Are we still Postmodern?

The endless ‘’movement’’

If we ask the question to any of us individually, surely, most of us will answer: "no, not at all". Even some, especially the young people, may not be familiar with what we’re talking about. Apparently we should be at the end of the cycle, but I think we are still part of Postmodernism, at least today, Jun 2018. I’m going to glance through its history and main milestones to justify this answer.

Precedents

Modernism was a European movement started in America. Like any other movement, it took some time to shape up. In my opinion, the first Modern project built was the Kings Road House, West Hollywood, California, designed by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler, in 1922.

It was the most important art and architecture philosophy in the first half of the 20th-century. Also called International Modern or International Style, became a dominant global ideology, based on an analytical approach to the function of buildings, a strictly rational use of materials, structural innovation and the removal of ornament. Modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art, and at the same time, force the audience to question their own preconceptions.

According to Charles Jencks: the symbolic end of the Modern Movement occurred exactly at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis (an award-winning version of Le Corbusier's "machine for modern life") was dynamited as an uninhabitable place. The complex was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Center towers, which collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001, after a terrorist attack.

1972

The rebellion against the dogmatism of Modernism started taking positions some years early, in 1966, with the publication of two books: the Robert Venturi postmodern "manifesto", "Complexity and Contradiction", and "L'architettura della città", seminal book of urban design theory published by Aldo Rossi.

In 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published "Learning from Las Vegas", a study about the city of entertainment, highlighting the taxonomy of its forms, signs and symbols. Their conclusion was a critique of Modernity mute and vacuous, putting their emphasis on the importance and the need for signs and symbols in architecture.

In 1978, Rem Koolhaas published "Delirious New York", an engaging review of modern architecture and urbanism, similar to what Venturi and Scott Brown did. While "Learning from Las Vegas" used Las Vegas' study to justify the return to historic symbols, "Delirious New York" is a "retroactive manifesto" without manifesto, about architecture and city planning. Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture, introducing the concept of "Manhattanism": the way technology and market responded to “congestion” and the new hedonist lifestyle. "Manhattanism" demolished the key principles of Modernist theory such as the relation between form and function, because it could not sustain the illustrated Modern ideology. Consequently, "Manhattanism" was already in itself a reaction to the Modern Movement and came to be an inspiration for Postmodernism. After "Manhattanism" "we have the idea that architecture was no longer a substance but an illusion", as Koolhaas claimed.

*****

Although Postmodernism started in the States, it quickly spread to Europe. As a philosophical and cultural movement, stormed from the French epicenter after the 68 Movement, wrecking all values of modern society and the western culture pillars.

In Architecture, during those ten years, "Historicist Postmodernism" overwhelmingly took the floor in all the stages: theory, schools and professional practice, in such a manner that many of the architects, which were working in the Modernism, became adherents to the new movement. Italy and the Venice Biennales emerged as its main exhibition center. In this environment "The Presence of the Past", the 1st International Architecture Biennale in 1981, showed the peak for the Classicist’s school.

As a consequence of Koolhaas’ book, the Biennale director, Paolo Portoghesi invited OMA to submit a design for an internal street frontage: The Strada Novissima. OMA tried to distance itself from the postmodernist dominant ambient in the Biennale, taking the invitation as a possibility to do a kind of graphic manifest with a canvas drawn by Stefano de Martino: a non-fa?ade, an anti-fa?ade; or as Koolhaas said: "an opportunity to confront our incompetence to do fa?ades". Like they didn’t have many works, behind the temporary screen OMA presented the two projects they were working on: the extension of the Dutch parliament in The Hague and the renovation of the Arnhem prison, together with Rem’s text "Our New Sobriety", with the assertion that "the plan is of primary importance". In both proposals, completely independent of the predominant fashion, the plan organized the activities, focusing on the systemic aspects of the program and creating conditions for specific interpretations.

1991

Twenty years later Postmodernist practice was divided into several trends, some of them under the influence of diverse philosophies schools: classicist or historicist, neo-vernacular, contextualist, high-technological, metaphorical, metaphysical, deconstructivist, ecologist… and those who were developing an ambiguous space. All of them were, more or less, distinguishable from each other, however they also had a commonality: they were looking into history or in other fields for a symbology, attempting to surpass the modern aesthetic with a new "style". All of them were utilizing an external reference system not emerges from the project itself, in some cases, kind of "alien" or even inappropriate: Instead of representing postmodern culture, they remained trapped into chasing postmodernist "imagery".

The main exception to this was the approach that OMA was setting out. During these years and since their first projects: Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, Agadir Convention Centre, Jussieu Libraries, and in especial the Kunsthal; OMA was working in the possibility to come up exclusively self-referenced projects, in a non-referential way that produces its own logic, defining a situation in?its?stead, or in Martino’s words: "We were trying to see what was essential, before you need bricks. When you have a system of relations, then you have architecture".

