Module 2

Post modern
theory
Robert Venturi
Charles Jencks
Deconstruction-Peter Eisenman
Kenneth Frampton
Christopher Alexander
Amos Rapoport,
Geoffrey Broadbent
Postmodern architecture is a style
or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality,
and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international
style advocated by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The movement was
introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural
theorist Robert Venturi in their book ‘’Learning from Las Vegas’’. The style flourished
from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown,
Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s it
divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including High-Tech Architecture, Neo-
Classicism and Deconstructivism.
• Postmodernism is basically an allusion to the past, with multiple
associations and meanings.
• Postmodernity- heralded by the return of “WIT, ORNAMENT
AND REFERENCE”.

POSTMODERNISM

A re-awakened Historical
interest in precedents
history and
A return to
heritage
tradition
 Robert Venturi
25th june 1925 - 18 September 2018
Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
Awards : Pritzker Prize – 1991,
Vincent Scully Prize - 2002
Founding principal of the firm Venturi , Scott Brown
Associates, and one of the major figures in the
architecture of the twentieth century

“Less is a Bore”
• In 1951 he briefly worked under Eero Saarinen, and later Louis Khan after his
graduation from Princeton University
• Radical ideas of Post Modernism bought about in his book in 1966 – Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture
• He made case for the difficult whole – rather than the diagrammatic forms popular at
the time, and included examples – both built and unrealized – of his own work to
demonstrate the possible application of the techniques illustrated within.
• Published ‘A Significance for A&P Parking Lots , or Learning from Las Vegas’ s 1972, later
revised as ‘Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form’
▪ Moving away from modernist functionalism
▪ Welcomed problems and exploited uncertainties
▪ Aimed at achieving vitality as well as validity
▪ hybrid rather than pure
▪ compromising rather than clean,
▪ distorted rather than straightforward
▪ ambiguous rather than articulated

• In architecture Contradiction has a special obligation towards the

whole ; it`s truth must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather
than the easy unity of exclusion
VANNA VENTURI HOUSE
• Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House (1962-
64) illustrates the Postmodernist aim of
communicating a meaning and the
CHARACTERISTIC OF SYMBOLISM.
• The façade is, according to Venturi, a symbolic
picture of a house, looking back to the 18th
century.
• This is partly achieved through the use of
symmetry and the arch over the entrance.
Critics called this house “UGLY AND ORDINARY”

• Historicist allusions are found in the binary

cleavage of the facade, where we can recognize
the SPLIT PEDIMENT of Blenhein Palace, and
even the PYLON of the EGYPTIAN completed with
its lintel, gapping doorway.
• The FACADE, for example, consist not only of
clearly visible PLANAR ELEMENTS but extend
sharply into the deep hollow of the porch
through the cleft above it , to the BROAD MASS of
the clear story of the second story which suggests
a large central chimney mass until one see’s a
small actual chimney projecting above.
GUILD HOUSE
• Guild house – Old peoples home’ Philadelphia (1965)
• It is a SYMMETRICAL, six story building and basically CLASSICAL in feel
• This housing project, while materially as well ICONOGRAPHICALLY remaining true to itself, reflects
the dignity of a BAROQUE CHURCH.
Charles Jencks
Charles Jencks
• Charles Alexander Jencks (born June 21, 1939) is an
American architecture theorist and critic, landscape
architect and designer. His books on the history and
criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely
read in architectural circles. He studied under the
influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and
Reyner Banham. Jencks now lives in Scotland where he
designs landscape sculpture
• Jencks received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English
literature at Harvard University in 1961 and a Master of Arts Jencks' Landform at the Scottish
degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of National Gallery of Modern Art
Design in 1965.
• He took his studies further in 1970, receiving his PhD in
Architectural History from University College, London
• Jencks is synonymous with his writings on postmodernism in
architecture.
• In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977).
Jencks discusses the paradigm shift from modern to
postmodern architecture.
• Modern architecture concentrates on univalent forms such
as right angles and square buildings often resembling office
buildings. However, postmodern architecture focuses on
forms derived from the mind, body, city context, and nature.
Charles Jencks
•The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, designed in part by
Jencks and begun in 1988, was dedicated to Jencks' late
wife Maggie Keswick Jencks.
•Jencks, his wife, scientists, and their friends designed
the garden based on natural and scientific processes.
Jencks' goal was to celebrate nature, but he also
incorporated elements from the modern sciences into
the design.
•The garden contains species of plants that are
pleasurable to the eye, as well as edible.
•Preserving paths and the traditional beauty of the
garden is still his concern, but Jencks enhances the
cosmic landscape using new tools and artificial materials.
Just as Japanese Zen gardens, Persian paradise gardens,
and the English and French Renaissance gardens were
analogies for the universe, the design represents the
cosmic and cultural evolution of the contemporary
world.
•The garden is a microcosm - as one walks through the
gardens they experience the universe in miniature.
According to Jencks, gardens are also autobiographical
because they reveal the happiest moments, the
tragedies, and the truths of the owner and family.
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland

