What happens with us human race? The best of us keeps inventing great stuff, to then have it ruined, every time, by the most mediocre of the species, who instead of thinking about others just think about their little selves, their little greed and their little ambition (that´s where the divide between great and mediocre is, I believe).
If you want to understand very fast what happened to Postmodernism just look at what has happened to the Internet in just 20 years. SAME SHIT. From free, fun, truly democratic and socially concerned to a dystopia of corporate power.
If you want to understand what Postmodernism is, don´t read Owen Hopkins book on Postmodern Architecture “LESS IS A BORE.” I would call it, “THIS BOOK IS A BORE” but that´s me 😊 Cause this book by Phaidon is – if we continue with the analogy with internet – like a book of surveillance protocols and DATA collection, instead of what the first innovators saw it could be: a truly democratic and free space, outside corporate power, to connect the world and bring us all closer (not a behavior modification platform for the marketplace and a surveillance technology to CONTROL EVERYBODY).
Exactly the same happened to Postmodernism. The last rebels!
But let me tell you first how I came across this book. It was in December 2022 (a couple months after my arrival to Barcelona). I went with my mom to the Miró Foundation and that book was waiting there for me. My mom even bought it for me as “my Christmas present!”
I started looking at it at home and I started to get enraged by it (one of its purposes). So I set myself to do an Instagram post about it, but the days kept passing and the material I kept gathering for it kept growing! I started to make the slides you will see further down, back then, and at some point, I realized I couldn´t make an Instagram post (I needed like 9) and since working on it had soothed my initial anger at the monstrosities of inaccuracies and the blatant historical misconstruction, I kind of let it be…
But this book followed me a year later, when I joined the Architect´s Association in Barcelona, to the library there. When I saw it showcased there for me to see it (again), I asked intrigued to the librarian. Someone had just donated it!
Here is a book on Postmodern architecture by someone (a historian!) my age who is constructing a false story on Postmodernism, to serve Robert Stern and the likes of that corporate mediocre narrative, in an intent of appropriating that movement and obliterating its initial social concerns and rebellious DNA. And the book I feel, with its Sol LeWitt (or Sottsass) kind of cover, and the Venturi title, was aimed at me, who had been writing for years on Postmodernism as well. Just not the one Owen Hopkins portrays in his book.
A few years earlier I made an Instagram post with an exhibition catalogue for a Memphis Design Group exhibition in Dusseldorf (more real postmodernism for you). I am almost certain (and my neighbor´s toilet flushing just now agrees with me) that this is where they got the name for their Simulacra book.
But if you go to Phaidon´s press release for Owen´s book, they basically tell you all you need to know. This is a book for coming generations! “NEWCOMERS” they write. Yes, because the old camers don´t buy this ugly stuff. THIS IS A BOOK TO CONFUSE YOUNG PEOPLE basically. And they are telling you!
This is why I was elated to read an architecture student in 2016, like Taylor Metcalf, not buying their shit 😊 Bob would love “Activist Mannerism.” Taylor understood it all. But he doesn´t associated Postmodernism with Robert Venturi anymore, like my generation does.
Like Dean Jonathan Massey, or this Owen guy that got a directorship at an architecture gallery in the UK right AFTER putting together this book (I´d say FOR), they are erasing history and rewriting it for the mediocre corporate system.
Mediocre Corporate World (MCW) ruined modern architecture first, and they just did it again with postmodernism. They are now ruining the internet and democracies worldwide as well. They just seem unable to do better! (I believe in a corporate system that is more enlightened and mature than what we have right now... That understands that when we all do better, they do much better! Cause I really wonder where you are planning to go, destroying the middle class as you are doing).
We also need better politicians to stand up for democracies and citizens instead of catering to the worse stupid greedy fascists. Why do you think they are still supporting Donald Trump! He really is the face of this ugly stupid and uneducated power. He will certainly deliver to them what they want! More deregulation for Big Brother. Who cares if he is being trialed as we speak for so many felonies !!! When a presidential nominee is a criminal (or suspected of being one) and a party still supports his candidacy, you can tell how bad that democracy is doing.
If I decided to finally make this post is after seeing how – even while MCW and their tentacles on culture and the arts are spreading and keep trying to tune historical events to suit their personal narrative (a very common fascist trait) like with the Dan Graham show NOT-POSTMODERN at the Serralves Museum in Portugal – people my generation (architects from the Hans Hollein book) and even younger (Irene Cheng´s student Taylor Metcalf) understand real postmodernism, know it is not Robert Stern, and revere Venturi Scott Brown as the true originators of the fun stuff.
And since now I have a wonderful BLOG to explain myself in length, the time has come I finally share with the world my book review.
