Sir Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman

REVISITING
POSTMODERNISM
© Sir Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman

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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

Pumping station on the Isle of Dogs. John Outram, 1988

2 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

twentieth century; whilst Postmodernism is possibly disadvantaged in the

propaganda and PR stakes by comparison, perceiving history as having many
threads, conflicts and meanderings, and is invariably personal rather than
communal. To a writer or historian who believes in the tidy supremacy of the
Modernist meta-narrative, everything and everybody must then fit into this
single idea – so that pre-Modernists like Antoni Gaudí, Charles Rennie
Mackintosh and early Frank Lloyd Wright were all labelled as early
Modernists and therefore part of that narrative. Architects who didn’t fit the
story, such as Edwin Lutyens or Jože Plečnik or Charles Francis Annesley
Voysey, were then outside the narrative and seen singularly and very unfairly
as nothing like as significant in terms of their place in the grand narrative of
twentieth-century architecture.
Modernism searched for and celebrated certainty. Its zeal, confidence and
even self-righteousness allowed it to persist despite its obvious failings, turning
the world ever more one-dimensional. As a reaction against it, the ‘post-’ age
is a celebration of uncertainty, plurality, diversity and, above all, ‘choice’,
which returns the narrative of culture back to the individual and the personal.
In truth, Modernism and Postmodernism were essentially natural swings in the
constructs we call culture, and were examples of what Yuval Noah Harari calls
‘cognitive dissonance’, in that:

‘HAD PEOPLE BEEN UNABLE TO HOLD

CONTRADICTORY BELIEFS AND
VALUES, IT WOULD PROBABLY HAVE
BEEN IMPOSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH AND
MAINTAIN ANY HUMAN CULTURE.’2

Venturi Scott Brown, House in New Castle County. Delaware, 1983

CHAPTER 1:
POSTMODERNISM IN ITS HISTORICAL PLACE
The pendulum effect through the centuries
Action and reaction is a part of the natural way that culture, taste and
society evolve; the swings of the pendulum even out extremes. The
progressive is always rebalanced to create some progress. Fierce
revolutionary change and indulgence in ‘feelings’ is followed by a
balancing concentration on tradition and reason, ever rotating and
evolving. All is an attempt to establish the truth of the human
experience. This can be traced back through all cultures in all ages, right
up to today.
The same applies in all spheres of culture, including even religion. There
are many examples of swings and rebalancing: high religion, followed by
populist reformation, followed by counter-reformation. The ‘Protestant’
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were characterised not just by swings in religious
terms but also in cultural terms. For example, the ‘Protestant’ Reformation
was a period of austerity and the elimination of all figurative art, when
medieval sculptures were destructively removed from churches and
cathedrals throughout Britain. The Counter-Reformation by contrast
expressed a rediscovery: the works of Borromini, the era of the Baroque
and the Rococo – of exuberant excess and figurative expression. Much
later, Protestant architecture is epitomised by places like the church of
St Martin-in-the-Fields (1726) on London’s Trafalgar Square (see page 6,
top), with its accent on restraint and severity. Indeed, Protestantism is a
word that generically transmits into architecture readily even today, with
its controlled lack of any figurative decoration or personal expression.
Mini-swings back and forth followed. The work of William Burges through
Arts and Crafts inspired and epitomised excess, just as did Alexander
‘Greek’ Thomson’s in a different style at the great St Vincent Street Church
in Glasgow (1859 (see page 6, bottom)). But in the nineteenth century a
compression and intensification began a process whereby a coexistence of
styles and swings of taste exemplified the era, and for every Burges or
Thomson there was a Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who greatly admired (though
himself a classicist) the industrial buildings of northern England. This was a
glorious period of pluralist taste. It was then followed by a purge towards
Bauhaus Modernist conformity.
Isaiah Berlin wrote memorably about two cultures – the natural and human
sciences (or what we might call science and the arts) – in conflict.1 This
probably goes back to the very birth of science and technology: the
recognition of science as its own ‘culture’ appeared in the many forms of
this ‘Age of Reason’ that was the eighteenth century. It was an era of
revolutions: political in America and France, and technical and social in
Britain’s industrial and agricultural revolutions, among others. London’s
Sydney Opera House. Jorn Utzon, 1973
6 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Royal Society was founded in 1680 by a group of natural philosophers to

discuss themes raised by the latest discoveries regarding the natural order – a
subject that had only recently come to be known as ‘science’. In the ensuing
Enlightenment period – with increasing opportunities for travel and
punctuated by inventions such as the microscope – myth, religion and indeed
most traditions came to be considered as being based upon questionable
foundations. The two sides of the same coin coexisted in open tension in
people’s daily life as the modern world sorted its views out and learnt to live
with itself.
The rate of progress since the eighteenth century, and particularly that of
science and its application through technology during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, has accelerated so that there has been an era of
coexistence of action and reaction: the swings coexisted because the speed of
change was so great. The very word ‘modernism’ – the modern, the
contemporary, the mode – evoked revolutionary progress: living in a today
independent of history and tradition, and particularly anticipating tomorrow
and what it might bring. But the nature of change and counter-change began
to subtly differ. It simultaneously condensed in temporal terms and expanded St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square,
in global terms, culminating in great agitations and cultural conflict. London. James Gibbs, 1726

This is palpable in the poems of William Blake (1757–1827) conveying the

inner turmoil of a man who was genuinely provoked, enraged even, by the
new ‘Age of Reason’ in which he lived. Sir Isaac Newton became a focus for
Blake’s poetic ire, yet Newton’s own inner conflicts were there, expressed in
his belief in the metaphysical at the same time that he was discovering and
structuring his thinking about so much that laid the foundations of modern
science. In earlier times these swings of action and reaction had always taken
place over such a long period that their assimilation was much more peaceful
and less turbulent; they helped us in good time to develop identity and
expression, and indeed generally coincided with generational development.
Children naturally want to express their own identity and differentiate
themselves from the previous generation by not undergoing the same
tribulations as their parents. They make their own imprint upon life and
community and cultural evolution by reacting to parents, as a natural force.
But such has been the rate of change that the conflict not only coexisted in the
time of Blake and of his contemporaries, the Romantic poets William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but has continued to coexist in
modern times. The modern world has increasingly compressed and condensed
these swings and rebalancings.
There is, then, in this confrontation between reason and Romanticism, a
growing phenomenon that has ever accelerated, so that in the conflict
between the modern and the postmodern in the twentieth century, the
movement and its counter-movement coexist ever increasingly, in these
opposing but interdependent worlds. The nature of progress and science was St Vincent Street Church, Glasgow.
driven by a unifying sense of the world, an era of objectivity. Science formed Alexander Thomson, 1859
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 7

a highly focused set of endeavours and beliefs, fine-tuned to a simplistic

cohesive unity, and was able to be followed with a set of rules and yardsticks.
It has at its root formulae and models of existence, which are all based upon
discoveries of reality and the natural order. But the counter to all this was, by
its very nature, not a coherent movement; it was deliberately opposed in every
respect. Romanticism and love of tradition and nature were strong reactions
against a singular technologically ordered view of the world, and in favour of
a more elusive, multi-faceted, anti-rules, anti-formula approach. The reaction
by its nature never deliberately and consciously developed a clear singular
sense of culture or style. As the Russian Romantic Andreyevich Vyazemsky
wrote in 1824:

‘ROMANTICISM IS LIKE A PHANTOM.

MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN IT; THERE IS A
CONVICTION THAT IT EXISTS, BUT
WHERE ARE ITS DISTINCT FEATURES,
HOW CAN IT BE DEFINED, HOW CAN
ONE PUT ONE’S FINGER ON IT?’2
The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire described it in 1846 as being ‘precisely
situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth but in a way of feeling’.3
Alfred, Lord Tennyson echoes this view of the primacy of feeling in Part 5 of
his 1849 poem In Memoriam A.H.H.:

‘I SOMETIMES HOLD IT HALF A SIN

TO PUT IN WORDS THE GRIEF I FEEL:
FOR WORDS, LIKE NATURE, HALF REVEAL
AND HALF CONCEAL THE SOUL WITHIN.’4
Like Postmodernism, the best of Romanticism didn’t actually want to set the
clock back to before the various revolutions; it assimilated the revolutions but
counterbalanced them by setting out what were perceived as the big bits
which were missing.
And so to the twentieth century: countering the complexity and cultural, social
and political changes of the nineteenth century, the world was divided up into
very simplistic groups which have been referred to as meta-narratives: a
version of communism derived from Marxism spread across the globe and was
faced by fascism and capitalism, each seeing the other as the inflexible
8 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

enemy, a totally unreasonable block of thinking, and understanding itself to

be uniquely idealistic and ultimately and undeniably ‘right’.
The comparison with today of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
reason‑versus-Romanticism debate could not be stronger. The early years of
the twentieth century were an era of democratisation and consumerism, such
as seen in the rise of Fordism – the combination of mass production and mass
consumption promoted by the Ford Motor Company’s leader Henry Ford, in
which unskilled workers on the new production lines were paid higher wages
so that they could afford to buy the goods they were producing. Technological
capabilities came together with giant socio-economic shifts, and Ford was held
in his time as an exemplar of what could (and should) be done.
The climate and methodology of Fordism has many parallels to the
industrialisation of Coleridge’s time. But Coleridge advanced a popular
critique of empirical science, referring to the philosopher and Royal Society
member John Locke as a ‘Little-ist’, whose rationalist methodology dismantled
the universe until it lay around in meaningless heaps of little bits and pieces.
To quote Coleridge:

‘THEY CONTEMPLATE NOTHING BUT

PARTS – AND ALL PARTS ARE
NECESSARILY LITTLE – AND THE
UNIVERSE TO THEM IS BUT A MASS OF
LITTLE THINGS.’5
This ‘mass of little things’ was not only taken up by Fordism but also epitomised
the Bauhaus revolutionaries. Founded by Walter Gropius in the German city
of Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus school started off with a focus on arts and
crafts, but very quickly the German political leaders redirected it to become
more utilitarian and oriented towards mass construction and production. It
looked at architecture and furniture through the lens of assembly lines, such as
cars, and considered how these could be transferred to windows, walls and
indeed all components of buildings. Construction itself became a component
part of the urban, man-made landscape and so led to a total reinvention of
design and architecture in the minds of those who had discovered, quite
rightly, that the population explosion and gradual urbanisation and
consumerist accessibility to wealth of so many in the world could only be met
by industrialised fabrication techniques. It was hugely successful, liberating
aesthetic expectations – its influence is still with us today.
Modernism as a culture and style caught the Bauhaus bug and particularly
took up the International Style, where all answers tended to be ubiquitous and
‘non-place’. Key buildings were no longer for the few but for the masses:
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 9

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:

‘THE ARTIST SHOULD PAINT NOT ONLY

WHAT HE SEES BEFORE HIM, BUT ALSO
WHAT HE SEES WITHIN HIM’6
The Wanderer above the Mists. – was in the twentieth century led primarily by the Dadaists and Surrealists
Caspar David Friedrich, 1817–18 and the followers of Freud and Jung, who importantly coexisted in time with
Bauhaus Modernists. It all formed the ‘other story’ of the twentieth century.
The scientific discovery of grander orders in nature – whether the stars,
gravity, theories of evolution or the natural order of species – all points to
the impersonal; the broad orders that are outside of humankind and emotions
and feelings. Although their discoverers are famous, they are famous for the
ultimately sublimating act of discovering the bigger order of things. Unlike
these scientists, artists very much emerged in parallel in the eighteenth,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as individuals, as people who indulged
their differences and personalities. Art became an ultimate expression of
individual identities and the uniqueness of the human personality. In a new
world order, the notion of the artist supreme existed far more than it ever
remotely had in history, when royalty and the Church had been the patrons,
the prime movers. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the artist became the
high priest or even ‘the king’ himself. There could only ever be one
Beethoven; there could only ever be one Picasso; and the celebration of
their difference, their personality expressed in their work and their life,
became everything.
The contrast between two views of human culture is perhaps most revealing in
a comparison, say, between Antoni Gaudí’s personal and extravagantly
idiosyncratic Sagrada Família church in Barcelona (1883 onwards) and
Walter Gropius’s sleek, restrained building for the Bauhaus school in Dessau
(1926) (see left). T.S. Eliot spoke for all Modernist artists when he wrote:
The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;
it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.7

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

In contrast to Eliot’s view, there is a fascinating parallel between the fantasy-

provoking narcotic substances that Coleridge and his peers indulged in, and
the drugs that the mid-twentieth-century individualistic hedonists and creatives
seeking an excess of emotion and fantasy felt obliged to consume – only to
inspire and create leftfield fantasies and links to the otherworldliness of the
non-ordered and anarchic.
Tim Blanning writes in the concluding paragraph of his book The Romantic
Revolution:
There has … been a corresponding reaction to the culture of reason at a more
intellectual level in the shape of strands known collectively as ‘post-modernism’ …
It must suffice to assert that all post-modernists have in common a rejection of grand
narrative, teleology and rationalism. They squarely belong with the culture of
feeling, in a line which stretches back to fin de siècle and romanticism (and indeed to
Baroque). But, as before this is not another spin of the cycle’s wheel, but a dialectical
progression … The romantic revolution is not over yet.9
The Bauhaus began a process of separating design out as a very specific skill
area; indeed, I suspect that architects prior to the 1920s – people like Edwin
Lutyens and Frank Lloyd Wright – did not speak about design in quite the
same way as they did after this era. Today architects speak of designers and
designing as though it encompasses everything about architecture, but in fact
it narrows and specialises. To my mind, design today has come to mean the
application of creativity and intelligence to mass production methods, to
components, to artefacts of consumerism.

Questioning progress: 1940s to 1970s

The belief in the utopian benefits of mass-produced buildings and environments
was more short-lived than people imagine or than conventional history records.
The Second World War was probably the watershed. The calamities and terrors
of industrialised warfare on a global stage affected everyone, whether civilian
or not, regardless of age, gender or race, and culminated in the creation of
weapons that could end all human life. That is when the love affair with human
technological ingenuity, and the excitement and blind thrill of the chase of
science for its own sake, finally came to be very seriously questioned.
Some have said that the First World War saw the first industrialised warfare,
and in limited ways it did: the railway, particularly, was capable of moving
large numbers of combatants to many different places. But this changed much
more dramatically in the Second World War, with the development of the
high-speed fighter plane and the long-range bomber, capable of carrying
phenomenal tonnage to be dropped on cities that were destroyed on a major
scale – whether German cities, like Hamburg and Dresden, or cities such as
Coventry in the UK, or indeed, Tokyo or Hawaii.
What, then, was it all about? Yes, technology was undoubtedly wonderful
and powerful, but what were its real and now ever-present dangers, and
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 11

Maisons Jaoul, Paris. Le Corbusier, 1956

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:

‘TECHNOLOGY IS THE ANSWER …

BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?’
This makes a perceptive observation on the blind allegiance to Modernism
and design that has endured amongst architects. And yet Modernists have
actually been hugely changed by the challenging and questioning, the swings
back and forward under Postmodernist influence. The Modernists of the 1950s
and 60s would not recognise the work of so-called Modernist architects today.
The Bauhaus established its leadership, particularly of physical, technological
designs of buildings and mass-produced objects; however, many other areas
like film, theatre, painting and dance began as early as the 1950s to abandon
the idea that they were in fact Modernist. They reinterpreted and challenged
the meta-narratives. For example, in the cinema industry there was a re-
examination of the oversimplification of early Westerns – cowboys/Indians,
good/evil – to produce highly complex films such as Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti
Westerns, shot by Italians in Spain with good and bad less clearly defined
(notably the trilogy A Fistful of Dollars (1964), A Few Dollars More (1965)
and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)). In 1968 I saw Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting a smooth, clean, perfect world (that
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 13

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

between factory-made (Modernist, Fordist) and hand-made (traditional,

vernacular) houses. In Newcastle in 1946 my family lived in a steel-framed
prefabricated house, clad in asbestos, which was lightweight, well planned
and highly efficient but stigmatised as a temporary pre-fab. My family then
moved within the same council estate four years later and lived for another
four years in a traditional-style brick – and therefore ‘permanent’ – house:
pitched roof, tiles, hand-made bricks, the whole ethos bearing none of the
Bauhaus traditions. My parents and the neighbours all felt that it was a much
better way to live than being in a mass-produced dwelling, but they missed the
efficient planning and lightness of the pre-fab. These choices, this awareness,
coexisted.
There was a spectacular social revolution going on. I had a free university
education; I was able to graduate in 1961 before setting off for America to do
a postgraduate course, at no cost and indeed having a living grant. My
generation were the first of our social class to go to university. So much then
began to change socially, there was no going back to the singular
meta‑narratives – we all felt it was culturally a time of organised complexity.
I was aware at architectural school of the emergence of other sub-narratives
within the modern one. I went to the Festival of Britain in 1951 and I really
enjoyed the technological ambitions of the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery.
Whilst impressed by these technological achievements, however, closer to
home I was appalled by the introduction of mass high-rise housing in
Newcastle, which at the same time razed to the ground so many streets of
perfectly good housing such as at Byker and Scotswood Road.
Alternative cultures presented ‘choice’ as an offer on more radical issues and
to a wider community. For a short time in the mid-60s, for example, I worked
for the town planner Colin Buchanan and was fascinated by the different
alternatives for dealing with the motorcar. With hindsight, Buchanan’s office
was way ahead of its time. It was concentrating on presenting choices of what
happens to cities under various scenarios, from full access to and ownership of
motorcars, to medium or minimal accessibility. In an extreme version of
Buchanan’s option 3, there have been congestion charges, improvements in
public transport and now automated vehicles. All of this makes management
of complexity the way forward, rather than form following function as in Le
Corbusier’s vision of destroying Paris to build his notion of a particular point in
time in the 1930s, which would have been so outdated and unworkable today
in transportation terms alone. I learnt that, technologically, form can never
follow function in city planning because the technology, the very functions,
and indeed society itself, change so rapidly.
But I also learnt that the north of England is different to the south, in that I
never felt such antagonism to Victorian architecture as people expressed
down south. Modernism was embraced as an escape: not from Victorianism,
although that was the mantra, but an escape towards Modernism and away
from pre-Modernism. I had been able to admire Newcastle’s Grey Street and
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 15

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

was a quirky answer to technology and lightness of means. I personally felt he

was much more interested in this than in the service tower at the back. His
persona as an American Mid-West loner appealed to me. I also appreciated
fellow American Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s empowering of schools to do their own
thing, through his School Construction Systems Development project in the
early 1960s. But High Tech during the 1970s lost all the vibrancy of a
counter‑culture led by Cedric Price and Archigram and became instead a big
orthodox business, working for insurance companies like Lloyd’s and Willis
Faber and for major banks like HSBC in Hong Kong, and producing the
world’s most expensive buildings. Today, its evolved successors dominate the
world of commerce.
So, in the mid-1970s, I began to rethink yet again. I had been very influenced
in my postgraduate course at the University of Pennsylvania, not only by
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (see right) whom I knew personally
(Venturi was writing Complexity and Contradiction at that time), but also by
Paul Davidoff (particularly his essay ‘A Choice Theory of Planning’), by Ian
McHarg on ecology, and by David Crane on the capital web.15 The American Denise Scott Brown on the strip, Las Vegas,
approach to town planning seemed much more innovative and inclusive than 1966
 CHAPTER 1: Postmodernism in its Historical Place 17

