Postmodernism

Definition

Postmodernism names the cultural, architectural, and philosophical shift away from the certainties of modernism — embracing pluralism, pastiche, historicism, and the collapse of high/low distinctions. In architecture, it is associated with the rejection of Modernist purity (form follows function, truth to materials) in favor of symbolism, ornament, historical reference, and communicative legibility. Fredric Jameson theorizes it as the "cultural logic of late capitalism"; Charles Jencks identifies it with "double-coding"; Venturi and Scott Brown champion its embrace of commercial vernacular and the "decorated shed."

Key Thinkers

• Fredric Jameson — postmodernism as cultural logic of late capitalism; the Bonaventure Hotel as postmodern hyperspace.
• Charles Jencks — double-coding, enigmatic signifier, the language of postmodern architecture.
• Robert Venturi — complexity and contradiction; the decorated shed as postmodern alternative to Modernist purity.
• Denise Scott Brown — commercial vernacular, learning from Las Vegas.
• Hal Foster — postmodernism of resistance vs. reaction.

Related Concepts

• modernism — the movement postmodernism reacts against.
• modernism — the architectural tradition postmodernism challenges.
• decorated-shed — Venturi and Scott Brown's postmodern alternative to the duck.
• the-duck — the Modernist tendency postmodernism critiques.
• iconic-architecture — contemporary manifestation of postmodern monumentality.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
• source-notes/hawthorne-2023-fifty-years-learning-from-las-vegas
• source-notes/jameson-1983-postmodernism-cultural-logic-late-capitalism
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — a "second wave" of postmodern practice and theory as one of three stimuli for interior architecture's founding literature: Brooker & Stone's Re-readings (its title "a nod to literary postmodernism") ties the rise of remodeling to "the reaction to what is perceived as the detrimental erosion of the city and its contents by modern architecture," pursuing "the aesthetics of the incomplete, the incoherent, and the layered" against modernism's "essentially self-sufficient" formal systems. Hollis also identifies a "postmodern turn" in history-writing itself: "an interest in the intertextual, the relative and the denial of linear heroic narratives."
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the postmodern museum as cultural diagnostic: postmodern institutions are "defined against their modernist counterparts by virtue of their heterogeneity… ambiguously defined spaces, ones that combine multiple functions and behaviours," having "appropriated elements from theme parks, malls, boutiques, food courts" without "abandoning the prestige of 'high' art" (p. 91); the sensory face of the same logic — sensory saturation via synthetic scents as "one of the most fashionable additions to the museum's repertoire of effects" and image quick-fix (pp. 91–92); and the smell-regime pair — the postmodern museum's "heterosmia" against the modernist museum's anosmia (p. 91). The five-senses "aromatopia" (aromatopia) as postmodern totality-experience. See heterosmia, exhibitionary-complex.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — postmodernism's architectural interior and its kitsch edge: the Portman originals as "iconic works of spatial postmodernism" whose reflective glass envelopes are coded "'modern,' while simultaneously experimenting with interior spatial postmodernity" — the skin as "a tenuous boundary between an ordered external architecture and the ongoing aesthetic chaos of its renovated interior spaces." Jameson's pastiche ("linked to an inability to develop new 'styles' as they are perceived to have already been invented") and postmodern "schizophrenia" ("the disappearance of a sense of history due to postmodern recycling of the past") are mapped onto the type: Portman "engaged in postmodern spatiality well before the overtly literal postmodern follies," whose 1986 Tivoli-derived pavilions "embraced postmodernity as fashion in the form of consumer kitsch" and "met their own demise" (see kitsch, atrium-hotel, jameson-fredric).
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the urban-critical register: the "insightful and critical postmodern approach to urban studies, focusing on what is new and different today rather than what is the same" (Preface, p. xiii) — the postmetropolis itself "can thus be used interchangeably with postmodern metropolis and interpreted as an expression of what some now call postmodern urbanism" (p. xiii); the "posts" anatomy (postfordism's deconstruction-and-reconstitution, p. 170; the least applicable posts being "post-urban, post-industrial, and post-capitalist," p. 147); the internal Left debate (Davis's "militant anti-postmodernism" versus the postmodern Left he walls off, p. 311); and the programmatic position: "a strategically postmodern radical politics… that goes beyond demystification and unmasking" — because "Modernist politics of the Left… provide much less insight into helping us understand – and respond effectively to – what is new and different" (pp. 348–349). Los Angeles "on the bad edge of postmodernity" (Davis, quoted p. 301) with Soja's insistence that "there is a good edge as well to the postmodern condition" (p. 302).
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the first stirrings of postmodernism in Charles Moore's succession to Rudolph at Yale (p. 136) and the pre-history in Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture — 'Less is a bore' (p. 84) — whose 'richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning' Goldberger credits with freeing him from orthodox purism (p. 182).
• source-notes/voordouw-2018-topology-and-interiority

Open Questions

• How does postmodernism's legacy continue in contemporary parametricism and digital architecture?
• Is the "critical/projective" debate a continuation of postmodernism's internal tensions?
• Hollis's "postmodern turn" in historiography (the intertextual, the relative, the denial of linear heroic narratives) — does the interior's layered, multiple-authored history offer a concrete test case for whether postmodern historiography can be written rather than merely announced?