A reaction against orthodox modernism that restored meaning, memory and wit to architecture through historical quotation, ornament, colour and signs, often using modern construction behind a knowingly theatrical front.
By the 1960s the modern movement had become the establishment, and its failures (anonymous office towers, inhospitable housing estates, cities cut up by expressways) were plain to see. Two American books of 1966 and 1972 by Robert Venturi (the second with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) supplied the argument against it. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture defended richness and ambiguity against purity (“less is a bore”); Learning from Las Vegas claimed that architecture is communication and preferred the decorated shed, a plain building with applied signs, to the modernist “duck” whose whole form was a symbol.
The critic Charles Jencks gave the movement its name and its theory of double coding: speaking at once to architects in the language of modern technique and to the public in a language of familiar forms. Built examples multiplied from the late 1970s: Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, a fountain of stainless-steel and neon classical orders; Michael Graves’s Portland Building, a box dressed as a giant keystoned pilaster; James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, a collage of classical rotunda, Egyptian cornices and bright green window frames; and Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, a granite skyscraper with a broken pediment on top.
Postmodernism took many forms: an ironic, pop manner in America; a serious return to classicism in the work of Leon Krier, Quinlan Terry and the New Urbanists; and a rediscovery of the traditional European city, with its streets, squares and typologies, in Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (1966) and the reconstruction of Berlin in the 1980s. The Venice Biennale of 1980, with its “Strada Novissima” of façades by twenty architects, was its festival.
By the early 1990s the style had become a commercial formula and was abandoned by the avant-garde. Its lasting effects were larger than its buildings: it made history, context, the street and the meaning of forms legitimate concerns again after half a century of abstraction.