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:

‘WHAT DOES YOUR BUILDING WANT

TO BE?’
This can only be asked by someone who is looking for deeper meaning rather
than preconceived and applied solutions. And so, by the mid-1970s,
particularly with the oil crisis and the three-day week in Britain, I was looking
at buildings as a resource: how to do more with less in real terms, context,
history and so on. I wrote an essay for the RIBA Journal which summed up the
basis of all I have believed in ever since: that it’s easy for places to become
unaware of their value, and to wastefully pursue utopianism:
Our existing buildings are a valuable resource like coal in the ground or oil under
the sea. … Usually, not until demolition takes place is it realised that communities are
a resource in an economic sense as well as a socio-cultural sense. … there has to be
give and take on the planning side to allow new viable ways of using buildings of
historic and architectural interest [to] change in order to survive. … The job of
urbanising this country is virtually completed; like fields broken in for agricultural
use, once the land has been cultivated to support the population, it is time to enjoy
and manage it as a resource. …16
Around that time I met Charles Jencks and attended conferences and began to
speak out about the hoped-for demise of Modernism as we knew it. It had
become such a style, such a club – so tribalist. I remember a conference in
Hull where somebody said something to the effect that the flat roof is a
Modernist badge of honour and the mark of belonging to a style club. If you
have a flat roof you are a Modernist; but if you want to get water off a roof
‘there is nothing so effective as tilting it’. This for me was a moment of clarity
and change. I felt that in the 1970s we in the UK were catching up with where
I had been whilst in America in my student days 10 years earlier.
I began to design a house with Charles Jencks, and at that point I started to
become aware that the broad cultural influences were beginning to be
claimed or driven or made into a style to which there was a whole set of new
rules. I was uncomfortable with this. For me, the essence of Postmodernism
wasn’t this style, as it emerged: it was an era, a way of seeing and thinking. It
was a counter-balance to reason alone, to over-reliance on mechanisation and
industrialisation. It embraced it all, it didn’t reject it. It wasn’t a beginning of a
Richards Medical Centre, Philadelphia. new style, it was a mellowing of an old one. That is my particular journey and
Louis Kahn, 1965 my beginnings of an interpretation of Postmodernism.
CHAPTER 2:
THE ‘HIGH STYLE’ PERIOD OF POSTMODERNISM
Early beginnings
In all culture and particularly in art, you can find what you like where you
look for it. Speaking for myself – which is the only way I can interpret the
subject – I grew up and had my architectural awakening in the library at
Newcastle University. It wasn’t through lectures or even initially through
travelling, but the library informed me to travel; I became in time a better
traveller for it. The most important physical journey I made was in 1959,
when I toured Europe in a bubble car. I went across to France, up through
Germany, and on to my ultimate destination of Scandinavia: Denmark,
Sweden and Norway. I was looking for the work of Arne Jacobsen, who
had developed a domestic architecture that spoke of regionalism and
Modernism. He became more International Modernist, High Tech and
Rationalist in his later years: for example, St Catherine’s College in the
University of Oxford (1962) and the SAS Royal Hotel building in
Copenhagen (1960). But I was particularly interested at the outset in his
Søholm terraced housing in Klampenborg (1950) (see page 20, top right).
I also looked at Gunnar Asplund, who belonged to an earlier era – he died
in 1940. His greatest building is the Stockholm Public Library (1928), in a
very Nordic style of monumental but stripped-down classicism which slowly
merged into Modernism. I looked at this and also at his Woodland
Cemetery in the same city (designed in 1915). The other architect that was
very present in my undergraduate period was Jørn Utzon (see page 20,
top left). Like Asplund’s work, his courtyard housing at Helsingør (1958)
epitomised the growth of interest in a Modernism with a vernacular feel that
connected back to groups of normal residential housing with brickwork and
pitched roofs. But for me he was the one that best represented, in that era,
the expressive nature of architecture as having iconic potential. This was the
opposite to the Modernism of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, which
had become more universalist, more rooted in anonymity and rectilinearity
and fabrication systems. Utzon’s 1957 competition-winning design for the
Sydney Opera House celebrated the iconic and romantic individualism of
architecture. Around this time, the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen
was very much of that persuasion and it was he who reportedly selected the
Utzon drawings for the Sydney Opera House competition.
Saarinen himself is recognised as a pioneer of the expressive, individual
nature of each project in an idiomatic style that the architect chose, not by
whimsy, but by varied artistic driving intentions. Amongst his best-known
buildings are the ice rink at Yale University (1958) and the TWA building at
JFK Airport (1962), both of which I saw when I became a graduate student
at the University of Pennsylvania and travelled the USA. Seeing his work
was very influential for me when thinking about architecture in a new way.
At Penn University I also saw another aspect of Saarinen, with the Hill Hall
Women’s Dormitories there (1960). These dorms were highly episodic,
TVam, London. Terry Farrell, 1983
20 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Terry Farrell’s Utzon inspired houses for nursing staff at Northampton Hospital, 1965

thematic and painterly, an abstraction of brick and of vertical and horizontal

windows. Of course, Eero was the son of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, Klampenborg housing, Denmark.
who grew from a classical background and embraced Art Nouveau. There was Arne Jacobsen, 1934
a continuity for me here: Scandinavia and North America had had a huge
influence on my upbringing. Indeed, the Geordie dialect is thought to be very
influenced by Danish, with many similar words in both vocabularies.
It would be unthinkable for me to look at this period without mentioning Le
Corbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp (1954) (see below).
This building comes as quite a shock from an internationalist, a Modernist who
had proposed a Ville Radieuse (Radiant City; presented 1924, published
1933). Ronchamp, by contrast, was decidedly painterly. But Le Corbusier
believed as much in painting as in architecture: he is said to have painted for
one half of the day and worked on architecture for the other half. Notre Dame
du Haut had a startling effect not only on his disciples but also on his non-
disciples, including me. I had been alienated by his town planning efforts and

Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France. Le Corbusier, 1955

 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 21

The Guggenheim, New York. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1959

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:

‘AT LIVERPOOL SCHOOL OF

ARCHITECTURE, WE OSCILLATED
BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS
BETWEEN THE ANTIQUE AND THE JUST
Marin County Civic Center. Frank Lloyd
Wright, 1962. Taken in 1963 ARRIVED MODERN MOVEMENT’.2
22 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Herb Greene’s house, Arizona. Taken in 1963

It is always a story of oscillations: that classicism which was evident in early

Miesian architecture, and even in early Le Corbusier, gave way to Modernism
and High Modernists; while Modernist-trained architects, like me, merged
gradually into Postmodernism and out the other end again.
During my extensive travels around America I also became fascinated by the
students of Bruce Goff, who had taken an Expressionist path. I met Herb
Greene and visited his house (see above), and I met Bruce Goff when he was
in residence in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma,
and saw several of his houses. I came back from the States in 1964 via Tokyo,
where I was on an RIBA scholarship studying public housing. I left two weeks
before the Olympic Games there began, to avoid the crowds and expensive
hotel bills, but I was lucky enough to be shown around the just-completed
Olympic complex by Fumihiko Maki, who had designed the gymnasium. I took
many photographs, including one of Kenzo Tange’s swimming stadium that
featured on the cover of the first colour edition of the RIBA Journal, in January
1965. What struck me then was how so many of the contemporary Japanese
architects were looking to combine regionalism and iconic expressionism.
When I returned to the UK in 1964 the influence of the avant-garde
architectural group Archigram was just beginning. The group flourished from
about 1963/64 right through to about 1970. In my view, Postmodernism as a
style borrowed from the freedom and expressiveness of Archigram’s Techno-
Pop approach. I particularly like their 1972 scheme for London’s South Bank,
which I later identified with when devising a new masterplan for the site in the
mid- to late 1980s. Indeed, what is now built is almost an expression of
Archigram in its final achievement of freeform layering upon the South Bank’s
structure. Ron Herron and Warren Chalk, both of Archigram, had worked on
the South Bank’s Brutalist buildings, including the Hayward Gallery (1968),
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 23

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).

Postmodern pioneers: America and mainland

Europe in the 1960s and 1970s
So who, in my view, were the key early players in Postmodernism? There were
architects and also writers and thinkers, and of course some individuals who
were both. Here I will single out four people who I believe contributed most to
beginning the development of the language of what we know as
Postmodernism: Robert Venturi, Hans Hollein, Aldo Rossi and Charles Moore.
Two Americans, an Austrian and an Italian.
Robert Venturi I met when I was a graduate student at Penn. At that time,
Louis Kahn was Professor of Architecture there, but I never was an acolyte of
his. I say that with feeling, because the only way to really enjoy Kahn was to
become an acolyte: you were a believer or a non-believer. I was going
through a stage, that has stayed with me, of scepticism towards those that are
messiah-like; having been brought up as a Catholic and then rejected it,
I wasn’t about to join another church. I was much more interested in Venturi
and the mixture of disciplines at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Penn,
with Ian McHarg on landscaping and ecology and Paul Davidoff on planning
theory. My individual tutor in architecture and planning was Denise Scott
Brown, and it was she who introduced me to Venturi, who eventually became
her husband and partner. I got to know him more socially than I did as an
architectural teacher; but I did follow his work, and I visited his first house –
built for his mother Vanna Venturi – with fellow students in 1964, just before
his mother moved in (see page 24, top left). His book Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture (1966) is for me the manifesto of these times and
indeed our times today,3 which went along with Jane Jacobs’s idea of a city as
24 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Lieb House, Barnegat Light, Long Island, NJ.

Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1969
and transferred to to Glen Cove, NY, 2009

Vanna House, Philadelphia, Pennyslvania. Robert Venturi, 1964. Taken when I visited in 1963:
Denise Scott Brown on the left and Bob Venturi in doorway

‘organised complexity’ (Jacobs’s impact on our relationship to the rich extant

fabric of our cities will be explored further in Chapters 4 and 5).4 Complexity
theory in science was meeting the arts. With it went a homage to Pop Art,
which was again very much in vogue at that time and influenced Venturi,
Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) – the book
that explored the power of Pop Art populism and graphic iconography in the
everyday cityscape.
Venturi’s work took on the serious side of Postmodernism from the outset.
His buildings from this time were all clear essays in advocating buildings as
communicators. His Guild House in Philadelphia (1963) (see page 73) had
many components that became trademarks of Postmodernism: the apartment
building eschewed the cult of asymmetry and the so-called freedom of the
plan, and actually celebrated ‘ordered’ symmetry and ordinariness (although
there is a kind of heroic arch): the doorways and windows are straightforward
but placed knowingly. His Vanna Venturi house (1964) was a play on the
normality of suburbia, but transformed in an ironic way. It contrasted deeply
with the Louis Kahn buildings that were being deified in Philadelphia at that
time. His non-monumentalism and reliance on an accessible, everyday
narrative was very different from the Kahn structures. (It’s interesting that
Venturi did work with both Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn before he started his
own practice.)
Venturi’s Fire Station Number 4 in Columbus, Indiana (1968) appears at first
glance to be ordinary, like the Vanna Venturi house, but there are elements
that are disturbingly not so: the gold lettering at the top, the flag pole etc. American Bar, Karntner Passage, Vienna.
There’s a crisp functionality, yet it’s an ironic play on Modernism, suburbanism Adolf Loos, 1908
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 25

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

architecture, and was quite determinedly graphic in its flatness and

pictorialism. A later Vienna project of his that caused a stir and again
progressed the early language of Postmodernism is the Austrian travel agency
(1978). It’s most interesting that these were all consumer-based, shops and
showrooms situated on the high street, and in that sense they were in the
Venturi tradition of the ordinary. But they were also in the indulgently
detailed tradition of experimental works reminiscent of buildings like the
De Stijl houses in Holland, by architects such as Gerrit Rietveld – most notably
his Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht (1924) (see right) – as well as Loos,
who had also experimented with high-street premises. I find Hollein’s bigger
buildings (like Mario Botta’s bigger buildings) less successful: they lost the
delicacy and intricacy, the fine detailing didn’t translate into a larger scale,
and became a bit bombastic and less controlled. The travel agency was an
inspiration for me when I was designing the interiors of the TVam building
(1982) in Camden, North London, in terms of the freedom to give expression
to short-life buildings and the accent upon the ordinary, plus the kind of
immediacy and pluralism that went with that. As Charles Jencks writes, ‘his Rietveld Schröder House, Prins Hendriklaan,
Utrecht: window and balcony detail.
Austrian travel agency jumped the boundaries with humour and
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1924
sophistication. The mixtures were Mozartian pastiche, in so far as a travel
agency can be so, and the eclecticism was semantic explaining for the tourist
where to go. A gleaming Lutyens dome-hat that said “India”, metal palm trees
said the “Brighton Pavilion and Palm Springs”, the frozen, blowing flag said
“take a boat”, the birds said “take a plane”, a broken column said “the
glories that were Rome” … The quality of details and the minimal narrative
robbed tourism of its usual pathos.’6
Hollein designed beautiful jewellery for Cleto Munari, and in many ways his
jewellery shows elements of the language of mature Postmodernism more than
anything else he did at this time.
Aldo Rossi was a very different architect to the other two. He had a long early
career but first came to international notice when he designed the cemetery in
Modena (1971), which had elements of all three of the components mentioned
above: the vernacular in the shaped rooms and formal layout; classicism with
its symmetry, heaviness and regularity; and Modernism in that it was stripped
bare. But it had another component which was truly postmodern in its eclectic
colouration. This was striking: particularly the blue roofs and the red cube.
Colour re-entered architecture and became part of the language of the new
style, supplanting the International Style which relied on white or the
unadorned tones of synthetic materials such as concrete, glass and steel. The
factory-made gave way to ordinary materials and colourful painted finishes.
Rossi used colour to emphasise role, form and narrative, and here was a
narrative in the cube itself: heroic and iconic but at the same time strangely
primeval. It has some of the elements of Louis Kahn’s formalism and
fundamentalism, but with a heavier reliance upon recognisable, commonly
accepted forms. In some ways it sat with Venturi in that it was in the
recognisable form of cemeteries, but unlike Venturi’s playfulness it expressed
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 27

other emotions: dolefulness, monumentalism and sadness. Rossi’s use of colour

reflects the influence of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose work then went
on to influence many other architects. Another project of Rossi’s that
particularly impressed me was his floating theatre, the Teatro del Mundo,
which was centre stage at the 1979 Venice Biennale (see pages 82–3). It was
based on a traditional form but abstracted in reflection of ideas and traditions
of the theatre and of audience – grouping for a shared occasion but
separated from the overall context – floating as it was on the canals of Venice.
An extraordinarily simple but bold shape, and highly coloured.
Last but not least in my list of pioneers whose influence went on to help
formulate the full-blown language of Postmodernism is Charles Moore
(Moore’s intensely subjective relationship to history is further explored in
Chapter 4). He was a deeply humanist person, a peripatetic teacher at
colleges all over the States, and a collaborative worker who spawned many
practices. This openness first showed itself in Sea Ranch, California
(see below), where Moore was one of the architects engaged by planner–
architect Al Boeke in 1963 to design for a community that would preserve the
site’s natural beauty. The living experiment was of a regional vernacular
inspiration as it started, but there was a freedom of form and an
independence that made it hugely influential. An even more influential project
came about a decade later: Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, designed by
Moore in collaboration with Perez Architects and completed in 1978 (see
Chapter 5). This has become a touchstone, an icon of nascent Postmodernism.
Even in its very brief existence as a public realm project, it countered
Modernism’s object-orientedness with its focus on placemaking; the void,
the very space was the architecture – inspired by Rome’s Trevi Fountain

Sea Ranch Condominium, Sea Ranch, California. Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, 1965
28 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

(as echoed in its Italian name). It was an exuberant piece of theatre, using

bright colour and an extraordinary mixture of materials including neon and
metals: modern, lightweight, cheap materials contrasted with the conventional
language of high architecture. It is almost cartoonish in its use of classical
motifs, with a temporariness and fragility yet quoting references to
monumentalist antecedents from up to 2000 years ago.
In his obituary of Moore in the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp called the
project a ‘festive agglomeration of semi-circular colonnades, neon arches and
fountains’.7 In every way, this was the antithesis of Modernism: it was
historicist, in some ways superficial, used tacky materials; it didn’t elevate the
mind of the common man, but spoke his language, and as such reflected many
of the Las Vegas and Miami manifestations of both interiors and exteriors that
Hollywood has portrayed – particularly the Busby Berkeley musicals of the
1930s. Like a lot of Postmodernists such as Venturi and Rossi, Moore wrote
profusely and was a great communicator; he wanted to reach out to the
broadest audience. But it is in his symbolism that Piazza d’Italia is most
convincing: it said at one stroke that this is a new era and the old one, if not
dead, is being seriously re-evaluated.
There was a very fruitful exchange between the UK and America in terms of
literature. Venturi’s mega-book Complexity and Contradiction has already
been mentioned. Then there was Charles Jencks – American-born,
London‑dwelling – who arrived on the scene and began writing and arguing
and codifying the language of Postmodernism in the 1970s. The other
transatlantic connection (though British in origin) was with Colin Rowe who
had a profound effect upon the architectural community (Rowe’s creative
transformation of the practice of architectural history is explored further in
Chapter 5). His and Fred Koetter’s Collage City, published in 1978, was one
of the most fundamental and influential books of its time.8 Rowe not only
addressed the city, which had been a long-neglected form except for abstract
idealistic demolish-and-start-again versions – ‘anti-city’, as we now know it –
but he explained and rationalised the reasons for the good city. He made
visual and architectural all the very points that Jane Jacobs had been making
in the early 1960s about New York,9 and he particularly demolished the
arguments of Le Corbusier, who in my view, whatever his undoubted
achievements in architecture, created substantial damage in his pontifications
and fanciful top-down overly mechanical proposals for the city of tomorrow.
This is particularly true in the Western established city context: there was no
way that Paris would have been better for his Ville Radieuse. His buildings, on
the other hand, are sublime, proving the point that mass production and
technology work well for buildings but a whole different mindset is needed for
the city. Colin Rowe captured this, and what it led me and many others to
conclude was that the city gives the context for architecture: that you begin
with the city and work inwards, unlike the Modernists who had begun with the
components and the ‘little bits’ – the factory, the car, the bathroom pod, the
cladding module – and worked outwards to the city, where they floundered.
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 29

The Strada Novissima, Venice. Numerous authors, 1980

The watershed: the first Venice Architecture

Biennale, 1980
I visited Venice many times and loved it, but had not been actively involved in
any aspect of the Biennale and what it stood for until I received a request for a
late entry to be installed in part of its first architecture-focused edition, in
1980. I had recently started work with Charles Jencks on designing a house in
Lansdowne Walk, west London, for him, his wife Maggie and their young
family, and we spent a few short hours collecting some impressions of it
– models, drawings etc. – and made a collage which we entered in the shape
of a window from the house. This was exhibited at the Biennale.
The 1980 Biennale proved to be a watershed, not just for me but for everyone
who was interested in the change of culture and the rise and effects of the
Postmodern era. It symbolised the fixing of things; it was the end of the
beginning. It gave structure and inspiration to a generation that then
proceeded to build through the 1980s in a much more resolved, even
(often regrettably!) codified manner.
30 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.

