Postmodern Architecture

An architectural rebellion against the modern glass box

« All Arche-tecture | Last Updated 2022

Eccentric. Slightly whacky. And pretty thoroughly dated. These are buildings you would see on the glossy cover of a coffee table book in 1985 and think you were looking at the future. Nowadays you might see them in an exhibit in a modern art museum and know full well you are looking at the past. So what’s with the name? You have to start with the definition of “modern” in its proper context. By the ’80s, the concept of modernity in architecture had slowly grown over time to mean two key things: 1) not looking back to reference past styles, and 2) getting rid of any extraneous ornament. Art Nouveau at the turn of the twentieth century locked in the first part of the definition by looking at least sideways (towards nature) for inspiration instead of the past. But the second part of the definition took a few more decades. Art Deco in the ’20s used minimal, blocky forms, but still had some ornamentation. Streamline Moderne followed in the ’30s and really smoothed out surface details, but it wasn’t until the mid-century International Style and its cousin Brutalism that modernism was on full display.

By the time these two styles proliferated into the ’70s and ’80s, they had moved beyond decorative arts; they had developed into their own dogma. Architects preoccupied themselves with utilitarian philosophizing – if a building decoration had no value to its function, why waste a precious resource on it? If an ornament could not help with the woes of the working class, what purpose did it serve? The movement was of course unsustainable – architects had moved so far along the spectrum away from ornament and historicism that there was really nothing left to strip back. Contemporaneous minds grew discontent with the prude glass box, the preachiness of the philosophy (which ironically aged from democratic to elitist as the decades turned), and so they rebelled. A decorative flourish here wouldn’t hurt the working class, they decided; a building crown, though offering no contribution to its function, wouldn’t take away from its overall utility.

Slowly, the boundaries were pushed in the ’90s until entire buildings were made up of exaggerated, asymmetric bursts of color and shape that served no function other than to represent the humor and taste of the architect. Classical references to columns and pediments, though heavily stylized, were added back in, their juxtaposition next to zany shapes and bold patterns taking on a wholly new, campy aesthetic. And thus, the style had moved beyond mid-century “modern” designs; “post-” modern was born.