Semiotics :The study of signs and
symbols and their use or interpretation.
Iconology : The study of visual imagery
and its symbolism and interpretation,
especially in social or political terms.
•1950s to 1960s the study of language and signs was
increasingly applied to areas outside linguistics , most
notably by writers
•Charles Jencks was one of the first to apply it to
architecture
•Semiology and Architecture; the idea that any form in the
environment, or sign in language, is motivated, or capable
of being motivated.
•The minute a form is invented it acquires ,inevitably a
meaning
•The concept of meaning is multivalent ,has many
meanings itself.
•Simple connections and correlations found example the
effect a rose would have if it was called garlic- it would not
smell as sweet
•Meanings through metaphors and context. For example
Music could be associated with Blue as this music was
heard in a blue room, or because it feels sad
•Charles Jencks states that “ there are many historical
movements countering the trend toward an abstract and
supposedly universal architecture. Each one is relatively
minor, but taken as a whole they amount to a strong
movement awaiting formulation as a new paradigm”
•He states that it would be immature to name this
paradigm of pluralism refering to the post modern era
Deconstruction-Peter Eisenman
 Introduction
• Peter Eisenman was born in Newark, New Jersey.
• He studied Architecture at Cornell and Columbia
Universities .
• He worked together with Charles Gwathmay, John
Hejduk, Michael Graves and Richard Meier in the
architects’ group -The New York Five. At this time,
Eisenman developed his principles for design theory in a
number of key publications.
• In 2001, Eisenman won the National Design Award for
Architecture from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design
Museum.