But before we go into the book and the slides I prepared 2 years ago almost! It is worth looking at the REAL TIMELINE OF HISTORIC EVENTS first. I made it also back then.
You can see how Philip Johnson is first the popularizer of the Modern Movement in the US while at MoMA, with the famous 1932 show he helped curate, and with the Glass House he built himself as a manifesto, and which is a copy of Mies van der Rohe´s glass house project -- the Fansworth house. Mies developed the design in time for it to be included in an exhibition on his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. In 1949 Philip built his glass house in New Canaan (CT). He finished it before Mies´even, who would only finish his in 1951.
And then when his International Style became the style of corporate america and lost its edge, he went on to herald and take over Venturi Scott Brown´s Postmodernism, but that lasted even less, and he went on to launch the "Deconstructivism" (whatever that was...).
Philip was a great curator and a trends setter, but not an innovator. I think he always regretted that :) And he became competitive and jealous if you didn´t do as he said. And because Bob and Denise never wanted (or needed) to dance to his tune, he got angry at them (especially after an article by Denise on his 1980 AT&T building) and promoted Bob Stern instead and other more mediocre and young architects who did need him. Some were just terrorized by him and his abuse of power, I think 😊 He could be so mean and revengeful. (ask Bob and Denise!) I remember an interview with Peter Eisenman where he was explaining how scared he was to tell him he did not want to run his Philip Johnson Foundation 😊
But the worse is how they elevated to mythical stature that poor Charles Jencks and his TERRIBLE BOOK rehashing and misuderstanding Bob and Denise´s ideas. HE called POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE (that´s how that great work happening for almost 2 decades got a name). It is funny to read it and see how he thinks he is discovering the wheel, when he is ONLY PARAPHRASING Venturi Scott Brown´s books, exhibitions, and studios. It is especially painful with the Learning from Las Vegas book, Jencks goes and supports the opposite of what Bob and Denise say you should do 😊 All that histrionic, monumental and tacky pseudo-postmodernism that comes in the 80s, is a direct consequence of this major misunderstanding.
Also, Philip Johnson is said to have read every single panel and text of the 1976 Venturi Scott Brown (Izenour) Signs of Life Exhibition at the Smithsonian. Six years later his first "postmodern building" was inaugurated. He and his AT&T building model even made it to the cover of TIME magazine in 1979, before the building was even finished! (He was so eager 😊). Robert Venturi and Denise, the parents of the movement, never got a TIME cover 😊.
It was Jim Venturi who told me, it is normally the popularizers who rip mainstream attention and the media success.
MoMA published Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and has several working models of the Vanna Venturi House.
Learning from Las Vegas started to create problems with prospective work and then Learning from Levittown they didn´t dare to publish it. Specially John Rauch feared the bad publicity such ideas (he wasn´t particularly fond of) could generate among clients. Las Vegas hurt them a little already...
I am sharing this youtube video from 1976 where you can see Bob and Denise coming to lecture at the AA (London) and where Charles Jencks is the moderator! He doesn´t seem to understand them much already and he is hard with them 😊 The following year he would publish his book based on the misunderstanding of their ideas.
Even a young Rem Koolhaas in the audience is quite belligerent with them 😊 But Rem did really understand them later on. Rem Koolhaas learnt a lot from Bob & Denise, from his books, which are modeled on Bob & Denise´s Learning from las Vegas model, to many of his projects. He even admits it. This Rally at the AA is a priceless document:
The trouble is he gave a name to that great built new work (which spans from the early 60s to the late 70s; curiously the exact period Owen´s book bypasses): POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE and so the public never questioned the validity of that book, which it is REALLY terrible.
Of course people thought his book was about Postmodernism, and it wasn´t really, cause he misuderstood it !! (reason why Bob started saying he was NOT and NEVER had been a postmodern!). So Jencks gave the name to something he didn´t fully grasped. And this is how postmodernism started to divert into this Duck flashy architecture (when VSB were advocating for the exact opposite! Even though you can have some ducks here and there, they are really praising Shed architecture (like the renaissance palazzos), which is flexible hence sustainable and cost effective, and reintroduce decoration (like color and supergraphics) as a communication device, infusing vitality to the building, instead of making expensive structural contortionisms, which Charles Jencks said it´s what postmodern architecture should do.
Since he was opposing Venturi Scott Brown, he got a lot of attention from Philip Johnson and his corporate version of postmodernism. The one Owen Hopkins´ book is promoting still... I think Owen sees himself as the next Charles Jencks (poor lost soul).