High Postmodernism in Britain:

English eccentrics
While the 1980 Venice Biennale had brought the postmodern style forcefully
onto the world stage, it was interpreted differently in different places. My
own experience of it was on the British side, and that is what I will focus on
here.
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 33

Throughout the 1980s, Charles Jencks and the publisher/editor of

Architectural Design magazine, Andreas Papadakis, continued to have a
strong influence over the architectural press. A scientist and entrepreneur,
Papadakis was from Greece and so was always perceived temperamentally,
socially and intellectually as an outsider to the British architectural
establishment. During the 1980s, Architectural Design demonstrated just how
eclectic the British architectural scene was at that time. Papadakis published
High Tech, Modernist, Neoclassical and of course Postmodern. He was, in the
Postmodernist manner, giving a voice to them all. And because of Jencks’s
energetic personal involvement in all his publications, Postmodernism was
given a full and free hand in his magazine over most of this time.
There was, however, little acceptance of Postmodernism among the British
architectural establishment. Even the Sainsbury Wing (1991) (see page 107)
of London’s National Gallery, conceived by Robert Venturi, the most senior
and authentic figure of American Postmodernism, was ignored or ridiculed. In
my view, his was a very fine art gallery, a clever and thoughtful piece of
design, but still today, regrettably few in Britain would agree with that
statement. And so the UK practitioners of Postmodernism – primarily Piers
Gough, John Outram, Jeremy Dixon, Edward Jones and myself – appeared as
mostly fringe architects, doing things outside the orthodox or mainstream.
I exclude from this list James Stirling, who was more Internationalist, older and
more established – I will return to his architecture later.
Gough and Outram are particularly interesting in that they ploughed a furrow
that was far from conventional and was very definitely eclectic/personal
and English in style. They follow in a long tradition of English eccentrics
that includes some notable past architects: for example, Sir John Soane
(1753–1837), whose remodelling of his plain terraced house in London’s
Lincoln’s Inn Fields is a monument to eccentricity, theatricality and eclecticism;
William Burges (1827–1881), with his romantic escapist re-creations of Cardiff
Castle (begun 1866) and Castell Coch (begun 1872) in Wales; and Sir Clough
Williams-Ellis (1883–1978), best known for designing the colourfully
whimsical and improbably Italianate village of Portmeirion, also in Wales
(begun in the 1920s).
Gough exuded playfulness, though, with a sense of irony and self-awareness.
He described himself as a ‘B-movie architect’, and even on his letterhead at
that time, he proclaimed jokingly to do architecture in ‘three dimensions’ as an
extra service. He was consciously outside the club but knowingly in the club at
the same time, and was forgiven again and again because of this
knowingness. I admire what he and his practice CZWG has achieved, and it
epitomises what I think the whole Postmodern movement in the UK could
achieve; it delivered and still does today. There has been no-one to my mind
that has equalled him in this country – or indeed most other places – in terms
of joy, fun, expressiveness, gutsiness and boldness in architecture. The strength
of his work is that he addresses the ordinary: houses and infill buildings and
34 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

simple commercial or cheap buildings. His architecture is at once irreverent,

cheeky, disrespectful but in-your-face colourful, and not afraid to verge on the
vulgar – as did so many great architects of the past, from the masters of the
Baroque to William Burges at Cardiff and even Antoni Gaudí in Spain. But
unlike these, his work didn’t involve cathedrals or great edifices for the rich;
this was ordinary street architecture. Gough transformed the everyday into
something more special. His, The Circle (1989) (see page 98), a pair of facing
residential blocks in London’s Bermondsey, is a prime example. With its
blue-tiled, curved main façades, it is astonishingly powerful, and yet has
elements that are totally unexpected and non-monumental, like the tree stump
holding up balconies, and the cat’s-ears form at the roofline. The sweeping
lines, like a flock of birds in the arrangement of the balconies, and the very
circle itself – bold, blue and shiny – are so unexpected; heroic in a B-movie
sense, and always memorable. His nearby China Wharf project (1988)
(see top right) drew immediate recollections of Art Deco and old Bakelite
radios, but its façade is much more than that – it has an exuberance and a
joyfulness that makes it one of the most iconic buildings, albeit a small one, China Wharf apartments, Bermondsey,
along the Thames. And the list continues: the house for Janet Street-Porter London. CZWG, 1988
(1987) in London’s Clerkenwell, the CDT building (1998) (see bottom right) at
Bryanston School in Dorset, and so on – he and his office have been and
continue to be unusually productive.
John Outram, who established his practice in 1973, also had a very strong
element of playfulness, but it was of a much more serious type. There was an
intensity, a wholesale immersion and a total belief about his work. He has
produced a series of buildings in which a heavyweight classicism, classical
allusion and exceptionally inventive polychromy are intrinsic to his work. The
first house of his that I came across was the New House in Sussex (1978–86),
which was inspired by a mixture of Indian, Sumerian and other cultures. At
around the same time he built a pumping station on the Isle of Dogs (1986)
(see page 1) which he himself described as a ‘monumental temple’.10 One of
his best-known and most elaborate works is the Judge Institute of Management
Studies in Cambridge (1995; now the Cambridge Judge Business School)
(see page 113), which is quite late for Postmodernism, a style he continues to
work with. It vividly combines the language of classical architecture with
engineering components. His style cannot be ignored, along with what he
himself called ‘the Robot Order’ (Ordine Robotico), which was described by
one critic as ‘the invention of a sixth order, a sheer act of architectural
terrorism’11 and by another as a collection of places that are ‘at once archaic
and hyper-modern’12. He designed the refurbishment of the Oude Stadhuis
(Old Town Hall) in The Hague (2000), in which Egyptian, classical and other
historical references are treated with verve and imagination. He is an
extraordinarily original architect who has continued with Postmodernism
longer than almost anyone else, and he brings with him his deep feeling for
materials and structure which goes back to his early Modernist days and is CDT building, Bryanston School, Dorset.
evident in all his buildings. CZWG, 1998
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 35

Will Alsop has had an outstanding career as an inventor of form and a

challenger of the orthodox and the normal. In particular when he was in
partnership with John Lyall in the early 1980s, the two produced a scheme
(never executed) for alterations and commercial extensions to the Riverside
Studios in Hammersmith, London that demonstrated an ad-hocism and
playfulness. This kind of bricolage approach was shared by various other
architects of the time, like Jean Nouvel’s municipal theatre in Belfort, France
(1983),(see left) and is also in the same category as Frank Gehry’s house in
Santa Monica, California (started 1977–78 completed 1993) (see page 90),
which features eccentric extensions around a pre-existing Dutch colonial-style
residence. It is almost like architecture without architects, but in a more
knowing way. Alsop went on to produce some of the most classic and
memorable buildings that grew out of Postmodernism, including his Peckham
Library (2000) in south London, which is acknowledged as a masterpiece of
eclecticism.
By far the most recognisable in Postmodern stylistic terms was the Mississauga
City Hall in Ontario, Canada (1987) (see page 97). It is highly orthodox in its
Belfort Municipal Theater. Jean Nouvel, Postmodernism, borrowing hugely from Michael Graves’s language. Its
1983 designer was Edward Jones, later of Dixon Jones who, as a firm, vacillated
back and forth between being Modernist and Postmodernist. They first came
to prominence with their Northamptonshire County Hall – a 1973 competition
which they won with their great (though unbuilt) pyramid scheme. They have
continued together to do much more orthodox but very well-crafted
Modernism (informed by Postmodernism), at the Ondaatje Wing of the
National Portrait Gallery (2000) and at the Royal Opera House (1999).
Before their partnership, Jeremy Dixon, with his wife, Fenella, carried out
several housing schemes – notably including one at St Mark’s Road,
Kensington (1979) (see page 89) – that can be called British Postmodern;
but they are not overtly Postmodern, being more historicist and contextual. In
spite of the meanness of the brief, they managed to provide something that at
least externally appeared grander and larger scaled. They gave back dignity
to social housing. This, with other housing schemes that they produced at the
time and then the work of Dixon Jones, marked them out as being an
extraordinary example of stylistic oscillation. The Netherfield housing scheme
that Dixon designed with Jones for Milton Keynes in the 1970s was extremely
severe in its Modernism; it was essentially High Tech. They have gone on to
produce other schemes in a more guarded Modernist fashion. But during the
1980s they built on the success of St Mark’s Road with other London housing
schemes at Lanark Road (1983) (see page 36, top) and Ashmill Street (1985)
in Maida Vale and at Compass Point (1986)(see page 36, bottom), on the tip
of the Isle of Dogs, which is, in my opinion, their most successful project from
this time.
I should also mention the creative work of Richard Reid and John Melvin.
The former’s outstanding work is probably Epping Civic Offices (1990)
(see page 37, top), which is, as Charles Jencks wrote:
36 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Lanark Road, Maida Vale, London. Jeremy and Fenella Dixon, 1983

a superb example … of contextualism which pulls together a messy high street

with a set of strong forms and contrasting colours… a low three storey block …
is anchored by a strong octagonal tower that also marks a huge arch and
the main entry.
Like many so-called Postmodernists his feeling for history, context and
urbanism have led him to an important career as a masterplanner, both here
in the UK and overseas.

Compass Point, East London. Jeremy and Fenella Dixon, 1986

 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 37

Epping Town Hall. Richard Reid Architects, 1990

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.

The view from the inside

Mercers’ House, Essex Road, London. What of my own contribution? How did I experience High Postmodernism in
John Melvin, 1992 practice, and where did my work fit into the context of the time?
38 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

During the 1970s, Bernard Rudofsky’s influential 1964 book Architecture

Without Architects was receiving tremendous attention in England. It celebrated
a kind of anti-architecture that left communities and individuals without
architectural training to their own devices, turning its back on all the high-brow
explanation and scholarship and photographs for magazines – ‘archi-porn’, as
it has often been called. This was seen as evidence that the International Style
and high-level Modernism or indeed any other official architecture wasn’t the
only option. It received considerable popular acclaim because people could
recognise in it publicly accessible answers to a culture for what was and is the
most public art, on the streets all around us: the buildings and forms that we all
live with, in our daily lives. The question that the book posed was: whose
architecture is it? I became very interested in this idea over this period.
I looked at how to combine Modernism with context in the Maunsel housing
(1975–8), which involved 12 sites around London. Each building was a
timber-framed, factory-made shell, and so it had the benefits of mass
production, but was hand-made externally – the bricks, tiles or timber
boarding were all adapted to the specific context.
Then in 1978–80 I designed Oakwood, a set of 200 houses for Warrington
New Town, where I was particularly interested in pluralism, populism and
adaptation. I ran a unit at the Architectural Association school in London in

Drawing by Andrew Holmes of Warrington housing scheme that anticipated individualisation

at the front (top) and back (bottom) 1978–80
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 39

1979–80, based on the theme ‘Learning from Chigwell’ – a homage to

Learning from Las Vegas – in which I looked at what people had done with
their standard suburban semi-detached houses: how they had added
extensions to the front and decorated with symbolic attachments (rusticated
stone, fibreglass lions, columns at the doorway); how they had made spatial
adaptations at the back to suit comfort and lifestyle (conservatories, verandas,
chicken sheds, climbing frames, treehouses. The customisation was a bottom-
up type of architecture and went along with the points in Architecture Without
Architects.
In the light of this, I devised the Warrington housing specifically to encourage
adaptation, and went back to take photos afterwards to see how much of this
adaptation had been taken up. I also worked with the artist Andrew Holmes to
create a drawing of Oakwood imagined in many years’ time, in which add-ons
and extensions were based on what I had observed in ‘Learning from Chigwell’
(see page 38). I designed bungalows, on the basis that the bungalow was the
most popular and ordinary ubiquitous house form and never at that time had I
found instances of their having been provided as social housing. I particularly
liked this as it thumbed the nose at top-down bourgeois thinking on mass
housing: where ‘don’t do as I do but do as I say’ was very much the manner;
where architects that lived in Georgian terraced London houses were designing
concrete tower blocks for the masses, spaced well apart, in places like the
Alton Estate at Roehampton (designed by the London County Council (LCC)
Architects Department in the 1950s) and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar,
London (by Alison and Peter Smithson, completed 1972).
My experience with Postmodernism as a style really began with the house for
the Jencks family in Lansdowne Walk. I began working with Charles on it in
the late 1970s, continuing throughout the split with my partner-in-practice
Grimshaw and beyond until about 1982. I knew at the outset that this was
going to be more an evolving cultural experience than a singular architectural
one. This was for two reasons: first, there was so much experimentation as we
went, it was unclear what the eventual product might be; and second, on
Charles’s part, there was an interest in it being an exemplar of and manifesto
material for his own writings and publications. But the truth – as I explained in
the ‘Designing a House’ special edition of Architectural Design (which I
co-edited with Charles in 1986)13 – is that:

‘IN THE INITIAL STAGES I PROVIDED THE

LION’S SHARE OF THE ARCHITECTURAL
THINKING, BECAUSE IT WAS ALL
ABOUT SPACE, STRUCTURE AND THE
ART OF THE POSSIBLE’.
40 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

Clifton Nurseries, Bayswater, London. Terry Farrell, 1980

 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 41

Clifton Nurseries, Covent Garden, London. Terry Farrell, 1981

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

Paris’s Pompidou Centre (architects Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and

Gianfranco Franchini, 1977). I was still playfully using High Tech. For
example, it was the first true use of Teflon-coated fibreglass of any scale in the
country. It was this hybridisation that caught the eye of the critic Martin
Pawley, who called it ‘the Barcelona Pavilion of post Modernism’.15
I applied similar thinking to some small out-of-the-way projects of a more
industrial nature. In 1979–81 I designed a series of factory units at Wood
Green, north London for the speculative developer Samuel Properties. These
units were a deliberate challenge to the greenfield sheds that we had done
endlessly at Farrell/Grimshaw: the Herman Miller factory, the Citroën
Warehouse (1973) at Runnymede – all big boxes with round corners standing
as objects in a landscape. Instead, and in true Colin Rowe style, I made each
of these urban factories space-positive, focused and enclosed around
courtyards, with a solid brick wall along the boundary of each plot and only
lightweight glass walls facing the courtyards. To comply with regulations
requiring a certain percentage of the façades to be thermally insulated, I
added solid insulation panels to the glass walls. Formalised as stage-set
‘windows’, these solid panels played games with perception: what you saw
was the opposite of what you got. None of this had been the case with the
Farrell/Grimshaw factory sheds, which were earnestly utilitarian and had no
time for such architectural frivolities. So again it was High Tech out to play, but
with a seriousness too, as making fun of regulatory necessity was decidedly
countercultural.
I did two other schemes of a similar nature at this time. The first was a
temporary pavilion at Alexandra Palace, also in Haringey, where I took
another Peter Rice invention, the Shelterspan system of prefabricated
lightweight construction, and adapted this to have a more colourful, axial and
graphic manifestation. The other one was the Thames Water Authority
treatment centre at Fobney, near Reading – a building that at first glance looks
High Tech, but in reality encompasses symbolism and reference (see right).
The upper part, a museum and exhibition space dedicated to water treatment,
spreads out catamaran-like to hold down the weight of the massive
underground sewage treatment tanks. The design however includes various
symbolic water analogies through colour, form and reflectivity. We coloured
the façades pale, sparkling blue, to imply purified water bubbling freshly to
the top. The bubble motif continues around the windows and throughout. We
cascaded the shape so it looked like water flowing and rippling. In the
exhibition space we put a wavy dark blue bench, while earth and fire were
respectively suggested by the solid interior steps and wall painted an earth
colour, and by ‘torcheres’ at the ends of each of the two long linear corridors:
these were in fact simple columns surrounded by neon lights. Amongst all of
this we played with neoprene gaskets being removed or not removed to
produce a contrast between the aluminium below and the neoprene black
above. It was a quiet exuberance, very grounded in High Tech origins which I Water treatment centre, Reading.
took delight in at that time. Terry Farrell, 1982
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 43

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.

TVam. Terry Farrell, 1982. Rear elevation

 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 45

TVam. Terry Farrell, 1982. Interior of atrium

The third phase of my experience of Postmodernism has been somehow

tainted in the minds of the critics by association with the Thatcherist boom.
While the buildings designed before and subsequently by Piano, Rogers and
Foster have never been seen as an excess of capitalism, the much more
modest buildings embarked upon in the late 1980s were identified with
Thatcherism and an era of greed. I think it was down to the shock of the
change at the beginning of the acceleration of London as the financial capital
of the world, as well as the emergence of what would later be called private
finance initiatives (PFI) whereby developers were involved in the procurement
process even of public projects – which has since become absolutely normal.
The 1980s and Thatcherism were also associated with the ‘power dressing’
style – some would call it show-off or flashy – and that is the way that the
buildings of the era were interpreted, too. There were many very poor
buildings done commercially at this time in the name of Postmodernism.
My three major projects begun in this period were Charing Cross
(Embankment Place) railway station (1990) (see left and page 100), Alban
Gate in the City (1992) (see page 46), and the MI6 Building at Vauxhall Cross
(1994), home of the British Secret Intelligence Service (see page 101). Unlike
the consistent visual language of Postmodernism developed by Michael
Graves, James Stirling and others (of whom more later), these were much
more freestyle. They had a more hybrid architectural programme and were
also hugely influenced by engineering aspects that were required and then
expressed within them.
At Charing Cross, it was the need to suspend a building over the station and
tracks that gave rise to the roof arches which dominate the south-east
(River Thames-facing) elevation. Some have said the building is an imitation or
Charing Cross, London. Terry Farrell, 1990. pastiche of a Victorian railway station, but it’s not at all – the big spans were
Bow window to river façade all part of the necessary engineering concept. This configuration allowed the
46 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

entertainment on a generous and grand scale. At Charing Cross I wanted to

express a sense of joy and fun – a far cry from the previous few decades that
had given us the dull, plodding joylessness of the Southbank Centre (1951) by
the LCC Architects Department and the new St Thomas’ Hospital (1966–1976)
by YRM. I designed the four cores outside the station as great towers to house
glorious individual office spaces with spectacular bay windows and terraces
for people to take some pleasure in their work environment, not just for plant
rooms and service areas. The arch itself was an engineering solution, but
made heroic and exuberant, stepping down from eight to six storeys above

