Character of and in American architecture

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2003 by Roth, Leland M

MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

The message of modernism, as devised and proselytized by architects such as Mies Van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Wallace Harrison, and Minoru Yamasaki (to name but a very few), was that there was no message. Such architects as these emphasized functional utility while conveying no particular meaning, at least to the normal user. Architects might wax rhapsodic over "less being more," but the ordinary user saw such modernist architecture simply as so many disposable boxes. Later, with the rise of the preservation movement in the 1980s and 90s, yet another irony became evident; the handmade, neoromantic, stylistically eclectic architecture of the 1920s and 30s was far more easily repaired and maintained than the intensely utilitarian modernist buildings of the 1950s because the latter employed special industrially produced parts and assemblies now no longer available except as expensive custom work. The details of classical, medieval, or Renaissance architecture, and stylistically related Georgian buildings, had been developed over centuries or decades to facilitate weathering; modernist pioneer architects seldom troubled themselves over their buildings surviving in the real world. Many modern buildings did not last more than a generation without significant intervention. In Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked (1977), Peter Blake noted that architects in the 1960s specified adhesives, caulking compounds, plastics, and other recent formulations with no idea as to whether they would hold up even long enough to amortize the cost of the building.

The bland, nonreferential emptiness of modernism prompted the rise of postmodernism, loaded with references to various periods in the past. Postmodernism began with tongue-in-cheek references to traditional classical details, as in the early work of Robert Venturi in the 1960s. In the forty years after that, postmodernism branched into numerous variants, including the late modernism found in the white cubical masses of the work of Richard Meier. The ironic architectural whimsy of the 1960s matured in the work of Michael Graves, such as his San Juan Capistrano Library, 1980-82, with its generalized allusions to stucco-covered California mission architecture. References to past traditions were sometimes abstract, as in Frank Gehry's Loyola Marymount University Law School, Los Angeles, 1978-86, or even more in the General Foods Corporation Headquarters, Rye, New York, 1977-83. Or references to the past were sometimes quite literal, as in the first Getty Museum, Malibu, California, 1970-75, by Langdon & Wilson, which was a direct realization of the ancient Roman villa outside of Pompeii. At its best, postmodernism is a double-coded fusion of modernism in functional utility merged with stylized references to the past, as in the many allusions to the history of Chicago's architecture in the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago, 1987-91, by Thomas Beebe. Another good example is (or was) the modestly scaled Observatory Hill Dining Hall at the University of Virginia, 1982-84, by Robert A. M. Stern, but an intelligent response to the architecture of Jefferson was no guarantee of longevity, for the building is being demolished.