Tuesday, January 11, 2011

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.

17 comments:

Murphy said...

That's very interesting that you'd have the Sugden House there, as I (perhaps naively) always considered it brutalism.

The first time I went to the New Vic, I was struck by what I saw as an affinity with this early Smithsons stuff... in which case, do I praise the New Vic as a pomo building or as a vintage brutalist one?

Anyway; your phantom project sounds tantalising.

EAMONN CANNIFFE said...

If these are the strawberry creams in your po-mo chocolate box what must the equivalent of the chocolate covered caramels be? To continue the mixed metaphor, the heyday of po-mo surely coincides with that of the double A side? And that's before we gat onto the 'Jellybean" 12-inch dance mix!

Pär Eliaeson said...

I these didn't make the final cut (especially Sugden) the real list should be great. The book (when?) is on my list, for sure.

Steve Parnell said...

Sugden House? You're having a larf, Mr. Netherlands. Your description applies to New Bru, not pop, sir! Pop is surely the precursor to PoMo, and the New Bru is linked with it too, but I don't think this is the missing evolutionary link.
What about the Smithsons' 1956 House of the Future as a piece of Indie Group pop?

Murphy said...

Ah, so I have an ally in Mr Parnell! Feeling less sheepish about my earlier comment...

AM said...

Looking forward to read your book and your very own Po-Mo top of the pops.

Murphy said...

And I'm also shocked at how much the Charles Moore plan resembles a Bartlett student's thesis circa 2003...

Charles Holland said...

Pär, the book is out in the late summer i think.

Eamonn, yes and who is the walnut whip?

Steve/Murphy, well you have to stick your neck out a bit!

Actually, I'm not convinced by your rebuttals. Yes, there's Brutalism in the Sugden but my point is there's a lot of Pop too and that a lineage can be seen from it to the Vanna Venturi house very easily. Look at those giant, oddly conventional windows with their cross-mullions and their subtle mis-alignment. Look at the chequerboard floor and the disembodied fireplace. None of these have anything to do with Brutalism. Neither does the deeply conventional form of the house shape itself.

They are rhetorical devices playing games with symbolism and representation. The only Brutalit aspect in fact is that the materials are rough and ready and unpretentious but other than that it's a million miles from either Hunstanton or Robin Hood Gardens. Finally, check out these drawings: http://tinyurl.com/6jra8o2

The house of the future is sci-fi cheese. It's not pop I reckon. No

Oh, and Kresge College a Bartlett plan? How dare you!

Pär Eliaeson said...

Definitely a lot of Venturi Scott Brown in Sugden. Lovely windows!

p said...

regarding the Sugden House: if it is po-mo would I be entirely out of line to suggest there is no such thing as pomo, merely a continuation of modernism with slightly different aesthetic ideals?

I'll be the first to admit that I haven't read a single one of the founding texts of architectural postmodernism's in their entirety so I might be completely wrong. it's just that to me modernism has never seemed like the dogmatic style/movement it was made out to be and what I have read of Venturi and Rossi do seem like a logical continuation of modernism in a lot of ways.

Murphy said...

Crikey Charles, those drawings!

Anyway, I wasn't trying to 'rebutt' anything, but you've now unpacked it anyway so I'm satisfied.

However - am I still allowed to call the New Vic 'Retro Brutalist'?

owen hatherley said...

Number 1 Poultry apologist Hugh Pearman described, I'm fairly sure, the new Young Vic as a pomo building in the paywalled so uncheckable Times.

This book sounds very exciting - whom is it for? Needless to say I hope the Soviet architects of 30s-50s will be getting full credit for inventing pomo a couple of decades avant la lettre - it's all about 'symbolism and representation', traditional motifs in mutant new forms. Someone like Andrey Burov, who went from working with Corb and Eisenstein to designing neoclassical superblocks with imprinted concrete flower patterns is the missing link. The arguments are similar also, as Catherine Cooke claimed in '80s AD...

Charles Holland said...

P, shhh! Don't let everyone know, at least until it comes out!

Murphy, yes you may!

owen hatherley said...

Aha - Pearman Young-Vic-is-pomo piece here.

Charles Holland said...

I'm not entirely sure I 'get' the Young Vic as pomo. There's collage for sure and a certain DIY, rough and ready charm but not sure exposed brick and neon = pomo.

Take the point about Stalinist architecture although ours isn't exactly a historical survey.....

Rossella Ferorelli said...

Hi, I've just written a blog post on the "Critical Futures" debate you joined yesterday in London. I'd really like to have your contribution. Hope I didn't make too many mistakes (because surely there will be some) since English is a second language for me, then I coud have misheard something. Please feel free to correct if anything's wrong!

Thank you,
Rossella Ferorelli

Anonymous said...

The Institute of Classical Architecture is planning a weekend symposium in New York reassessing Post Modernism. Maany of the top names will speak from this under appreciated era which is literally the new Victorianism. It is also the 30th anniversary of Wolfe's Frow Bauhaus to Our House. Also see the nook Utopia's Gohost by Reinhold Martin on Po Mo...