A Postmodern Beginning:

Postmodern architecture's return of history through myth,

play, and context

focus on: -Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Venturi and Rauch, Plan and

Section, Vanna Venturi House,

Residence in Chestnut Hill, PA,

1960s

Venturi and Rauch, Vanna Venturi

House, Residence in Chestnut Hill, PA,

1960s, Postmodernism

“complexity and contradiction”

in 1963

Venturi and Rauch, Vanna Venturi House, Residence in Chestnut Hill, PA,

1960s, interior; interior detail- stairs and fireplace chimney compete,

Postmodernism

“complexity and contradiction”

detail

“the duck,”

modernist“the decorated shed,”

postmodernist

Paul Rudolph, Crawford

Manor, 1960s, modernism

Robert Venturi and Denise

Scott Brown, Guild House,

1960s, postmodernism

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans,

1960s, Pop art

James Rosenquist, F 111, 1960s, Pop art

Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted

Men, 1960s, Pop art

Modernist- looks more

advanced but it is just

poured concrete with

concrete block like Guild

House; pure form,

“structural purity”

Postmodernist- like the

subjects of Pop art, they are

common-place elements

made uncommon; mundane

made iconic!

“decorated shed”

ugly and ordinary vs.

modernist heroic and original

Michael Graves, Public Services Building, 1980s, Postmodernism

In theorist Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism,” the postmodern condition is characterized by “Pastiche…an

aesthetic of quotations pushed to the limit; an incorporation of forms, an

imitation of dead styles”

Theorist Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism” argues that the postmodern condition is characterized by

“Pastiche…an aesthetic of quotations pushed to the limit; an incorporation

of forms, an imitation of dead styles deprived of any satirical impulse.”

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Bruno/bladerunner.html

Pastiche

Jameson has derived his view of postmodernism from the field of

architecture: "It is in the realm of architecture . . . that modifications in

aesthetic productions are most dramatically visible, and that their

theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was

indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of

postmodernism began to emerge.” Jameson, Cultural Logic, p. 54

postmodernist modernist