POST MODERNISM

Post Modernism
• While the International Style continued to dominate the world of architecture through
the 1960s, only in the 1970s did it become apparent that the International Style and
modern architecture were not necessarily the same.
• Indeed, the work of such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others
reveals that modern architecture has never been limited to a single style. Among the
architects who produced important variants are Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo Rossi of Italy,
and Louis Kahn of the United States. Nervi’s vast airplane hangars (1936-1941) and
sports arenas (1932, Florence; 1960, Rome) demonstrate the pure poetry of modern
forms in reinforced concrete.
• At the other end of the spectrum, the Torre Velasca in Milan, Italy (1958) by the Italian
architectural firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (BBPR) reveals the resilient
appeal of medieval tower design transformed into a 20th-century skyscraper.
• Rossi and Kahn explored the architectural potential of elementary building blocks,
drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere, and cylinder. This
approach is exemplified by Kahn’s highly original designs from the 1960s for
government buildings in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh.
• While clearly modern, Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture was rooted in a respect for older
traditions, which they transformed through new combinations into highly personal
poetic statements. This is especially visible in Rossi’s Bonnefanten Museum (1990) in
Maastricht, Netherlands, and in Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959-1965) in La Jolla, California.
• In the 1970s a new movement known as postmodernism began
to challenge long-held modernist principles.
• The architects who led the movement asserted that the use of
historical references in architecture was not only permissible
but desirable.
• To the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, 'Less is more,' American
architect and leading postmodernist Robert Venturi replied,
'Less is a bore.'
• Arguing that the modernist aesthetic was stifling to creativity,
disliked by the masses, and uninteresting to design, postmodern
architects celebrated diversity, color, and historical references in
their designs.
• Venturi articulated many of these ideas in his 1966 book
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
• Other leading voices of postmodernism include Americans
Charles Moore, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Frank Seagram byuling by
Gehry. Mies van der Rohe
• Moore's design for the Piazza d'Italia (1975-1978) in New
Orleans, Louisiana, is a boldly colored, open-air plaza
celebrating the city’s Italian community, for which Moore
playfully arranged fragments of classical columns and other
traditional forms, along with images drawn from a delicatessen.
• Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982)
in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of postmodernist
architecture. Garlands over windows, a giant keystone, and a
statue of a mythical figure adorn this 15-story celebration of
color and ornament. Surrounded by modernist high-rise towers
of steel and glass, Graves’s building is a startling insertion in the
cityscape and a strong statement against the austere terms of Venturi house
modern architecture.
Robert venturi
• One of the most exuberant expressions of postmodern
freedom came in the design of the Guggenheim Museum
(1997) in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. The originality of
its undulating metal forms relate to the organic
expressionism of Antoni Gaudí’s designs of a century
earlier, also in the Catalan region of northern Spain.
• But even as postmodernism thrived,
modernism did not disappear.
• The dramatic and elegantly understated
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by
American architect Maya Lin dates from
the same year as Graves’s Portland
Building.
• Another premier example of modernism,
the High Museum of Art in Atlanta,
Georgia, by American architect Richard
Meier, was completed the following year.
• Meier went on to design the Getty
Center for the Arts and Humanities
(1997, Los Angeles, California), a paragon
of elegantly spare modernist design.
Indeed, variety is the most consistent
characteristic of the architecture built
since the emergence of postmodernism
in the 1970s.
• In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged,
known as Deconstruction, which sought to demonstrate
the arbitrariness of all previous cultural assumptions.

• Deconstructivist architects applied these analytical,

abstract ideas to the design of buildings.

• Leading practitioners included Zaha Hadid of England,

Peter Eisenman of the United States, and Swiss-born
architect Bernard Tschumi.

• In Eisenman’s design for the Wexner Center for the Arts

(1989) in Columbus, Ohio, the architect used local Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts
conditions in generating a seemingly arbitrary
mechanism to govern his design.

• One wall of the art center is aligned with an adjacent

building, another wall with a nearby football gridiron,
and a third with the flight path of planes that regularly
pass overhead. After a brief flurry of interest in the late
1980s, interest in deconstruction faded, and only a
handful of buildings were ever constructed to represent
it.
Thank you