The 1960s saw the rise of dissatisfaction with consequences of the Modern movement, especially in North America, where its failings were exposed in two influential books, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Jacobs highlighted the destruction of urban coherence wrought by the utopian iconoclasm of the Modern movement, whereas Venturi implied that Modern buildings were without meaning because they were designed in a simplistic and puritan way that lacked the irony and complexity which enrich historical architecture. This dissatisfaction was translated into direct action in 1972 with the demolition of several 14-story slab blocks that had been built only 20 years earlier from designs by Yamasaki as part of the award-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Mo. Similar apartment blocks in Europe and North America were demolished in the following decades, but it was at St. Louis that the postmodernist era was begun. (see also Index: Saint Louis)
Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) was also published in 1972. In seeking to rehumanize architecture by ridding it of the restricting purism of the Modern movement, the authors pointed for guidance to the playful commercial architecture and billboards of the Las Vegas highways. Venturi and his partner John Rauch reintroduced to architectural design elements of wit, humanity, and historical reference in buildings such as the Tucker House, Katonah, N.Y. (1975), and the Brant-Johnson House, Vail, Colo. (1976). These owed something to Lutyens, who, as a master of paradox and complexity, exercised a deep appeal for Venturi and for his followers, such as Charles Moore and Michael Graves. Graves's Portland Public Service Building, Portland, Ore. (1980-82; Figure 26), and Humana Tower, Louisville, Ky. (1986), have the bulk of the modern skyscraper yet incorporate historical souvenirs such as the colonnade, belvedere, keystone, and swag. Like Moore's Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans (1975-80), and Alumni Center, University of California at Irvine (1983-85), these confident and colourful buildings are intended to reassure the public that it need no longer feel that its cultural identity is threatened by modern architecture. That mood was encapsulated in Venice in 1980 when a varied group of American and European architects, including Venturi, Moore, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi, Hans Hollein, Ricardo Bofill, and Léon Krier, provided designs for an exhibition organized by the Venice Biennale under the title, "The Presence of the Past." These key architects of postmodernism represented several different outlooks but shared the ambition of banishing the fear of memory from modern architectural design.
The many American architects in the 1970s and '80s who adopted a populist language scattered with classical souvenirs included Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee and the prolific Robert Stern. Johnson and Burgee designed the AT&T Building, New York City (1978-84), a skyscraper with a Chippendale skyline. Their School of Architecture Building, University of Houston (1982-85), is inspired by Ledoux's project for a House of Education at Chaux (1773-79). Stern's Observatory Hill Dining Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1982-84), is in a cheerful Jeffersonian classicism, while his Prospect Point Office Building, La Jolla, Calif. (1983-85), incorporates Spanish Colonial references. Many postmodernist architects were either trained by or began their careers as modernists, and many elements of Modernism carried over into postmodernism, especially in the work of architects such as Graves, Venturi, and Richard Meier.
Rejecting the playful elements in such buildings as kitsch, some architects, notably Allan Greenberg and John Blatteau, chose a more historically faithful classical style, as in their official reception rooms of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. (1984-85). The most complete instance of historical accuracy is probably the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif. (1970-75), an essay in Neoclassicism designed by the Los Angeles partnership of Langdon and Wilson, who relied on archaeological advice to achieve the authentic character of a Roman villa at Herculaneum.
A similar duality existed in this period in Britain, where the populist style of Graves was paralleled in the work of Terry Farrell (TV-am Studios, Camden Town, London, 1983), and of James Stirling (Clore Gallery at the Tate Gallery, London, 1980-87), while undeviating classicism was pursued by Quinlan Terry (Riverside Development, Richmond, Surrey, 1986-88), Julian Bicknell (Henbury Rotunda, Cheshire, 1984-86), and John Simpson (Ashfold House, Sussex, 1985-87). The spirit of classical urban renewal was represented in France by Christian Langlois's Senate Building, rue de Vaugirard, Paris (1975), and the Regional Council Building in Orléans (1979-81). Urban preoccupations have been more dramatically expressed in France by Ricardo Bofill's vast housing developments, such as Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris (1978-83; Figure 27). The gargantuan scale of this columnar architecture of prefabricated concrete pushes the language of classicism to its limits and beyond.
