07-25-2014, 11:41 AM
•Modernist architecture –when the cube was king-didn‘t age well. As time passed, grime streaked flat, concrete walls, like wrinkles carved into a smooth face. Glass-paned skyscrapers lost their shine. Stripped of ornament, abstract forms that once seemed ultramodern appeared just plain blank by the 1970s. In scaling up from the margins to the mainstream, Modernism went awry.
•What shook up the architectural world and broke the stranglehold of slick, geometric forms was a book by Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction (1966). ―Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary.
•During the 1970s and ‘80s, buildings termed Postmodern were decorated not only with color –but with a Classical elements like slightly out-of-whack columns. Architects liberally tacked on miscellaneous borrowings from all periods of history. Sleek was gone―Anything goes was booming.
•By the 1990s, picturesque Po-Mo had been so overdone, plastered on every suburban strip mall facade, it was declared passé. The next thing was Deconstructivism, a cerebral style of spiky angles and fractured forms. Decon practitioners claimed the style reflected cultural chaos at the end of the millennium.
•Since 1960s, the mainstream has split into multiple branches. Diversity reigns, with a push for sustainable (environment-friendly) design gaining ground.
•What shook up the architectural world and broke the stranglehold of slick, geometric forms was a book by Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction (1966). ―Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary.
•During the 1970s and ‘80s, buildings termed Postmodern were decorated not only with color –but with a Classical elements like slightly out-of-whack columns. Architects liberally tacked on miscellaneous borrowings from all periods of history. Sleek was gone―Anything goes was booming.
•By the 1990s, picturesque Po-Mo had been so overdone, plastered on every suburban strip mall facade, it was declared passé. The next thing was Deconstructivism, a cerebral style of spiky angles and fractured forms. Decon practitioners claimed the style reflected cultural chaos at the end of the millennium.
•Since 1960s, the mainstream has split into multiple branches. Diversity reigns, with a push for sustainable (environment-friendly) design gaining ground.