Postmodernism vs Modernism

Framing

This is the central architectural debate of the late 20th century: whether architecture should continue the Modernist project (functional purity, rejection of ornament, universal solutions, social progress through design) or embrace postmodern alternatives (symbolism, ornament, historical reference, popular culture, contextualism). Learning from Las Vegas (1977) is a foundational postmodern text that challenged Modernist orthodoxy. Foucault and Latour complicate the binary: Foucault's archaeology undermines modernism's claims to progressive rationality, while Latour argues that postmodernism is merely a devalued version of modernism — suggesting we should suspend modernism's key features rather than simply invert them.

Positions

Position A: Modernism

Modernism holds that architecture should express its time through new forms derived from function, structure, and technology—not historical styles or applied ornament. Key principles include:

"Form follows function"
Rejection of ornament (Adolf Loos: "Ornament and Crime")
Universal, international style
Social progress through rational design
Space as the essence of architecture (Giedion)
Process over image

Key texts:

Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941)
Gropius, various manifestos
Mies van der Rohe, "Less is More"

Position B: Postmodernism

Postmodernism argues that Modernism became dogmatic, ignoring symbolism, context, and popular taste. Key principles include:

Symbolism and communication over spatial purity
Ornament as legitimate architectural element
Historical reference and eclecticism
Acceptance of commercial vernacular
"Ugly and ordinary" over "heroic and original"
Decorated shed over the duck

Key texts:

source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)

Additional Position: The Split Object (Portman's modern skin / postmodern interior)

Marinic's chapter on the Portman originals adds a hybrid position the binary misses: a single building can be modernist and postmodernist at once, distributed across its layers. "Portman codes his reflective glass building envelopes for the Westin Peachtree Plaza and Detroit Renaissance Center as 'modern,' while simultaneously experimenting with interior spatial postmodernity. This skin serves as a tenuous boundary between an ordered external architecture and the ongoing aesthetic chaos of its renovated interior spaces." The debate is thereby internalized as the building's own "internal disconnect": Baudrillard reads the Bonaventure's hyperspace as "an unintentional parody of modernism," while Portman's 1986 follies "embraced postmodernity as fashion in the form of consumer kitsch" — postmodernity applied by a late modernist to his own late modernist podium. The position also radicalizes the stakes: once the modern shell and the postmodern interior split, renovation becomes the site where the debate is fought — and the postmodern renovation wave is what consumed the "Brutalist spirit" of the originals. Key texts: source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman

Additional Position: Topology as Postmodernism's Continuation

Johan Voordouw's chapter adds a genealogical position: the computational "fold" — usually narrated as a Baroque development within modernism's formal lineage (via Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) — is in fact postmodernism's continuation. The Baroque association is an inheritance from Wölfflin's Renaissance und Barock (via Deleuze), but "While architectural topology could exhibit the somber massiveness, movement, painterly effects, and totalizing unity of Wölfflin's Baroque topology, as Banham's anecdote illustrates, is not inherently Baroque in form. In relation to architecture, this shifts the development of topological surfaces to a different historical lineage. Topology as an architectural form and practice is a continuation of postmodernism, not a 'Baroque' development of modernism." The position re-dates the debate's stakes into the digital present: Lynn's blobs as "a last reaction against modernism," and the fold's continuity-of-surface as the postmodern critique of form's predominance carried into computation. It also quietly sides with Position B's historiography while refusing its philosophical packaging — the fold is not Baroque metaphysics realized but postmodernism's formal afterlife. Key texts: source-notes/voordouw-2018-topology-and-interiority

Additional Position: The Middle Ground in Planning (Røe's Skjettenbyen)

