A return to history and context

It was precisely these factors that certain figures utilised to begin breaking down the edifice of orthodox Modernism. They questioned its rejection of the past, and attacked its blindness towards tradition, context and local cultures, harnessing these overlooked considerations to begin tentatively re-introducing a certain amount of difference into the vocabulary of acceptable architecture.

With unimpeachably great modern figures like Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier already imbuing their buildings with a deeply felt sense of place and materiality that resonated with regional traditions, as well as a certain humane sensuality that had been missing from earlier works, younger architects had an as-yet untheorised but architecturally explicit direction marked out for them to follow. Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul in Paris (1956), and Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1939) and his Muuratsalo holiday home (1953) in rural Finland, amongst other works, introduced into Modern architecture forms that had no technological explanation for their presence, but were instead utilised because of their atavistic qualities and sense of specific, local belonging.

By demanding, with differing degrees of emphasis, a return to regional identities, and for this to be radically embodied in their architectures, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Giancarlo de Carlo and Ralph Erskine created a rift at the 1960 CIAM Congress in Otterlo, Norway that was to rapidly tear apart the Modernist consensus. They began to explicitly theorise the demand for the incorporation of regional identities that had already been implicitly explored in the works of some of the great masters, and which would soon shake the foundations of Modernism’s claim to supremacy over contemporary architecture. The claim that architecture was progress, that progress was technological and universal, and that buildings could only be of their time if they expressed universal values and technology and nothing else, would soon be undermined first by the return to history and tradition, and later by the return of the individual, the arbitrary, the eclectic, the expressive and the ambiguous, and more besides – all key features of what would become Postmodernism.

Shifts in Italian modernity

An interest in the past, in cracking the rigidity and universality of Modernism, did not arise out of nowhere in Italy. The country had an extremely vibrant architectural scene before the Second World War, in which various groups competed – although the competition was mostly between the Rationalists, who developed an intriguing mediation between Italian tradition and the thrusting techno-industrial aesthetics of Futurism, and the Classicists, led by Marcello Piacentini (a proponent of pared-back classical architecture who was as close as Italy got to a chief national architect), who were looking for a modern architecture rooted in ‘Romanità’, or Roman-ness. The dialogue between the two – played out in ideological journals and through numerous competitions for state buildings – had the interesting result that even the Rationalists incorporated a profound sense of historical awareness and sensitivity into their works; and inversely, the more classically oriented architects developed new expressions of historical form, more modern and aggressively abstract than those ever explored in other European countries. The modern became historical, and the historical modern. A telling example of this is the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome (1942), an intriguing hybrid between the two tendencies, designed by the rationalist Adalberto Libero, but with a large amount of input from the classicising Piacentini. It is a strange, classical-Rationalist hybrid, with a classicised portico facing in one direction, a clean Modernist cantilever the other, with its low rationalist proportions being surmounted by a giant, mausoleum-like marble cube.

The issue of continuità (continuity) in architecture, as the Italians put it, lost the grandiose classical aspect it had attained under Piacentini et al, broadening after the war into a more nuanced and playful understanding of the past and what constituted the ‘local’. Gio Ponti, a hugely important figure in Italy’s post-war design scene, was editor of Stile magazine from 1941 to 1947, in which he brought together all the arts, design and architecture in a search for new syntheses, for a richness that was mostly absent from international Modernism. A little later, in 1953, Ernesto Nathan Rogers became editor of Casabella and immediately renamed it Casabella Continuità, turning the national magazine into a hotbed for the propagation of debates around the opening up of modernity to history.

Luigi Moretti’s 1950 Casa Girasole is a perfect example of how these ideas were already coming together architecturally by the late 1940s. One of the thousands of ‘palazzinas’, or small apartment blocks that were going up in Rome after the war, it takes Modernist tropes like the horizontal strip window and the free façade and incorporates them within an exceptionally complex design that is pregnant with Roman architectures of the past. The building is crowned by a barely abstracted split pediment, whose division runs through the whole structure, leaving it dramatically cleft in a Michelangelesque act of mannered expression. The strip windows and façade over-sail the building behind, directly recalling the stone façades propped up in front of brick churches that one sees all over Italy. The base is a Renaissance-palazzo-derived plinth replete with stone rustication, some of the individual blocks within which have sections of figures embedded in them: a clear reference to the continuity and necessary intermingling of all things from all eras in Rome.

