“Form follows the function”

To

“Less is more”

To

“Less is bore”

Post
Modernism
Theory of design

Submitted by
Govind
Junaid
Mohammed sajid badar
Praphulla
Sruthy krishna
S3 barch (2016-21) IES college of
architecture, Thrissur
 POST MODERNISM IN ARCHITECTURE
INTRODUCTION

Postmodern architecture style and comfort addresses the needs of the present
generation. The idea of postmodernism first emerged in the early 1950’s which
featured a wide range of ideals and practices that are not normally perceived
“acceptable” based on traditional philosophies. It has influenced every area of
discipline, including Arts and Architecture. Several architectural designs
adapted the ‘international’ design in the said decade. However, postmodern
architecture was not made a movement until the 70’s.

Postmodern architecture is derived from a previous movement called Modern

Functionalism, wherein the designs are centered on the usability. However,
emerging architects at that time viewed functionalism as “boring” and
unwelcoming. With the conceptualization of Postmodernism, architects merged
Art and functionality in one broad concept. Properties adapting postmodern
architecture are popular in the real estate industry nowadays and could have a
greater value in the future. If you’re gaining interest in postmodern architecture,
it is right for you to know what makes a good property adapting this kind of
architectural movement.

ORIGIN
Postmodern architecture emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the
perceived shortcomings of modern architecture, particularly its rigid doctrines,
its uniformity, its lack of ornament, and its habit of ignoring the history and
culture of the cities where it appeared. The architect and architectural historian
Robert Venturi led the attack in 1966 in his book, Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi summarized the kind of architecture he
wanted to see replace modernism,He also contradicted the saying of “less is
more as “ “less is bore” of Mies van der Rohe’s statement .

CHARACTERISTICS

Characteristics of Postmodern Architecture

The prominent features of postmodern architecture are mainly adapting diverse
aesthetics which gives emphasis on unique forms. Postmodern features are the
striking counterpoint of traditional architecture and all its preceding movements.
The principle of “anything goes” is applied in this type of architectural
movement. There is no room for structural ideas and conventional designs when
speaking of postmodernism.

Diversity of expression defines the core philosophy of postmodern ideals.

Buildings are designed not only to deliver conventional function but also
combined with characteristics of meaning such as pluralism, irony, paradox, and
contextualism. For example, postmodern skyscrapers are adorned with non-
conventional ledges or classical columns, something unusual for a skyscraper to
have.

Colors of postmodern architecture do not necessarily follow the “color wheel

law” but there is a certain harmony that exudes from it. Often, colors are
irregular, though following a theme. An example for this is the Team Disney
Buildings designed by Michael Graves in 1991. Snow White’s Seven Dwarves
are the main attraction of the building’s entrance. The “dwarves” were colored
light brown, away from the colorful characters people used to watch.

The Team Disney Buildings, as a great example for postmodern architecture are
just few of the buildings built nowadays (Bird’s Nest in Beijing and LaSalle
SIA Art College also belong to the same category). Along with the designs,
sustainability issues are likewise addressed in postmodernist designs. The
quality and origin of the materials are assured to be sustainable.

Lasalle College of the Arts

Creating a structural definition and fixed characteristics for postmodern

architecture may be a rather difficult task, as the designs do not necessarily
follow a principle. An important aspect of postmodern architecture is that it
uplifts the architecture as both functional and artistic in nature. The intentional
discontinuity of designs and conscious irony best defines the movement as a
whole. Adding properties with postmodern features may be a great investment
for your business. Since postmodern designs are aesthetically driven, positive
psychological effects for your employees are anticipated

IN SHORT

 COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION TO EXISTING

MODERNISM
 FRAGMENTATION
 ASYMMETRICAL AND OBLIQUE FORMS
 COLOUR
 HUMOR AND CAMP
 USED CLASSICAL STYLES IN NEW COMBINATIONS: PILLARS,
ARCHES, DOMES, CURTAIN WALL FACADES, SCULPTURES
AND ROMAN CONVENTIONS BANK OF AMERICA CENTER IN
HOUSTON, BY JOHN BURGEE AND PHILIP JOHNSON,
COMPLETED 1983
 USED CLASSICAL STYLES IN NEW COMBINATIONS: PILLARS,
ARCHES, DOMES, CURTAIN WALL FACADES, SCULPTURES
AND ROMAN CONVENTIONS
 USED CLASSICAL STYLES IN NEW COMBINATIONS: PILLARS,
ARCHES, DOMES, CURTAIN WALL FACADES, SCULPTURES
AND ROMAN CONVENTIONS
 SIMILAR TO OLD CATHEDRALS, DRAWS THE EYE UPWARDS
TOWARD THE SKY