New Scotland Yard, Victoria Embankment, London. Norman Shaw, 1906

48 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

about creating variety in office accommodation rather than the ‘pile-’em-up-

stack-’em-high’ repetitive architecture of the 1960s. An architecture that is
richly complex and that combines heroic structure and symmetrical elements
arranged in such a way that they make the whole composition have urban
sense, despite what had been an anti-urban condition beforehand. This urban
sense of making a street, composing a gateway and re-creating Monkwell
Square was in those terms all about space-positive gestures. It was an urban
space-positivity that contrasted with the orthodox Modernist urban culture of
objects in a landscape. It was more than a style: it reinforced place, context
and space-positive elements of square, street and gateway. These arguments
were pioneering then; moving on to today, all these characteristics are
integral to any architect’s toolbox and thinking.
The MI6 building was likewise an engineering tour de force in its concrete
cladding assembly structure, as it pioneered in the UK the reusable metal
formwork system that has since been adopted wholesale. It was built out of
storey-height, pre-formed concrete panels – so, ironically, like my earlier 1970s
timber-frame housing, it was a factory-made project but in exuberant dress.
I was very involved in the quality and colour of the concrete and in trying to
design out staining and weathering by traditional and ‘classical’ detailing using
cills, cornices and elaborations. ‘Painting with rain’ was the aim. Sure enough,
it looks technically reasonably fresh and clean today, 20 years later. It was
also another palazzo on the river, but this time on the more utilitarian, once-
industrialised south bank, which hadn’t been built up permanently. It was on an
empty stretch of the river, a blank canvas, as the nineteenth-century buildings
had been cleared away long ago. Undoubtedly my stylistic inspiration were
the two relatively recent twentieth-century Art Deco masterpieces by the
between-the-wars eclectic architect I much admired, Giles Gilbert Scott, the
designer of the power stations at Battersea and Bankside.
Unusually with this project we only had two weeks to finalise the design, so it is
all of a style and oneness in design time – not our normal evolutionary process
at all. The result reflects a moment in time, because, to coin a phrase then used
in the office, it ‘relied upon back-pocket architecture’: it was based upon
evolved urban design solutions previously worked on but in terms of
architectural expression was enforcedly instantaneous, as I will explain.
An option for offices was taken up by the government and we had to design it
very rapidly. When the agreement was signed between the developer and the
government, it was for a specific set of documents that could never then be
altered. At both Alban Gate and Charing Cross we had the benefit of serial
design and construction: we were continuously adapting and adjusting as we
went along. At Vauxhall the design was all done, delivered and fixed in two
weeks.
But the design and massing had been worked out very rationally. It steps down
and expands outwards in a very considered way. The ‘shoulder pads’ of the
side/end massing of cores are the service areas, and the crown of the lift shafts
50 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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:

‘THEY ALSO HAVE A SPECTACULAR

ARCHITECTURAL PRESENCE OF THEIR
OWN, OFFERING A DRAMATIC NEW
ELEMENT IN THE CITY THAT IS OPERATIC
IN ITS POWER AND RANGE’17
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 51

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

Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Terry Farrell, 1995

A turning tide: late 1980s and early 1990s

By that stage a regrouping was evident: a return to the city, to urbanism, to
context. It was happening with all architects – Modernists and High Tech. I
remember a talk by Norman Foster, on his Sackler Galleries at the Royal
Academy of Arts (1991), when he spent so much time presenting the historical
context, the inspiration he took from existing buildings, and thinking this was a
world away from the previous brave new world of the pre-1980s. There was
also Richard Rogers’s adaptation of Billingsgate fish market (1988), and the
eventual leadership he gave to the Urban Taskforce under the late 1990s Tony
Blair Labour government. All of this heralded the fact that the ends were
joined up again and that contemporary architecture had converged and
reformed, with all the advantages of both Postmodernism and Modernism.
Personally, I felt I’d never really given up my Modernist roots, or indeed any
roots, and by the mid-1990s I was prepared to re-join twentieth-century
contemporary architecture as it was now reformulated. Even some confirmed
54 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

The Peak Tower, Hong Kong. Terry Farrell, 1997

Modernists began to experiment convincingly with what they called Late

Modernism – which was a Modernist revivalism – which in itself was a very
Postmodernist thing to do.
Postmodernism – having raided history for inspiration from Egyptian, classical,
Roman and Greek to Renaissance, Baroque, Victorian and Art Deco design
– was now raiding the history books of the 1930s and 1940s to bring the
whole thing up to date. Rem Koolhaas published his seminal book Delirious
New York in 1978 and proceeded to reintegrate his work with the great
buildings of that American city in the early twentieth century – Art Deco and
early Modernist. (Art Deco was indeed a favourite of Postmodernists, perhaps
because that was the first truly populist style – a genuinely international style
but also with a flowering particularly in everyday buildings like cinemas and
department stores.) Zaha Hadid and others began to draw from
Deconstructivism and the architects of the between-the-wars Russian
Revolution. Even so-called Minimalists emerged with a monumentalism that
owed something to the traditions and abstractions of classical architecture.
And so the High Period of Postmodernism was quite brief, particularly in the
UK. Its grip on the popular imagination and its acceptance by the
 CHAPTER 2: The ‘High Style’ Period of Postmodernism 55

establishment quickly drained away, whilst its committed UK practitioners –

Gough, Outram and I – carried on and grew and transformed but still held on
in varying degrees to the basic tenets of Postmodernism. The loss of the style’s
momentum was not helped by many of the big commercial firms trying to
appeal to planning officers and uninformed politicians with a nicer, friendlier,
cuddlier architecture – or at least what appeared to be these things,
although it was often just a question of dressing up an otherwise merely
commercial office building. Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building in New York (1984)
(see page 95), topped with a massive pastiche of a classical split pediment,
and his designs for London Bridge City (1987) in the shape of the Houses of
Parliament, both fall into this category; they were truly awful. Some of the big
blocks at Canary Wharf by SOM and others followed suit, but were not quite
as bad. Generally speaking, however, the commercialisation of
Postmodernism seemed to fulfil most of its critics’ predictions, although this
should not be seen as a negative reflection on the other fine work that had
gone on, or the cultural shift that had certainly taken place.

The Brits do things differently

Postmodernism in Britain was a quiet affair in many ways, although you
wouldn’t think so from the architectural press. As a style or form of
architectural expression it was quite self-possessed, provincial and modest. It
never really took hold here as a style in the way it did elsewhere. Compared
with Ricardo Bofill in Spain and France – particularly his design of the
Antigone neighbourhood at Montpellier (begun 1979; this project and
others by Bofill’s practice are explored in detail in Chapter 5) – and
compared with Christian de Portzamparc in Paris and in his public housing
schemes, such as Les Hautes-Formes (1979) in Paris, there was no British
equivalent that took things over in quite the same overwhelming way. It was
partly because High Tech, as a late flowering of Modernism, kept going
continuously and came to be perceived as the national style. Its British
pioneers, Foster and Rogers, consolidated their domination of the scene in
the 1980s and 1990s, and still do to a large degree now; there is hardly a
view of London, and hardly a major global city elsewhere, that doesn’t
include some of their buildings.
The International Postmodernism of Michael Graves (US), Massimiliano
Fuksas (Italy), Arata Isozaki (Japan) and others was much more codified than
the British version. Isozaki only dallied with the style intermittently and left it
early, but was able to fluently epitomise it, with blocky big geometry like
children’s play blocks as at the Team Disney Building in Florida (1990; see
Chapter 5 for further exploration of Isozaki). Graves shared with the Italian
Postmodernist Ettore Sottsass a massiveness, an element of caricature, as well
as intense colour variety in a highly developed palette – a mixture of subtly
toned greys and greens predominating, but also pink, and full of half tints
(see pages 104–5) – in striking contrast to the industrial primary colours used
from Le Corbusier’s International Modernism to Rogers’s High Tech. They also
56 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

…HAVING CAREFULLY CONSIDERED

THE ARCHITECTURAL AND HISTORIC
INTEREST OF THIS CASE, THE EXACTING
CRITERIA FOR A BUILDING OF SUCH
RECENT DATE ARE NOT MET.18
In this context, the inward battle of taste and culture on this island is always a
struggle between what is global and what is special for us. And in this sense,
Postmodernism was no exception – we didn’t follow the big pattern, we found
our own path, the contrarian’s wandering, mazy, oscillating pathway. But it
has dramatically changed the culture of architecture, as I will explore in the
next chapter.
CHAPTER 3:
WE ARE ALL POSTMODERNISTS NOW
From dominance to diversity
The age of Postmodernism accepted the demise of the dominance of a
single style. Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s there was an all-
pervasiveness about what was accepted, with only subtle differences here
and there. There had been limited choice in each previous modern fashion
era, such as between rock ’n’ roll and jazz; or hemlines moving up and
down, trousers flared and straightened, shoulder pads getting large and
smaller. In many ways architecture was substantially no different to music
or fashion.
However, the effect post-1980s was to free things up, to shift to a much
greater diversity of expression and choice. This phenomenon was
increased by the sheer numbers of people involved in the creative arts,
which has multiplied in recent decades, way beyond anything that existed
before. For example, there are vastly greater numbers of schools of
architecture and a much-increased design profession. In the 1950s there
were only the elite appealing to the elite: a small number of architects,
artists and fashion designers designing for a relatively small group of
informed and wealthy people. From the 1980s onwards, the numbers
exploded on both sides: artist providers and client consumers. There was a
considerable popularising of the arts, and some architects became
household names: Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid; indeed
the sad, untimely death of Zaha in early 2016 was an international
front-page story. In the course of this, the sheer explosion of numbers has
meant there is ever greater diversity, because convergence is no longer
the norm.
Amidst all this, there are today perhaps five broad groupings of
architects; five patterns of architectural approach in which one can
perceive the legacy of Postmodernism. The first are those that continued
as Postmodernists and are not afraid of the name. Second, there are
those that evolved a bit, loosely Postmodernists who then reabsorbed the
mainstream and went off to look at other aspects such as urbanism and
contextuality. The third group are those who only emerged onto the
scene in the 1980s and integrated their style as part of their personal
language, freed of so many of the strictures of International Modernism
because they were never part of it anyway. The fourth are the
unknowingly but reformed Modernists that adjusted everything they did
because they could no longer remain aloof from, or impenetrable to, the
influence of Postmodernism. The final group is a very interesting one:
dubbed ‘Radical Postmodernism’ by Charles Jencks and ‘Post-
Postmodernism’ by others, it involves a younger generation rediscovering
Postmodernism afresh, the graduates more often than not of the last 10 to
20 years.

Islington Square, Manchester. FAT, 2006

60 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Strand 1: the true believers

Some architects willingly acknowledge themselves as enduringly
Postmodernist. They are the true believers, who didn’t break stride or change
direction and have continued with a language that shows direct continuity from
the straightish line of original Postmodernism: it is alive and well in their hands.
Michael Graves was one such architect. His Dolphin and Swan Resort Hotels
(1990) at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida are a tour de force (The
buildings are explored further within the context of Graves’ development in
Chapter 5). They are of a lineage that stretches back to the early work of the
late 1970s and right through the 1980s, but more exuberant and with true
Disney characteristics of brash populism and confidence. Love them or hate
them, they are extraordinary monuments to Postmodernism. If anything, they
are a magnification of the style – the colours, the interior décor, the
completeness.
James Stirling was another in this strand. His US buildings – such as the Arthur
M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (1985) (see below) and the
Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Cornell University (1989) – were
extremely refined, and he got even better towards his somewhat early death
in 1992. Probably his last work in the UK was No. 1 Poultry in the City of
London (designed in 1985 but not completed until 1997), which is perhaps not
his best, but it is a complete and consistent piece of work that very much
carries on the language he had developed and relaxed into. After his death,
his practice was continued by Michael Wilford, who then went on to do his
own work. The British Embassy in Berlin (2000), for which I was one of the

Arthur M Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. James Stirling

Michael Wilford & Associates, 1985
 CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 61

Chichester Car Park. Birds Portchmouth

Russum, 1991

Canada Water Library, Southwark, London. CZWG, 2011

competition judges who selected Wilford’s design, is a very strong and

thoughtful piece of architecture that is quite clearly part of the Stirling/Wilford
Postmodernist oeuvre.
Since Michael Wilford’s retirement, other smaller firms have continued the
Stirling/Wilson tradition, such as Birds Portchmouth Russum. They first came
to attention with the Avenue de Chartres Car Park (1991) in Chichester
(see top left), and subsequent buildings such as their house at Wood Lane in
Highgate, London (2012) and Downley House in Hampshire (2011); buildings
which have shown a strong affinity with Stirling’s work: the manners and the
language are still there, but they have developed their own brand of
somewhat eclectic British Postmodernism.
But by far the most unabashed Postmodernist is Piers Gough, who has
continued in his firm CZWG with various buildings since the early 1990s.
Notable among these are the De Barones shopping centre in Breda, The
Netherlands (1997) (see page 99), the CDT Building at Bryanston School in
Dorset (1998), the Westferry Studios in London (1999) (see page 62, top)
and the Canada Water Library, also in London (2011) (see top right). He has
not ceased to jolt, to challenge and to be a truly British example of
Postmodernist eccentricity and eclecticism. Unlike Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, true Postmodernists who have nevertheless repeatedly rejected the
categorisation, Gough has unashamedly declared himself to be a
Postmodernist, and said to me at a recent University of Westminster
conference on Postmodernism: ‘I’m the only Postmodernist left that’s not
frightened to use the term.’
62 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Westferry Studios, Limehouse London. CZWG, 1999

Strand 2: the inheritors

The obvious ‘inheritors’ of Postmodernism were those that picked up some of
the lessons and inspirations of 1980s Postmodernism, but who modified and
re-integrated into the mainstream.
Arata Isozaki epitomised the Postmodernist language definitively with his
Team Disney Building (1990) at Walt Disney World, Orlando, but he has
evolved and produced a language of buildings that is no longer as obviously

Qatar National Convention Centre, Doha, Qatar. Arata Izosaki, 2011

 CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 63

derivative or caricatural. His 2011 National Convention Centre in Qatar has a

visual sophistication rare in these types of buildings with its arresting giant tree
structures (see page 62, bottom). (The Gravesian aspects have disappeared
from his work; the buildings are much more mainstream and orthodox, but are
of high creativity.)
Robert Stern, likewise, has moved on with buildings like the Weill Hall, Ford
School of Public Policy, Ann Arbour, Michigan, 2006 (see left) and has other
concerns these days.
Jean Nouvel first came to prominence as a playful, experimental type, in early
buildings such as the Collège Anne Frank in Hauts-de-Seine, France (1978),
but has also moved on to other forms of expression in works such as the Institut
du Monde Arabe in Paris (1987) and the Kultur und Kongresszentrum in
Lucerne (1998). He characteristically and determinedly remains very
idiomatic in his building expression; it’s hard to place him. Meanwhile,
commercial firms have moved from Modernism to Postmodernism and back to
Weill Hall, Ford School of Public Policy,
Ann Arbour, Michigan. Robert Stern, 2006 Modernism. SOM, in particular, played with commercial versions of
Postmodernism after having been pioneers of early International Modernism
and have now moved back to Modernism with projects such as 7 World Trade
Center in New York (2006). In Britain, Dixon Jones have moved on from their
dalliance with Postmodern forms, but they still produce a refined Modernism
that is truly informed by their original preoccupations, of which Kings Place in
London (2008) is one example.
I include myself in this category. From early on, I thought that it wasn’t a
question of developing a postmodern style; it was much more than that. Even
though I was fond of and explored the stylistic possibilities of the language of
Postmodernism, I knew that wasn’t the central aspect. Instead I became
increasingly convinced about citymaking and urbanism being the urgent

The British Consulate, Hong Kong. Terry Farrell, 1996

64 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Kowloon Ventilation Building, Hong Kong. Terry Farrell. 1996

immediate and primary concern. I gradually, more or less, re-joined the

modified Modernist mainstream, but in a more aware way, and it was a
revamped mainstream. For instance, at The Peak Tower (1997), the British
Consulate, Hong King (1997) (see page 63, bottom) and Kowloon Ventilation
Building (1996) (see above), all in Hong Kong, I picked up on the context and
traditions of China and the Far East with temples and iconic language, but with
much greater reliance on an adapted and more modern interpretation. At the
same time, the Chinese people were grappling with the conflict of becoming
more global and yet explicitly desired to keep identity and localism. The Peak
is in stainless steel, as a structural expression, and yet a deliberately
recognisable and traditionally related icon for Hong Kong (as evidenced by its
local nickname, ‘the flying wok’). The concept for the Consulate was to
produce a Savile Row-suited British gentleman in a sub-tropical climate. In
severe contrast with the high-rise buildings around it, it sits along the
horizontal contours of the mountainous landscape. With several entrances, it
has a highly choreographed processional route and spatial composition. It is a
piece of classical Postmodernist thinking, but dressed in a far sparser language
than true Postmodernism: clad in white granite with pale green slate, a
hole-in-wall expression and a slightly dainty motif for the windows that carries
on an early Hong Kong 1950s Modernist tradition.
The enduring challenge for designers is urbanism. I have developed more and
more thinking about this and about ‘masterplanning’ as a way of approaching
all buildings, large and small. There is a well-trodden path of developing and
understanding context, of placemaking through diversity of expression. I was
working as overall masterplanner in the early 1990s with Modernist High Tech
architects at Chiswick Park in West London: Norman Foster, Richard Rogers,
ABK (Peter Ahrends), Peter Fogo and Jan Kaplicky; and was also working at
the same time masterplanning at London’s Paternoster Square, with classicists The Home Office, London. Terry Farrell,
Robert Adam, John Simpson, Thomas H. Beeby, Quinlan Terry, Sidell Gibson 2005. Entrance
 CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 65

and Dimitri Porphyrios. This virtually simultaneous juxtaposition of the two

masterplan projects further developed my conviction that it was not
architectural style but urban design that led. The subsequent faithful
completion of the Paternoster masterplan but with a more Modernist group of
architects rather proves this point.
Later, working on the Home Office (2005) (see page 64, bottom right), I was
able to show that the existing Corbusian-inspired Modernist buildings – by
Eric Bedford, chief architect for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works,
completed in 1971 – had not only failed technologically (the concrete was
crumbling; the cladding needed replacing; it had become known as the ‘three
ugly sisters’), but it had also failed urbanistically. It occupied more than one
urban block and sat on an impermeable, unneighbourly podium with towers
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. that severely damaged the setting of major historic buildings such as the
Frank Gehry, 1997 Houses of Parliament (a World Heritage Site). So the very clear solution, to
me and many others, was its removal and replacement by a kind of
architecture where neighbourliness and urbanism and the kindliness of art
predominated. I delighted in demonstrating that urbanistically it was possible
to have permeability at ground level, mixed use with housing as well as
government headquarters, pedestrian routes, and particularly the Gugg
incorporation of art, not as an add-on but as an integral and frontal part of
the architectural expression itself. And all this no more than six to eight storeys
high (compared to the original 18 storeys), yet offering a surprisingly greater
floor area than the original towers scheme. For me this was an object lesson in
how to do urbanism, art and placemaking, with architectural language, style
and expression taking second place.

Strand 3: the real beneficiaries

The ultimate beneficiaries of Postmodernism are those who emerged from the
Postmodern turbulence without severance from the utilitarian Modernist
narrative. These are the big ‘success’ stories: those that were able to develop
an iconic and heroic branding. I use the word ‘branding’ deliberately in this
context because certain groups of ‘starchitects’ attained astonishing
commercial success which had an element of fashion among clients,
politicians, world leaders and the general public, beyond anything that
architects have ever previously achieved. It was, and is, a truly dramatic and
historic turn of events. Whether one refers to them as being in the modern
tradition, as some do, or whether one claims that they are all inheritors of the
freedoms established by Postmodernism, is almost academic: they were and
are a new phenomenon. This was the architect as Hollywood film star and pop
star, as image maker on a global scale – which wasn’t what pre-1980s
Modernists meant by international architecture. Far from it, as they themselves
were the individual stars of their own architecture, they were the style-leaders
and taste-makers. Each had their own personal brand. This has happened in
Citylife Milan Residential Complex. parallel in other fields too: with cars, it’s Ferrari, Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes,
Zaha Hadid, 2013 Bugatti and so on; with art, it’s Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor;
66 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

National Stadium, Olympic Green, Beijing. Herzog & de Meuron, 2008

 CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 67

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.