Below I added the 2 quotes by Charles Jencks in Owen Hopkins´ book. See in the one just below, which got viral at the time, how Jencks wants to stablish when Modern architecture died. For him it was in the 70s, which is totally innacurate, but serves the agenda for the second wave corporate postmodernism, the popularizers.
This is why it got copied in this book, even when there is a 2012 documentary explaining why this is not true. It is funny how they mock Jencks in it. I guess Owen has not seen it either! I highly recommend it. This Pruitt Igoe myth, instead, killed State funded social housing in the United States. THANKS CHARLES JENCKS !!!! Corporate America still is thanking you for it.
Since Jencks and Owen are British, let´s read the definition of Modernism on the Britannica Encyclopedia:
It´s funny Charles Jencks or Owen Hopkins ignore this fact. This is why Modernism starts to be put under scrutiny and contested. Look what all those modern dreams of the machine brought humanity. The War on an industrial scale. Great !!
I am very disturbed by Owen Hopkins being an architecture historian and consistently say that postmodernism started in the mid 70s. It´s wrong. This is Jenck´s and Philip Johnson´s version.
I read it this morning again in one of Owen´s articles on his website, and he says it again in his introductory essay in the book: "So while 1970s and 1980s postmodernism...." If even wikipedia knows it was born in the early 1960s; why Owen doesn´t??
What is clear is the 60s decade who birthed Postmodernism is of no interest to him (or to whoever hired him to put together this corporate propaganda). The book skips the 60s, has very few 70s buildings and is focused on the 80s and 90s up to the 2000s (when it was totally derivative and in many cases shear ugliness, like half the architecture in this book).
Why on earth would anybody come to such lengths to try to explain to new generations what something was, and to do so chooses the less relevant and uglier examples (while obscuring the sources to the ones he decides to portray)?? Seriously. Modernism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Neoclassic architecture is plagued with ugly examples of bad architecture too, but you wouldn´t choose them for a book! Maybe it´s just that Owen has very bad taste 😊
Jokes aside. Unfortunately for Owen, the architecture historian, he is catering to the wrong side of history, (but he got himself a nice job!). This book he made, is maybe a book on ugly corporate architecture of the 80s and 90s, with some tiny sparkles here and there of what had been before. A book on POMO? Maybe.
But real meaningful postmodern architecture is way more sophisticated, elegant and intelligent than all of this corporate derivative stuff he is showing us together and it is specially disturbing HOW he is showing it.
They really took Venturi´s boutade on how he loves the "ugly and ordinary" a little too literal. Like all the rest of his ideas. THIS was alwasy their problem. No finesse.
But after this long introduction, let´s dive together into the book now, shall we:
First of all, Postmodernism is a response to the Information age indeed -- as Modern architecture was a response to the Industrial age. I like it when Jencks mentions Marshall McLuhan in the introduction to the VSB lecture of the Rally (see link above). As Bob says, it is about COMMUNICATION. Hence the use of supergraphics in his buildings (there is not one single example in Owen´s book). By analyzing architectures of the past in C&C, Bob is analyzing the communicative power of architecture throughout history, I guess to see how he can apply it to today´s information era. Bob says, that even if Modernism claims not to be symbolic, it actually is as well. It speaks the language of machine aesthetics. Something that after WWII was not so romantic anymore...
The house Bob designed for his mother is an exercise for him on the theories he is developing while writing Complexity and Contradiction. I love this image below I found while checking out Irene Cheng and Taylor Metcalf, and their ideas on Learning from Levittown. The pairing is Irene´s, I think. As they say the Vanna Venturi house talks the language of the archetypal suburban home. But with a twist!
It is not about copying history, obviously. It is about LEARNING FROM it...
The other quote Jencks has in the book is even worse... "Postmodern Classicism" WTF. It is hard to understand less about it!
So, we can boil it down to the next image. Jim Venturi in his documentary about his parents had a running theme that sums it up perfectly: THE CYLCE OF INNOVATION.
You get the innovators first, with their new, hot and dangerous ideas, who go through a lot of hardships to have these ideas materialized (his own mother preferred the traditional homes on the neighborhood than the home he built for her. But she knew he was creating something new and special. The house was really for him to make his statement, more than for her. Vanna made Robert Venturi! But she missed having a porch 😊)
After the new ideas are out in the open, smart people with an eye for business (generally) take these ideas and develop them with a more commercial mindset: THE POPULARIZERS. This is Philip Johnson or Steve Jobs! As Jim asked me: Do you know Steve Wozniak? I didn´t !
And after comes the COMMODIFIERS, that might be Walmart. By then, the initial ideas are dumbed down or perverted so much, that a new cycle of innovation and creativity starts again.
Another key figure to understand early Postmodernism is architect Charles Moore. Also a writer, he was developping very similar ideas to Venturi by the same time.
