Jayne Merkel: When Less Was No Longer More
[Jayne Merkel is an architectural historian and critic. She is the author, most recently, of “Eero Saarinen.” She is a contributing editor of Architectural Design/AD magazine and Architectural Record.]
Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities.
These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.
Although the most visible signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades.
In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones....
Read entire article at NYT
Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities.
These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.
Although the most visible signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades.
In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones....