Postmodern and Late-Modern Architecture
Postmodernism and late modernism emerged from the 1960s as competing reactions to the Modern Movement, one embracing history and symbolism, the other extending modern technology.
Definition
The study of the postmodern and late-modern tendencies in architecture from the 1960s through the late twentieth century.
Scope
This topic covers the critique of modern architecture launched by Venturi and others, the postmodern revival of historical reference, ornament, and symbolism theorized by Jencks, and the parallel late-modern and high-tech directions that pushed modern structure and technology to expressive extremes in the work of architects such as Foster, Rogers, and Piano.
Core questions
- What did Venturi mean by complexity and contradiction?
- How did postmodernism reintroduce history and meaning?
- How does late modernism differ from postmodernism?
- What was the high-tech movement?
Key theories
- Complexity and contradiction
- Robert Venturi's argument for a richer, more inclusive architecture embracing ambiguity, history, and 'both-and' complexity against the reductive 'less is more' of modernism.
- Double coding
- Charles Jencks's notion that postmodern architecture communicates on two levels at once—to architects and to the public—through historical and popular references.
History
Venturi's 1966 book and Jencks's writings of the 1970s articulated a postmodern reaction against modernism that flourished into the 1980s with historicist and symbolic buildings; alongside it, late-modern and high-tech architecture—from the Centre Pompidou to the work of Foster and Rogers—extended modern technology rather than rejecting it.
Debates
- Critique or commercialization
- Critics dispute whether postmodernism was a serious intellectual critique of modernism or a superficial, commercially driven recycling of historical motifs.
Key figures
- Robert Venturi
- Charles Jencks
- Michael Graves
- Renzo Piano
Related topics
Seminal works
- venturi1966
- jencks1977
- frampton2007
Frequently asked questions
- What is high-tech architecture?
- High-tech architecture is a late-modern tendency that celebrates structure, services, and industrial technology as expressive elements, as in the Centre Pompidou and Lloyd's of London.
- How did postmodernism differ from modernism?
- Where modernism rejected ornament and historical reference, postmodernism reintroduced them, often ironically, valuing communication, context, and visual variety.