Strand 4: the reformed Modernists

The next category is probably the most controversial: a group that were
T4, Madrid Barajas airport, Madrid. unknowingly or in some cases knowingly but sotto voce reformed Modernists,
Richard Rogers Partnership, 2005 or indeed proclaimed Modernists that continued in their Modernist traditions
but would never have done so in the way they did if Postmodernism hadn’t
happened.
This particular group is primarily but not always those of the High Tech
persuasion, as that was in many ways the last flowering of true Modernism.
The most singular of these are probably Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Foster, for instance, has swapped his single-building, big-architecture
approach for everyday, non-utopian and traditional street patterns at West
Kowloon Cultural District in China (2009). The contextuality of his remodelling
of the Reichstag building (1999) in Berlin is also a case in point: its dome
cleverly countered the memory of the proposal for a massive domed
Volkshalle (People’s Hall) that was at one time Hitler’s favourite to outdo the
original Reichstag. Rogers has taken his High Tech into an even more playful
area. After the somewhat bombastic Lloyd’s building (1986) and Pompidou
Centre (1977), which so overstated functionalism that it became a very
knowing decorative form, he has succeeded in producing much more plastic,
humane and delightful projects like Madrid Barajas Airport (2005) (see top
left) and the Welsh National Assembly building in Cardiff (2005). There’s
no-one who personifies this more in the UK than Michael Hopkins. His later
work – such as Portcullis House (2001) (see page 68, top), the office building
for MPs that overlooks the Houses of Parliament, among others – is a far cry
from the functionalist rhetoric of his draught beer cellars building for the
Greene King Brewery in Bury St Edmunds (1980) and one or two other things
he did pre-Postmodernism. Although these architects would probably hate
ever to acknowledge indebtedness to Postmodernism, they would admit
68 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

restrained, functionalist way, revolutionising the use of structural reinforced

concrete in them.

Strand 5: the born-again Postmodernists

The final group is what I would call ‘born-again Postmodernists’. These are a
much younger generation who are discovering Postmodernism afresh,
consciously examining and re-stating it as a style, but their style. It’s a double
take on a double take; irony piled on irony. It’s fascinating for someone who
saw it emerge, flower and diversify in the first place, where it was once a
pioneering movement, to now see its rediscovery in many other forms, as a
treasure trove of source material.
It is amplified through the modern media of new technologies, particularly of
film, computer, mechanical image production, digital mass communication and
TV. These are truly postmodern technologies that this generation has taken to
its heart. Particularly the digital medium – that is an enormous and
fundamental part of the new generation’s everyday lives.
The Melbourne-based practices ARM Architecture and LAB Architecture Studio
fall into this category, as do FAT and the later work of Eric Parry (see below
and page 112; several ARM projects are further explored in Chapter 6),

50 New Bond Street, London. Eric Parry Architects, 2009

70 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Peter Barber (the recent Worland Gardens scheme for Newham Council

exemplifies a sympathetic and thoughtful urban development (see below))
and Caruso St John in the UK (Tate Britain, renovation 2013, see page 120),
and Atelier Bow-Wow in Japan. I find it at one level a great compliment that
there is a rediscovery in our time, and on another level disarming because the
quotations are such that I do not fully recognise them – there is a difference,
it is a new way of doing things and seeing things.

Where to from here?

What does this all mean? Where is it going, and what is life really like in this
era of Post-Postmodernism?
I look around at the architecture of today, read the magazines, visit buildings
– the Gehry buildings, the Zaha Hadid buildings – and I find that an
extraordinary change has come over architecture in the last 50 years. Digital
technology has transformed the potential to express and indulge – indulgent
expressionism – and in the course of bringing joy and fantasy it is also high
entertainment, accenting on style choice and fashion to a much larger, wider
audience. The physical manifestation of technology and science in buildings has
reached a level where it is in itself an entertainment. Spanning huge bridges and
enclosing vast domes, or building kilometre-high buildings, then two kilometres,
is a form of entertainment, a diversion, a fashion – one man’s tastes against
another’s.
Amongst the literature on the subject of Post-Postmodernism I would single out
Alan Kirby’s essay ‘The Debt of Postmodernism and Beyond’, in which he
states that:

‘IN POSTMODERNISM THERE WERE NO

TRUTHS, ONLY CONVERSATIONS’,1
and writes of ‘the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge,’ Kirby posits that the
Postmodern world was one that was inevitably full of victimhood, because it was
reacting to the obvious excesses of Modernism: the science, technology and
mass-production that increased the horrific nature of subsequent world wars.
My own experience of a meta-narrative was being brought up in the Catholic
faith, where everything was highly prescribed. But as I reached adulthood and
my world expanded, these perceived absolutes were questioned, just as empire
and the Commonwealth were being questioned as the misdeeds of colonialism
were beginning to be exposed; the wars in Aden, Malaysia and Kenya were
increasingly being revealed as ones of oppression where we, the British, were
the oppressors. Likewise in the church: gradually the Catholic Church became a
postmodern church, in that popes and clergymen relaxed their rules, and they
continue to do so. When in September 2015 the Pope, the promoter of one little Worland Gardens, London. Perter Barber
red book (the catechism), met Fidel Castro, the follower of another little red Architects, 2016
 CHAPTER 3: We Are All Postmodernists Now 71

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

successful leadership or focusing on our communal natures and acting better

collectively. Whether it happens organically, or through coercion, we are all
in this together.
This ever-changing world and the scale of the issues emerging have resulted in
a certain feeling of hopelessness in the human condition. As we increasingly
take on board Charles Darwin’s notion of the inexorability of evolution –
which has famously been described as ‘the single best idea anyone has ever
had’4 – together with the vast extent of the universe that we have discovered
through space exploration, we are inevitably left with a sense of our own
unimportance. Without gods to believe in, the post-Postmodern world looks
out to space and at the vastness of time and realises that one day the Sun will
cool, the Earth will be subsumed, the Milky Way will be no more, and other
things will take their place. What do we do with this awareness, this cognitive
revolution? How do we handle it, what answers might there be? Or is
everything increasingly relative in this post-Postmodern world?
The following pages are a collection of seminal Postmodernist images
73

IMAGE
GALLERY

Guild House, Philadelphia, PA. Venturi,

Scott Brown and Associates, 1963
(rehabilitated 2009)
74

San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena.

Aldo Rossi, 1971
75
76

Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans.

Charles Moore, 1978
77
 78

Photo taken when I visited Vanna House in 1962,

Retti Candle Shop, Vienna. Hans Hollein,
Venturi’s first completed building, a house for his
1966
mother
 79

Schullin I Jewellery shop, Vienna.

Hans Hollein, 1974
80

Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona.

Ricardo Bofill, 1971
81
82

Teatro del Mundo, Venice Biennale.

Aldo Rossi, 1979
83
84

2 Columbus Circle, New York City.

Edward Durell Stone, 1964.
Credit: © Ezra Stoller / Esto
 85

Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Hans Hollein, 1982
86

Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal. Charles Correa,

1996
 87

Egg of Columbus Circle. Rem Koolhaas,

Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis,
Madelon Vriesendorp, 1975
88

2–4–6–8 House, LA. Morphosis, 1978

 89

St Mark’s Road, Kensington.

Jeremy and Fenella Dixon, 1979
90

Gehry’s house in Santa Monica,

California. Frank Gehry, started
1977–88 completed 1993
 91

Portland Building, Oregon.

Michael Graves, 1982
92

Swan and Dolphin resorts, Orlando.

Michael Graves, 1990
93
94

Atlantis Condominium, Miami.

Arquitectonica, 1982
 95

AT&T Building (now Sony Building),

Manhattan. Philip Johnson and
John Burgee, 1984
96

Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

James Stirling, 1984
 97

Mississauga City Hall, Toronto.

Edward Jones, 1987
98

The Circle, Bermondsey, London.

CZWG, 1989
 99

De Barones shopping centre, Breda,

the Netherlands. CZWG, 1997
100

Charing Cross, London. Terry Farrell,

1990
 101

MI6, London. Terry Farrell, 1994

102

The Chiat/Day Building, Los Angeles.

Frank Gehry & Claes Oldenburg, 1991
103
 104

Photo taken when I visited Vanna House in 1962,

Team Disney Building, Orlando.
Venturi’s first completed building, a house for his
Arata Isozaki, 1990
mother
105
106

Residence and Pool House, Llewelyn

Park, New Jersey. Robert Stern, 1982
 107

The National Gallery and Sainsbury

wing extension, London. Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott-Brown Architects, 1991
108

Denver Public Library. Michael Graves,

1996
 109

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

(foreground). Mario Botta, 1995
110

No. 1 Poultry. Interior, 1997

 111

No. 1 Poultry, City of London.

James Stirling Michael Wilford &
Associates, 1997
112

One Eagle Place, Piccadilly, London.

Eric Parry Architects, 2013
 113

Judge Institute, Cambridge.

John Outram, 1995
114

The Blue House, Hackney, London.

FAT, 2002
 115

A House for Essex. FAT, 2015

116

Holmes Road Studios, London.

Peter Barber Architects, 2016
117
118

Rotterdam Market Hall. MVRDV, 2014

 119

De Piramides, Amsterdam.
Soeters Van Eldonk, 2006
120

Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

Caruso St John Architects, 2013
 121

‘Gateways’ temporary installation,

Granary Square, London.
Adam Nathaniel Furman, 2017
CHAPTER 4:
MODERNIST ORTHODOXY CHALLENGED
By the 1950s Modernism was beginning to reach full maturity. As is the
wont of every new generation, young architects were becoming sensitive
to and drawn towards the issues which they were precluded from
exploring in their work by their elders.
Modernism in its early years had been a maelstrom of competing
movements, each with its own distinct take on what it meant to be Modern,
and what the visual languages were that would best represent the exciting
and terrifying new age the western world was moving into.
This initial period of ferocious experimentation from the turn of the century
onwards – which saw de Stijl, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism,
Rationalism and countless other groupings – rapidly gave way to a rigid
consensus. This coalesced in the years following the 1932 ‘Modern
Architecture’ exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art around the
stylistic elements that constituted the ‘International Style’. A broad diversity
of approaches shrank to a narrow and prescriptive orthodoxy.
The limitation of contemporary architecture to a set of highly restricted
formal elements – pilotis, clear glazed curtain walls, strip windows,
expressed structural components – together with the all-powerful dictates
of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM, founded
1928), defined what the driving mission of architects at the time should be.
This made the ground fertile for the rebellious tendencies of architects who
were looking to explore a richer architectural language.
One of the few characteristics – besides a desire to embody the
contemporary condition – uniting the various strands of modernity with each
other and with its later stylistically unified incarnation of the International
Style, was a rejection of the past, and of regional cultural and historical
context. Modernity was about moving forward, universal applicability,
reproducibility, and belief in the machine, technology and progress. History
was seen as baggage, local context as a surmountable contingency.

A return to history and context

It was precisely these factors that certain figures utilised to begin breaking
down the edifice of orthodox Modernism. They questioned its rejection of
the past, and attacked its blindness towards tradition, context and local
cultures, harnessing these overlooked considerations to begin tentatively
re-introducing a certain amount of difference into the vocabulary of
acceptable architecture.
With unimpeachably great modern figures like Alvar Aalto and Le
Corbusier already imbuing their buildings with a deeply felt sense of place
and materiality that resonated with regional traditions, as well as a certain
humane sensuality that had been missing from earlier works, younger
architects had an as-yet untheorised but architecturally explicit direction
Palazzo Grande, Livorno. Luigi Vagnetti, 1952
124 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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.

Shifts in Italian modernity

An interest in the past, in cracking the rigidity and universality of Modernism,
did not arise out of nowhere in Italy. The country had an extremely vibrant
architectural scene before the Second World War, in which various groups
competed – although the competition was mostly between the Rationalists,
who developed an intriguing mediation between Italian tradition and the
thrusting techno-industrial aesthetics of Futurism, and the Classicists, led by
Marcello Piacentini (a proponent of pared-back classical architecture who was
as close as Italy got to a chief national architect), who were looking for a
modern architecture rooted in ‘Romanità’, or Roman-ness. The dialogue
between the two – played out in ideological journals and through numerous
competitions for state buildings – had the interesting result that even the
Rationalists incorporated a profound sense of historical awareness and
sensitivity into their works; and inversely, the more classically oriented
architects developed new expressions of historical form, more modern and
aggressively abstract than those ever explored in other European countries.
The modern became historical, and the historical modern. A telling example of
this is the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome (1942), an intriguing hybrid between
the two tendencies, designed by the rationalist Adalberto Libero, but with a
large amount of input from the classicising Piacentini. It is a strange,
classical‑Rationalist hybrid, with a classicised portico facing in one direction,
a clean Modernist cantilever the other, with its low rationalist proportions
being surmounted by a giant, mausoleum-like marble cube.
 CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 125

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:

‘VIOLATED THE MODEST EUROPEAN

STANDARDS OF PERMITTABLE BUILDING
SIZE AND AT THE SAME TIME SEEMED
TO DERIDE THE SKYSCRAPER AS THE
IDEAL PROTOTYPE OF MODERN
The Torre Velasca, Milan. BBPR, 1958 ARCHITECTURE’.1
126 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Comparing the Velasca to SOM’s Union Carbide Building in New York

(1960), an exemplar of the kind of building that was being put up around the
world now that the International Style had become the de facto language of
capitalism, one can see how shocking the messy Milanese tower-cum-
ancient‑fortress must have seemed to the Modernists, coming as it did just at
the moment when the perfectly replicable and efficient style of Walter Gropius
and Mies van der Rohe seemed to have won the battle for architecture’s soul.
Here was a building that followed many Modernist precepts – it expressed its

Palazzo ENPAS, Bologna. Saverio Muratori, 1957

 CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 127

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

Popular architecture and the past in the

post‑war United States
Italy also proved part of the story for the US, that other great wellspring of what
would later coalesce into what we now think of as Postmodernism. Louis Kahn
and Robert Venturi, two figures who in very different ways rediscovered the
power of historical form when reinjected into contemporary architecture (see
Chapter 2), both had extended stays at the American Academy in Rome (Kahn
in 1950, Venturi in 1954–6) that turned out to be transformative experiences.
Romanced by the ruins of ancient Rome, Kahn formulated what for him was
the essence of all great architecture, namely the coming together of building
Casa Baldi, Rome. Paolo Portoghesi, 1962
materials in the heroic primary forms of timelessly monumental compositions.
The quasi-mystical inspiration he gathered from his Italian experience went on
through his works to inject late Modernism with a poetic grandeur it had up to
that point never sought, and achieved only rarely by accident.
Venturi had travelled to Europe previously in 1948, falling in love with the
architecture of John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and the British Baroque. His later
stay afforded him the time to travel the continent thoroughly and re-affirm his
particular fascination with Baroque architecture, and Rome in particular. The
incredible richness and complexity of buildings designed in reaction to the
austere order of the classical cannon as strictly interpreted – whether by
Mannerists like Giulio Romano (c. 1499–1546) or masters of fluid Baroque like
Borromini, or indeed British eccentrics like Nicholas Hawksmoor (c. 1661–1736)
and Vanbrugh – seemed to offer Venturi tantalising glimpses into how
architects could re-enrich the by-then stagnant language of modernity.3
Immediately following his return from Rome, Venturi taught at the University of
Pennsylvania, initially as assistant to Kahn. The two were in constant contact,
and their discussions must have helped both to develop a sense of assurance
and confidence towards their mutual interest in historical form. Kahn’s work in
this period progressively moved away from a common Modernist approach to
the almost ancient grandeur that he discovered from the Salk Institute in
La Jolla, California (1965) onwards. Venturi, meanwhile, was honing his ideas
that burst onto the scene fully grown in his seminal 1966 book Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture, hot on the heels of two seminal buildings he had
completed: the Guild House (1963) and the Vanna Venturi House (1964),
both in Philadelphia, which together perfectly illustrated the points he made in
his text.
This well-known extract from Complexity and Contradiction highlights the
radical break it made with the dictums of the time:
I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than
‘clean,’ … I am for messy vitality over obvious unity … an architecture of complexity
and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole … It must embody the
difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.4
 CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 129

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

American Embassy, New Delhi. Edward Durell Stone, 1959

130 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium, Detroit. Minoru Yamasaki, 1964

Memorial Conference Center, Prentis Building and DeRoy auditorium complex

in Detroit (1955–64) (see above) opened up the use of ornament and
historical elements as well as luxurious claddings like travertine that had
nothing whatsoever to do with any notion of a ‘machine aesthetic’. Stone’s
Perpetual Savings and Loan Building in Los Angeles (1961), a rectilinear form
of clustered marble arches with its clear similarity to the Palazzo della Civiltà
Italiana in Rome (Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario
Romano, opened 1940), embodied the interests and techniques that New
Formalism shared with the classicising modern architects of pre-war Italy.
One of the strangest buildings constructed in this style, and perhaps most
related to later Postmodernism in its mixture of references, is the former
Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle in New York City (1964)
(see page 84). Designed by Stone, it is a vast high-rise with an astonishing set
of elevations. Facing Columbus Circle is what could only be described as a
Venetian palazzo, with ‘lollipop’ columns at its base and a huge blank surface
framed with ornamental circular openings; the central highlight of each of its
faces is a set of super-slim elongated arches that open up to a loggia, in
exactly the location one would expect the loggia on a Venetian palace to be,
terminating the grand hall at its heart.
The New Formalist approach to architecture reached its zenith of popularity,
and perhaps its conclusion, in top-tier corporate commissions like the World
 CHAPTER 4: Modernist Orthodoxy Challenged 131

World Trade Center, New York City. Minoru Yamasaki, 1971

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. Morris Lapidus, 1954

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

By dressing his radical eclecticism up in the image of modernity, his buildings

managed to introduce, under the radar, a key point of disruption into the
architecture of the time. The experience of the visitor, the pleasure that a
building could provide through visual and sensory stimulation, was an aspect
of space that Modernism had banished from consideration. In the interior of
the Fontainebleau and other projects, this consideration came back with a
vengeance. This was Hollywood architecture.

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:

‘HE BELIEVED THAT BUILDINGS SPOKE

FOR THEMSELVES AND THAT HE COULD
INTUITIVELY FEEL THE POETIC IMAGES,
OR CREATIVE SOURCES, FROM WHICH
THEIR DESIGN EMERGED.’6
This was the emergence of a divide between those who read architectural
history – and indeed architecture in general – in a creative, often subjective
manner, and the methodology of the historian whose goal was a circumspect
objectivity, a rift that would only widen in the coming decades.

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

constructed out of a vernacular-seeming pitched roof structure that contained

two ‘aedicular spaces’, or spaces within a larger space – a motif that he
would develop greatly throughout his career, and which creates a sense of
layered enclosure. Using found columns, these quasi-ceremonial spaces,
including a four-post curtained space around a bathtub embedded in the floor,
would form a ‘body-centred sense of space and place’ upon occupation.7
His New Haven House of 1966 (see right) evolved the idea of aedicular
space, and combined it with a complex spatiality on more than one level.
Moore imbued it with bright, polychromatic surface effects that were a
combination of techniques learned from Op-Art and the efficacies of
camouflage. Together they created an almost psychedelic and deliriously
stimulating interior that at the same time was filled with spaces within spaces
where private moments could occur.

