Before Comes After

A movement was emerging, principally in the United States, that advocated a total reassessment of Modernist presumptions and recognised that architecture had begun to evolve a vocabulary beyond the mannerisms of interwar Modernism. It suggested that legitimate inspiration might be found in pre-Modernist precedents for the enrichment of the architectural vocabulary. It became known as Postmodern Classics.

Architects and designers can still become nervous about Postmodernism, fearing that alignment with it throws doubt on their commitment to macho Modernism, but to reject it is to deny the broader aesthetic shift that has transformed architecture and design in the last 40 years. Postmodernism has prevailed but with broadly Modernist principles at its hybrid heart.

The Postmodernist label came into usage after the 1977 publication of Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.¹² In it he identified the pedigree of the genre, citing as pioneers Eero Saarinen, whose buildings shared no stylistic gestures but instead attempted to express the activity they housed, and Louis Kahn, who turned to the Beaux Arts, principles of formal planning and a richer palette in search of a more expressive vocabulary. Jencks suggested that ‘pluralism’ – a multiplicity of modes and means of expression – was necessary to combat the aridity of the International Style that had evolved from Mies van der Rohe’s interpretation of Modernist principles in which meaning and decoration were expressed with unbending architectonic rigidity. Nikolaus Pevsner had recognised that something subversive was afoot in 1966, citing Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians in London, and Stirling and Gowan’s Engineering Building at Leicester University. While he conceded that they belonged legitimately to the 1960s, he was uncomfortable with their expressionistic flourishes.

In the 1960s and 1970s Architectural Design magazine saw itself as a progressive and even subversive voice within architecture. Primarily addressing an audience of students and fledgling professionals, it was a counterpoint to the establishment’s Architectural Review. In the April 1977 edition it called upon Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic of the New York Times, to explain Postmodernism. He characterised Modernism as having a ‘puritan austerity’ and Postmodernism as representing ‘an indulgent complexity’.¹³

He explained that, ‘Image and symbol, pushed aside by much modern architecture, again become important’; that ‘formal consistency’ and ‘originality’ were no longer ‘necessary’; and that, ‘History is a crucial source of both forms and images – sometimes reproduced literally, but more often woven into a complex sort of collage.’¹⁴ He conceded that Modernism had been a utopian ideal, concerned with restructuring artefacts and mores to achieve a benign matrix to which individuals would adjust for their collective and individual benefit, but that its social engineering had failed. That conclusion was close to the reservations expressed consistently in the Architectural Review from the 1950s onwards about Modernism’s persistent disregard of popular preferences.

Geoffrey Broadbent, a British academic and Jencks’s collaborator contributed two essays: a summary of Jencks’s book, and his generally positive response to it. He emphasised the desirability of ‘pluralism’ and diversity of expression to meet functional particularities. He dwelt, at slightly lascivious length, on the idea of ‘deviants’, of whom he believed the most reprehensible was Mies with his fetishistic detailing.¹⁵

Jencks also contributed, confessing his opposition to the corporate impersonality of the International Style. He was appreciative of any alternative that sought to enrich the architectural palette, whether it drew on precedent or context. Yet when he remodelled the interior of his London home, the extravagant and symbolic decoration seemed to place him undisputedly in the Postmodern Classicist camp and distorted perception of his broader analysis.

He proposed six sub-sects of Postmodernism: historicism, neo-vernacular, adhocism, metaphorical, and metaphysical. British architects and designers however ignored the complexities and subtleties of his thesis and were infatuated by and fixated on the historisiam of Postmodern Classicism, and the rather arch abbreviation of the movement’s title to PoMo matched the spirit of anarchic frivolity that surrounded its assault on canonic Modernism.

Postmodern Classicism had its origins in an earlier book by Robert Venturi, who had worked with both Saarinen and Kahn. His Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966, argued for what he called ‘the difficult whole’ in architecture rather than the simplicities of corporate Modernism.¹⁶ In 1977 he published the equally influential Learning From Las Vegas, an analysis of the Las Vegas Strip produced in collaboration with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.¹⁷ In it they criticised the sterility of corporate architecture and argued for Vegas’s populist vigour.

Venturi and Scott Brown’s early buildings, like the Vanna Venturi house of 1964 and the Guild House retirement home of 1961–66, were clear but provocative interpretations of architectural precedent. Their 1977 ‘Eclectic House Series’ of cartoonish elevations seemed indebted to the pictograms that made up Hollywood’s cartoon townscapes. Those and the capital of their ‘Ironic’ column, in which the volutes of the classical Greek Ionic order were simplified to invite comparison with Mickey Mouse’s ears, were the images that defined Postmodern Classicism in Britain (and the anxieties surrounding it, particularly among academics who had been contently advocating Modernism to generations of students). In 1991 their classic-esque extension to the National Gallery in London infuriated Modernists and baffled traditionalists.