As documented in Heinrich Klotz’s The History of Postmodern Architecture, it was an Italian project that acted as the lightning rod for the CIAM 1960 debates: the Torre Velasca in Milan (1958) (see left), by Ernesto Rogers’s firm BBPR. A radical departure from the expectations of what constituted a timeless, progressive Modernist edifice, it is to all intents and purposes a Lombardian fortified belvedere that looks simultaneously ancient and of-its-place, and incomparably distinct and contemporary. As Klotz points out, it:

The Torre Velasca, Milan. BBPR, 1958

Comparing the Velasca to SOM’s Union Carbide Building in New York (1960), an exemplar of the kind of building that was being put up around the world now that the International Style had become the de facto language of capitalism, one can see how shocking the messy Milanese tower-cum-ancient-fortress must have seemed to the Modernists, coming as it did just at the moment when the perfectly replicable and efficient style of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe seemed to have won the battle for architecture’s soul. Here was a building that followed many Modernist precepts – it expressed its

Palazzo ENPAS, Bologna. Saverio Muratori, 1957

structure; was functional and efficient; was an unrepentant new tower in the city; utilised the latest construction technologies – and yet its design strained every single one of its elements to be as expressive as possible of characteristics the architects felt derived from the regional vernacular.

Exploring similar themes and under construction at the time (though designed in 1952–7) was the Palazzo ENPAS in Bologna by Saverio Muratori (see page 126). Less strident on the skyline, but an equally ground-breaking disruption of the Modernist ethos, it sits on massive brick piers and has a castellated broken-pediment crown, a base close to a traditional Bolognese arcade, and vertical slot windows set within what appear to be masonry openings. It embodied Muratori’s search for essential forms deriving from a building’s context that could be creatively synthesised into new kinds of construction. Similarly of interest is Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s Convento di Sant’Antonio dei Frati Francescani in Milan, built between 1959 and 1963 (see below, left). Another tower, although this time brick, squat and small, it is reminiscent of a modest provincial church’s bell tower, perforated by strangely ornamental openings and fitting into its street as if it had always been there.

As a figure within Italy’s post-war INA-Casa housing programme who had sought to incorporate local contexts into designs for new apartment blocks in a contemporary manner, Luigi Vagnetti designed the Palazzo Grande in Livorno (1952) (see opener pages 122–3), a large mixed-use structure in which Rationalist and Modernist elements were transfigured through a composition that had everything to do with traditional Italian civic architecture. The windows are arranged with a strong vertical emphasis, the ground floor as an arcade with rustication, a first-floor loggia echoes the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and the whole is topped off with small pitched roofs, echoing the ornamental crenellations on some historical structures.

Convento di Sant’Antonio dei Frati Francescani, Milan. Luigi Caccia Dominioni, 1963

The young Paolo Portoghesi’s Casa Baldi in Rome (1962) (see page 128, top) clearly references the Baroque forms of Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) and the classical ordering of the architecture in his beloved city. Portoghesi recalls his works from this period as explicit reactions to the stifling conventions of the Roman architecture schools of the time, with their emphasis on diagrams and function and little else. He was beginning to formulate the idea that the architect could be the unifier of traditions from diverse places and historical periods, bringing them together into singular compositions that were infinitely richer than those the architecture schools allowed their students to produce. What he referred to as:

– an almost heretical position to hold at the time – would eventually flower into his curating of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled ‘The Presence of the Past’, a veritable carnival of international eclecticism (see Chapters 2 and 5).

Popular architecture and the past in the post-war United States

Italy also proved part of the story for the US, that other great wellspring of what would later coalesce into what we now think of as Postmodernism. Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi, two figures who in very different ways rediscovered the power of historical form when reinjected into contemporary architecture (see Chapter 2), both had extended stays at the American Academy in Rome (Kahn in 1950, Venturi in 1954–6) that turned out to be transformative experiences.

Casa Baldi, Rome. Paolo Portoghesi, 1962

Romanced by the ruins of ancient Rome, Kahn formulated what for him was the essence of all great architecture, namely the coming together of building materials in the heroic primary forms of timelessly monumental compositions. The quasi-mystical inspiration he gathered from his Italian experience went on through his works to inject late Modernism with a poetic grandeur it had up to that point never sought, and achieved only rarely by accident.

