The Language of Post-Modern Architecture

by Charles Jencks

An illustrated survey of post-modern architecture that points out its successes and more often, its ludicrous failures

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Design, Art, Urbanism, History

204 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1977

About the author

Charles Alexander Jencks (born 21 June 1939) is an American architecture theorist and critic, landscape architect and designer. His books on the history and criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely read in architectural circles. He studied under the influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham. Jencks now lives in Scotland where he designs landscape sculpture.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wig! This is so cool Jencks brings his own theory of architectural language, a solid definition of postmodernism, and great history that's focused specifically around the work. Good formal analysis written to an accessible level without compromising complexity.

[Stephen Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whether or not the term was used at the time, Jencks states that what came to be referred to as modern architecture was conceived in the 1850s as a call to morality, but by the 1920s, had become a call to social transformation. Just how architecture could be either moral or a call to social transformation is not explained. The book argued that architects brought up in the International style, characterised by minimalist and utilitarian functional, modular and rectilinear forms without ornamentation constructed of concrete, steel and glass, were ingrained with the purist notion that one aesthetic and one structural system should be used on a building observing that in due course, modern architecture’s problems were that it was seen as impersonal, heavy and academic – incorporating the worst excesses of the International style. It noted, however, that by 1961, a camp had developed in favour of eclecticism and, by the mid 1970s, consistency and purism were seen as the opposite of integrity and some ornamentation instead of pseudo-functionalism began to be reintroduced to modern architecture. Although less influential, the book also noted that contextualism, which began in the early 1960s in Cornell University, began to be considered to address another failure of modern architecture and planning, that of the lack of understanding of urban context and an over emphasis on objects rather than connections.

As the book was about the language of post-modern architecture, it did cite the International Style, Robert Venturi’s "duck buildings" (iconic signs), "decorated sheds" (symbolic signs), functionalism, purism, eclecticism, sympathetic architecture, contextualism, architectural meaning, house styles and other terms, some of which were discussed but others just mentioned. The book also cited a number of significant buildings including the Sydney Opera House, Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, Venturi’s Headquarters building for Nurses and Dentists, the Hillingdon Civic Centre, Venturi’s head office building for AT&T and Kresge College in UCLA and numerous architects, some well known, others less so.

While much of the material was interesting and the book was well illustrated with photographs of the buildings cited, the text tended to jump from one concept or observation to another abruptly. But perhaps more significantly, while the title cited post-modern architecture, most of the book described modern architecture, and its shortcomings.

[Sandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t particularly agree with some of his arguments nor like his architectural works/styles, but the book at least gave me more clarity in understanding the Post-Modernism movement in closer detail.

[Ariel Hasibuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cool way to see how post modern bridged society with architecture, though the style itself has been left behind, it's thinking is strikingly appropriate to consumerist, individualistic society

[Muhammad Mauluddin · Rating 5 out of 5]

good

[Gentry Bluzzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Architecture

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jencks attempts to concretize Venturi's famous statement in "Complexities and Contradictions in Architecture": That richness of meaning is superior to clarity of meaning; less is a bore. Architecture is a wonderful medium for illustrating this. Like its literary equivalent, architectural postmodernism was a reaction to (the various understandings of) modernism. Hence definitionally, both kinds of postmodernism are challenging to pin down - like defining women as non-men. So Jencks' tactic here is to historicize the shift in architecture from modernism to postmodernism in the hopes that in doing so, we can more vividly see the epochal transition.

Modernism, Jencks tells us, though picking up steam in the pre-war (2nd) years - with Corbusier, Bauhaus, the various Vienesse schools (e.g., Klimt's Secessionists and Hoffman's Werkstätte), Art deco etc.- experienced its most glorious years post-war. The leading lights were Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walther Gropius, Gordon Bunshaft (of Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill), and I.M Pei. The glass-steel office building, that dominating sign of the triumph of capitalism, was the most significant product of this era.

But modernism, being too univalent, was too concerned with purity, too obsessed with function over form - and in being such, neglected matters of style, thereby widening the ever-present gap between elite and popular architectural codes. Brutalism, for example, which architectural elites found (and still find) charming, was (and is) maliciously maligned in the common eye - as an exemplum of eastern bureaucratic state dominance. We are told, then, that the death of modernism wasn't slow: it occurred precisely at 3 pm on March 16, 1972, when Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt Igoe building in St. Louis was demolished via detonation. (Here Jencks proceeds to issue some terrible, somewhat racist, analysis about public housing - some plainly dispelled by the facts, like the fact that many black Pruitt Igoe residents went on to collectivize and live together in various habitable parts of the former building.)


What emerged on the other side were architects like Lucien Kroll (with his projects that involved the future inhabitants of his buildings in the design process), Leon Krier, Robert A.M. Stern, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebeskind, Santiago Calatrava, etc., etc. - and most importantly, Venturi and Scott-Brown (though they had of course already attained significant prominence pre-Pruitt-Igoe). Abandoning the intense rationalism of modernism, these architects embraced eclecticism. In the spirit of J.C. Loudon, this new architecture spoke to both architectural insiders, who were concerned mainly about architectural signification, and various local publics who were concerned with comfort because of the vernacular nature of the new projects, the maintenance of tradition etc. Aided by computer design software like CATIA (which Gehry famously pioneered in his Bilbao design), the rigid lines of modernism became a thing of the past. Venturi's contention that Main Street (or High Street, if you're British), with its sensual mixture of brows high and low, was the epitome of the postmodern was revealed to be true.

[Leonardo]

En el clasicismo moderno un edificio se suponía que obedecía a un código global, mientras que con la posmodernidad tenemos una multiplicidad de códigos. Esto puede suponer o bien una multiplicidad (ambigüedad) de significados –lo que Charles Jencks llamaba la «metáfora aludida» (¿la Ópera de Sidney es el crecimiento de una flor o una serie de tortugas copulando?)– o bien una multiplicidad de funciones, desde los espectáculos escénicos a las compras y los restaurantes (la Ópera de Oslo, de Snøhetta, dirigida a una generación más joven, trata de aparecer «fría», imitando las elegantes líneas del avión invisible; además, el tejado se inclina hacia el fiordo y se desdobla en dos, como el tobogán de una piscina).






Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.261

[John Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a great introduction to what's been happening in architecture in the last 50 or 60 years. Not only a great introduction to post-modern architecture, but also a nice complement to the study of post-modernism itself. Somehow post-modernism as a movement was more clear to me when looking at something (perhaps literally) concrete like a building than something more abstract like a painting or a piece of writing. What I liked best was the extensive collection of photographs of post-modern buildings all over the world.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Including his extremely specific (and completely artificial) dating of Modern Architecture's demise, this is classic Jencks (and Andrei still cringes).

[Yusita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book for architecs!

best regards,
YP

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious and important.

[Tamara Damjanovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nice inspiration for space research!

[Gandhi Kumakaw]

this book is have power to my study

[Diego Lacazette]

espasmos

[Ian]

“Let us then romp through the desolation of modern architecture, and the destruction of our cities, like some Martian tourist out on an earthbound excursion, visiting the archeological sites with a superior disinterest, bemused by the sad but instructive mistakes of a former architectural civilisation. After all, since it is fairly dead, we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse” (Jencks, pg. 10).

[Anwar Ali]

I like to read this book Post Modern Architecture 6(hardcover). It is a good book of Charles Jencks.