The Post in Postmodernism
The style of Postmodernism was one of architecture’s prime moments where it anticipated a wider cultural phenomenon — even outrunning other disciplines. However, due to Postmodernism’s shameless flirtations with bad taste, the ugly, and the ordinary, PoMo has all too often not been taken seriously or even looked down upon as a necessary evil of history unfolding. Examples of starchitects in the 1990s proclaiming to finish the modern project after it was cut off by Postmodernism are numerous.
A major museum such as the V&A to dedicate it’s space to this style is a sign for a revaluation of Postmodernism as a serious set of ideas with continuing influence and relevance for today. One of the most striking sentences in the catalogue to the exhibition, that captured the PoMo attitude read:
Nothing looks as dated as last season’s future.
To over come modernism (anyways declared dead by PoMo-Father Charles Jencks) the postmodernists embraced the collage as a technique to subvert the present by intertwining it with the past. The new was rejected and replaced by novel combinations and recombinations as the method of expression. In architecture the new mix of styles culminated in a new semiotic project that gave semiotics the power over space and declared architecture to be a language. PoMo successfully broke with modernist dogmas and reintroduced ornament (arguably it was never gone), the iconic, the symbolic, and the sculptural into the architectural discourse.
However, PoMo is not the dominant style any longer (according to the V&A it ended in the 90s) — so what came after it? How is contemporary architecture differentiating itself from the postmodern bricolage?
Reverting back to a neo-modernism or neo-functionalism has come as an answer to many. In this blog I want to explore alternative hunches of contemporaneity that potentially evade a post-everything neo-anything characterization.