The first glimpses of built Postmodern Classicism came to the UK in 1982 via photographs of Michael Graves’s government building in Portland, Oregon and, in 1984, Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York. Graves became immensely prolific and was commissioned by the Disney Corporation to design its offices and theme park hotels. These, with their enormous, kitsch sculptures of the Seven Dwarves, swans, and dolphins, were the final proof European Modernists needed to declare ‘PoMo’ a travesty. Graves’s London showroom for the Sunar furniture company, which incorporated formal planning devices, shallow arches, and a warm but restrained colour palette, was not enough to reassure doubters. It still looked like a facetious denial of the Modernist principles with which they had grown up.

PoMo was enthusiastically adopted by British commercial architectural practices, and ham-fisted pastiches proliferated. Nevertheless a few notables joined the cause. James Stirling plunged in with his Turner Gallery for Tate Britain in London, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and an office block in the City of London (for which he replaced a proposal by Mies van der Rohe).

Terry Farrell’s appetite for the richer PoMo vocabulary led to a split with his partner Nicholas Grimshaw, who remained wedded to the High-tech principles that had characterised their collaboration. Farrell built extensively in London, most notably the Thames-side landmarks of Charing Cross railway station and the MI6 headquarters. One of his earliest PoMo ventures was the 1983 conversion of a former car showroom to the headquarters of the breakfast television company TVam, in which he displayed an erudite with an enormous skeletal keystone over the courtyard entrance and giant egg cups deployed in the manner of classical urns. The interior allowed him to indulge in formal pastel-coloured gestures.

A Movement by Any Other Name

That Postmodernism generally caused consternation in architectural circles is clear in an introduction by Lance Wright to his essay ‘Post-Industrialism’ in the Architectural Review of May 1979. He began with a justification of his subject matter, reminiscent of the apologies with which the magazine had habitually prefaced its pieces on interior design.¹⁸

He explained why he employed the term ‘Post-industrial’ rather than Postmodern. The distinction was designed to hold the attention of readers liable to dismiss anything Postmodern. A new label might allow calmer consideration and legitimise what he saw as a viable movement.

In the Review of April 1973 he had, in his essay ‘Robert Venturi and Anti-architecture’, said of Venturi: ‘Not many, during the last 20 years or so, have been brave enough to write about architectural theory.’¹⁹ He himself now showed the pluck necessary to critique the aesthetic plight of Modernism in Britain.

His observations about the role of interior designers echoed the arguments of Casson’s ‘Inscape’ in the light of another decade’s activity. He anticipated, and justified, the changes that were to reshape interior design in the 1980s and helped explain why and how the practices of architecture and interior design diverged, and why the former might aspire to the status of high art and why the latter should not.

He credited the label and idea of Post-industrialism to the American sociologist Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which identified a point in economic and, consequently, social development when the service sector generated more wealth than manufacturing. This validated the proposition that the 1980s saw the advent of something more fundamental than a new style.²⁰

Wright asserted, in a variation on Auguste Choisy’s 1899 treatise, that ‘automation and the micro-chip’ would encourage ‘a re-shaping of life along more humane and entertaining lines’,²¹ anticipating the digital reorientation of social mores 40 years later. Postmodernism, he suggested, was no more than a ‘reaction against Modernity’ and that it was not ‘wrong’ but merely ‘fleeting’ (which is certainly true of Postmodern Classicism).²² He suggested that Post-industrial was ‘a new phase of Modernism’, one that sought the reinstatement of traditional values not by literal reproduction of traditional form but by ‘reincarnation’ of those values, freeing architecture from ‘the bondage of necessity’ and returning it to its former role as a provider of ‘public entertainment’.²³ He ended:

This was a substantial statement to make in the pages of the Architectural Review but it assuredly foresaw the extraordinary burgeoning of interiors in the 1980s.