Per Gunnar Røe's study of the Skjettenbyen suburb (built 1969–1973, Oslo) adds the debate's planning-side and built-case position: the binary dissolves into a chronological middle occupied by an actual housing project. Skjettenbyen was "built while Pruitt Igoe… was demolished in 1972" and "may be seen as a symbolic step towards postmodernism in planning" — "a forceful representation of the 'turn' to low-rise, bottom-up housing projects": "a turn from the monumentality of the high-rise satellite town, to a more human scale and micro-oriented interactional spaces. It was a turn from top-down planning achieved through rigid master plans, to greater user participation and more flexible solutions" (pp. 544). Yet "the legacy of modernism was still very much alive as is evident in the use of scientific knowledge, such as the environmental psychology of Gehl (1971)… in the detailed prescriptions for the development, use and maintenance of the area in the handbook. The houses were flexible but people were told how to be flexible, in a paternalistic fashion." The position's formula: "The Skjettenbyen housing project may be viewed as a middle ground between modernism and postmodernism in planning. It had turned its back on high modern functionalism, and introduced a degree of flexibility to ensure some participation and socio-demographic diversity, with the ambition to avoid developing what Grubbauer (2014) calls an architecture that functions as 'a socially classifying device'" (p. 544). Where the Positions A/B and the split-object position distribute modernism and postmodernism across a building's layers, Røe's distributes them across a regime's practices — functionalist standards and environmental psychology (modernist) inside a participatory, flexibility discourse (proto-postmodern) — and adds the debate's reception audit: the inhabitants evaluated the result "as part of the everyday life of its inhabitants, and not as part of a suburban counter culture" (p. 547). Key texts: source-notes/roe-2015-construction-of-a-suburb

Additional Position: The Polarisation Verdict (housing history)

Glendinning and Muthesius's Tower Block adds the debate's housing-history position and its meta-critique: the Modern/postmodern flip in housing was a media- and party-political polarisation, not a reasoned refutation — "within a decade, professional and public opinion, and the burden of proof in argument, were all thrown into reverse" (p. 326), with Coleman's Utopia on Trial and Ravetz's "monumental vs. vernacular" as the new polemic's slogans. Their verdict reframes the whole binary: "polemics are inherently unstable… Only thirty years ago, the cry was that 'all Victorian private housing is bad—pull it down and build Modern public housing!' Now we hear that 'all Modern public housing is bad—pull it down and preserve Victorian private housing!'" (p. 327). The position's charge: "If it is proper to speak of any kind of 'failure' or 'blame' in respect of Modern housing, then in our view the major 'culprit' must be the polarisation of Utopia itself" (p. 327) — and the historians' programme, "reassess the 'Dystopia' of the seventies and eighties — Modern Housing" (p. 327). Where Røe's position distributes modernism and postmodernism across a regime's practices, this position distributes them across a debate's history — and indicts the debate form itself. Key texts: source-notes/glendinning-muthesius-1994-tower-block

Key Texts

source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas — Postmodern position
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) — Early postmodern critique
Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941) — Modernist position
source-notes/elliott-benjamin-for-architects — Benjamin's alternative modernism
source-notes/yaneva-latour-for-architects — Latour's complication of the binary
source-notes/fontana-giusti-foucault-for-architects — Foucault's archaeological critique
source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman — the split object: Portman's "modern" envelopes over "interior spatial postmodernity"; the follies as postmodernity-as-fashion
source-notes/voordouw-2018-topology-and-interiority — topology as postmodernism's continuation, not a "Baroque" development of modernism; the fold's Wölfflin inheritance separated from its actual lineage; the blobs as "a last reaction against modernism"
source-notes/roe-2015-construction-of-a-suburb — the middle-ground position in planning: Skjettenbyen as "a middle ground between modernism and postmodernism in planning" — the high-rise critique and participatory turn with modernism's scientific knowledge and paternalist prescriptions intact
source-notes/glendinning-muthesius-1994-tower-block — the polarisation verdict: the housing flip as media-political reversal; "the major 'culprit' must be the polarisation of Utopia itself" (p. 327)
Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the debate from criticism: modernism's 'style for the time' doctrine dismantled (pp. 138–44), 'Less is a bore' (p. 84), and the claim that the traditional buildings of 1900–1914 are as much their time as the modern ones (pp. 139–40).

Current State

The debate is historically resolved in favor of postmodernism's critique (Modernism's claims to universality and purity are widely questioned), but the terms continue to shape architectural discourse. Contemporary "parametricism" and "starchitecture" can be read as late Modernist or as new forms of the duck. Glendinning & Muthesius add the historiographic warning: the debate's own form — polarised utopia against dystopia — is unstable and cyclical, and its next reversal (their forecast: "Is not this very book a continuation of the endless cycle," p. 327) cannot be ruled out.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

This debate is central to understanding:

The critique of iconic architecture
The legitimacy of everyday/commercial architecture
The role of symbolism in architectural meaning
The relationship between architecture and popular culture