A third branch of postmodernism was represented by a neorationalist or elementalist approach that echoes the stripped classicism of the 19th and early 20th century. This movement was again in part a reaction to changes in the urban environment by the combination of commercial pressure and Modern movement ideology. Neorationalism originated in Italy where the architect Aldo Rossi published an influential book, L'architettura della città (1966; The Architecture of the City). Rossi's Modena Cemetery (1971-77) exhibits both his austerely fundamental classicism and his concern for contextualism, since it echoes features of the local farms and factories of Lombardy.
Neorationalist ideals have also been realized in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino: for example, in the work of Mario Campi (Casa Maggi, Arosio, 1980); Mario Botta; and Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhardt, whose Casa Tonino, Torricella (1972-74), is a pristine stripped Palladian essay in white concrete. Close to this work is a group of buildings in the Basque region, including the School at Ikastola (1974-78) by Miguel Garay and José-Ignacio Linazasoro; Casa Mendiola at Andoian (1977-78) by Garay; and the Rural Centre at Cordobilla (1981) by Manuel Iniguez and Alberto Ustarroz. The projects of the German architect Oswald Matthias Ungers--for example, his Stadtloggia in the Hildesheim marketplace (1980)--promoted the same kind of rationalist contextualism in Germany. They have been influential on the design of infill buildings in other historic towns in Germany, Italy, and France. The Viennese architect Hans Hollein also contributed to this vein of radical eclecticism, as in his sophisticated interiors in the Austrian Travel Bureau, Vienna (1978), which distantly recall the city of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann. The urban work of the Belgian architect Rob Krier has been related to this movement, as can be seen in his housing in the Ritterbergstrasse, Berlin (1978-80). His brother, Léon Krier, has been influential in both the United States and Britain for his iconlike drawings of city planning schemes in a ruthlessly simple classical style and for his polemical attacks on what he sees as the destruction by modern technology of civic order and human dignity.
The 1920s revivalist element in the neorationalist movement is demonstrated in the United States in the work of Richard Meier, for example in his Smith House, Darien, Conn. (1965-67), inspired by Le Corbusier's Citrohan and Domino houses, and his more complex High Museum, Atlanta (1980-83). Helmut Jahn's Bank of the South West, Houston (1982), recalls the Art Deco glass skyscraper, while the prolific Kevin Roche, originally a minimalist trained in the 1950s by Eero Saarinen, returned to the heroic formalism of the early skyscrapers for his Morgan Bank headquarters, New York City (1983-87), a 48-story skyscraper resting on a 70-foot-high entrance loggia of coupled granite columns. (see also Index: Morgan and Company)
In Japan, Isozaki Arata and Yamashita Kazumasa led the move away from Brutalism and Metabolism toward a postmodernism inspired by Charles Moore--for example, Isozaki's Tsukuba Centre building, Tsukuba Science City, Ibaraki (1983), and Yamashita's Japan Folk Arts Museum, Tokyo (1982). In India, Charles Correa led a parallel shift away from high-rise mass-housing of the Le Corbusier type. In the 1950s he worked in the International style, as in his hotel of white concrete at Ahmadabad, but in later low-rise housing and in his book, The New Landscape (1985), he demonstrated the virtues of a return to the more indigenous building types of the Third World.
The spirit of technology is, by contrast, celebrated in the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1971-77), by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. With its services and structure exposed externally and painted in primary colours, this exhibition centre can be seen as an outrageous joke in the historic centre of Paris. Though defiantly "modern," it has a postmodernist flavour as a playful statement of the modernist belief, going back at least to Viollet-le-Duc, in the truthful exposure of the structural bones of a building. Rogers repeated the theme in his Lloyd's Building, London (1984-86), but Stirling's addition to the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Ger. (1977-82), is a key postmodernist building in the Venturi sense: that is, it makes ironic references to the language of Schinkel without accepting the fundamental principles of classicism. (D.J.Wa.)
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