THEORIES OF POST MODERNISM

Use of sculptural forms, ornaments, anthropomorphism and materials

which perform trompe l'oeil.
These physical characteristics are combined with conceptual
characteristics of meaning, include pluralism, double coding, flying
buttresses and high ceilings, irony and paradox, and contextualism.
The sculptural forms, not necessarily organic, were created with much
ardor. These can be seen in Hans Hollein's Abteiberg Museum

Hans Hollein's Abteiberg Museum

The building is made up of several building units, all very different. Each
building's forms are nothing like the conforming rigid ones of
Modernism. These forms are sculptural and are somewhat playful. These
forms are not reduced to an absolute minimum; they are built and shaped
for their ownsake. The building units all fit together in a very organic
way, which enhances the effect of the forms.

Frank Gehry’s Venice Beach house

After many years of neglect, ornament returned

The Venice Beach House has an assembly of circular logs which exist
mostly for decoration. It is littered with small ornamental details that
would have been considered excessive and needless in ModernismThe
logs on top do have a minor purpose of holding up the window covers
However, the mere fact that they could have been replaced with a
practicall invisible nail, makes their exaggerated existence ornamental.

IRONY

The best example of irony is Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia. Moore

quotes (architecturally) elements of Italian renaissance and Roman
Antiquity. The irony comes when it is noted that the pillars are covered
with steel. It is also paradoxical in the way he quotes Italian antiquity far
away from the original
in New Orleans.

DOUBLE CODING
Double coding meant the buildings convey many meanings
simultaneously.The Sony Building in New York does this very well. The
building is a tall skyscraper which brings with it connotations of very
modern technology. Yet, the top contradicts this.The top section conveys
elements of classical antiquity. This double coding is a prevalent trait of
Postmodernism

The most notable among their characteristics is their playfully

extravagant forms and the humour of the meanings the buildings
conveyed
. Postmodernity in architecture is said to be heralded by the return of "wit,
ornament and reference" to architecture in response to the formalism of
the International Style of modernism. As with many cultural movements,
some of Postmodernism's most pronounced and visible ideas can be seen
in architecture. The functional and formalized shapes and spaces of the
modernist style are replaced by diverse aesthetics: styles collide, form is
adopted for its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and
space abound. Perhaps most obviously, architects rediscovered past
architectural ornament and forms which had been abstracted by the
Modernist architects.
Postmodern architecture has also been described as neo-eclectic, where
reference and ornament have returned to the facade, replacing the
aggressively unornamented modern styles.
This eclecticism is often combined with the use of non-orthogonal angles
and unusual surfaces, most famously in the State Gallery of Stuttgart by
James Stirling and the Piazza d'Italia by Charles Moore.
modernism is rooted in minimal and true use of material as well as
absence of ornament, while postmodernism is a rejection of strict rules set
by the early modernists and seeks meaning and expression in the use of
building techniques, forms, and stylistic references.

One building form that typifies the explorations of Postmodernism is the

traditional gable roof, in place of the iconic flat roof of modernism.
Shedding water away from the center of the building, such a roof form
always served a functional purpose in climates with rain and snow, and
was a logical way to achieve larger spans with shorter structural
members, but it was nevertheless relatively rare in Modernist buildings.

ROOTS AND RELATIONSHIP OF POSTMODERNISM AND

OTHER STYLES
The Postmodernist movement is often seen (especially in the USA) as an
American movement, starting in America around the 1960s–1970s and
then spreading to Europe and the rest of the world, to remain right
through to the present. In 1966, however, the architectural historian Sir
Nikolaus Pevsner spoke of a revived Expressionism as being "a new
style, successor to my International Modern of the 1930s, a post-modern
style", and included as examples Le Corbusier's work at Ronchamp and
Chandigarh, Denys Lasdun at the Royal College of Physicians in London,
Richard Sheppard at Churchill College, Cambridge, and James Stirling's
and James Gowan's Leicester Engineering Building, as well as Philip
Johnson's own guest house at New Canaan, Connecticut. Pevsner
disapproved of these buildings for their self-expression and irrationalism,
but he acknowledged them as "the legitimate style of the 1950s and
1960s" and defined their characteristics. The job of defining
Postmodernism was subsequently taken over by a younger generation
who welcomed rather than rejected what they saw happening and, in the
case of Robert Venturi, contributed to it.
The aims of Postmodernism or Late-modernism begin with its reaction to
Modernism; it tries to address the limitations of its predecessor. The list
of aims is extended to include communicating ideas with the public often
in a then humorous or witty way. Often, the communication is done by
quoting extensively from past architectural styles, often many at once. In
breaking away from modernism, it also strives to produce buildings that
are sensitive to the context within which they are built.
Postmodernism has its origins in the perceived failure of Modern
architecture. Its preoccupation with functionalism and economical
building meant that ornaments were done away with and the buildings
were cloaked in a stark rational appearance. Many felt the buildings failed
to meet the human need for comfort both for body and for the eye, that
modernism did not account for the desire for beauty. The problem
worsened when some already monotonous apartment blocks degenerated
into slums. In response, architects sought to reintroduce ornament, color,
decoration and human scale to buildings. Form was no longer to be
defined solely by its functional requirements or minimal appearance.

