arXitecture
Articles and Review
POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION 1970-1990
This exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which ended in
January 2012, covered the whole range of Postmodernism from clothing,
product and industrial design to graphics and architecture. The latter is a
small part of this and so the exhibition was not reviewed by arXitecture. However Nigel
Halliday writing in Third Way noted how architecture is usually different
and distinctive from all these other design categories. This is an important
point worth making as we consider architecture in context.
extract from REVIEW from Third Way Dec 2011 by Nigel Halliday
Postmodernism's architecture was,
by necessity, more seriously purposeful than its applied arts: for few
clients will pay for genuinely nihilistic buildings. So playfulness and
stylistic promiscuity are to the fore in the work of Philip Johnson and
Robert Venturi. The series of Best Products department stores designed
by James Wise and the SITE group are delightfully creative and amusing. The
exhibition also reminds us what a welcome relief postmodern architecture was
in the 1970s, a redemptive rejection of the inhumanity of late modern and
brutalist architecture........
............postmodernism was a step forward in recognising the limitations
of human power to command and control, and the impossibility of taking a
neutral position in your views on life. However, its two options for living
are equally dispiriting.
On the one hand it offers the despair that is evidenced in wilful nonsense
...[and] on the other hand it offered itself up to commercialism.
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