Movements
Postmodernism
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An architectural and artistic movement that emerged from the late 1960s through the 1980s as a reaction against the austere functionalism of high modernism, reintroducing historical ornament, color, symbolism and playful reference to earlier architectural styles that modernist orthodoxy had rejected. In architecture, Philip Johnson and John Burgee's 1984 AT&T Building in New York, with its Chippendale-style broken pediment atop an otherwise plain granite tower, became one of the movement's most widely reproduced images, alongside work by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Michael Graves. Critics remain divided between reading postmodern buildings as a witty, historically literate correction to modernism's abstraction and dismissing them as superficial historicist costume over conventional structures.
Facts
Start YearDated from Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), the movement's most commonly cited opening statement; the movement has no single founding event and this date is conventional, not exact. Founded In PlaceUnited States; formally introduced by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, through Venturi's 1966 manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in New York, and their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, though the source also notes parallel developments in Italy around the same period. 1 Key PrincipleHistorical reference, ornament and symbolic meaning reintroduced against modernist austerity. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Expressed In
Movement Members
The AT&T Building (1984) is a founding landmark of the movement.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationPostmodern architecture, lead section and Origins sectionQuote, Postmodern architecture, lead section and Origins section
The movement was formally introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, building upon Venturi's 'gentle manifesto' Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966.
1. Wikipedia
1. Wikipedia
Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage LearningExpressed In: Architecture, chapters on postmodern architecture
John Henry Burgee (Britannica)
Movement Members: John Burgee
Open Questions (1 open question)
Has postmodern architecture reached a settled end date, or does it remain an open-ended, still-practiced idiom with no agreed close?
Architectural historians commonly date postmodernism's death to the mid-1990s, framing later work as revival or aftermath. Postmodernism's own Wikipedia treatment gives no such closing date: it records only that the movement "divided into a multitude of new tendencies" in the late 1990s and explicitly notes that some buildings built after that period are still considered postmodern, describing a diversification and continuation rather than a documented end.
What would resolve this A source naming a specific year or event as postmodern architecture's own agreed close, rather than competing claims of a mid-1990s death alongside an admitted continuation into later buildings, would resolve this.
Architectural HistoryWikipedia
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