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Design and Architecture of the 20th Century: Late Modernism
Late Modernism was the ideological dam of modernism bursting, and the metaphorical river diverged into many tributaries of coexistent styles. The technological advances of the 60s, and particularly the 70s led to much speculation about the architecture of the future. It was during this time that the computer became more and more sophisticated. In the span of less than 20 years, the computer went from the size of a refrigerator to the size of a television set.
This post will focus on a few of the many movements of this time, and the philosophies behind them: Metabolism (Japan), High Tech (Europe and some US), and finally US Corporate architecture (as a far extension of the International Style).
Metabolism in Japan
After World War II, the industrial expansion of Japan as a manufacturing superpower was deemed an economic miracle. The country’s development, as well as its population growth occurred at an astonishingly rapid rate. Combined with the small size of the country, issues of space became an urban planning crisis by the turn of the 1960s
The Metabolists sought to use variable building elements ‘plugged in’ to a central system or infrastructure - a concept both rooted in technology and futuristic aesthetics as well as the organic structures such as beehives.
The extreme complexity of these ideas, however, made their execution almost impossible, and their only true fulfillments were in the World’s Fair Expo 70, hosted in Osaka and the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970-72) by Kisha Kurokawa. Despite the short-livedness of the Metabolist movement, its idea of pods and clusters of human beings are very much of the 1970s, and their science-fiction aesthetic is still fascinating even today.
High Tech
The expression of the interior on the exterior took on another form in the High Tech architecture of the 70s. Another short-lived movement, High Tech turned buildings visually inside out with the mechanical innards and other structural components displayed on the exterior (however these were often not the actual mechanical innards but rather an artistic expression of them, just as Mies’ use of I-beams were not entirely structural but rather an expression of the structural.)
The High-Tech movement was spearheaded by the British architect Richard Rogers, whose collaborative work with Italian architect Renzo Piano, the 1971 Pompidou Center in Paris reached levels of structural complexity previously unheard of.
Despite its sci-fi aesthetic, High Tech, like Metabolism, did not last very long as its projects were notoriously expensive. However, Rogers continued to build in the style, culminating in the Lloyd’s of London Building (1978-86) and the 2016 BBVA Bancomers Tower.
Corporate Architecture
The previously mentioned sub-factions of architecture were almost exclusively relegated to the public realm; that is, public housing, university buildings, museums, and other artistic institutions. The corporate architecture of the era was entirely separate from its experimental contemporaries.
Spearheaded by architects like Kevin Roche, Philip Johnson, the previously Brutalist I.M. Pei, and massive firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), the corporate architecture of the 60s and 70s took the aesthetics of the International Style glass tower set in place by Mies to the extremes of expression.
American corporations needed to express their power resulted in an era of ambitious skyscraper building, whose prominent examples included the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York (Above Left, Minoru Yamasaki, 1969, destroyed by 9/11) and the John Hancock Center in Chicago (Above Right, SOM, 1968-70).
Conclusion
By 1975, Postmodernism was already well underway via Robert Venturi (a student of Louis Kahn) in America and James Sterling and Charles Moore in the UK. When the 1980s rolled around, Late Modern architecture became best known as the aesthetic of evil in speculative film. (Shameless plug for my new job, by the way.)
Still, Late Modernism is amongst the most fascinating periods in the history of architecture - until recently, there has never been such rabid experimentation, idealism, or fear of the future, rooted in the belief that the built environment can, in fact, save the world
From Postmodernism to PoMo
Let’s just say developers loved it. Through developers looking for a big ROI, the great, elegant glass box of modernism, was transformed through said developers into cheap, soulless office boxes, forgettable skyscrapers, and loathed public housing. Their shoddy modernist jobs were, by the 80s, becoming rather passé and unpopular. Thank gawd the Sony Building came along, the developers thought
AND SO, the original spirit of Postmodernism, lovable, colorful, nostalgic for most of my readers and myself
This is the crux of the failure of PoMo: Postmodernism was about using architectural ornament within a modern context because we have emotional connections and connotations to architectural ornament. These buildings were about saying through ornament “I AM A HOUSE” or “I AM A BANK” mixed, of course, with a bit of clever architectural humor.
However, this was also the 80s & 90s and the global corporation ruled all, and rather than using the clever language of Postmodernism, PoMo was global corporations saying architecturally: “WORK IS YOUR HOME” or “THE MALL IS YOUR HOME” or “DOLLAR GENERAL IS YOUR HOME.
So what did we learn from this endeavor?
We have no choice but to live in houses that look like our office blocks, because our office blocks took the architectural symbols of our houses. And, in response, our houses took the vomited up architectural symbols from their corporate remixes, because residential architecture almost always imitates the public architecture of the time.
Now, I’m not saying McMansions are a product of Postmodernism, or that they are themselves Postmodern architecture, because neither is true. It’s more of a coincidence than anything else that they borrowed certain tropes from the PoMo office tower and integrated them into features like the two-story entryway with the huge transom window.
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