander ‘Greek’ 5, 6 46 Yokohama Ferry Terminal Building 185
Poland 180–1 Tigerman, Stanley 153 Victorian architecture 14–15 Young, Michael 12
SOM 55, 63, 121, 126, 168, 178, 179, TOD’s building, Omotesando, Tokyo Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal, India 86, YRM 47
183 68 165–6
Sorkin, Michael 174–5 Tokyo Olympics 22 Vienna 25–6, 145–6 Zaera-Polo, Alejandro 185
Sottsass, Ettore 55–6, 162, 163 ‘Tomorrow’s New World’ competition Villa Foscari (‘La Malcontenta’) near Zenghelis, Elia 85, 156
South Bank, London 22, 47 31, 40–1 Venice, Italy 147 Zenghelis, Zoe 85, 156