Venturi had travelled to Europe previously in 1948, falling in love with the architecture of John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and the British Baroque. His later stay afforded him the time to travel the continent thoroughly and re-affirm his particular fascination with Baroque architecture, and Rome in particular. The incredible richness and complexity of buildings designed in reaction to the austere order of the classical cannon as strictly interpreted – whether by Mannerists like Giulio Romano (c. 1499–1546) or masters of fluid Baroque like Borromini, or indeed British eccentrics like Nicholas Hawksmoor (c. 1661–1736) and Vanbrugh – seemed to offer Venturi tantalising glimpses into how architects could re-enrich the by-then stagnant language of modernity.³

Immediately following his return from Rome, Venturi taught at the University of Pennsylvania, initially as assistant to Kahn. The two were in constant contact, and their discussions must have helped both to develop a sense of assurance and confidence towards their mutual interest in historical form. Kahn’s work in this period progressively moved away from a common Modernist approach to the almost ancient grandeur that he discovered from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1965) onwards. Venturi, meanwhile, was honing his ideas that burst onto the scene fully grown in his seminal 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, hot on the heels of two seminal buildings he had completed: the Guild House (1963) and the Vanna Venturi House (1964), both in Philadelphia, which together perfectly illustrated the points he made in his text.

This well-known extract from Complexity and Contradiction highlights the radical break it made with the dictums of the time:

Whilst the academies and much corporate building of the 1950s and 60s in the US might have strictly adhered to the orthodoxy of High Modernism, the country in fact had a highly varied and vibrant architectural scene that did not fit the orthodox narrative. Much of this was simply ignored by the Modernist academic elite, and has continued to be somewhat sidelined in the re-telling of the story of post-war American architecture; but it was never ignored by the media or the public at the time.

New Formalism

At the more traditional end of this world of not-strictly-modern architecture that filled the US in the period was New Formalism, which had been flourishing throughout the 1950s and 60s, with Edward Durell Stone, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson and others introducing an aspect of classical proportion, material richness, order and gravitas to new public buildings. Often confused now with High Modernism, these projects were highly distinct, and embodied a concerted effort to return select elements of historical architecture into Modernity, in order to imbue it with a more profound feeling of timelessness, a quality that clients felt was lacking in the Modernist offer.

American Embassy, New Delhi. Edward Durell Stone, 1959

Beginning with Durell Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi (1959) (see below), with its clear references to subcontinental architecture and classical proportion, the style spread across the US, defining numerous cultural and civic commissions, including the high-profile and contentious Lincoln Center in New York City (Johnson, Max Abramovitz, Wallace Harrison et al, opened 1962). Buildings like Minoru Yamasaki’s McGregor Memorial Conference Center, Prentis Building and DeRoy auditorium complex in Detroit (1955–64) (see above) opened up the use of ornament and historical elements as well as luxurious claddings like travertine that had nothing whatsoever to do with any notion of a ‘machine aesthetic’. Stone’s Perpetual Savings and Loan Building in Los Angeles (1961), a rectilinear form of clustered marble arches with its clear similarity to the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome (Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario Romano, opened 1940), embodied the interests and techniques that New Formalism shared with the classicising modern architects of pre-war Italy.

Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium, Detroit. Minoru Yamasaki, 1964

One of the strangest buildings constructed in this style, and perhaps most related to later Postmodernism in its mixture of references, is the former Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle in New York City (1964) (see page 84). Designed by Stone, it is a vast high-rise with an astonishing set of elevations. Facing Columbus Circle is what could only be described as a Venetian palazzo, with ‘lollipop’ columns at its base and a huge blank surface framed with ornamental circular openings; the central highlight of each of its faces is a set of super-slim elongated arches that open up to a loggia, in exactly the location one would expect the loggia on a Venetian palace to be, terminating the grand hall at its heart.

The New Formalist approach to architecture reached its zenith of popularity, and perhaps its conclusion, in top-tier corporate commissions like the World Trade Center in New York City (1971) (see above) by Minoru Yamasaki, with its stratospherically stretched Gothic ogee-arches and ribs, and the gleaming white marble monolith of the Amoco Tower in Chicago (1973) by Stone. By this point the arches, stones and implied columns that had successfully imbued theatres and other public buildings with a sense of pomp and formality began to disappear, left effectively illegible when applied to the massive bulk of skyscrapers. The New Formalists opened up the possibility of history’s return to the composition of rigorous architecture, but because they never questioned more fundamentally the Modernist approach to public space, urban form, figure and ground, their input could only go so far.

World Trade Center, New York City. Minoru Yamasaki, 1971

An architecture of excess

Morris Lapidus was representative of a more liberated and freely creative vein within American post-war architecture, one that wilfully mixed Baroque, classical and modern. His distinct architecture of excess came to define post-war Miami (later followed in the 1980s by Arquitectonica – see Chapter 5). His Fontainebleau Miami Beach (1954) (see above) was the epitome of both this eclectic approach to design and of American notions of high glamour in this period in general. The sweeping concave curve of its elevation uses Modernist elements, but in such a way as to give absolutely primary importance to its theatricality and effect, as did Italian Baroque master Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) with his deformations of the classical elements.