This is too elegant and subdued to be in Owen´s book. But this is what postmodernism is!
This book is considered the second most important architecture book of the XXth century, after Le Corbusier´s Vers une Architecture. I think this one is much better.
And now let´s see a little what projects got inside the book and which ones did not! I am telling you I spent my Christmas week making these cards! The resolution is so low cause I did not have a blog then 😊 and I made them for the phone size! (a mistake)
So, the book starts in page 14-15 showing in a double spread a 1992 Disney project by Arata Isozaki. Then we have several 90s and 2000s quite ugly POMO style buildings to arrive to page 20 with Stern´s Disney project from 1989. A project which is copying Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown´s Extension of the Allen Museum in Oberlin from the prior decade. A very important project for this period, which is missing in this book.
In the following page you have a Philip Johnson project. The Bank of America in Houston! Disney, Bank of America and corporate postmodernism is setting the tone of the book as we start it. And of course, the first architect from that period who is showcased is Robert Stern, followed by Philip Johnson. They make sure not to make the book chronological so the popularizers doing this book can put themselves first.
The Vanna Venturi house (which they couldn´t avoid) is in page 113 !!! 😊 And the best is they put Charles Jencks´ home (1985) right after it !!! I am telling you, all this is so in your face it´s embarrassing...
When I was working with Jim Venturi on his documentary on his parents, I saw a lot of incredible footage. One of the funniest was an interview with Charles Jencks´ inside his home. That home was hillarious... With big metal swans and crystal everywhere! Some nice moments too of course, but the overall was making you dizzy with POMO stravanganzza.
In contrast I think Bob and Denise´s art nouveau home in Philly, with its phenomenal furniture, hand painted and stenciled walls and funny objects collection, is the most gorgeous and sophisticated house I have ever been into. And so homey! It is like entering into a museum where you also live.
Poor Jencks had such bad taste... He is a much better landscape designer. His real profession. He understood nothing to early Postmodernism and just went to launch himself as the theorist of it. God help us all.
No wonder this book is also so ugly. Poor Owen is following the footsteps of the wrong people.
And the book starts with Arata Isozaki "Team Disney Building in Orlando (1990)," then Stern´s Disney project comes few pages after (1989), then Michael Graves building for Disney (1989) but none of the 4 projects of Venturi Scott Brown (VSB) for Disney can be found in this book! One even got a prize for environmental graphic design! They still look so contemporary today.
Bob used a classical inspiration for the addition to the Allen Museum (Oberlin) because he had to integrate all the bodies together, the old building and the new addition.
And even though his addition is modern, it is rich and complex enough to talk both languages, creating a unified whole. If you look at it, for Disney, Venturi does not use classical references.
Robert Stern did not understand Venturi. It is hard. So he uses classical styles as if this is what Bob is saying. Far from what it is. Stern does not have the capacity of to abstract concepts and ideas from the past for the present, what Bob and Denise call LEARNING FROM or what Giorgio Agamben calls "Being Contemporary." It needs some sophistication and a vast culture indeed. Stern just copies. So he uses this historical language of Oberlin, scales it up, thus creating this sort of pastiche architecture, which is all but contemporary.
And they hide VSB projects for Disney cause they look so contemporary next to Stern. Everybody is doing those supergraphics today. Oh! And note how Isozaki is not doing historical pastiches for Disney either.
Funny they have Camille Walala (who is not even an architect) with a mural painting for a facade in a New York building from 2018, but they omit ALL VSB SUPERGRAPHICS. Even this VSB Wells Building for Disney, two decades earlier, who even won a prize for precisely THIS type of GRAPHIC DESIGN WORK FOR ARCHITECTURE (2000 Merit Award for Environmental Graphic Design). But VSB built the building and "painted" ALL the surfaces (walls and floor). Well, they are not here but Camille is !!
ON A SIDE NOTE:
[Funny Camille had this commission in 2018 in New York and in 2019 she gets to be in this book of architecture (she is not an architect) edited in England !! What´s the connection do you think? With this last fact you maybe guess it:
When Peter Halley had his show in London in 2022, he went to visit Camille Walala in fact -- I used to follow her on instagram -- and Camille wrote in her post "what a great studio visit she had with Peter and his new partner!" __ I believe Peter has no new partner, but Camille was asked to write this on her instagram for me to see (how you get commissions and book appearances!) And she even made it to Robert Stern´s book !!