Wright identified two divisions in interior design, between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, and between ‘art’ and ‘nature’. He argued that when the interior was seen as an extension of the exterior (Industrial), and therefore ‘outdoors’, the ‘indoors’ was denuded of the qualities that made it rewardingly habitable. It became a utilitarian enclosure which allowed the architect to disregard an obligation to cater for ‘the irrational tastes and preferences’ of the user: ‘The architect asked him sharply what he wanted and then told him what he would get.’ Art, he said, was deliberate and finite, but nature did not follow logic and could be modified in response to human need or whim.²⁵

He suggested that the supposed objectivity of the Industrial – its abstraction – did not make it ‘naturally likeable’, and its success relied on the perfect (and expensive) execution of all elements. Even then its stylistic devices – the emphasis on low, horizontal ceilings, the elimination of decorative detail, and the suppression of gratuitous pleasures – resulted in, ‘An aesthetic [that] treats people as automata who have been pre-set to perform certain acts at certain times and in certain places.’²⁶

He talked of how the industrial aesthetic ‘shows itself up for the ugly thing it is’ when applied to spaces of ‘indefinite use’, citing the home, with its changing patterns of occupation and insertions of user’s taste, as an example. He wondered if it would not have been possible, and desirable, ‘to accept the advantages of industrial production without feeling any need to express the thing itself’, as the Victorians did.²⁷

He accused the industrial aesthetic of concentrating on the practical and avoiding the ‘personal’, preferring an empty space ‘with something abstract, with which people cannot identify in any way’.²⁸ He talked about the abstraction of furniture, when seating and storage are subsumed into walls and reconstituted as room dividers, and when backs of chairs are made uncomfortably low to avoid imposing on the ‘space’ and form is mercilessly cuboid. The Eames lounge chair – the architect’s favourite comfy seat – might seem to be an exception, but Wright compared it to a dentist’s chair. He deprecated the Italians’ treatment of furniture as ‘art objects’. He talked of people ‘camping out’ in the externalised aesthetic of the industrial interior but proposed that the Post-industrial alternative would offer a ‘new contract between art in the stable elements of design, and nature in the ever-fluctuating behaviour of the occupants’.²⁹

The use of ‘art’ as a category prompted his consideration of the relationship between the Post-industrial interior and what was happening in art, concluding that the connection was, at that time, a movement from abstraction towards representation. He surmised that the Post-industrial aesthetic would become ‘again an art form, both in its own right and as a subject’.³⁰

In 1984, Liberty department store’s Arts and Crafts interior hosted ‘Four Rooms’, an exhibition by four artists, staged in collaboration with the Arts Council of Great Britain, that attempted to assess the contribution that contemporary artists might make to design. Two of the four ignored if not the brief then certainly its spirit by producing pieces of art that barely differed from their usual work. Richard Hamilton made a quasi-political installation – an ‘operating theatre’ that looked like an operating theatre – and Anthony Caro produced one of his characteristic structures in oak rather his usual steel. The other two invitees offered more relevant responses. Marc Camille Chaimowicz produced furniture and wallpapers and added a rug by Eileen Gray and ceramics by Keith Murray. Two of his wallpapers, a stained-glass ‘window’, and three pieces of furniture were put into production. Howard Hodgkin designed everything in his room: two fabrics, a sofa, a side table, and two lamps. All were dull but were nevertheless put into production. All four exhibitors failed to produce anything that suggested productive crossover. The exhibition’s value may be only that it recognised the 1980s obsession with interior design.

Peter Davey, writing in the Architectural Review in January 1995, quoted a note in one of Louis Kahn’s sketchbooks: ‘Architecture comes from the making of rooms… The plan is a society of rooms… The room is the place of the mind.’³¹ He suggested that these aphorisms ran counter to the Modernist idea of infinite space and reminded readers that Kahn contributed to the emergence of ‘Post-Modern consciousness’. He proclaimed everyone now to be Postmodern but warned that there was no need to ‘embrace PoMo or any other silly pastiche approach’.³² He said that Kahn was proposing that ‘interior spaces should be specific to human needs (emotional as well as functional)’³³ and gave four examples of architects’ interiors that transcended the functional: Aalto’s town hall in Säynätsalo, Lewerentz’s church in Klippan, Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, and Scharoun’s concert hall in Berlin. He suggested that, without directly referencing to historical precedents, they had provided communal spaces that were as powerful as any before them. But it is worth mentioning that the typology of all four were, by Loos’s criteria of the monument and the tomb, architecture rather than building, and certainly not the commercial buildings in which interior design was finding its niche. They were shaped by their principal interior spaces, which were in turn shaped by the conventions of ceremony. Davey admitted that not many of his readers would have the opportunity to create on a grand rhetorical scale but encouraged them to elevate the shops and restaurants of high streets and malls.

