b-sides

I'm currently involved in writing a book re-appraising architectural Post Modernism. It's top secret, hush-hush. Part of it contains a top ten of Po-Mo moments, which I realise makes it sound like a rather ugly box of chocolates. Anyway, now that the final mix has been agreed I thought I'd share a few of the ones that didn't make the final cut. In no particular order, here they are:

















SITE, Indeterminate Façade. 

Following Duchamp, SITE abandoned architecture’s obsession with the retinal, its fixation on new form, and replaced it with a clear-eyed conceptualism. SITE made use of ‘the ready-made’, starting with generic structures which were then subjected to violent 'actions' – cutting, peeling, stretching, collapsing – in order to render them uncanny and strange again. Refreshingly they had no truck with expressionism and subverted the over-bearing idea of originality in architecture. The tired clichés of Modernism – truth to materials, form following function, honest structures – become meaningless in relation to SITE's work.

Charles Moore, The Plan of Kresge College.

Moore’s Kresge College is a hippy Hadrian’s Villa, a 1970's Southern Californian take on the collage city. A series of pavilion buildings spill down a wooded hillside linked together by paper-thin arcades painted with rainbow coloured super-graphics. Internally, the buildings mimic the external landscape to form an artificial topography of cascading steps and jinking shifts in direction.

The conflation of vestigial classical elements, flattened decoration and dramatic shifts in scale make it a deeply ambiguous and richly contradictory piece of architecture. It is both dissonant and charming, a series of sampled fragments resolved into Venturi's 'difficult whole'. It is De Chirico's ghostly classicism mixed with Alvar Aalto's fragmented forms and Andy Warhol's ironic ordinariness. There is a  constant oscillation between the mundane and the spectacular, an acknowledgement of the distance between architectural ambition and prosaic reality. This balance achieves its greatest moment in the superimposition of scales and layers around the entrance to the laundromat.

Hans Hollein, Austrian Travel Agency, Vienna.

This interior contains a diminutive bronze Lutyensesque dome, a chrome pillar growing out of a ruined Doric column, a field of petrified flags, some shiny metal palm trees and for some reason, a row of reception grilles in the shape of  Rolls Royce radiators. It's a decadent and queasy mix of techno fetitishism, ruin-porn, the picturesque and an up-market travel brochure. Hollein's work took the sumptuousness of Joesph Hoffman, the mechanical surfaces of Otto Wagner and the sardonic wit of Adolf Loos and combined them with a very late sixties/early seventies pop-eroticism. Like Post Modernism in general, Hollein's later tendency towards bombastic commercialism blinds us to the perverse brilliance of his early work.












Alison and Peter Smithson, Sugden House.

One definitely to wind up the purists. The Sugden House rehearses a number of post modern tactics, particularly evident in the work of the Venturis. The use of ugly and ordinary elements, re-scaling, a deliberate 'wrongness' in the placing of windows in relation to structure and various disembodied fragments combined in a three-dimensional collage. The interior is especially rich, a simple plan where the walls have dissolved, leaving fireplaces and other domestic elements hanging in space. The Sugden House is perhaps the only piece of Pop architecture to come out of the Independent Group and contains all sorts of rich possibilities for architecture, none of them explored by the Smithsons themselves.