The book that popularised the term “Post-Modern” for architecture and defined it by double coding: speaking at once to architects in the language of modern technique and to the public in a language of familiar signs.
Jencks opened with a theatrical claim (that modern architecture died in 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks in St Louis were dynamited) and went on to treat architecture as a language with words, syntax and semantics. Modern buildings, he argued, spoke only to specialists; a post-modern building should be doubly coded, combining modern construction with historical, vernacular or popular references that ordinary people could read.
The book, part by part
I Double coding
Architecture as communication; the failure of univalent modernism; the eclectic, witty, historically aware alternative.
Rules: Double coding