OMA's proposal was not based on other references, culture or symbolism. It was a direct consequence of Manhattan, origin of the postmodernism culture and, in essence, of Postmodernism itself: hedonist, individualist, pragmatic, consumerism, relativist and wishing to live only in the present, the immediate. OMA, in its intent to run away from the dominant postmodernist aesthetic, found its core and embodied the Postmodernism ethos, becoming the true Postmodernism: more postmodernist than the postmodernists.

*****

The 8th of September 1991, 5th International Architecture Exhibition opened its doors, directed by Francesco Dal Co, the first and only Biennale without a theme, title, manifesto or agenda. Dal Co justified it, because architecture did not need to be "cured" at all; was not "sick". The organizers opted for the path of least resistance by addressing no explicit themes, problems, currents or tendencies. This turned the exhibition into a fashion show where quantity became much more important than quality.

From the 1990s onwards, novelists, artists, critics and art historians have foreseen the death of Postmodernism. Writing in The New York Times in 1991, the critic Andy Grundberg affirmed that "in art, Postmodernism has lost its momentum" and is showing "signs of fatigue": "the young artists are turning toward spiritual values". Those that defend the idea that Postmodernism died around the 90s, very likely in this biennale, might be wrong: what we saw there was merely the end of the schools which were more identified with classic motifs. Apparently, they left the architectural space to new ways of thinking, in words of Geert Bekaert: "What Rem Koolhaas demonstrated in ‘Delirious New York’ has, after some delay, seeped through into consciousness". Seeing it from our days, it looks more clear what happened: the dominant position in the architectural panorama was taken up by the rest of the postmodern schools and their mutations, or as Janny Rodermond said, the biennale was a "manifestation of the established order"; between the juries, the organizers and the participants, we could find only famous names.

The truth is that neither Postmodernism nor Modernism were considered paradigmatic any longer and architecture was embraced as a product of liberalism, confirming the worse Koolhaas' premonition when he was retrospectively talking about the 1st Biennale: "I have always thought that postmodernism was the style per excellence of market economy. There was a strange discrepancy: probably the thinkers involved in the exhibition had the impression that they were working on a highly intellectual enterprise, with a lot of historical sophistication and dimension. But actually, at the time, I perceived the exhibition as the first manifestation of the free market. The Strada Novissima showed what architecture, ruled by the market economy, would imply". Postmodernism is a "living dead", a dead body that has been kept alive by the supernatural force of money.

2018

Checking the names that were present in the 5th Biennale, they are all almost the same that we can find still on the road, in the media or behind most of the projects recently built. That means that the "established order" in 1991 has not really changed much today, except for the successful approach that OMA proposed, that has remained the fundamental theory for more and more offices, what should serve as its validation.

While the modern movement lasted 50 years, we have been in Postmodernism for at least 46 years. Most of the postmodern thinkers have passed away, and the "star system" architects are at retirement age. So far, we have not seen thoughts or ideas that announce a change, neither in architecture nor in culture. Architecture and urbanism are more than ever in the hands of market developers, private, and public acting like private. We are not designing for people, cities or communities anymore: we are designing for the market. Thinkers have virtually disappeared; a post in a digital media has replaced any academic thought; debate has left the space to architecture broadcasting, digital images and to those who only show off the "wow" factor of their inventions. In Philip Ursprung words: "Today, architecture theory is evoked merely as a phantom that haunts us. As if it were a ghost unable to find its rest."

The only signs of change come from Internet globalization: architecture has got into the culture of mass tourism, becoming a claim to attract more tourists and visitors, and the digital era has displaced any reflection by a "like" on a website. We are exposed to more images than ever, but at the end, have inevitably the bitter feeling of "I have seen that before". But, is there anything on the planet more postmodern than the Internet?

Conclusion

The Modernism review that postmodern architects did, was possible because they were part of modern culture, where critique had its space, sort of believing in a general system of values and the idea of continuing progress. The added difficulty we face nowadays to go beyond Postmodern culture is that we constitute part of it, for better or for worse. Our image of reality is blurred; we don’t admit the existence of a permanent truth, which has been replaced by multiple individual realities, based on our subjective characteristics and contexts.

In this situation, perhaps this article is completely wrong. It is possible that architecture, as well as culture, is at this point going around and around repeatedly. Or maybe, as part of the "Internet carnival" that we are in, and thanks to a wave of "twits"... we can get out of the circle, just at the same moment that we synchronize our claps at the end of the show.

Kunsthal, Rotterdam (2005)?Carmen Jimenez & Antonio Alejandro.

Mary Ellen Carroll installation on Alserkal Avenue. Picture (fragment) by Christophe Viseux.