Style
•Eisenman has always sought somewhat obscure parallels between his architectural works and
philosophical or literary theory.
•His earlier houses were "generated" from a transformation of forms related to the tenuous
relationship of language to an underlying structure.
•Eisenman's latter works show a sympathy with the ideas of deconstructionism.
House VI
•Located in Cornawall, Connecticut.
•Eisenman created a form from the intersection of
four planes, subsequently manipulating the
structures again and again, until coherent spaces
began to emerge.
•The envelope and structure of the building are just a
manifestation of the changed elements of the original
four slabs, with some limited modifications.
•The purely conceptual design meant that the
architecture is strictly plastic, bearing no relationship
to construction techniques or purely ornamental
form.
•The use of the red stairs in House VI is somewhat
odd.
•It is an upside down stairs, marked red, which
functions only as to divide the building and provide
the house with symmetry.
• He succeeded in building a structure that functioned both as a house and a work of art, but changing
the priority of both so that function followed the art.
• He built a home where man was forced to live in a work of art, a sculpture, and according to the
clients who enjoyed inhabiting Eisenman’s artwork and poetry, the house was very successful.
Wexner Center for the Arts
• Location : Ohio State University,Ohio
• Building Type :University arts center.
• Construction System :steel, concrete, glass.
• Included in the Wexner Center space are a film
and video theater, a performance space, a film
and video post production studio, a bookstore,
café, and 12,000 square feet (1,100 m²) of
galleries.
• The firm of Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott
won the design competition for Wexner Center of
Arts.
• Eisenman wowed the Jury with his bold ideas for
the art center, which were aimed at linking the
past to the present (“Timeless Earth 1), through
the use of unconventional means.
• The end result became both Peter Eisenman’s
first large public commission and one of the first
large scale constructions of Deconstructivist
Architecture.
Design process
• The literal use of the rotated grid is
used by Eisenman as an extensive
method of giving the architecture its
own voice.
• The identification of the dialectic
grids stems from conditions that
exist at the boundary of the site,
Eisenman then grafts one grid on top
of the other and seeks potential
connections or ‘event sites’ at the
urban, local, and interior scales.
Wexner Center for the Arts
•The extension of the Columbus street grid generates a new
pedestrian path into the campus, a ramped east-west axis.
•a major part of the project is not a building itself, but a 'non-
building'.
•Scaffolding traditionally is the most impermanent part of a
building. A large white metal grid meant to suggest Scaffolding to
give the building a sense of incompleteness.
•For although this building shelters, it does not symbolize that
function.
 • To add to the depth of possibilities afforded by this
excavation of the immediate condition of the grid
Eisenman grafts figured scaffolding onto the site and
integrates this figure into the primary circuit or pathway
of the building.
• The scaffolding is scaled to represent the module of the
grid that is interpretable at a human scale.
• The scaffold is reduced to its raw type, to the essential
• Scalar operations are performed
condition that signifies the essence of its existence that
as a means of mediating the scale
being an impermanent accessory to architecture that
of the urban grid towards a
allows its construction, but does not necessarily shelter.
pedestrian or human scale, lastly,
• This architecture of non-shelter is aligned directly
the results of these operations
adjacent to an interior pathway within the building that
serves as a map that is used to
does enclose and protect.
locate program, pathways,
structure, interior forms,
excavations, and views along the
newly afforded possibilities of
‘event sites’ in both the horizontal
and vertical planes.
• The results of these operations
are visible in almost every aspect of
the construction, from the module
in the curtain wall, the tiling of the
pavers, planters and trees on site.
• Eisenman coupled his grid abstractions with a series of figures that would play a key role in his aim of
linking the past with the present.
• The most prominent of these figures exists as a reconstruction of a part of the armoury that occupied
the site from 1898 until it was terminally damaged by fire on May 17th 1958.
• The figure of the armoury Eisenman has presented along the south pedestrian access (the most
visually accessible elevation of the building) has been reduced to a series of fragments of armoury-like
forms that indicate the ‘essence’ of the armoury without reproducing any of the original intricate detail.
• Within the armoury forms the negative space carved out of the solid
brick masses that make up these figures is cast with a dark tinted
curtain wall, within which is an aluminum mullion pattern
evocative of the use of grid.
• The contrast created by the anodized aluminum of the mullions
intensifies the impenetrable depth of the glass.
• The lack of historical fidelity in the reconstruction of the armoury,
the fragmentation of the form, and the insertion of dark glass into the
voids left between these fragments seems to speak of the disjointed
manner in which we reflect the past, and in turn, it serves to remind us
of a past we have lost and can never return to.
• In revisiting the design devices that Eisenman used in the design of
the Wexner Center for the Arts is has been possible to determine that
much of the abstraction of form derives itself from co-related
processes.
• Initiated by a series of processes which appropriate and manipulate
‘rotate’ the coordinates of the urban and pedestrian, horizontal and
vertical, and the past and the present Eisenman produces three very
distinctive extensive and intensive operations of shifting, figuring,
fragmenting that coalesce into an engaging ecology for the celebration
of creative thought.