Fontainebleau Miami Beach. Morris Lapidus, 1954

But it was perhaps on the interior, or rather the extreme difference between interior and exterior, where Lapidus really embodied the synthetic and contrasting tendencies that were at play in the period. Swirling Baroque ceilings, patterned marble floors, neoclassical trompe l’oeils on sweepingly modern curved walls, stone spiral staircases with Aalto-like handrails and bulging Michelangelesque treads. Every style under the sun seemed to come together in his interiors in a manner that must have chimed with the America which had loved the richness of Art Deco and the exuberance of the Beaux-Arts.

Lapidus allowed American vacationers to enjoy the luxuriousness of theatrical space without resorting to an historicism that would have been frowned upon.

By dressing his radical eclecticism up in the image of modernity, his buildings managed to introduce, under the radar, a key point of disruption into the architecture of the time. The experience of the visitor, the pleasure that a building could provide through visual and sensory stimulation, was an aspect of space that Modernism had banished from consideration. In the interior of the Fontainebleau and other projects, this consideration came back with a vengeance. This was Hollywood architecture.

Architecture as experience

Indeed, in the 1940s and 50s there evolved an occupant-centred approach to design related to what is known as ‘architectural phenomenology’⁵ Studying techniques of camouflage and the visual language of advertising, students were told to analyse, understand and then deploy in their own work the powerful ways in which these modes of design profoundly affected the viewer, moulding their experience of space. The source of the material the students worked with did not matter; what mattered was the effect it would generate on the occupant or viewer when used. This was a very different approach to the Modernist idea that certain materials and structures had inherent qualities. Value lay not in the buildings themselves, but in the contingent feelings and reactions they elicited, much as Lapidus had intuitively done in his Miami hotel.

One of Lapidus’s many students was Charles Moore, a figure who influenced generations of architects through his lifelong teaching career and his body of built works (see Chapter 2). With a photographic memory for architecture, he illustrated his ideas to students using his large archive of photographs, mixing examples from different eras, styles and locations. His approach to space focused on the user’s experience, the private world of imagination, contemplation and sensory stimuli, and his relationship with history was similarly oriented. As architect and theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos explains:

Drawing for Orinda House, California. Charles Moore, 1962

This was the emergence of a divide between those who read architectural history – and indeed architecture in general – in a creative, often subjective manner, and the methodology of the historian whose goal was a circumspect objectivity, a rift that would only widen in the coming decades.

Moore’s houses illustrate the development of his experience-oriented methodology. His Orinda House in California (1962) (see left) was constructed out of a vernacular-seeming pitched roof structure that contained two ‘aedicular spaces’, or spaces within a larger space – a motif that he would develop greatly throughout his career, and which creates a sense of layered enclosure. Using found columns, these quasi-ceremonial spaces, including a four-post curtained space around a bathtub embedded in the floor, would form a ‘body-centred sense of space and place’ upon occupation.⁷

New Haven House, Connecticut. Charles Moore, 1966

His New Haven House of 1966 (see right) evolved the idea of aedicular space, and combined it with a complex spatiality on more than one level. Moore imbued it with bright, polychromatic surface effects that were a combination of techniques learned from Op-Art and the efficacies of camouflage. Together they created an almost psychedelic and deliriously stimulating interior that at the same time was filled with spaces within spaces where private moments could occur.

Googie architecture

McDonald’s, Los Angeles. Stanley Clark Meston, 1953. An iconic example of the bold, futuristic, highly communicative Googie architecture of post-war commercial America

Another immensely rich thread in American architecture after the war, far more geographically spread, which also involved the fusion of multiple stylistic inputs, was what has collectively come to be termed ‘Googie’ architecture (see below for an exemplar of this type of architecture). Where New Formalism looked to the past, and Lapidus blended Modernism into an eclectic pot with historical ornament, Googie was all about the celebration of the contemporary, of a dream of the future, of a consumer culture that was by the 1950s burgeoning with an unprecedented confidence throughout the US. It was an explosion of colour and form in which the popular imagery of space-age futuristic design, graphics and comic books mingled with the architectural forms of High Modernism and even aspects of Art Deco, blending them together in the built environment to make engaging, fresh architecture for boom-time America. Coming from a commercial origin, this was a new vernacular architecture, native to the US, whose volume and level of abandon could never be matched by academic architecture, even when it decided that the phenomenon of commercial buildings and their related signs and interiors were worth studying and emulating. Googie was architecture for effect writ large.

By the 1960s, in particular in Italy and the US, the rebellious energies and emerging interests of architects, and the contexts in which they found themselves working, had altered dramatically, and soon the profession would follow suit. The seeds of what would later be recognised as Postmodernism had been sown.