Post-Modern Classicism...edited by Jencks...  

I just picked up and read a softback book called Post-Modern Classicism by Charles Jencks (published 1980). Approximately 42 buildings were presented. It was clearly an promotional tool calling attention to a group of architects who hoped to promote a half classist and half beaux arts revival overlaid on contemporary structural engineering. It spurs a couple thoughts.

First, it is remarkable how much thought went into the formal and ornamental languages being used, especially regarding contradictions between past and present.

Second, it is remarkable how little thought went into the space programs. These architects seemed to have assumed space programs were sufficiently rationalized by modernists so as to be continued virtually intact. Further, they just plain didn't seem to care much about space programs. They almost never mention space programming in the book.

Third, post modernist architects really did come up with alot of splendid formal and ornamental contradictions that are still appealing to my eye over 25 years later.

Fourth, to be blunt, with few exceptions, they weren't very good architects and were just plain pedestrian interior designers.

Fifth, I used to think Post-Modernism collapsed from an insufficiently rigorous philosophy, but now I think the philosophy was less the problem than the talent level of the architects. Every architectural style I have ever explored has produced some ingenious,knock-out beautiful, and functional wonders. But when I looked at these 42 buildings, I had to conclude there just were no geniuses working in post modernism.

I infer something from all this that kind of surprises me--something I hardly thought I would ever say.

Post-Modernism maybe worth revisiting. There is the germ of something potentially quite good in it. It was just worked out too superficially and without the benefit of any great talents capable of juggling the complexity and contradictions of historical and contemporary references, while at the same time thoroughly working through the design problem posed by the building, site and context.

If Louis Sullivan and his peers were the Functionalist School, then Venturi and his peers might fittingly be referred to not as post-modernists, but rather as the Dysfunctional School. No other word I can think of better fits many of these design solutions than dysfunctional. But its less that they don't work very well than that they are consciously designed to work less than optimally.

And yet I very much like the forms and ornamentations of many parts of the buildings so much that I think they ought to be reexplored with more deeply thought out solutions.