The Story of Post-Modernism Quotes

“A recurrent theme of this book is that architects, fairly low in the chain of command and needing jobs, are prone to compromise with the state and the establishment. Very rarely do they resist the zeitgeist. On a political level such compromise leads to the folly of invading Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, follies of modern complicity too obvious to need comment. On an architectural level they lead to tearing down historic districts, building leviathans for multinationals or, for instance, constructing with cheap building systems that soon collapse.”
― Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture

“the philosopher Karl Popper and his ally Ernst Gombrich, wrote many critiques of the zeitgeist and argued that although there is no such thing as historical inevitability, there most certainly is a ‘logic of the situation and climate of opinion’, and morality consists in resisting those pressures when they are socially negative. In architecture this syndrome became the alliance of mass production with mass urban renewal, cheap housing and overcrowding.”
― Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture

“Like politicians, they may pretend to be in charge and shape society – this is a large part of their hope and mental equipment – but it is mostly an accident if they do so.”
― Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture