Explore the legacy of postmodern architecture
Explore the legacy of postmodern architecture
Learn about the legacy of postmodern architecture.
Checkerboard Film Foundation (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
[Music in]
The whole series of things come together here. The preservation movement actually emerged at this time.
It all goes back to sort of Emerson, you know, when you're not allowed to copy.
The factoid, invented by Charles Jencks, that Modernism died on the 15th of July 1972 . . .
It's gonna be like the Golden Girls meet the golden age.
[Laughter]
You have to design within the codes of your users. So architects love the Unite d'Habitation.
There's an understanding in classicism and in the traditions that one might—that it might be iterative and that it might repeat and get better over time.
They were not interested in anything but the object building. And you cannot make an architecture out of objects.
There's never going to be a dominant aesthetic again.
In that sense, taste is a very important way of making architecture perform politically, in a sense.
And the only reason that I think we can consider that postmodernism may have died is because we deny evolution.
Vincent Scully helped me and so many of my generation to see that architecture, with a capital "A," is not only to be found in the work of heroic form givers but also in the modest buildings and places of our quotidian world.
Postmodernism has been given a bad name through cheap and junky architecture.
It's a paradoxical statement that—that the postmodern is—can ever assist the classical.
Something that Denise Scott Brown said today: "What about fun?"
Well, the history of American architecture would also have been different had the people on this stage not been there in the 1970s and 1980s.
It tells you where you're coming from. It doesn't tell you where you're going.
The whole nine yards—the story of architecture.
[Music out]
The whole series of things come together here. The preservation movement actually emerged at this time.
It all goes back to sort of Emerson, you know, when you're not allowed to copy.
The factoid, invented by Charles Jencks, that Modernism died on the 15th of July 1972 . . .
It's gonna be like the Golden Girls meet the golden age.
[Laughter]
You have to design within the codes of your users. So architects love the Unite d'Habitation.
There's an understanding in classicism and in the traditions that one might—that it might be iterative and that it might repeat and get better over time.
They were not interested in anything but the object building. And you cannot make an architecture out of objects.
There's never going to be a dominant aesthetic again.
In that sense, taste is a very important way of making architecture perform politically, in a sense.
And the only reason that I think we can consider that postmodernism may have died is because we deny evolution.
Vincent Scully helped me and so many of my generation to see that architecture, with a capital "A," is not only to be found in the work of heroic form givers but also in the modest buildings and places of our quotidian world.
Postmodernism has been given a bad name through cheap and junky architecture.
It's a paradoxical statement that—that the postmodern is—can ever assist the classical.
Something that Denise Scott Brown said today: "What about fun?"
Well, the history of American architecture would also have been different had the people on this stage not been there in the 1970s and 1980s.
It tells you where you're coming from. It doesn't tell you where you're going.
The whole nine yards—the story of architecture.
[Music out]