What is Postmodern architecture? Characteristics and examples

Postmodern architecture is a reaction against modernism that took shape in the 1960s and was at its strongest in the 1980s. Instead of white boxes without ornament, architects used colour, symbols and free quotations from the styles of history, often with humour and irony. Well-known examples are the Vanna Venturi House, the Portland Building and Bofill's Arch in Stockholm.

Facts

“Less is a bore”

The modernist master Mies van der Rohe had summed up his position in the words “less is more”. In 1966 Robert Venturi replied in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture with “less is a bore”. He wanted an architecture that was rich, contradictory and understandable to ordinary people.

His Vanna Venturi House, a house for his mother outside Philadelphia from the early 1960s, at first glance looks like a child's drawing of a house: a large gable, a chimney and an entrance. But the gable is split and the proportions deliberately shifted. The house became a manifesto.

Symbols and double coding

Venturi and Denise Scott Brown also studied Las Vegas and its signs, arguing that architects could learn from the commercial everyday environment. The critic Charles Jencks described Postmodern architecture as double-coded: it speaks both to architects, with clever references, and to the public, with recognisable forms.

Jencks claimed jokingly that modernism died in 1972, when parts of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St Louis were blown up. The exaggeration says something about the mood: many felt that modernism's large-scale projects had failed and sought an architecture with more meaning and context.

The icons

Michael Graves designed the Portland Building in Oregon, completed in 1982, with a façade like a giant classical decoration in red, blue and beige. Philip Johnson, once a champion of modernism, gave the AT&T Building in New York a pediment crown that made people talk of a piece of Chippendale furniture.

In Stuttgart James Stirling built the Neue Staatsgalerie, with a circular sculpture court, classical stone façades and brightly coloured railings. In London Venturi and Scott Brown designed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, an extension that plays with the classical columns of the neighbouring building.

Bofill and Postmodernism in Sweden

The Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill built large housing complexes in France with classical forms on a giant scale, such as Les Espaces d'Abraxas outside Paris. In Stockholm he designed Bofill's Arch at Fatburen on Södermalm, a semicircular housing block with columns and pilasters in prefabricated concrete, completed in 1992.

During the 1980s many Swedish offices, shopping centres and housing estates also acquired Postmodern features: columns, arches, pastel colours and gables. Read more about the style on the page on Postmodernism.

How to recognise a Postmodern building

Look for historical elements used in unexpected ways: a column that carries nothing, a gable that is split, an arch at the wrong scale. The colours are often strong or pastel, and the materials may be mixed, with stone, render, glass and sheet metal in the same façade. The building likes to say something, sometimes with a wink.

Postmodernism was controversial and has often been called superficial, but it opened the way to a freer architecture. Later Deconstructivism and contemporary architecture build on the freedom to break modernism's rules. In design the movement corresponds to the Memphis Group; read the guide to Memphis.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who answered “less is more” with “less is a bore”?