RELATIONSHIP TO PREVIOUS STYLES

San Antonio Public Library, Texas

Ancient ruyi symbol adorning Taipei 101, Taiwan

A new trend became evident in the last quarter of the 20th century as
some architects started to turn away from modern functionalism which
they viewed as boring, and which some of the public considered
unwelcoming and even unpleasant. These architects turned towards the
past, quoting past aspects of various buildings and melding them together
(even sometimes in an inharmonious manner) to create a new means of
designing buildings. A vivid example of this new approach was that
Postmodernism saw the comeback of columns and other elements of
premodern designs, sometimes adapting classical Greek and Roman
examples (but not simply recreating them, as was done in neoclassical
architecture). In Modernism, the traditional column (as a design feature)
was treated as a cylindrical pipe form, replaced by other technological
means such as cantilevers, or masked completely by curtain wall façades.
The revival of the column was an aesthetic, rather than a technological
necessity. Modernist high-rise buildings had become in most instances
monolithic, rejecting the concept of a stack of varied design elements for
a single vocabulary from ground level to the top, in the most extreme
cases even using a constant "footprint" (with no tapering or "wedding
cake" design), with the building sometimes even suggesting the
possibility of a single metallic extrusion directly from the ground, mostly
by eliminating visual horizontal elements—this was seen most strictly in
Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center buildings.
Another return was that of the "wit, ornament and reference" seen in
older buildings in terra cotta decorative façades and bronze or stainless
steel embellishments of the Beaux-Arts and Art Deco periods. In
Postmodern structures this was often achieved by placing contradictory
quotes of previous building styles alongside each other, and even
incorporating furniture stylistic references at a huge scale.
Contextualism, a trend in thinking in the later parts of 20th century,
influences the ideologies of the postmodern movement in general.
Contextualism is centered on the belief that all knowledge is "context-
sensitive". This idea was even taken further to say that knowledge cannot
be understood without considering its context. While noteworthy
examples of modern architecture responded both subtly and directly to
their physical context (analyzed by Thomas Schumacher in
"Contextualism: Urban Ideals and Deformations," and by Colin Rowe
and Fred Koetter in Collage City), postmodern architecture often
addressed the context in terms of the materials, forms and details of the
buildings around it—the cultural context.

ARCHITECTS AND THEIR WORKS

Robert Venturi

The Guild House in Philadelphia by Robert Venturi (1960–63)


Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi (1964)


Fire Station Number 4 in Columbus, Indiana (1968)

Trabant Center at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE (1996)


Episcopal Academy Chapel


Frist Campus Center at Princeton University (2000)
Robert Venturi (born 1925) was both a prominent theorist of
postmodernism and an architect whose buildings illustrated his ideas.
After studying at the American Academy in Rome, he worked in the
offices of the modernists Eero Saarinen Louis Kahn until 1958, and then
became a professor of architecture at Yale University. One of his first
buildings was the Guild House in Philadelphia, built between 1960 and
1963, and a house for his mother in Chestnut Hill, in Philadelphia. These
two houses became symbols of the postmodern movement. He went on to
 design, in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of buildings which took into
account both historic precedents, and the ideas and forms existing in the
real life of the cities around them.

Michael Graves


Portland Building by Michael Graves (1982)


Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, (1982)

Team Disney building in Burbank, California, (1986)


Richard Meier, was considered one of the New York Five, a group of
advocates of pure modern architecture, but in 1982 he turned toward
postmodernism with the Portland Building, one of the first major
structures in the style. The building has since been added to the National
Register of Historic The Denver Public Library by Michael Graves
(1995)
Michael Graves (1934–2015) designed two of the most prominent
buildings in the postmodern style, the Portland Building and the Denver
Public Library. He later followed up his landmark buildings by designing
large, low-cost retail stores for chains such as Target and J.C. Penney in
the United States, which had a major influence on the design of retail
stores in city centers and shopping malls. In his early career, he, along
with the Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Places.

