2009.08.17 09:10
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Took the time to look through Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) and read a little from Part Three: 'Post-Modern Architecture:
"There articles and attacks, lasting from 1959 to 1962, were meant to wipe out these heresies with a little critical weed-killer, but in the event the Italians fought back at this Puritanism, the refrigerator school of criticism.
The kind of buildings which were provoking this debate all had vague or repressed historical allusions..."
"Here is the schizophrenic cross between two codes that is characteristic of Post-Modernism..."
"Saarinen couldn't quite go the next step and design conventional decoration."
"The historicism is attenuated, embarrassed, half-baked--a problem for many of the architects who left Mies setting out for decoration (and never quite arrived)."
"'We can not know history'.
So by 1961 we have at least a camp, laconic statement in favor of eclecticism."
"What, might be asked, is really wrong with the decorative use of traditional elements--indeed straightforward ornament and the Trad styles? No one was prepared in the sixties to pose these questions in a radical way, and so the vague modernist suspicion of ornament and convention remained.
I suppose the first Modernist architect to use the decorative moulding and traditional symbol (such as the doorway arch) in an aggressive way was Robert Venturi. His Headquarters Building (1960)..."
...where the colors have been homogenized, the windows changed, and only faint traces of the mouldings remain.
2009.08.17 18:04
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
That traditional symbol, like the doorway arch at the Headquarters for the North Penn Visiting Nurses' Association, actually references Frank Furness, Gravers Lane Railroad Station (Chestnut Hill, location of Mother's House), Philadelphia, 1883.
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