Postmodernism or Neoclassicism? Columns with a Twinkle in the Eye

Neoclassicism is in earnest about Antiquity. Between about 1750 and 1840 architects copied Greek and Roman temples as exactly as they could and placed them on museums, churches and gateways, like Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin. Postmodernism plays with the same forms. From the late 1960s and through the 1980s, architects quoted columns, pediments and arches, but made them flat, enlarged, broken or colourful, often with a twinkle in the eye. Bofill's Arch in Stockholm and the Portland Building in the United States are typical. Ask yourself whether the form follows the rules or jokes with them.

Facts

Neoclassicism: Antiquity in earnest

Around 1750 architects turned against the excess of the Baroque and Rococo. The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and careful surveys of the buildings of Athens, published from 1762, gave a new picture of Antiquity as simple and noble. Antiquity became a moral model for a rational state, and the copies were to be correct. The proportions of the columns, the forms of the capitals and the spacing between the columns followed the models.

The Altes Museum in Berlin, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and completed in 1830, has a colonnade of eighteen Ionic columns facing the Lustgarten and a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon inside. The British Museum in London has a south façade with 44 Ionic columns, modelled on Greek temples in Asia Minor. In Uppsala the Linneanum, built in 1788–1807, has a portico with Doric columns without bases, after the temples at Paestum. The choice was deliberate: Greek Antiquity was seen as more original and serious than the Roman.

Neoclassicism used the forms of the temple on buildings that were not temples, and that is one of its hallmarks: a temple with windows is neoclassical. But it was in earnest. The forms were to lend dignity to the museum, the church or the state.

Postmodernism: Antiquity as quotation

In the 1960s more and more people tired of the smooth boxes of Modernism. Robert Venturi answered Mies van der Rohe's less is more with less is a bore, and in the house for his mother, the Vanna Venturi House of 1964, he split the gable in the middle and let an arch be only a moulding on the façade. The Postmodernists wanted buildings to mean something again and to speak to ordinary people, and they borrowed from history to do so.

The borrowings were not copies. Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in New York, completed in 1984, is a skyscraper in pink granite crowned by a broken pediment like that of a Chippendale chest of drawers. Michael Graves's Portland Building of 1982 has stylised pilasters and a keystone shaped like a cone painted on the façade in terracotta, blue-green and cream, like a poster of giant size. James Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart has a classical rotunda without a roof and blocks of stone that seem to have fallen from the wall.

In London, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed the Sainsbury Wing, the extension to the National Gallery, in 1991. The façade takes up the pilasters of the old museum, but they cluster tightly beside the main building and thin out towards the corner until they disappear. The façade is as flat as a stage set. It is a conversation with Classicism, not a repetition of it.

Bofill's Arch: Classicism for ordinary homes

In Sweden Bofill's Arch beside Fatbursparken on Södermalm is the clearest example. Around 1990–1992 Ricardo Bofill built a semicircular housing block reminiscent of a Roman amphitheatre, with pilasters through several storeys, heavy cornices and strict symmetry. Everything is cast in prefabricated concrete elements in light and warm tones.

Compare it with a neoclassical building such as Gustav III's Pavilion at Haga, built in 1787–1792. There the columns are low and well judged, and the house is a king's private retreat. In Bofill's Arch the scale is gigantic, the material industrial and the content ordinary flats. It is precisely the displacement, the form of a palace for the tenant, that makes the building postmodern.

Five questions that decide

First look at the proportions. Are the columns of the right thickness for their height, and do they stand at the right distance? In Neoclassicism yes; in Postmodernism often not, on purpose. Then look at the details: do the capitals have their volutes and leaves, or are they simplified to discs and spheres? Is the pediment whole, or broken, split or merely hinted at with a moulding?

Look at the colour and the material. Neoclassicism is white, pale grey or lightly rendered, in stone or in plaster meant to look like stone. Postmodernism can be pink, blue and terracotta, and stone and concrete are used openly as slabs and elements. Finally look at the context: a temple front on a museum of 1830 is neoclassical, a temple front on an office building of 1985 is almost certainly postmodern.

The drawing of the temple below shows the original from which both styles start. A third style, the simplified Classicism of the 1920s, is compared with Neoclassicism in the guide to Gustavian Neoclassicism and 1920s classicism. The styles are described under Postmodernism and Neoclassicism and in the guides to Postmodern architecture and Neoclassicism in architecture.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

An office building from the 1980s has a gigantic broken gable and pilasters painted pink and blue. Which style is it?