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

Les Espaces D’Abraxas, Noisy-Le-Grand, France.

Ricardo Bofill, 1983
138 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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.

Italy’s La Tendenza: re-imagining heritage

The Tendenza group of architects – who, as their influence spread across
Europe, would become known as Rationalists – were at work in earnest in
Italy, also exploring the power of the existing and the creative use, re-use and
re-imagination of the city and its heritage, but in a very different way. Their
approach was perhaps best summarised by architect-painter Arduino
Cantafora’s enormous Città Analoga (see below), first displayed in 1973 at
the 15th Milan Triennale. The 7-by-2-metre picture brought together diverse
buildings, existing and imagined, in an impossible but haunting scene.
Whereas the visionary drawings of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Hilberseimer
showed the clinically efficient brave new worlds of a problem-solving
Modernism – an architecture that had invented the world anew – the Città
Analoga took its cues from Canaletto and Giorgio de Chirico. Canaletto
would carefully modify existing views, notably of Venice, to create a depiction
that was more evocative of the city than any faithful rendering could have
been. De Chirico would take recognisable, universal elements of cities that we
all relate to and render them abstract, strange, and almost menacing.
Cantafora’s ‘analogue’ city combined both of these tendencies, with buildings
that offered potent examples of architectural form from a range of times and

Citta Analoga, drawing. Arduino Cantafora, 1973

140 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Piazza del Municipio e Monumento ai

Partigiani, Segrate. Aldo Rossi, collage and
pencil, 1967

Parabita Cemetery. Studio GRAU, 1967

geographical locations, real and imagined, brought together in one space:

recognisable, and yet rendered strange, dreamlike. It was an illustration of the
enduring primacy of fundamental (i.e. historical) architectural form, and how
that was now, as the Tendanza group saw it, the starting point for
contemporary architecture.
No interest in popular culture or romanticism here; rather, the search for
essential truths, for irreducible forms, for an architecture that is self-sufficient
and whose primary aim is not one of solving problems. The tiny Casa Zanaboli
in Rome (1969) by Gruppo Romano Architetti Urbanisti (GRAU) is topped
with forms that recall both split pediments and crenulation, and the same
group’s unfinished Parabita Cemetery (begun 1967) (see above, left) in
Apulia is like a vast medieval fortification with earthworks and the leftover
plinths for long-lost temples. Aldo Rossi’s Piazza del Municipio e Monumento
ai Partigiani in Segrate (1967) (see above, right) discovered early-on the
primary language of triangles, beams and cylinders that became common
features of Postmodern architecture, here used as hauntingly primal forms,
placed at the centre of a piazza to remember the dead (the Italian partisans
who fought the Fascists and Germans): the monument recalls in its simplicity
the most ancient of commemorative structures.
Massimo Scolari was producing beautifully ambiguous paintings and
drawings of buildings of indeterminate scale, function and location, set in
dreamy landscapes, sometimes even appearing to fly (see right), and being
made of the most wonderfully improbable combinations and distortions of
basic historical forms. The drawings of Franco Purini and Laura Thermes
(see page 141) systematically explored primal spatial conditions in cold Gate for a Maritime City, drawing.
black-and-white abstraction. Massimo Scolari, 1979
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 141

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.

The Italian radicals: design as rebellion

In parallel with the ‘pure’ approach of those seeking an autonomous
architecture of timeless typologies, there were the Radicals, a collection of
architects and thinkers who took a diametrically opposed approach. A 1972
show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York called ‘Italy: The
New Domestic Landscape’ caused quite a stir, and proved to be a seminal
moment for Italian design. Superstudio, Archizoom, Ettore Sottsass, Gae
Aulenti, Ugo La Pietra, Gaetano Pesce and others were invited to create
environments together with leading Italian manufacturers. Rather than the
usual array of beautifully crafted displays, the designers used the opportunity
to express their idea of architecture and design as cultural critique on a world
stage. Their approach was the inversion of La Tendenza, for whom
architectural form was somehow eternal, and human activity passing. For
these designers, form was a tool to directly affect people’s understanding of
society, and could be crafted accordingly, with design becoming a language
of rebellion.
142 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

Continuous Monument: On the Cliff, collage. Superstudio, 1969, A. Natalini, C. Toraldo di

Francia, Roberto Magris, G. Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Alessandro Poli (1970–2)
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 143

vast megastructures as well as interiors and furniture. This almost ornamental

use of the grid is a tactic that was picked up by many of those rebelling
against Modernism in the years to come.
In the MoMA exhibition, architecture and design, even once inserted into the
commercial sphere, effectively became art, with the only function of the
exhibits being to critique the existing order – whether it be of domesticity or of
burgeoning capitalism. Whereas Modernists always sought to actively build
solutions to society’s ills, here architects were instead primarily inspirational
artist-poets, using their work to highlight problems and tell stories about the
contemporary world, without in any way proposing viable tools for achieving
a better world.

SITE in the US: consumerist critiques of

consumerism
These Italian architects and designers, from Pesce to Superstudio, dealt with
contemporary culture – an interest that we have seen in the US with Venturi
and Scott Brown (see Chapters 2 and 4). In Italy the engagement with the
contemporary was separated from that with history, and interests split
between the Tendenza, who were archaeologists of the essence of the past,
and the Radicals, who were pugnacious provocateurs, throwing certainties
into doubt through the act of design. In the US, however, these interests were
seen from very early on as interrelated, as Venturi’s practice always sought to
join the contemporary, the banal and the popular with the richness and
complexity found in the past.
The most astonishing example of critical architecture and design of this period
was a series of eight projects for the BEST stores in the US by SITE (Sculpture in
the Environment) and James Wines between 1972 and 1984. It is still hard to
believe, but a retail outlet approached an avant-garde set of designers to come
up with new façades for their stores, and gave them complete artistic
autonomy. What they conceived was not only equal in didactic punch to the
acidic and dystopian critiques of the Italians at MoMA, but was far more
powerful in effect for being embedded in the daily life of suburban America.
BEST’s big box stores were given new fronts that turned architecture into an
expressive art form, using tactics from fine art to communicate in a much more
visceral way than even Venturi Scott Brown’s Vegas-inspired billboard
architecture. One store, in Richmond, Virginia, had a façade with one upper
corner peeling off, and its other entire side coming loose and rolling up, as if it
were a huge sheet of paper. One in Houston, Texas had a high brick parapet,
a section of which is crumbling (see page 144, top and top right), as if it were
the moment just after an earthquake. A store in Miami had an entire section of
its façade ‘knocked out’, revealing the mechanical services, layers of structural
materials and contents of the store to the passer-by; while another in Richmond
– the only one extant – has the front of the shop pulled away, as though by a
geological movement, and vegetation fills the gap. Ruination; the revealing of
144 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

BEST Store, Houston, Texas. SITE, 1975

the tenuousness of construction, and by implication of contemporary culture;

the disruption of expectation: these are all techniques common to artistic
practice today. Yet their implementation in this period, in the heart of
consumerism, as a direct critique of that consumerism, still inspires architects to
this day, with images of the crumbling Houston store apparently appearing in
more books on 20th-century architecture than any other building.2 BEST Store, Houston, Texas. SITE, 1975

Hans Hollein in Austria: architecture without

purpose
Earlier in the 1960s the Viennese Hans Hollein, later to become a leading and
prodigious figurehead in Postmodernism, was exploring similar veins of
ambiguous critique (see Chapter 2). At the same time as Archigram were
inventing new forms of similarly paper-bound Pop Modernism, that actively
celebrated consumer culture in a mechanised context, Hollein, in line with
most Postmodernists and the Italians who followed, had a darker view. He
created a series of collages that juxtaposed everyday items of technology and
consumer culture into landscapes and cities at gigantic scales (see below). This
rendered them powerful, monumentally forbidding and strange explorations

Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape, collage. Hans Hollein, 1964

 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 145

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.

The Independent Group and Archigram in

Britain: Pop architecture?
An engagement with popular and consumer culture, as well as an interest in
history in relation to modern architecture, had been present in Britain for some
time as well. The Independent Group – which included the architects Alison
and Peter Smithson, the architecture critic Reyner Banham and the artist
Richard Hamilton, among others – met and staged exhibitions between 1952
and 1956, concluding with the seminal show ‘This is Tomorrow’. They
explored techniques and themes that were absent in modern practice at the
time: readymades, using found objects, and incorporating the excitement of
consumerism which was then just starting to arrive in Britain. The exhibition, in
its format – creating environments within a gallery that could be experienced
– was revolutionary. It was echoed by Emilio Ambasz in his curation of the
1972 MoMA show, and would be most spectacularly put to use in the 1980
Venice Architecture Biennale (see Chapter 2).
Richard Hamilton went on to become known as the first ‘Pop Artist’. The Pop
movement’s use of mass-production techniques, interest in the idea of the copy
and the original, plays on scale and ironic, humorous commentaries through
art commingled with Postmodern architecture at many points, most famously
perhaps in Frank Gehry’s collaborative design with Claes Oldenburg, the
Chiat/Day Building in Los Angeles (1985–91) (see pages 102–3), and
Terry Farrell’s hyper-communicative TVam studios in Camden, London (1982)
(see Chapter 2). The Smithsons did not fully develop their interest in consumer
culture that was evidenced in the Independent Group and their House of the
Future of 1956, a product-design-like home for the consumer of the near
future, perhaps for the reasons evinced by Banham when he declared in
1962: ‘there is no Pop architecture to speak of, and never will be in any
ultimate sense, because buildings are too damn permanent.’4
This was an observation that Archigram soon resolved through their wild
proposals for walking megastructures, plug-in cities and event architectures,
proposing armatures – rather than standard buildings – for a hedonistic world
of constant change. Their imaginings would later inspire High Tech, with its
extreme technological metaphors and robot-like aesthetics, but at their heart
was a pleasure (missing in the later works by Rogers and Foster) in the
possibilities of the country’s new-found wealth, leisure time and entertainment.
They communicated through a comic-style publication that was often
completely in line with the graphic movement of psychedelia, and received
wild, pop-star-like adulation from architecture students around the world.
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 147

Archigram thus themselves became popular culture, rather than commenting

on it or studying it as Venturi and Scott Brown were doing. The hedonism and
populism at the heart of High Tech is possibly why there was so easily
crossover in the UK between architects exploring that form of late Modernism
and the transgressive mixing of Postmodernity when it began to arrive on the
British Isles.

Colin Rowe and the ‘Whites’: architecture as an

autonomous language
One of the most influential and important texts of the period was ‘Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa’ by Colin Rowe, an English architect and theorist. Together
with Complexity and Contradiction (see Chapter 4), it helped bring
architectural history and its riches back into the contemporary architect’s
toolkit and realm of awareness. Originally published in March 1947 in the
Architectural Review, it came to a broader audience when it was republished
in a collection of essays in 1976, a time when there was a rapidly broadening
interest in new ways of dealing with the past and the present.5 In this astute,
creatively analytical comparison between Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at
Garches, France (1927) and Andrea Palladio’s Villa Foscari (‘La
Malcontenta’) near Venice, Italy (c. 1560), Rowe draws an intriguing
continuity between the two, historicising Le Corbusier on the one hand and
modernising Palladio on the other. The implication is that all great architecture
has shared underlying principles, and that the past is effectively (when
analysed formally) no different to visions of the future.
Rowe studied at London’s Warburg Institute under the famous architectural
historian Rudolf Wittkower. His MA thesis, submitted in 1947, was not a critical
text or piece of research in the traditional sense, but rather a speculation, a
fictional exploration: what if Inigo Jones had intended to publish a theoretical
text on architecture, in the vein of Palladio’s Quattro Libri? – which of course
he hadn’t. It was a method that relied more on the imagination than on facts,
but one which could often be incredibly incisive, revealing deep truths in ways
standard architectural historical research could not. This method has been
taken up by many architects since, allowing them to incorporate history
imaginatively into their practice, and creating tensions with methodologically
traditional architectural historians. For two years in 1948 and 1949, Rowe was
a tutor at Liverpool University, where he taught James Stirling, passing on to
him the ideas that he was developing about the architectural continuity
between modernity and the past, and an imaginative, somewhat intuitive
approach to architectural thought.
From 1962 until his retirement in 1990, Rowe taught at Cornell University in
the US. In the 1960s he came to be the intellectual father of a group of
architects later known as the ‘Whites’, in opposition to another group referred
to as the ‘Grays’. As with the Italian Tendenza architects, the Whites –
comprising Peter Eisenman (who studied under Rowe in Cambridge),
148 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier – were

interested in architecture as an autonomous practice; they rejected
modernity’s concern for social change and focused instead on its own
internal, formal mechanisms. They were known as ‘Whites’ because they were
‘pure’ and deadly serious, and more prosaically their buildings were white. In
contrast, the Grays – Romaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg, Charles Moore,
Jaquelin T. Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown – were ‘mixed’: they referenced multiple eras, used colour, engaged
with their buildings’ contexts, and were witty. Philip Johnson acted as a
personal mentor to the Whites, whom he christened ‘The New York Five’,
giving them a show at the MoMA (1969) and a publication (The New York
Five, 1972) that effectively crystallised them as a school in the public’s mind;
whilst Rowe, together with Eisenman – the most intellectual architect of the
group – continued to be their theoretical pivot.
Much like Rowe, the Whites were in search of deep, irreducible elements,
common to all modern architecture. The word ‘modern’ is key here, because
intriguingly this group followed Rowe’s passion for Le Corbusier and the
avant-garde era of Modernism, and mined it as a source of material. Their
desire to resurrect a kind of pure avant-garde, recycling and recombining and
distorting the formal elements of Corbusian, and as they saw it fundamental
(column, wall, beam) form, effectively meant they were approaching their
source material in much the same way as architects like Venturi, Rossi and
Moore were approaching broader architectural history, only with a self-
imposed chronological, content and authorship limitation. It is clear to see in
projects like Eisenman’s House II in Hardwick, Vermont (1970) and House VI
(1975) (see right, top) in Cornwall, Connecticut, Graves’s Benacerraf House
in Princeton, New Jersey (1969), and Richard Meier’s Smith House in Darien,
Connecticut (1967) (see right, bottom), how the Modernist language has been
used in a mannerist fashion, divorced from its original revolutionary intent. The House VI. Peter Eisenman, 1975
built examples of their work in this period achieved a level of pure complexity
that could have been lauded by Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction,
albeit without the striving for a ‘difficult whole’.6
The rejection of function is so extreme, at least in Eisenman’s work, that in
House VI what appears to be structure often hinders everyday activities.
A column crashes into the kitchen table; there are walls where walls are not
needed, no windows where there should be, windows where there shouldn’t
– running through the middle of the main bedroom so that the clients could not
have a double bed in the space. Architecture becomes a linguistic game that is
about the process of architecture and the elements of that process, rather than
any real-world factors such as function, structure or material.
Most of these architects moved away from the strict replication of Corbusian
form. Michael Graves’s colourful, transgressive Snyderman House in Indiana Smith House, Darien, Connecticut.
(1972) (see page 149), for instance, incorporated other historical referents Richard Meier, 1967.
and sensory explorations. However, through the trajectories of their varied Credit: © Ezra Stoller / Esto
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 149

Snyderman House, Indiana. Michael Graves, 1972

careers, they all stayed true to what they called Formalism, or the idea that
architectural form was independent of external factors.

Venturi, Scott Brown and the ‘Grays’:

communication and complexity
The Whites were unabashed elitists, seeking an exclusive language for
architects alone; while the Grays, although sharing the notion of architecture
as a linguistic exercise, saw it as a language for broader communication with
a wider audience and general social engagement, as well as a communion
with architectural history. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Charles
Moore were the most prominent figures of the Grays, with the texts Learning
from Las Vegas (see Chapter 2) and Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture acting as a coherent set of guiding principles.
The Grays produced works like Stern’s Lang House in Washington,
Connecticut (1974) (see page 150, top) that realised the architectural notions
set out in Venturi and Scott Brown’s texts, with its stage-set-like front and ironic
use of historical form, combining a simple cubic volume with didactically
attenuated ornament that is so obviously applied it looks as if it might slide off.
It was ordinary architecture that nonetheless had elements which were
intended to convey clearly comprehensible references. Later works like
Stern’s Gramercy Park Apartment in NYC (1979), with its distorted classical
elements, and his Residence and Pool House in Llewelyn Park, New Jersey
(1982) (see page 106) with its camp Egyptian theme, would become far more
theatrical and ornamental, using the immersive and entertainment possibilities
of this kind of communicative design to much greater effect.
As their renown spread, Venturi Scott Brown’s work would similarly have the
opportunity to be further liberated in its deployment of motifs, with their
150 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Lang House, Washington, Connecticut. Robert Stern, 1974

Betty Abrams House, Pittsburgh (1979) orchestrated around a radial sunburst

of a window and bright supergraphic, and their House in New Castle County,
Delaware (1983) (see below) and its full_blooded applique façade-as-sign
and sensuously polychrome interior (see page 3) constructed out of painted
two-dimensional elements. Their approach to large programmes is well
illustrated by their own BEST Products Catalog Showroom in Oxford Valley,
Langhorne, Pennsylvania (1978), completely distinct from those designed by
the more critically conceptual James Wines: the store is treated as a surface
for a grid of decorative tiles which at once emphasise its boxiness and
edge‑of‑town location while providing the delight and attractiveness of an
advertisement.
A comparison with unbuilt designs for BEST stores by Allan Greenberg (1976)
and Robert Stern (1979) illustrates the differences already present at that time
within the Grays, with Greenberg moving towards a full acceptance of the

House in New Castle County, Delaware. Venturi Scott Brown, 1983

 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 151

classical language of architecture. Venturi Scott Brown’s careful intellectual

balance between conveying programme and its separation from surface and
communication is clearly different from Stern’s bravura, baroque development
of their formal techniques. Both Stern and Greenberg would later move
entirely away from an architecture of multiple references, instead adopting in
Greenberg’s case classical architecture, and in Stern’s case traditional forms
of design in general.

Rowe and Koetter, Ungers and Koolhaas:

collage versus differentiation
In fact, the ideological distinction between the groups, and the internal
coherence of these supposed schools, was never clear cut at all.7 Figures
within the Grays had close links with the Whites and vice versa. Intent and
architectural interests varied quite considerably between architects within
each grouping. The theatrical nature of the disagreements between Whites
and Grays helped generate interest from a wider public that was beneficial for
both sides, and the Whites vs the Greys became, at least within the confines of
architecture, a media success. In combination with the apparently high level of
intellectual debate being carried out in Oppositions, the journal of the Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies (of which Eisenman was director), this
resulted in US architecture being seen, perhaps for the first time, as an
intellectual, cultured pursuit of general interest.
By the 1970s, Rowe was already in different theoretical pastures to the Whites,
who were still taking inspiration from his earlier texts. He was expanding his
interests beyond the imaginative formal analyses of individual buildings, into the

708 House, LA. Eric Owen Moss, 1982

152 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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.

Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago:

a diversity of approaches
The United States was by this point proving to be increasingly fertile ground
for newly transgressive architectures. The liberating words of Venturi and
Scott Brown, and the general atmosphere of rebellion in the post-68
generation, were pushing architects to create a dazzling array of approaches,
united in their harnessing of the art of building as a tool for conveying
complex messages, whether that be about our relationship to the past, to
contemporary identity or to popular culture.
In Los Angeles, Thom Mayne and Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss and Frank
Gehry were carving out a particularly wilful and distinct corner in the
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 153

Elevations for 708 House, LA. Eric Owen Moss, 1982

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

Perspective drawing of Pink House, Miami. Arquitectonica, 1979

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

Atlantis Condominium, Miami. Arquitectonica, 1982

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.

Representing the contemporary and

transforming the past
In many ways, those who claimed some continuity with modernity were
perhaps right. As mentioned in Chapter 4, there was a distinct difference
between modernity and the kind of Modernism that was codified into
orthodoxy as the International Style. The various explosive experiments that
aimed to create buildings embodying the contemporary state subsided as
architects in the 1930s fell into line behind Modernism. In the 1960s and 70s
– with all the architects mentioned here, and many more I have sadly had to
elide – there was a similarly explosive and diverse current, as various groups
156 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

and individual designers grappled with what it meant to represent the

existing era, in all its complexity, in built form. It was very much a return of the
spirited, rebellious intellectual environment of early modernity – the most
outstanding differences being the incorporation of history, the turn away from
tabula rasa and the complete repudiation of positive techno-futurism and
functionalism.
Those, like the Whites, who referred to High Modernism, just as those who
referred to classical architecture, Art Deco, Gothic or vernacular, treated it in
a historical manner: they did not replicate its internal meaning, its socially
transformative (in its European phase) or its rationalist, functional drive, but
instead used it as a set of elements to articulate a language of their own
meanings and theories. They re-appropriated the historical forms to create
something new, the way a bricoleur might re-appropriate wood and stones
found in a ruin to make his own new house.

City-scale poetics: Koolhaas, Bofill and Moore

Arquitectonica’s drawings and project proposals around this time – such as
the 1982 Horizon Hill Center, San Antonio, Texas and the 1981 Riverbay in
Miami – have a vigorous sense of self-assurance in their vast scale, and bold
use of extreme collage, combining references to Russian Constructivism, High
Modernism, vernacular and Radical architecture. This was an approach to the
Postmodern era that was devoid of the acute self-consciousness, intimate
orchestrations and careful concentration on the small scale that were the focus
for most architects exploring new possibilities at this point. From almost the
very beginning, Arquitectonica aimed at a heroic scale, surpassed perhaps
only by the city-making activities of Bofill in France at the same time. The Office
for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded in Rotterdam in 1975 by Rem
Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis, was
committed to the rediscovery of bold urban interventions at a heroic scale,
comparable with those proposed by the Modernists but guided by a wholly
different logic. Reacting against the perceived timidity of their peers, OMA
were part of the growing desire to recapture the city as a subject of the
architect’s activities, rediscovering the ability to design big. In Koolhaas’s
1978 book Delirious New York, he successfully undertook the perfect
inversion of a Modernist manifesto in which the ills of society are solved
through the proposition of a new ideal architecture. Instead, Koolhaas takes
New York – specifically Manhattan and Coney Island – and digs relentlessly
into their past, discovering alternative histories that blow apart the accepted
narratives of the city and its development. He described the book as a
‘Retroactive Manifesto’, in which all the strangeness and excitement that one
needs to define an exciting path forward are already latent in the existing city;
finding them is only a matter of changing how we look at it. This reorienting of
perception, of finding interest in the existing, is something that has remained
present throughout Koolhaas’s subsequent research and work.
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 157

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

Antigone, Montpellier, France. Ricardo Bofill, 1979–97

158 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

Les Espaces D’Abraxas, Noisy-Le-Grand, France. Ricardo Bofill, 1983

 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 159

completed in 1997, is a kilometre-long sequence of spatial and building types

at a vast scale (4,000 homes and 20,000 square metres of commercial space)
connecting the old city centre to the new district in the east. An enclosed
square flanked by apartment buildings with an over-scaled cornice (visibly
detached from the main structure, indicating its evocative rather than
functional purpose) is the same form as Donato Bramante’s plan for a
centralised, ideal St Peter’s Basilica in Rome from the 15th century, and is
called Place du Nombre D’Or (Plaza of the Golden Number), further
reinforcing its classical connotations. There are a mall whose shape recalls a
Roman hippodrome, a square flanked by double exedra recalling the Roman
forums, a vast semicircular circus, an array of temples, and a tiered palace
and oversized portal (housing the regional government’s offices) framing
either end. Entablatures expand vastly in scale and become balconies for
multiple floors of apartments, and on top of the standard giant order of
columns are introduced a new super giant order, so large they take up the full
Les Espaces D’Abraxas, Noisy-Le-Grand, height of the building and hold nothing but air above them. Extreme mannerist
France. Ricardo Bofill, 1983
games abound, distorting the classical canon almost beyond recognition.
When combined with the entirely contemporary, gargantuan scale of the
development, and its use of concrete and glass as the primary materials,
a positively unnerving effect is achieved.
Something completely new and unknown cannot be uncanny. The uncanny,
or unheimlich, is when something familiar – the bedroom, the living room,
a parent, a house – becomes, without any discernible explanation, strange
and alien. Many Postmodern works trigger this reaction in their blending
and distorting of known precedents, but in his urban projects Bofill uses this
human reaction to sublime effect. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his
Les Espaces d’Abraxas (1983) (see pages 136–7, page 158 and above),
a social housing complex in Noisy-le-Grand in the Île de France, part of a
concerted drive by the French government to build new towns in the
outskirts of Paris. An amphitheatre, an arch and a palace are pressed
together in plan to create a singular ensemble with a subdivided internal
space. Each of these building types is expanded to gigantic proportions,
the arch and amphitheatre 10 storeys high and the palace 19 storeys,
making the negative space feel canyon-like. The columns on the interior
face of the amphitheatre building are continuously glazed bay windows,
while to its rear they are a smaller order stacked up as if three buildings
were piled atop each other, broken by a super-order of columns of the kind
used in Montpellier. The taller block has a rusticated base, giant two-storey
metopes above, 12-storey paired columns that double as cores, and a
subsidiary giant order in between that disappears in its central six-storey
section, indicating its functionless state whilst destabilising the whole
composition. This is rich and complex architecture that has a powerful
effect, but is of wholly different intent to the intellectual and popular
refinements of the Grays, Moore and Venturi in the US, or of the
melancholic return to the past of the Italian Tendenza. Bofill’s formidable
160 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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.

‘The Presence of the Past’: the 1980 Venice

Architecture Biennale
This was the febrile atmosphere that led up to and provided the context for
what was perhaps the most important event in the development of
Postmodernist architecture as it is mostly known today: the first Venice
Architecture Biennale, in 1980. Curated by Paolo Portoghesi, a leading Italian
architect, intellectual and historian of the Baroque, it crystallised all the varied
schools that were efflorescing around the planet into a discernible global
architectural movement.
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 161

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 primacy of the present:

the Memphis Group
A year later a mirror image to the Venice event exploded into the public’s
consciousness, with the Memphis Group’s (see page 162) show at the Milan
Fiera (furniture fair) of 1981.
162 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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

Where Portoghesi’s ‘The Presence of the Past’ de-emphasised communication

to the benefit of history, Sottsass and his group – a broad mix including
well-known names like Arata Isozaki, Hans Hollein and Alessandro Mendini,
but mostly made up of eager young Milan-based designers – were entirely,
unequivocally about communication, about the present, about demolishing the
old language codes of a culture they found stifling, and rebuilding it from
scratch, drawing upon everything and anything that felt new, exciting and
relevant. As Radice explains:
The free and easy, anarchic, and unrestrained use of unforeseen and unforeseeable
materials, the combined use of heterogeneous, cheap and expensive materials, of
rough and smooth textures, of opaque and sparkling surfaces, tend in the end to turn
a piece of furniture into a complex system of communication.12
The group’s arrival on the world stage was explosive, and their furniture
designs (see top left) became a media and fashion sensation unparalleled in
the history of design – an entirely intentional success, for they actively
engaged with the mechanisms of consumption, introducing their new aesthetic
almost as a virus into the system, before disbanding only a few short years
Beverley Unit. Ettore Sottsass Jr of later. Memphis was the perfect counterpoint to the increasingly historicist bent
Memphis Milano, 1981
of Postmodern architecture; and the proof of its profound connection with and
embodiment of the contemporary state – something never so fully achieved by
another group in the period – is its enduring appeal, with the forms and
techniques pioneered by the group constantly re-appearing to this day. For
most of the public, Memphis design is in fact what they think of as Postmodern
– not Venturi, Rossi or Stirling.

Unity and differentiation: Isozaki, Stirling,

Hollein and Correa
A towering figure in Japan, but also highly influential around the world and
intimately involved in the discussions that evolved over the 1970s, was
Arata Isozaki. Initially part of the Metabolist movement, and close to his
mentor Kenzo Tange (later, like most, to produce buildings in a Postmodern
garb), almost from the beginning he was critical of the group’s earnest
belief in technology and absence of historical sensibility, expressing an
intriguing ambivalence in drawings like Ruined Megastructure – Incubation
Process (1962). By 1974 he had completed the Kitakyushu Central Library
and the Fujimi Country Club. Both buildings recuperate the form of the
barrel vault, something that Louis Kahn was doing at the same time in his
Kimbell Art Museum, only here the vaults distort into a continuous
serpentine form that unites various functions and spaces, referring to
architectural forms of the past whilst rendering them strange and
unexpected. In a directly figurative pun that underscores the ambiguity of
the designs, equal to Moore’s Daisy House, the Fujimi club’s vaulted roof
Drawing of Tsukuba Civic Centre, Japan. forms a giant question mark, with the dot being a small landscape feature
Arata Isozaki, 1983 just in front of the building’s entrance.
164 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Tsukuba Civic Centre, Japan. Arata Isozaki, 1983

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

slope as an excuse to break the building into descending volumes; and by

providing a public route through the site from the upper-level street to the front
of the gallery, this dynamic collection of elements, each individually
articulated with a distinct character, becomes a ‘promenade architecturale’
for passers-by. The central drum, rather than being an interior space, is a
negative, a public space at the very heart of the gallery. Stirling famously
used classically inspired but highly graphical alternating courses of travertine
and sandstone, much copied in the years to come, as well as brightly coloured
painted metal elements that are straight out of the Archigram, High Tech
textbook. He also created one of the most wittily communicative set pieces to
date, with blocks of stone collapsed out of their wall enclosing the car-park
level as if in ruination, which were used to generate ventilation for the
basement.
In Hans Hollein’s first large-scale built project, the Museum Abteiberg in
Mönchengladbach (1972–82) (bottom left and see page 85), a public route
through and over the building, which also sits on a slope, is again a primary
driver, serving both to break down the Museum’s constitutive elements and to
articulate them as an architectural experience – here in a more romantic,
irregular mode. Mönchengladbach is a small city, and the elements into
which the project is fragmented are appropriately scaled: small gems set in a
hill garden through which the public may wander. The museum is underneath
you, and next to you, and pops up above you, in what appear to be
separate structures designed by different architects, as Jonathan Glancey
explains:
Hollein has deployed a vast army of building materials – brick, stone, concrete,
marble, lead, aluminium, brass, bronze, steel – shaping them into a medley of
building types. So the museum – both from a distance and from close-up – appears
to be a small city compounded of many different elements.16
This is the embodiment of the anti-modern interest in architectural diversity and
of the implication of organic, incremental change, displayed by so many
architects in the period, only here it is designed and delivered in one building,
by one architect. Venturi’s ‘difficult whole’ has here dissolved into a landscape
of delightful and diverse pavilions.
Another exploration in the balance between a unified building and the
expression of architectural diversity is Charles Correa’s Vidhan Bhavan in
Bhopal, India (1980–96) (see pages 86 and 166). As a collection of spatial
types in a strong geometrical boundary, it recalls Sir John Soane’s Bank of
England in London (1788–1833), which resembled in plan a dense city more
than a building. Containing the regional government of Madhya Pradesh’s
administrative offices and meeting chambers, Correa’s large complex is a
collection of distinct areas, with three assembly halls, outdoor courtyards, an
un-programed entrance area, and arrays of offices. The plan is a nine-square
Axonometric drawing of Museum Abteiberg, grid, that fundamental geometric proposition we see everywhere following
Mönchengladbach. Hans Hollein, 1982 Rowe’s analysis of Le Corbusier’s and Palladio’s villas, carved into by a
166 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal. Charles Correa, 1996

perimeter circle. Each programmatic unit of the complex is articulated with a

different basic form – a dome, a wavy series of vaults, a centralised block,
stepped terraces – but this collection of types is unified in material treatment and
in the slice of the circular perimeter. The Vidhan Bhavan illustrates how
aesthetically intriguing the result can be when the fine line between dissolution
into constituent parts and formally coherent unity is delicately straddled, so that
both readings are triggered at the same time. Correa, who was a convert from
Modernism, very much integrated Indian symbolism and theory into his works,
which became a simultaneous reaching back into Indian and Western traditions.

Commercial success and gigantism:

Johnson, SOM, Pelli, Jahn, Graves
In the early 1980s a consensus began to emerge that the Postmodern
approach had superseded the Modernist paradigm. A client wanting to be
seen as progressive would either need to employ a famous architect affiliated
with the sensibility, or at least might expect their commercial architect to
produce a building that looked as if it was. The AT&T Building on Madison
Avenue in New York City, and PPG Place in Pittsburgh (see pages 95 and 167),
both completed in 1984, are representative of a series of large office towers
built by the partnership between Philip Johnson and John Burgee in these
years employing allusions to history in unusually straightforward ways when
compared to the complex mixing of references that had been predominant
up to this point. As we have seen, Johnson had been interested in history and
a sense of monumentality for quite some time, and in his turn to the
Postmodern he retained his preference for grand gestures and almost
neoclassical clarity.
In PPG Place, Johnson took the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament in
London (1843–60, by Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin), abstracted it as
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 167

PPG Place, Pittsburgh. John Burgee, 1984

much as was possible while maintaining its origins as recognisable, and

sheathed its simplified form in reflective glass. As well as being an
unmistakeable visual transposition to those aware of architectural history, and
an obvious ‘glass Gothic’ tower to those who were not, it acted as a virtuoso
advertisement for the client’s products, PPG being one of the world’s largest
suppliers of architectural glass. The AT&T building takes a slab of offices,
sheathes them in stone and forms a classical tripartite division between base,
middle and top, with the pinnacle of the building being a supersized version of
a Chippendale furniture split pediment. The eminently consumable image of
the tower, its visual pun on the skyline (is there a giant cabinet amongst
Manhattan’s towers?), its gravitas and pomp at street level and its easy
comparison with nearby Modernist towers of similar height and proportions
meant that the building was vaunted as the full-blown arrival of
Postmodernism. Johnson famously appeared on the cover of Time magazine
even before its construction had finished, brandishing a model of the tower as
if it were the World Cup. Another reading of the form of the tower is that it
resembles a tombstone, and some have referred to it as the tombstone of
Postmodernism in the sense that it heralded the adoption of the style’s formal
168 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

tropes by commercial architects, and the gradual depreciation of its vitality as

less refined examples, often at vast scales, became ubiquitous.
Denise Scott Brown blamed Johnson for the damning by association of the
richer, more sophisticated form of Postmodernism that had gone before, with
the gargantuan pastiche of what she described as ‘PoMo’, which retained the
scale of Modernism but incorporated historicising references:
while we were studying varieties and juxtapositions of scales in cities, Johnson,
a modern recidivist, continued to handle the scale of his history-draped
buildings according to modernist precepts of ‘human scale’. Bland sameness
of scale resulted … PoMo architects handled history self-indulgently, often
humourlessly, and by imitation rather than allusion.17
This critique is widely accepted, and with merit. However, the nature of the
expanding global economy was always going to ensure that large, inhumanly
scaled developments would be built. Architects can either grapple with this or
turn their noses up at the corporate clientele and stay relatively pure with
extremely beautiful small projects that do not require too much compromise.
SOM, that great bastion of Modernism, made a startling about-turn in the
mid-1980s (although some partners doggedly stuck to their Modernist
principles) and began to offer their clients buildings in highly textured,
complex geometries and historically referencing designs, often with intriguing
results. There are early transitional designs like the Olympia Center in Chicago
(1982), the Wang Building in New York (1982) (see right) and the Southeast
Financial Center in Miami (1984), which retain the repetitive abstraction of
SOM’s earlier works (see Chapter 4) but introduce disruptive elements: a
transitional hierarchy of openings towards the top in the Olympia; a
super‑reflective curtain wall of stone and glass in the Wang with implied but
hidden structure; and the use of domestically scaled windows with mullions
and transoms, arrayed on a highly irregular geometry, in Miami. Their Chase
Tower in Dallas (1987) and Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles (1991) are
stone-clad towers that step back to reveal more complex glass profiles,
creating articulated pinnacles that in Dallas are organised around an
enigmatic void. The AT&T Corporate Center in Chicago (1989) (see page 169)
is perhaps the best example of SOM’s historicist bent in the period, here
re-enacting the vertical romanticism of 1930s Art Deco towers.
The Art Deco revival in the US, which coincided with the corporate adoption
of the style, was perfected by the American-based Argentine architect Cesar
Pelli, who in parallel with Helmut Jahn produced the most outstanding
examples of corporate Postmodernism. The most successful of the
straightforward Art Deco revival buildings were his Norwest Center in
Minneapolis (1988) and the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte,
North Carolina (1992), with the former modelled on the RCA Building in New
York’s Rockefeller Center (1930–39, by Raymond Hood) and the latter
recalling the lower Manhattan towers of the 1930s with feature crowns like the
General Electric Building (1931, by Cross & Cross). Pelli had been producing The Wang Building, New York. SOM, 1982
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 169

AT&T Corporate Center, Chicago. SOM, 1989

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

World Financial Center, Battery Park City,

Lower Manhattan. Cesar Pelli, 1988. Interior

Pacific Design Center. Cesar Pelli, 1975

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:

‘THE POETIC FORM OF ARCHITECTURE

IS RESPONSIVE TO ISSUES EXTERNAL
TO THE BUILDING, AND
INCORPORATES THE
THREE-DIMENSIONAL EXPRESSION OF
THE MYTHS AND RITUALS OF
SOCIETY.’20
 CHAPTER 5: The Postmodern Spirit Takes Hold 173

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.

Disney: a step too far?