I believe Camille is a friend of Peter Halley, so they gave her a commission in New York to woo her!! 😊 Simulacra Art World has done this same thing with ALL my friends. Now, nobody talks to me anymore cause they are getting so much attention and new work. As I keep saying, I have created a second economy around me 😊 ]
But let´s go back to the origins again, cause early Postmodernism was an architecture with social concerns (just like the early modern movement was), not thought for Disney and Bank of America originally. In their desire to recall the original ideas that had motivated the early modern movement, the social contract was at its core. Bob Venturi and John Rauch met while building the Guild House, a state sponsored house for low-income senior citizens. It´s their first collaboration.
It was designed by Venturi and Rauch in collaboration with Cope and Lippincott. In fact Rauch was working for Lippincott at the time, and left them to create his own office with Bob after falling in love working together.
"It was commissioned by a local Quaker organization, Friends Rehabilitation Program, Inc. and completed in 1963 [Vanna Venturi was a Quaker]. Employing a combination of nondescript commercial architecture and ironic historical references, Guild House represented a conscious rejection of Modernists ideals and was widely cited in the subsequent development of the Postmodern movement." (wikipedia)
Charles Moore (who I know less) also had several projects for low-income communities. In tune with the Guild House, the Church st. Housing project uses color and graphic elements, to enliven the life of the projects while being inexpensive. How to improve people´s lives is at the center of early postmodernism´s concerns.
In the whole book there is not one single social housing project (the Pruitt Igoe myth comes back here again). Not even these two, which are SEMINAL to understand Postmodernism. "Along with the Vanna Venturi House [Guild House] is considered to be one of the earliest expressions of Postmodern Architecture." (Wikipedia)
But if the quote from Jencks says that Postmodernism started when Public Housing Policies in America got their coup de grace, with the 1st televised demolition (Pruitt-Igoe), you can understand they don´t have room for it in here either.
So none of these are in the book !! Or the ones below either... Too cool for Owen´s book 😊
When you look at these projects, which are not neoclassical tacky pastiche, you can understand why they would leave them out !! Funny cause they do have one James Wines´ project for BEST PRODUCTS (he did several), but not Venturi´s... BASCO was also for BEST i think, and there are a couple of projects they did for them which are also missing here!
BEST PRODUCTS was a corporation with this vision for architecture where they would hire the most rebellious architects and let them do whatever they wanted !!! A real vision and sophistication from their part. So rare...
MoMA has panels from this facade in its collection. But it doesn´t work with the neoclassical tacky narrative of this book once again. As you can see all these projects are so fresh, fun and radical. What early postmodernism is !! And they are not tacky.
Sorry folks but early postmodernism is elegant, sophisticated, fun, modern and naughty. You really got it all wrong with the neoclassical right-wing pastiche there !!
This is Bob´s real first project. A café. See how COMMUNICATION is at the core of his project from the beginning. Color as well (if the typical suburban house is white, he painted his green). How to make an interesting space with little money and with creative ideas, communicating in the language of TODAY. He never said nothing about Neoclassicism 😊 He just cares about CONTEXT (his thesis at Princeton in the 50s when NOBODY was looking at context), so if he has to build in a historical context, like Oberlin or Wu-Hall at Princeton, sure he will try to learn from it !! He was not advocating for classical revivals. SO MISSUNDERSTOOD.
And now let´s look at the quote Robert Stern has in the book (of course he has one! ). It´s about context !! I wonder where did he got that from? 😊 I wonder too what´s the context for his Disney-Camelot casting building? Maybe it´s for casting the next King Arthur movie 😊
OK! We can all agree Postmodernism is about the Information age. Then why the Scientific Information building in Philadelphia is not in the book either !! Its low budget facade is so gorgeous, creative and fun. See the Decorated Shed at work? So electronic and pixelated! before pixels were known to the common mortal.
Good architecture never gets old. This building looks so fun still. But it doesn´t fit with Owen´s survey of tacky corporate architecture.
I really think it´s a book for Postmodernism popularizers. So they include the buildings that cater to their work -- while hiding the early postmodern gems that make their work look derivative and second hat next to them, instead of explaining to new generations what postmodernism really was and is.
I found the whole thing so mediocre and manipulative that I am making this very long post.
Cause not including Ricardo Bofill´s Muralla Roja in a book of postmodern architecture (one of my favorite buildings in the world) is like a joke. What are you people so afraid of??? Good architecture ?? To then include Bofill´s uglier and more banal buildings instead -- which have nothing memorable if you compare it with this one -- is almost like you want to hurt him. 😊
See !! They do have Bofill´s later and not so great buildings. I believe if you make a book you need to put the best material, not the worst. I might be confused 😊
So we are leaving most of all the great sophisticated stuff out. THIS is what this book is about. Mediocrity in Architecture.
Page 82-83 is priceless! You have Another Disney building by Stern (he left all Venturi´s out!) next to Charles Moore´s Beverly Hills Center (1990) and Ettore Sottsass Kelly´s house! Not bad who he puts himself next to !! I am telling you, Robert Stern is so behind this book, leaving out everything that explains where his sources come from but then putting himself next to the best innovators. What a technique !! A pity you then can see his work.
This book is really embarrassing.
THERE IS MORE !!! 😊 He did it again. With the great Hans Hollein this time. So Robert Stern COPIES Hans Hollein´s famous and iconic palm trees for a swimming pool (he is a practical guy! Why would you want them in a travel agency?? Makes no sense! 😊 You want them next to the pool or the beach, where palm trees belong! 😊 (and they are so Hollein iconic that I think it is lame to just copy them and hide the orginal project. Remember this book is for newcomers!).
Hans Hollein should be happy his Abteiberg Museum made it to the last page of the book! Next to Bob´s last building "The Episcopal Academy" (2008).
BUT HERE IS THE BEST (and most revealing) OMISSION OF THE WHOLE BOOK 😊
British Art Historian Owen Hopkins forgot to put in his book England´s Postmodern crown jewel !! Venturi Scott Brown´s extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square (London). Do you think he missed it ? 😊
Only with this, you know who is making this book, published 2 years after Bob Venturi died, not to insult him while he is still alive! Stern ran to put this book together as soon as Bob left us.
Not a coincidence that Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture´s 50th anniversary and book presentation at MoMA (a two-volume beautiful, revised edition by Martino Stirli) coincided with Robert Stern´s 80th birthday party and no one went to Bob ´s book birthday. Martino had no idea it was Stern´s birthday. He was floored. Someone with very bad and small intentions had both coincide. We can all guess who...
THIS IS HOW SMALL AND HOW JEALOUS HE IS OF BOB VENTURI HISTORICALLY. To lenghts I am myself now discovering...
See, the Decorated Shed museum! This award was given to the Sainsbury Wing while Owen Hopkins was in the midst of editing his book! And yet decides not to add this super important building. What bothers me most is he is an architecture historian.
To his defense I´ll say that Owen´s introductory essay is all in praise of Robert Venturi, and he talks about him with respect and warmth and understands his contribution, unlike the pages of his book demonstrate. The essay starts with a quote from Complexity & Contradiction:
"The doctrine ´less is more´ bemoans complexity and justifies exclusion for expressiveness purposes. But architecture can exclude important considerations only at the risk of separating architecture from the experience of life and the needs of society. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore." So wrote the great American architect and theorist Robert Venturi in C&C (1966) one of the most important architectural thesis of the XXth century. Even those who reject his ideas cannot help but be affected by them."
"But dear Owen, Blatant simplification is what your book is all about !!!! It´s worse than simplification. But when I read Owen´s essay I really think it is not his fault so much. You cannot write about Venturi in such a loving manner and then put together this book. Something happened in the middle.
My intuition is that this book is put together in part by the people in New York who got Camille Walala her 2018 mural project. Cause there are so many young and real architects working on these ideas today (more below) you could have included them here. But she is the only one you have. [2018 Comission, 2020 Book, 2022 Instagram post with the fake Halley partner] 😊
I know who is sponsoring this book as well !!! If you know me, I think you do too.
With the following image you´ll understand it all, I think. What I find gross is to pretend to take the place of the person you try to copy everything from, (but don´t even succeed in doing it well), and have constantly people hiding their buildings from monographs of postmodern architecture like this one, so your derivative work gets a pass among a collage of randomness out of order.
I heard this funny story: There was this running joke in the old office of Venturi Rauch and Scott Brown. Whenever Robert Stern called to say he was coming to say hi, Venturi yelled to everybody "Hide everything !! Robert Stern is coming to the office !!
He understood Venturi alt-right !! 😊
MORE OMISSIONS OF GREAT POSTMODERNISM SOURCES
See how early postmodern IS NOT neoclassical or revivalist ?? Le Corbusier was an expert on classic architecture (he said you could not do architecture without it) and he used its harmonies and geometric proportions for his project of Modern architecture. Le Corbusier learnt from Greece and Rome too. But he did not start to make little temples! He wanted to transpose the greatness of classical proportions to the new industrial era. He removed ornament, but that´s about it. The Modern movement is very classical.
Another omission by another pioneer. Dan Graham explained to me how Atelier Bow-Wow loves Charles Moore´s architecture. Bow-Wow were Dan´s favorite architects today. If Bow-Wow with all their sophistication think of this project as fundamental, why it is not in the book either? Looks like it is a book of the wrong things 😊
Even great projects that are there, look ugly in this tacky cacophony of corporate stravaganza. Like when you go to an art fair and everything looks ugly. The curatorial of this book with its tendentious parings is as disorganized and unstructured as a commercial fair.
Atelier Bow-Wow is a much better example of the Postmodern new generations... And many others I discovered. I´ll explain all this, a little further down.
To finish with my slides, I wanted to add this slide of John Rauch. He was Venturi´s first office partner and a great architect. You can feel him so much in all the early stuff when you look at these two houses he built on his own. He died a bit before I was doing these slides and so I wanted to add him here. Quite funky his 1962 house for his siter!
I could continue, but you get the idea...
The book consists of photos of buildings without any coherent order and random quotes throughout them to serve the neoliberal corporate theme running throughout the book. They got Margaret Thatcher in there even ! (not your early postmodern gal precisely. I have a feeling Margaret Thatcher was not a social housing fan either 😊).
All to configure this very conductive and innacurate vision of what postmodern architecture was and is.
So let´s just look to a few quotes here. Look how perverse and almost disrespectful they are being with Bob Venturi!
This quote he said it precisely to separate himself from the corporate pastiche architecture Philip Johnson started to promote with his new AT&T building, where he literally sat the Vanna Venturi house on top of a tower. And specially to distant himself from Charles Jenck´s new definition of HIS work and misuse of his ideas. It is probably Jencks and his book who have confused and done more damage to the whole postmodern venture.
But Jencks (as Owen) was just an instrument. (real time neighbor´s toilet flushing for TRUTH).
Popularizers will always need innovators to get ideas. The worse popularizers are the ones, like in here, who don´t give credit, and worse, who desperately want that credit for themselves, to the point of obscuring history itself. Poor postmodernism popularizers, they just can´t avoid Venturi.
I understand Bob so much now.
"Robert Venturi [...] began to make a name for himself while teaching at Yale in the early 1960s, earning the admiration of art historian Vincent Scully [who wrote the introduction of C&C]. And later the Yale studio he taught with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown led to their important book Learning from Las Vegas." (Yale Alumni magazine).
So Robert Stern (who went to Yale for his graduate program) was a student when the young and talented Venturi was teaching at Yale. Robert Venturi was considered a genius from very early on, already in his Princeton days as a student himself. Stern says in his Wikipedia that his two influences were Philip Johnson and Vincent Scully. A pity Scully was all in aw with Venturi and not so much with him. What Scully did for Venturi, Philip Johnson did for Robert Stern. Johnson was his real mentor, the reason why this book has almost more projects by Johnson than by Venturi. He is really loyal to Johnson. I admire that. But there is something very painful in this overbearing jealousy and abrasive competitiveness he still has at 80 years old!
I think Stern, despite all the ugly buildings he has managed to build, carries such a sting since then. Cause look the book they put together just as Venturi dies !!! I find the whole thing very mediocre.
OK, so I will stop here with this book. I think you understand it now. SIMULACRA ART WORLD wants to rewrite history. It is a nasty tendency in the beginning of this XXIst fascist century!
Fake News book for you.
I WOULD LOVE NOW TO TALK VERY BRIEFLY ABOUT ANOTHER BOOK (from 2023) WHO HAS UNDERSTOOD POSTMODERNISM MUCH BETTER.
It´s a book on HANS HOLLEIN (another early postmodern architect from Viena) and on young architects today practicing a sort of well understood postmodernism (at last!), and who comment on it. I am having a blast reading this one! And it is a perfect nemessis for Owen´s book.
Denise Scott Brown always said that maybe the people who were really going to understand them were not born yet. We were babies back then. There is a trend in today´s architecture of people my generation who operate in the early postmodern language. WE ARE LEARNING FROM IT, not copying it. Not one architect made it to Owen´s book, but here on the Hans Hollein one they are the protagonists!!
You call it LEARNING FROM HANS HOLLEIN 😊
Bovenbouw Architectuur is one of the offices I really liked in the book. They are real descendants from the ideas and the architecture of Venturi Scott Brown (as you can see in this school) and truly UNDERSTAND them so well. Their comments on postmodernism are so correct, one wonders how Owen Hopkins can be so confused!
So I want to quote Dirk Somers from the Hollein book:
"Architects thought they had to mix up architectural languages to be "Venturian," which is also a false interpretation because it misses Venturi´s social and ideological agenda, which was a very pop-inspired embrace of the everyday."