Philip Johnson

550 Madison Avenue, (Formerly AT&T Building) by Philip Johnson
(1982)


Bank of America Center in Houston, Texas by Philip Johnson (1983)


PPG Place, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Philip Johnson (1979–84)

500 Boylston Street building in Boston, Massachusetts, by Philip Johnson
(1989)


400 West Market in Louisville, Kentucky by Philip Johnson (1993)


Glass house Pavilion for the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut
(1995)
Philip Johnson (1906–2005) began his career as a pure modernist. In
1935 he co-authored the famous catalog of the Museum of Modern Art
exposition on the International Style, and studied with Walter Gropius
and Marcel Breuer at Harvard. His Glass House in New Canaan,
 Connecticut (1949), inspired b a similar house by Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe became an icon of the modernist movement. He worked with Mies
on another iconic modernist project, the Seagrams Building in New York
City. However, in the 1950s he began to include certain playful and
mannerist forms into his buildings, such as the Synagogue of Port Chester
(1954–56), with a vaulted plaster ceiling and narrow colored windows,
and the Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska (1963). However, his
major buildings in the 1970, such as IDS Center in Minneapolis (1973)
and Pennzoil Place in Houston (1970–76) were massive, sober, and
entirely modernist.
With the AT&T Building (now named 550 Madison Avenue) (1978–82),
Johnson turned dramatically toward postmodernism. The building's most
prominent feature is a purely decorative top modeled after a piece of
Chippendale furniture, and it has other more subtle references to
historical architecture. His intention was to make the building stand out
as a corporate symbol among the modernist skyscrapers around it in
Manhattan, and he succeeded; it became the best-known of all
postmodern buildings. Soon afterwards he completed another postmodern
project, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1979-1984), a complex
of six glass buildings for the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company. These
buildings have neo-gothic features, including 231 glass spires, the largest
of which is 82 feet (25 m) high.
In 1995, he constructed a postmodern gatehouse pavilion for his
residence, Glass House. The gatehouse, called "Da Monstra", is 23 feet
high, made of gunite, or concrete shot from a hose, colored gray and red.
It is a piece of sculptural architecture with no right angles and very few
straight lines, a predecessor of the sculptural contemporary architecture of
the 21st century.

Humama building

• Address:101 E Main St, Louisville, KY 40202, USA

• Height: 127 m CTBUH
• Floors:  27
• Area:5,000 square foot
• Opened: May 1985
• Architectural style: Postmodern architecture
• Architect: Michael Graves
• Construction began in October 1982 and was completed in May 1985.
•  The Humana Building, also known as the Humana Tower, is a
1985 skyscraper in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, located at 500 West
Main Street and headquarters of the Humana Corporation.
• The building is also known for its exterior construction of flat pink
granite
• Each of the sides of the building is different,
• but all meet in a sloping pyramid at the top and are clad in pink granite.
•  The north facade's loggia is respectful of the older downtown
architecture, being perfectly flush with the original Main Street
storefronts
•  The open-air front portion of the loggia contains a large fountain
• The large, curved portion towards the top of the building is an open-air
observation deck
• The outermost point of the circle has space for a few people at a time to
be surrounded by glass, allowing for a spectacular view of the Ohio
River and down Main Street
HUMAN FOCUS
The award-winning interiors emphasized the quality of the workplace,
from beautifully detailed and commodious public spaces to employee
lounges and offices.
Humana since opening day said that the building today is as fresh and
functional
TRANSFORMATION
The project’s program called for a building that would contribute to “the
responsible and creative development of downtown Louisville and its
Riverfront.”
IDENTITY
A conference center on the top floor leads to a large outdoor porch
overlooking the city and the river.
The truss work that supports the porch alludes to the many steel bridges
crossing the river, which are visible from this vantage point.
Views of the front
Like many post modern skyscrapers, it uses the classically-based tripartite
division with a strong sense of a base--the 8 story loggia extending in
front of the office structure, a shaft, and a top, here a kind of ziggurat
when seen from the side.

View of the side (left) and rear (center)

This post-modern style contrasts strikingly with the cigar-box-on-end
repetitive designs of modern glass and steel architecture. Materials are
expensive--pink granite for most of the suface , with several other
polished granites. The building is decorated in gold leaf.
Views of the top
A huge circular bay projects at the top which is surmounted by the
ziggurat--or notched gable--topped by a curved roof. The eight-story
loggia in front is capped at the center by a pyramidal skylight .