My postmodernists (2012

Postmodernism emerged in the Bay Region in the late 1970s as a reaction to stuck corporate modernism and Sea Ranch knockoffs, but my personal encounters with postmodernists began a decade earlier.

I. Norman Spatz

"When postmodernism was defined in the other arts, sciences, and cultural forms, it was understood as “subversion from within” the establishment, using the reigning voice to send a different message."—Charles Jencks

My first postmodernist was a Washington University classmate. We were in the third-year studio, in a school of architecture devoted to Corbu. The assignment was to replace the traditional house of one of the professors. “Pretend it was burned down,” we were told. The house was in one of the gated neighborhoods that adjoined the campus. Spatz opted to replace it with a house in the same idiom, complete with a pair of lions guarding the doorway. Spatz's scheme was a riff on tradition, not a replica.

Talk about subversion! The professors rounded on the project like a pair of imams dealing with an apostate. This was in 1969, so my classmate was in the avant-garde.

I tracked Spatz down in Montreal a few months ago, hoping to obtain an image of his project. He had abandoned a career in preservation to become a teacher of English as a second language. After another classmate photographed his model, he told me, he destroyed it, only to learn that there was no film in the camera.

II. Minoru Takeyama

"Postmodernism in architecture is usually thought to have rejected earlier metaphysical efforts in favor of the playful, more or less arbitrary exchange of signifying elements. But this exchange spoke a jargon of its own."—Reinhold Martin

My second postmodernist made the cover of the first and second editions of Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture(1977) with two versions of the same night-club building in Tokyo. I was in graduate school when Takeyama arrived

at Wurster Hall at U.C. Berkeley on a Fulbright fellowship. Helping him transliterate a few of his essays from “Takeyamese,” I learned of his interest in semiotics, referencing Saussure and Barthes. Based on this, Takeyama argued that each place generates an architectural language that reflects its underlying culture. His work was influenced by Metabolism, and by Bauhaus and Scandinavian modernism. (He studied at Harvard and then worked in Denmark for six years). Having Rossi, Sottsass, Venturi, and even Hundertwasser as contemporaries may also have figured.

“The methods of architecture are more opportunistic and subversive than strictly logical,” he noted. Part of what makes postmodernism subversive is its critique of modernism’s bias toward the universal. This is the core of his understanding and use of semiotics, and what makes him an early and enduring postmodernist. As he argued,

Architecture may appear to have achieved a global syntax. The truth is that this syntax is filtered through a multitude of cultural screens that differ with each individual community. Unless one is attuned to this, it is easy to misread the signs. Many architects are like tourists, projecting their own values and biases on particular cultures. Architecture should rather emerge from a process of understanding and responding to the particularity that we experience, allowing its meaning to enrich our world rather than imposing our world up on it. Otherwise, I fear the universal world will come again.

III. Thomas Gordon Smith

"I was uncomfortable with the notion of this street, “Strada Novissima,” and the title, “The Presence of the Past.” It may be one of those cases where I thought I didn’t belong, but in the end belonged much more than I thought." —Rem Koolhaas

My third postmodernist participated in the 1980 Venice Biennale to which Koolhaas alludes, but I first met him in the early 1970s as the classmate of a friend in Joseph Esherick’s graduate architecture studio at U.C. Berkeley. I believe that his thesis project was modernist, but I can't swear to it. But Thomas Gordon Smith really made my map later with his Richmond Hill House, a self-built project in the East Bay to house his growing family.

Although “a key figure in the development of postmodernism,” the critic Richard John wrote, Smith “rejected the ironical approach of

Robert Venturi and the decontextualization of Charles Moore to develop an architecture which draws freely on the 25 centuries of the classical tradition.” Bernard Maybeck was an influence, he adds, an architect “who fused a wide-ranging knowledge of architectural history and a fascination with modern materials and techniques. Smith has come to pursue a similar synthesis in his own work.”

Smith’s Richmond Hill House pulls off what amounts to the greatest challenge for a young architect without a private income, which is to infuse a body of thought into a small and dirt-cheap package without having it sink under its own weight. It has always appealed to me as a creative fusion of his growing interest in classicism with the inevitable influences of his education and upbringing—his actual time and place.

IV. My postmodernism

"The historian John Summerson said Post-Modernism’s original claim was to insist that “Modernism could die” when he, like most people, thought it was immortal, and therefore inevitable. " —Charles Jencks

The real necessity of postmodernism in the late 1970s, here and elsewhere, was modernism’s sclerosis. The motto of that moment was Paul Feyerabend’s “Anything goes,” bidding farewell to the claims of the scientific method, the existence of which he denied. Postmodernism freed modernism from its status as the “official corporate style,” letting it evolve. In a 2011 essay, Jencks notes Anthony Blunt's assertion that “there are no perfectly and completely Baroque and Rococo buildings because the category is always more capacious and contradictory than any single structure.” What postmodernism revived is similar, Jencks believed, "a new take on an old cliché: sometimes history repeats itself better if the architects don’t know it.”

Jencks's essay, "What is Radical Post-Modernism," appeared in Radical Postmodernism, Architectural Design o5/2011 / Wiley, 2011.

Written for the blog journal TraceSFin 20