The apogee of client interest in the works of those early Postmodernists, and
the point after which critical support and interest rapidly drained away – the
perceived moment of selling-out, as it were – was the series of projects
The Humana Building, Louisville, Kentucky.
executed by Disney in the late 1980s and early 90s, using a roll call of
Michael Graves,1985
Postmodernism’s most famous names and amounting to over a billion dollars’
worth of commissions. The transformation of Disney’s resorts through
Postmodern architecture was spearheaded by the charismatic, architecture-
loving Disney chairman Michael Eisner, whose romance with the art form
began with Robert Stern designing his parents’ Manhattan apartment in the
early 1970s. With guidance from Graves and the arch-pluralist Robert Stern,
Eisner commissioned Frank Gehry, Charles Gwathmey, Venturi Scott Brown,
Arata Isozaki and of course Graves and Stern themselves in the
redevelopment of Disney World in Orlando, Florida as a more upmarket
family destination, as well as many more in the Disney-developed new town of
Celebration nearby, and Disneyland in Paris.
Aside from Isozaki’s Team Disney Building in Orlando (1990) (see page
104–5), with its giant Mickey-Mouse-ears entrance, biggest sundial in the
world and fragmented, colourful cubic forms, brilliantly capturing the
Japanese architect’s radically pluralist approach – as well as what is now
called the Michael D Eisner Building, another Team Disney office building in
California, this time by Graves (1990) in the form of a classical temple, with its
famous frieze of Seven Dwarves caryatids – the most spectacular of these
commissions was Graves’s Swan and Dolphin resorts in Orlando (1990; see
Chapter 3) (see pages 92–3, 174–5). Here, the architecture had to itself
become the attraction, and Graves developed a design approach that
combines grandeur, pleasure, the imagination, history, myth and
communication, orchestrated through a coherent formal language. The two
hotels had a total of 2,268 rooms between them, and cost $375million.
Graves used their immense scale to create a complex with a central axis
running over an artificial lake, terminated on either side by palatial structures
174 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Swan Resort, interior, Orlando. Michael Graves, 1990

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

– that exclude unwanted ‘others’ as having originated in Disney’s pay-to-enter

worlds. Others simply saw the brand and its globalised mission of
entertainment as vulgar, including James Stirling who rejected any
commissions from Disney:

‘TO ME, IT SEEMS DEMEANING AND

TRIVIAL AND SOMEHOW NOT
PROFOUND OR IMPORTANT.
IT’S OVERLY COMMERCIAL.’22
The twin successes of Disney’s relationship with Postmodern architecture, and
of corporate America’s wholehearted adoption of commercial variations of
Postmodernism for their headquarters and other buildings, completely
stripped the approach of its anti-establishment and intellectual credentials.
Younger architects, critics and the public were blinded to the incredible
opening-up of the profession that it had brought about, to its transformation of
how planners and architects related to the city, to history, to heritage and the
contemporary world, and to how buildings could say something, could tell
stories and generate atmospheres, and not remain entirely mute. Combined
with the rapid adoption of Postmodern architectural tropes – pediments, fake
columns, brightly coloured primary shapes and so on – by developers all over
the world who stuck them onto fundamentally terrible buildings, this was the
point after which no self-respecting architect could any longer adopt the style,
and many began to move back towards a neo-modern aesthetic.
Nonetheless, architecture had been changed forever for the better, and we
have been left with a wealth of hugely important buildings from one of the
greatest explosions of architectural energy that the world has ever seen.

Swan Resort, exterior, Orlando. Michael Graves, 1990

CHAPTER 6:
BACKLASH AND RESURGENCE
As the ambition of Postmodernism’s pioneers, and the scale of their
buildings, grew over the 80s and early 90s, the critical backlash to their
work rapidly gathered momentum, and was already well under way by the
time some of the buildings we most associate with the period were under
construction. Broad as the range of approaches were in this period, they
were mostly characterised by a shared interest in the past, and in the ways
in which buildings communicate. These qualities, once scaled up to the
parody-like – and some would say sinister – scale of the historical
quotations in Philip Johnson’s skyscrapers, or the unparalleled scale of the
narrated environments and monumental populism of Graves’s Disney
resorts, gave the critics easy targets with which to devalue the qualities
architects were striving to realise and to dismiss the Postmodern project in
general as a concluded enterprise.
The use of historical forms, often in confused profusion – mixing elements
from various times in history, and places in the world, on the façade of the
local mall or business park, and other times using them in deadening
conformity to reactionary precedent – led to the view that the direct
quotation of past architectures was inevitably ‘pastiche’. By this, critics
meant that the free use of figures from history in new compositions, or the
re-creation of designs from the past, was a way of emptying that past of
any significant meaning allied to its original context, thereby turning all of
history into meaningless signs that could be used willy-nilly for titillation,
comfort and pleasure.
In the hands of Venturi Scott Brown, Moore, Rossi or Stirling, historical
form was incorporated into contemporary buildings in intriguing ways,
unique to each project, relating to the context, programme, site history
and precedents within the canon of architecture. This was not a tool for
being haughtily uncommitted to the designs, but rather a technique for
allowing their buildings to be perceived in more ways than one at any
given moment, the mode of operating that allowed them to be
contemporary and rooted at the same time. Once the forms they used
were picked up by other architects as the clothes of fashion, the rich irony
and complex relationships with the past that characterised their work gave
way to a superabundance of histrionic historical elements draped over
otherwise unchanged buildings. Poetic irony turned to sarcasm.
Much as the many innovations and achievements that the earlier
Modernist masterpieces had contributed to architecture were somewhat
forgotten as the march of lesser-quality International Style buildings
spread around the world, and critics like Charles Jencks attacked their
banality and bankruptcy as an acceptable model for the production of
spaces and buildings (famously lauding the demolition of Minoru
Yamasaki’s 1954 Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in 1972 as the exact point at
which ‘Modern Architecture died’1), so it came to be Postmodernism’s

Chung Tai Chan Temple, Taiwan. C.Y. Lee, 2001

178 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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.

International spread: the Far East, Eastern

Europe, the Middle East and South America
Despite the turn away from the various formal methods of design and the
iconography associated with Postmodernism in the United States, Western Jin Mao Tower in Lujiazui, Shanghai.
SOM, 2013
Europe and Japan, other nations that were pressing ahead with rapid
development eagerly picked up on the aesthetic liberties, and possibilities for
regional references applied on vast scales, that were apparent in the later,
more commercial projects produced in the idiom.
Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan and China were booming in the 1990s, being
transformed by urbanisation on a scale that had not been seen before. Whole
new cities appeared where before there had only been villages, and
skyscrapers were built where before buildings had not risen above two floors.
Perhaps the most visually spectacular, and generally illustrative, of these
transformations was the development of the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone
in Pudong, Shanghai, where an international-scale business district appeared
in little more than ten years, although transformations on a far greater scale
were happening further south in the Pearl River Delta.
Architects like SOM and Cesar Pelli managed to perfect their historically
inspired skyscraper designs, modifying them for the geometric traditions of
different cultures, while maintaining their essential logic and efficiency, and
increasing their scale. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur by Pelli (1998)
were the tallest towers in the world at the time and, as twins, stood in
 CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 179

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

its west front into a double split-pediment, colonnaded piece of classically

referencing, bravura complexity, a miniature version of which nestles in
disconcerting counterpoint at the back of the church, next to and in the
shadow of the nave’s great Modernist bulk. The Seminary of the Resurrection,
Krakow (1985–96), by Dariusz Kozlowski, is a powerful use of various
Postmodern formal techniques to create an otherworldly, sombre environment
for an ecclesiastical community on a large scale.
A particularly exuberant form of Postmodernism, of the popular kind that used
collage and revelled in complex geometries and colours, spread across
Poland in the 1990s together with the arrival of capitalism and consumer

Church of God’s (Divine) Mercy, Kielce, Poland. M. Sztafrowski, 1996

 CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 181

culture. Wojciech Jarząbek’s Solpol Department Store in Wrocław (1993)

(see below) has come to be something of a symbol of this era, and illustrates
the exuberance with which ornament, complexity and polychromy were
adopted at the time. The University of Warsaw Library (1999), by Marek
Budzynski, and the TVP Building in Warsaw (2001–08), by Czesław Bielecki
and Maria Twardowska, are good examples.

Solpol Department Store, Wrocław. Wojciech Jarza˛bek, 1993

182 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

Al Yaqoub Tower, Dubai. Adnan Saffarini, 2013

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

Freddy Mamani Silverstre. Photo of a ‘Cholet’ events hall in El Alto 2014

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.

Passing of the Postmodern flame

Certain issues and approaches that postmodern architects and thinkers have
brought to architecture and urbanism have – in the intervening period during
which those deploying its stylistic attributes have been critically dismissed –
 CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 185

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.

Icons and ‘starchitects’

The 1990s and 2000s would see the rise of iconic architecture. In the period
we have looked at, and the buildings highlighted, there was almost always a
concerted attempt to create complex layers of meaning, or at least an
architecture that was evocative and symbolic in some way, mixing history and
popular references. Emphasis was on allusion rather than innovation. Iconic
architectural works – whether of the kind that evolved out of deconstruction
like Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au, or of the kind that evolved from
Postmodernists like Frank Gehry and Modernists like Norman Foster – all
shared a return to a unitary abstraction that emphasised the image of
structural innovation, hermetic consistency and advanced technology.
All symbolism, allusion, contradiction and complexity was smoothed out into
the silent complications of spectacular structure and geometries. These were a
Freddy Mamani Silverstre. Photo of a
return to the overgrown behemoths of late Brutalism that strained at
‘Cholet’ events hall in El Alto, 2016 expression through their structural hypertrophy. Except this time they had also
learned from Postmodernism. Rather than being dour mountains of concrete,
they were spectacles, spatial rollercoaster rides and spaceships. Where in the
1990s art produced celebrities with household popularity in Damien Hirst and
Tracy Emin, architecture did the same, making Koolhaas, Hadid, Libeskind,
Foster, Jean Nouvel and others into ‘starchitects’: popular commodities in their
own right.
This turn towards creating an abstract architecture that appealed to the
popular imagination is embodied in a moment at a press conference in which
the avant-garde practice Foreign Office Architects (FOA) radically reframed
the design of their hugely important Yokohama Ferry Terminal Building
(1995–2002) for an audience struggling with progressive architectural
techno-jargon. FOA cofounder Alejandro Zaera-Polo recalls his realisation
that the ‘material organisations’, ‘artificial ecologies’ and ‘circulation
diagrams’ on which the practice had previously relied for communication were
‘not coming across’, and how:
in a ‘burst of inspiration’ they ‘terminated the factual process narrative to conclude
that what really inspired us was the image of the Hokusai Wave. The room exploded
in an exclamation of sincere relief: “Ahh!”’5
186 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) is perhaps the most famous of these

iconic buildings, ushering in an era in which ‘urban regeneration’ was
imagined to be spurred almost singlehandedly by cultural projects in structures
of this kind. Over the next ten years their ilk spread far and wide, increasing
the fame of their related starchitects with each new opening: Hadid’s Phaeno
Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany (2005); 30 St Mary Axe in London
(2003; originally the Swiss RE Building) by Foster; UN Studio’s Mercedes
Benz Museum in Stuttgart (2006); Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North in
Trafford, Manchester (2002); the De Young Museum in San Francisco by
Herzog & de Meuron (2005); and countless more around the world – a trend
that continues to this day.

A new wave: London, the Netherlands,

Australia…
The years following the 2008 financial crisis have seen a distinct turn away
from such designs, in the United Kingdom at least, with a move towards a
new sobriety in architecture, much of which has become distinctly nostalgic
in ways that would most definitely not have been acceptable prior to the
Postmodern turn from the 1960s onwards. An approach to building that
organises façades in austere grids, clad in brick, with varying degrees of
infill and articulation, has become so predominant in London (and now the
rest of the country) that it has begun to be referred to as the New London
Vernacular (NLV). Recalling the clarity of Britain’s Victorian industrial
warehouses, as well as harking back to the early days of the high-rise in
the US, these buildings consciously re-create a pre-Modernist image that
evokes an era of urban and industrial grandeur. Two of the earliest and
best of these NLV buildings are Saxon Court and Roseberry Mansions
(2012) by Maccreanor Lavington, in the new King’s Cross masterplan, as
well as their recently completed Cartwright Gardens Student Housing just
around the corner – a design which illustrates the desire for almost
classical compositions that imply the depth of a building held up by
structural masonry.
Full-blooded, distinctly stylistic Postmodernism never died out, but had its flame
carried by a few practitioners in the West throughout the period during which
it became almost a taboo among the wider architectural community. CZWG in
the UK has an unbroken lineage of buildings that have continued developing
the same themes they began exploring in the 1980s. Short and Associates
design ecologically advanced buildings that generate their forms based on the
firm’s passive ventilation and cooling research, which – combined with a flair
for making the most of the unusual resulting profiles and elements – has led to
projects like the Lanchester Library at Coventry University (2000) and the
Contact Theatre in Manchester (1999) with their staccato monumentality and
almost castellated presence in their respective contexts. One of Short’s most
urbane works is the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at
 CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 187

The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
Short & Associates, 2005

University College London (2005) (see above), with its symmetrically

undulating brick façade.
Also in the UK, the now-disbanded practice Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT)
began in the mid-1990s to extend the Postmodern project with gusto. They
ironically used classical elements in their designs (Writer’s House, Clapham,
1998); explored the contemporary possibilities of Venturi and Scott Brown’s
technique of thin, billboard-like architecture (the Blue House, Hackney, 2002
(see page 114); Islington Square, Manchester, 2006); utilised collage and
extreme sampling (Community in a Cube, Middlesbrough, 2013); and
approached the profession generally from a refreshingly popular, conceptual
and artistic perspective, much as James Wines and SITE had in the 1970s
(see Chapter 5). FAT picked up the rich possibilities of Postmodernism at
precisely the point when it was at its lowest possible critical ebb, and were
responsible for maintaining the possibility of architecture in the UK being a
conceptual, multi-disciplinary practice that could absorb influences from other
timely areas of cultural production. Unlike most of the radical architecture
groups from the 1960s and 70s, FAT has an impressive list of built projects, all
of them provocative, inventive and clever in equal measure, ending their run
of schemes with the completion of A House for Essex (2015) (see page 115),
a holiday home designed in collaboration with the artist Grayson Perry. Aside
from being a holiday home, it is also – and probably primarily – a memorial
to a fictive character invented by the designers: Julie Cope, a quintessentially
188 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Essex individual whose life is commemorated in this spatially complex,

intricately crafted, ornate little gem. Their parting shot was a veritable
manifesto in how architecture can be communicative, popular, deeply sincere
whilst giving great pleasure, colourful, contextual in unexpected and
imaginative ways, full of ornament and craft and history, and involve great art
(Perry is a winner of the Turner Prize).
Another influential office that loudly continued the project of architectural
complexity, and which also recently split, is the Dutch practice Soeters Van
Eldonk architecten. Working in the same period as FAT, they were prolific
builders, being involved in the Netherlands’ giant VINEX housing
programme, for which they produced the Castle Lelienhuyze estate in Den
Bosch (1999–2006) – a fortified, moated castle for the 21st-century Dutch
middle class, constructed out of numerous homes and carefully designed to
convey an atmosphere of constructed rustic charm. The extreme plurality in
their works is clearly explained in their practice philosophy: ‘As the
environment and the history of the context are equally important to the final
appearance of a building, Soeters Van Eldonk architects consciously uses a
range of architectural languages, or styles, varying from historical to
symbolic to modern.’6 Their De Piramides housing in Amsterdam (2000–
2006) (see page 119) takes traditional Dutch brick town houses, extracts two
of their gables, and blows them up to a monumental scale as apartment
blocks. City Centre in Spijkenisse (2007) breaks a large shopping centre
down into a cityscape of smaller elevations, including some nautical baroque
replete with giant porthole windows and scrolls; while their Gouda City Hall
(2006–12) plays with the expectation of a structural frame implicit in the form
of the building’s windows, but here clad in clearly non-structural brickwork, a
huge decorative quilt over the cube of the office block.
The Netherlands never really lost the sense of intelligent play and symbolism
in architecture, even in the witty and clever games that were played with the
logic of functionalism and Modernism by many Dutch architects in the 1990s,
the children of OMA and its re-imagination of modernity for an irrational era
(see Chapter 5). Chief amongst these was MVRDV, who managed to combine
OMA’s heroic bravura and programmatic inventiveness with historic and
contextual references and a joyous sensibility for popular appeal. Their Glass
Farm in Schijndel, The Netherlands (2013) takes a shiny abstract, angular
reflective shape and, following a project with artist Frank van der Salm in
which numerous barns in the local region were documented and a new
‘typical’ barn created out of their composite, the 1:1 image of a barn was
printed over the entire glazed envelope. In the corner of one’s eye it is
unnervingly real, until one looks close or it catches the light, and at night the
typical barn is a ghost hovering around the edge of the lights shining from the
interior. Rotterdam Market Hall (2004–14) (see page 118) is almost like a
child’s cartoon of an enclosed space, a slightly squashed jam roly-poly with its
inside hollowed out by a spoon. A vast space enclosed on three sides by
apartments, the surface of its interior ‘vault’ is a 36,000-square-foot brightly
 CHAPTER 6: Backlash and Resurgence 189

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

Inntel Hotel, Zaandam. WAM Architecten, 2010

190 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

Swanston Square tower (Barak Building), Melbourne. ARM, 2014

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

Now that a younger generation of architecture students and practitioners are

rediscovering these concerns, reading Venturi and Scott Brown and Rossi
once again, these practices will no doubt have numerous progeny in the
coming years.

Where will Postmodernism go now?

Broad principles have been adopted from the days of Postmodern discourse,
but the stylistic, symbolic and aesthetic richness which was implied in the
pluralism of the approach’s first decades has been lost, with the incorporation
of history only ever involving a set of very constrained referents. Popularity in
the sense of an architecture that communicates with the richness and intensity
of other contemporary media has been almost entirely lost, and there is a
great reduction in the expression of individuality on display in the current
spread of architect-designed construction. As Joseph Rykwert writes:

‘AFTER PO-MO, QUIPPED A NEW YORK

WIT, COMES PO-PO-MO. AND AFTER
PO-PO-MO – COMES NO-MO!
SO THAT’S WHERE WE NOW ARE.’7
192 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

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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Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of 12 Abitare, November 1996.
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in his 1923 manifesto Vers une Architecture: Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of and Beyond’, Philosophy Now, 58,
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Press (London), 1961. 2011. p 1: http://www.un.org/esa/population/
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13 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great at 68’, New York Times, 17 December
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History of Humankind, Vintage Books 10 John Outram Associates website, 2 See Paolo Portoghesi, ‘Architecture born
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Projects & Drawings 1949–1979, ed. 9 Charles Jencks, ‘La Strada Novissima: The 21 Adelyn Perez, ‘AD Classics: Walt Disney
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1980, pp. 16. October 1980. Graves’, 14 June 2010, http://www.
3 Martino Stierli, ‘In the Academy’s Garden: 10 Léa-Catherine Szacka, ‘Historicism Versus archdaily.com/64270/ad-classics-walt-
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Issue 56, 2007, p. 46. 81, Issue 5 (September/October 2011), 2017).
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Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of 11 Barbara Radice, Memphis: Research, Deco’, New York 8 April 1990, http://
Modern Art (New York), 1966, p. 16. Experiences, Results, Failures and www.nytimes.com/1990/04/08/
5 See Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Successes of New Design, 1982, quoted on magazine/disney-deco.
Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the http://text-bin.blogspot.fr/2011/07/ html?pagewanted=all (accessed 12
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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.
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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
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196 REVISTING POSTMODERNISM

IMAGE CREDITS
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 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