Postmodern Architecture

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how postmodern architecture, as its name suggests, and like so many aesthetic movements in general, arose as a reaction to the expressive sensibility of the previous generation and how perhaps the most striking formal and spatial qualities and characteristics of postmodern architecture is its lack of cohesion in all of the qualities of form and style. The paper also looks at how there are some shades of classicism in postmodern architecture--or at least neo-classicism and its embrace of an earlier era, that of Greek and Roman formality, and its transformation and appropriation of those forms in different uses.

From the Paper:

"The new postmodernists derided the formulaic genre of the preceding generations of architects, which they felt had produced buildings that were "monotonous" ("Art and culture: Postmodern architecture," 2007). The new critics despised modernism's uniform, linear lines, its consistency of shape, its "glass skyscrapers" that were "based on an efficiency of construction fostered by capitalist speculation ("Art and culture: Postmodern architecture," 2007). Modernism argued for architecture's politicization, an end to its "formal isolation" and for an expansion of architecture's role to address social problems. Postmodern critics of the early 1970s felt that elitism and individual expression were superior values to modernist's embrace of a populism that had really degenerated into a routinized corporate regime (McLeod 27)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• "Art and culture: Postmodern architecture." Arts & Culture Website. 10 Oct 2007. http://www.artandculture.com/cgi- bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/movement?id=131
• Foster, Hal. "'(Post) Modern Polemics.'" Perspecta 21:1984.
• Jencks, Charles. "'Post-Modern Space,' & 'Conclusion - Radical Eclecticism?' From The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London, 1977, pp118-126 & 127- 132.
• McLeod, Mary. 'Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism.' Assemblage. 8: 1989.
• Paradis, Tom. (2003). "Postmodern Commercial and Situational Architecture." Architectural styles of America. 10 Oct 2007. http://www2.nau.edu/~twp/architecture/postmoderncom/

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