Post Mortem on Post-Modernism?

In bestowing the coveted Progressive Architecture magazine awards reviewed here a few weeks ago, the jury made some telling and noteworthy remarks about Post-Modernism and its embrace by the architectural profession.

“All four of us were distressed by the great number of mediocre Post-Modern submissions,” said Bernardo Fort-Brescia, a Miami architect who served as a juror, along with architectural historian Thomas Hines of UCLA and architects George Hoover of Denver and Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City.

“If Post-Modernism was supposed to come here and save us from the uniformity of Modernism, it certainly came more uniform than what it was replacing,” added Fort-Brescia. “It’s almost as if there were a dictionary of architectural cliches telling us about a machine-made history. It was scary.”

The architect said the jury worried about finding winners, and when they did, “it was as if we had returned to unpretentiousness and innovation. It was a return to buildings that are designed not only because the architect knew history, but because the architect is talented and has good intuition about volume, space, light and sculptural form.

“Post-Modernism did awaken architects, and that was good, because today we look at Modernism with different, and I think improved, eyes,” Fort-Brescia concluded.

Hines generally agreed with Fort-Brescia, and added that the first day, when the submissions were initially culled, “was the most interesting, educational, and, at times, depressing day I’ve had in a long time. It was a Post-Modern Sweet’s Catalog; it was the school of Graves, the school of Jahn and some of the work of the masters themselves.”

In an interview later, Hines estimated that of the nearly 700 submissions, perhaps 450 to 500 were what he called Post-Modern cliches.

“It seems that architects have gotten the word that Post-Modernism is in and have become true believers, playing with their designs mindless, suffocating and depressing games,” he added. “It’s definitely a backwash that is making Modernism look good again. But that is not to say we should make the mistake and abandon Post-Modernism the way Modernism was abandoned.”

Hines called attention to remarks he made concerning the award to an expressionistic constructivist-styled concrete batching plant in Oakland: “However tired we may get of the late International Style, and however tired we get of a certain Post-Modern silliness, there is something about this that one cannot get tired of when it’s well done. “

He explained that in selecting winners, the jury based its preferences on designs that had a certain, indefinable freshness, no matter what their style. They were designs that “seemed to suggest things and even to teach us things we had not thought about in quite the same way,” Hines said.

The jury’s struggle with the submissions, its disappointment with the drift of Post-Modernism and its search for freshness also stirred my memories of shifting styles back in the bad old days when Modernism reigned.

Once embodying the promise of a better, brighter world, the sleek Modern style by the mid-1960s had become oppressive. It was the architecture of the establishment, giving form to alienating, cookie-cutter high-rise housing projects and anonymous, slick corporate office towers.

The heavy-booted march of these monoliths in the wake of federal bulldozers plowing through communities made many of us then involved with cities yearn for a design style more in the vernacular and more humanistic. Instead of solving the ills of the city, Modernism seemed to be exacerbating them, creating alien environments.

For me, Modernism hit its nadir when, in 1966, as downtown urban renewal director of New Haven, Conn., I reviewed with others a moderate-income housing scheme the city had commissioned Modernist master Mies van der Rohe to do. I remember remarking at the time that the proposed project looked like one of Mies’ exquisitely structured glass and steel north-shore Chicago apartment houses, laid to rest on its side, cold and rigid.

Mies was politely dropped, and the city hired the then new dean at the Yale School of Architecture, Charles Moore, whose designs at Sea Ranch in Northern California hinted at what we were seeking in our Church Street South project: not just another anonymous housing complex, but a neighborhood.

Moore, with the aid of others, fulfilled that promise, incorporating into a lively, well-scaled and modestly detailed housing design, stores, small plazas and winding pedestrian streets. Though the project was not without problems, its use of time-tested Italianate urban amenities and colorful supergraphics and playful shapes generated hope for a more congenial community.

What we were seeing at the time in Moore’s fanciful design was the beginnings of the later misnamed Post-Modern movement, and most of us concerned with cities took heart. Architecture had, in our opinion, gotten pompous, corporate and cold, and needed a jolt of something to remind it of its history, social purpose and aesthetic potential.

A jolt it did get in the 1970s in the select designs of the talented Moore and Robert Venturi, soon followed by some interesting efforts by a then aspiring Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stern. All eventually were blessed by supersalesman Philip Johnson and chronicler Charles Jencks.

In the process, the bright, populist promise of Post-Modernism as an antidote for the elitist Modernism became for many a faddish exercise, its potential for art and humanity giving way to mimicry, self-indulgence and self-promotion. Being different did not necessarily mean being better.

So much for architectural revolutions, and beware those who might question and deviate, for they run the risk of being ridiculed by disingenuous cultural arbitrators and being cast out of the temple.

This is all not to say that many Post-Modern-styled buildings weren’t an improvement over the severe Modern style. When competently handled and not overdone, they certainly make for a more interesting skyline and cityscape.

It is just to say that there once was the hope that Post-Modernism would be something more than a pastiche pasted on a building or a witty massing, and by using history, would better serve architecture’s social purpose and aesthetic potential.

Perhaps the singular designs cited by the Progressive Architecture magazine jury will give the Post-Modern movement a needed jolt to get it back on track, just as Post-Modernism a decade ago gave Modernism a needed jolt.