Post-Modernism and high-tech

In 1955 the City of St Louis completed a large public housing project – the Pruitt Igoe flats. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki (who also designed the World Trade Centre towers in New York) and based firmly on the principles of the great modernists such as Le Corbusier, the development won an American Institute of Architects prize. By 1972, just 17 years later, they had been ‘vandalized, defaced, mutilated and had witnessed a higher crime rate than any other development of their type’ (Nuttgens, 1997, p. 284) and were demolished. The well-known author and critic, Charles Jencks, suggests that the modern era ended in 1972 with the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe buildings. Since then many other tower blocks have been demolished after a similarly short life.

The fundamental problem with the buildings of the modern movement was that the strict functionalism of the designs was at odds with what people feel comfortable with – there is great irony in the observation that the interiors of many offices encased in a sternly functional steel-and-glass curtain wall are filled with timber panelling, decorative set

plaster ceilings and Greco-Roman columns and pediments. In residential buildings people want to be able to personalize their space by adding gardens, and pergolas, and fountains, and window boxes and so on; consequently the grand visions of the architects who seek to control the very lives of those who occupy their buildings produced environments that made people uncomfortable and angry. Mies van der Rohe even expected tenants in his Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings to keep their blinds (all of the same standard colour) at the same height so that the elevations of the buildings appeared properly ordered (Nuttgens, 1997).

Not surprisingly Modernism and the International Style, and their rigid supporting philosophies, began to be questioned by some in architectural circles. The publication in 1966 of Venturi’s book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi, 1966), and in 1972, coincidentally the year of the demolition in St Louis, of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al., 1972), marked the beginning of a move away from the strict functionalism that had driven so many to design the faceless boxes that still dominate many of our cities today.

What has emerged in the last 30 years can hardly be called a ‘style’ but there are, perhaps, two streams that may be identified at least in broad terms. Jencks (1981) suggested the title ‘post-modern’ to cover the amalgam of stylistic fragments that appeared as a reaction against the austerity of the modern school. Today we see buildings that are colourful, displaying many textures and forms, using elements from all historical periods side by side; a classical column here, a stylized broken pediment there, even caryatids in the form of cartoon characters, and these often made from the most modern of materials such as glass reinforced plastic or epoxy. As well as this seemingly ad hoc mix, and sometimes as part of it, there is the so-called ‘hi-tech’ approach that may see designers do away with the skin of the building and instead display the bones and the circulatory and nervous systems for all to see. Look no further that the Lloyds building in central London where the services pipes and ductwork dominate the exterior of the building, gleaming metal and glass lifts run up the outside of the building and even the cleaning gantries become ‘decoration’ at roof level.

Of course, when we talk of an architectural style it is easy to lose sight of a most important fact: the vast majority of buildings around the world are not designed in any architectural sense, or style, at all. Influential Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas claims that each year in the Pearl River Delta region of China around 500 sq km of ‘urban substance’ are created, much of it in nondescript tower blocks perhaps reminiscent of the grand designs of Le Corbusier but ‘designed’ on personal computers in a week or two and then built as quickly as possible to meet the heavy demand for space (Wolf, 2000). New houses, whether cottages in Surrey, tract houses in the suburbs of Houston, or bungalows on the outskirts of Sydney or Melbourne are most often based on standard designs, often with detailing to appeal to the common view of what a family home should look like: a front garden with a path to a cheerily painted door flanked by small paned windows with lace curtains. There is precious little of the Villa Savoye, the Farnsworth House or the Vanna Venturi house in any of these but they dominate vast areas of our modern cities.

The same is true of the majority of buildings being constructed in many places – from houses to hotels, fast food outlets to high rise offices, from warehouses to whorehouses.

While there may be the name of an architect on the documentation, the design will be driven more by commercial imperatives, such as corporate identity (a McDonald’s outlet

in Moscow looks remarkably similar to one in Tokyo), least cost, or ease of construction, than by any architectural philosophy or vision. In Australia, in recent years, perceived savings in construction time and cost have, for instance, led to the widespread use of a method, which originated in the USA, called ‘tilt-up’ construction for low rise industrial/

commercial buildings. A concrete floor slab is poured on the ground and wall slabs are poured flat then hoisted into an upright position, braced and bolted into position – the erection of a steel-framed roof, fabricated off-site, is a quick operation and the building is well on its way to completion. Visually, the result is uniformly awful: the construction method dictates that walls are flat, the overall form is strictly rectilinear, decoration is restricted to banal points and scallops along the top of the wall and there are no shadows or rhythm in the façades. Yet they flourish because they provide a cost-effective solution to the basic problem of providing large enclosed spaces with flat floors suitable for lift trucks; no architect is needed save, perhaps, for the preparation of documents for approval by the relevant controlling bodies (local council, municipal authority or whatever) and a signature to give the project legitimacy.

Of course there are visionary buildings being designed and constructed today, such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the building work that is going on at any one time. These buildings do, however, exert some influence on the rest, just as the glass boxes of Mies spawned thousands of similar buildings, so elements of the landmark buildings of the late twentieth century are appearing everywhere: on blocks of flats, supermarkets, institu-tional buildings and hotels. The general rule now is that there are no rules, and architects, when given the opportunity to actually design a building, rather than simply plan some spaces to suit the client’s operation, have a freedom to ‘mix and match’ or perhaps ‘plug ‘n’ play’, as they tackle the eternal problem of enclosing space for their clients’ needs in a way that is functional yet satisfying for the people who see and use their buildings every day.

2.5 Pluralism

If there is a label that can be applied to contemporary architecture then perhaps it is pluralism. Post-modernism has been used to describe the move away from the geometric approach of the Modernists and so included the assembly of a range of historical elements mixed, in many cases, with a playfulness that saw such buildings as the Portland Public Services building (architect: Michael Graves, completed 1983) challenge the ideal of the rational steel-and-glass tower. The Pompidou Centre in Paris (architects: Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, completed 1977) represents a parallel stream, that of the so-called high-tech style, where structure and services dominate the visual experience of the building.

These buildings often use the structure as the main visual interest, with exposed trusses, frames, masts and tension stays acting as virtual exoskeletons; in some cases with ducts, pipes, cooling towers and elevators all visible.

Naturally what we see in the everyday buildings around us ends up being an amalgam of these buildings and the styles and philosophies that they represent – some exposed ductwork and an external elevator may well be juxtaposed with some Modern white walls framed by an applique Greek temple front – there are no rules, hence the adoption by some of the label ‘pluralism’.