He conceded that Postmodernism would shape the components of humane interiors. ‘Collage, multi-layered space, dematerialisation, dramatic distortions of scale and distance, arbitrariness…the opportunities that contemporary computing power offers’, were all, he wrote, devices as likely to be deployed in a shop or a restaurant as in architectural set pieces.³⁴

Ornament – Frankly Speaking

Ornamentalism: the new decorativeness in architecture and design, by Robert Jensen and Patricia Conway, was published in the US in 1982.³⁵ In the foreword Paul Goldberger described ornamenting as a radical act in defiance of prevailing articles of faith imposed upon architects and designers. He recalled that, in 1980, the principals of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), specialists in the design of corporate towers, had asked for a meeting between their top designers and Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Jorge Silvetti, and Steven Petersen, four of the leading perpetrators of Postmodern Classicism. Despite admitting that Postmodernism had little impact on SOM’s work beyond a few ‘oblique angles’, Goldberger suggested that the meeting confirmed the extent of Postmodernism’s threat to established theory and commercial certainties.³⁶

He suggested that Ornamentalism was not necessarily Postmodern or anti-Modern, and that many of the projects illustrated in the book were ornamented in defence of ‘other Modern ideals’.³⁷ He was not specific about what these ideals might be but one might infer that he meant the movement’s humanitarian and egalitarian aspirations.

Jensen and Conway were clearer in their introduction, speaking of the ‘impulse to decorate’ as fundamental to the human condition, a way of identifying buildings and the cultures that created them.³⁸ They also held that ornament gave scale, and quoted Henry Hope Reed’s assertion of 1952 that ornament has a human scale. They acknowledged the good intentions of early Modernists but suggested that, in attempting to eliminate social brutalities, they had eliminated the means of giving pleasure to those not inducted into the mysteries of Bauhausian objectivity.

They dated the revival of ornament to Robert Venturi’s 1962 renovation of the Grand Restaurant in Philadelphia, in which the restaurant’s name was spelt out in lettering 1.2m high on one interior wall and reflected in the mirror on the wall opposite.³⁹ They also pointed to Charles Moore’s oversized graphics. Such devices were labelled ‘supergraphics’ by the critic C. Ray Smith in 1966; at the same time in London, Max Clendinning was breaking up rectilinear geometry with graphic devices.

Jensen and Conway elaborated on Goldberger’s assertion that Ornamentalism remained broadly true to Modernist principles, and quoted Ada Louise Huxtable, the architectural critic of the New York Times:

To that they added that Ornamentalism was, ‘The first serious attempt in fifty years to make Modernism keep its promise of projecting new possibilities’.⁴¹ They were right in that when the appetite for literal appropriation of historicist motifs was satiated, enthusiasm for colour and more complex form remained to enrich the vocabulary of architecture and interiors.

Examples of Ornamentalism illustrated in the book were predominantly and distinctly North American, but there were images of La Strada Novissima exhibition from the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi had assembled 76 architects from across the world, all of them considered to be Postmodernists. He chose ‘The Presence of the Past’ as the theme and the 76 contributed drawings and models to an exhibition, with 20 of the most prominent invited to design a façade. There was certainly evidence of historicism but it was delivered through interpretation rather than appropriation. Each façade was no more than a theatrical flat, but the diverse, discordant, and allusive aggregation whetted appetites for new creative possibilities.

Charles Jencks, who was one of the committee selecting exhibitors, expressed concern in Domus that the historicism that had prevailed in La Strada had distorted understanding of Postmodernism. He explained that the historicist bias had been prompted by Portoghesi’s choice of theme and that to confuse Postmodernism with historicism was to misunderstand its subtleties and complexities. He argued that a Postmodern building was distinguished by its ‘double-coding; partly Modern (because of the tradition from which they depart) and partly Other’.⁴² He declared that Postmodernist practice was uniting the world of architecture, just as the International Style had done before it.

The confusion caused by squabbles over the nature and worth of Postmodernism (and in particular those manifestations of it that chimed with Classicism) agitated theorists and critics. But for many designers, such cerebral concerns were peripheral and secondary to the promiscuous climate that destabilised Modernism’s status as the one permissible design credo.

Jensen and Conway affirmed Venturi’s assertion that he practised Modern architecture:

That elegantly contrived argument was unlikely to convince doubters. The details and devices illustrated in the book looked distinctly like traditional applied ornament to anyone educated in the ways of Modernism.

The book had too many coloured illustrations and too little text to have clout, but it articulated principles that had already been absorbed by a few radical British designers who were about to unveil projects that were distinctly British and would offer inspiration to other practitioners and the clients who employed them. For all who dabbled in it, PoMo was a creative purgative.

Lance Wright had concluded that, ‘Post-Industrialism is evolutionary, not revolutionary’, but it was to be an accelerated evolution.⁴⁴

Very Sour Grapes

In 1986 E. M. Farrelly was guest editor for the August edition of the Review. She eulogised something she called ‘The New Spirit’ and attacked Postmodernism, although she obviously had Postmodern Classicism in mind. Written with all the sound, fury, and bombast of early 20th century artists’ manifestos, it might have been the floweriest, most abusive prose ever to appear in the magazine. It was entertainingly apoplectic and, for that alone, worth quoting at length. She began:

She continued in this tone for several thousand immoderate words:

She conceded that Modernism had not been popular and that:

She regretted that Postmodernism, which had seemed like a rebellion, was no more than a reaction against Modernism and that, ‘Its freedom fighters – unwittingly no doubt – were in fact architecture’s harbingers of death.’⁴⁸ It was ‘easy, popular and saleable’⁴⁹ and, by ignoring Modernism’s principles, lacked a ‘positive’ direction of its own: ‘Liberty, quickly degenerated into licence…vernacular into pastiche, and decoration into the flabby mass mediocrity that has become so unresisting a pawn of monetarism.’⁵⁰ Architects who embraced it were quiescent, ‘fervent now only in their desire for money and acclaim’.⁵¹

She suggested that Classicism represented a, ‘Point of momentary equilibrium between times of great change’.⁵²

She deemed the New Spirit to be Romantic:

If one ignores the disapproval implicit in ‘prettification or escapism’ the description could serve as a definition of interior design, although its rhetorical flourishes might be a little rich for interior design’s modest practitioners.

Farrelly explained that the New Spirit was not a revival of Modernism because it drew on every identifiable progressive grouping in architecture and art that preceded it, and in particular Dada, with which, she said, it shared the impulse to ‘break down and break through existing patterns of deceit and smug self-interest’.⁵⁴ The same could have been written about Postmodernism as Jencks defined it.

To polish up New Spirit’s glamour she lumped it in with ‘rock and roll, punk and post punk New Wave’,⁵⁵ but did not neglect to belabour PoMo-ists again:

She thought the New Spirit might be political – ‘No movement with this kind of pedigree could be otherwise’⁵⁷ – and equated it to punk, although in doing so she ignored the influence on punk of Malcolm Mclaren, that serial packager of youthful whims, whose synchronising of the Sex Pistols’ promotion with the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 gave the movement its semblance of politicisation. Robert Elms, who understands youth movements, describes punk as ‘a trouser revolution…a putsch led by a small hardened band of hairdressers and shop assistants’.⁵⁸ Farrelly then changed her mind and doubted that the New Spirit, ‘whose base-line is individual diversity and freedom’, had the cohesion to become a political movement.⁵⁹

The New Spirit, she insisted, shared Dada’s ‘weapons’ – randomness, accident, and chance – but, recognising that these do not contribute significantly to the resolution of any project, she made the qualification that, ‘Chance and randomness are used only as tools.’⁶⁰ She cited Coop Himmelblau’s use of something similar to ‘automatist techniques’.⁶¹ The design firm had described its 1983 Open House project as, ‘Created from an explosive sketch, drawn with eyes closed; undistracted concentration, using the hand as a seismograph of feelings created by the space…’⁶²

Another contributor, Peter Cook, bombastically complimented his own constituency and insulted others when he described how Coop Himmelblau’s output, and the firm’s cry of ‘Architecture must burn’, caused ‘the normally cynical AA kids to clap and cheer – just ten per cent of the audience looked rather puzzled (and couldn’t wait to creep back to those London polytechnics where the easier game of Post-Modernism offered safety and orthodoxy)’.⁶³ He insulted a few more Postmodernist practitioners and compiled a Jencksian interlinking of New Spirit architects across the globe and time.

In her conclusion Farrelly feared that the New Spirit would, like Modernism, be ‘understood and imitated as form, not philosophy’⁶⁴ but concluded that such a fate was ‘unlikely, for such timid passivity is emphatically not a part of the New Spirit’s makeup’.⁶⁵ Instead, it was, ‘Unfailingly vigorous, exploratory and, although it takes no heed of fashion, very much an architecture of now’.⁶⁶ Ironically it became the modish architectural style of the late 1980s, and Farrelly’s article was in fact a passionate love letter to a Postmodernist fad. She did not appear to have noticed that it was Postmodern Classicism that had broken Modernism’s stranglehold on architectural thinking. She excoriated Michael Graves’s PoMo phase but did not acknowledge the role his earlier work, such as the Hanselmann House, had played in beginning the process of disassembling Modernist prototypes in pursuit of richer architectural form and putting what would become the New Spirit’s ‘de-constructivist’ tendencies on the agenda.

In Britain, James Stirling, Terry Farrell, and other serious architectural thinkers such as Ed Jones, Jeremy Dixon, and John Outram thought it worthwhile to dabble in PoMo, and it was from their experimentations that a clearer idea of how to retune Modernism emerged.