"The building embodies what is for me one of the most fascinating aspects of postmodern architecture, namely, the idea of interiorizing the complexity of the world-- of bringing the city into the building with very characteristic spaces. You find it in this building, as well as in Abteiberg. Also Charles Moore did a school based around a street which feels related." (Dirk Somers)
Another studio I liked a lot in the book, and who has really understood early postmodern ethos and its sophistication, is the interior designers from https://doorzon.be/
"We try to teach students to preserve this tension between the idea and the actual object or architecture they make. In this sense, Hans Hollein would have been a great student." (Stefanie Everaert)
A third studio I´ll showcase is Conen Sigl Architekt:innen https://www.conensigl.com/
They say about Hollein:
Raoul Sigl: I think a lot comes down to the fact that he does not conform to convention and defies classification.
Maria Conen: He doesn´t stick to rules, everything is possible, to the point of testing the limits of "good taste". In the case of the column on the Siemens hall, however, it seems that he manages to pull everything together in a balanced way. The work reflects a creative will that is quite fascinating.
Raoul Sigl: What lends the work authority is its combination of elements: on its own, the door would perhaps appear historicizing, but together with the column and the floor it creates a fresh new language -- one that still looks fresh today, in my view. The craftsmanship and the choice of means of construction also contribute to this.
You can see their references a bit more... If the house above echoes Hans Hollein, the bar furniture below is a total Ettore Sottsass ! Yet, it is not totally derivative, and I feel they know how not to copy but interpret.
What was my surprise when reading Owen Hopkins´ web site, where he calls himself a CULTURAL LEADER, to see he actually knows about these young offices who are getting their inspiration on early postmodern ideas !! All those ideas he is trying to hide from his book on Postmodernism. I feel Owen is very confused. So of course, he cannot call these young people postmodernists 😊 He has even given them a name !! Wait for it...
He calls these young Venturi, Hollein and Sottsass devotees: MULTIFORM !!! Jajajaja !!! I think he sees himself as the next Charles Jencks, confusing everybody as to what things really are.
I add below a the passage of one of his articles defining this new movement he has discovered! which is kind of obnoxious and totally empty. Like the name he has found for it! (toilet flushing !! TRUTH AGAIN 😊). Poor thing. Maybe these young pratictioners will explain to him what exactly early postmdernism is.
At least Jencks was really on point (of course he did not invented the term Postmdernism. It existed already in literature. He just transposed it, rightly so).
This MULTIFORM nonesense, is all not to call these mega cool real children of early postmodernism, what they are: THE CHILDREN OF EARLY POSTMODERNISM (few decades after). A generation that has finally understood it, without the need to paint the city in red.
Postmodernism is subtle and hard to understand. It took all this time !!!
I don´t think Adam Nathaniel Furman or Camille Walala saturated colorfull environments can be put together with these architects in the Hollein book. Furman and Camille are the two that made it to Owen´s book! But not the Hollein. Architecture is not only decoration either... Like these dubbed ´New London Fabulous´ specialise in.
What is sure is Owen and Nathaniel know how to market themselves. I just saw Furman also made a 2019 book on Postmodernism !! together with Terry Farrell. Terry Farrell despite his age (born 1938), arrived to postmodern architecture with the popularizers. He was partner since 1965 with Nicholas Grimshaw, and only in 1980, after they broke up, heopen his office and began to do the postmodern work he is known for.
So I am afraid this book is more POMO architecture. I will review it next year 😊 Probably this one inspired Owen´s "Less is a bore" (they are friends after all). But I feel, Owen´s was specially dedicated to me...
I might be wrong!
What it is true, is the young architects inspired from early postmodernism in the Hollein book are real hot indeed !! And where Architecture might really be heading to. So Owen and Adam want to, not only associate themselves with them, but also define them !!! While making a horrible book shitting on the early postmodern ideas these young and hot architects love, and THEY have understood.
Sorry but you cannot be in all the camps at the same time. You have to choose... And that BOOK AS A BORE gives you away. As the technology articles Owen has started writing too !! I see his agenda through a crystal glass. Be careful of wanting to rise to power very fast... You might fall as fast. There is nothing like INTEGRITY for a long, solid and meaninful career.
Ask Venturi.
I will finish this VERY LONG blog post with a quote by Dirk Sumers again of Bovenbouw Architectuur, who understands beautifully what postmodern architecture really is and was and so who can make work as kowledgeable and playful as the early postmoderns did.
"I would say this complexity is what makes postmodernism so amazing, but at the same time it´s also why it has such a bad reputation. It´s so hard to do, only the best of the best designers can make it work. That explains why there are so many bad postmodern buildings." (Dirk Somers)
And you can find a great selection of those bad postmodern buildings in Owen Hopkins´ book. He chose a great title for it after all 😊 Cause LESS IS A BORE.
With love, for Bob and Denise (and Jimmie).
Without understanding the past, you cannot build a meaningful future.
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