The Modern movement was an attempt to create a no historical architecture of functionalism in which a new sense of space would be created with the help of modern materials. A reaction against the stylistic pluralism of the 19th century, believing that the 20th century had given birth to ” modern man” who would need a radically new kind of architecture .
In this blog we will discuss the first movement of them all the post-Modern Architecture.
Post-Modern Architecture:
The post-modern movement began in America around the 1960’s/70’s and then it spread to Europe and the rest of the world. Postmodernism or Late-modernism began as a reaction to Modernism; it tried to address the limitations of its predecessor.
Its list of aims extended to include communicating ideas with the public often in a then humorous or witty way. Often, the communication was done by quoting extensively from past architectural styles, often many at once. In breaking away from modernism, it strived to produce buildings that were sensitive to the context within which they are built. This trend became evident in the last quarter of the 20th century as architects started to turn away from modern Functionalism which they viewed as boring, unwelcoming and unpleasant.
They turned towards the past, quoting past aspects of various buildings and melding them together to create a new means of designing buildings. For example, pillars and other elements of pre-modern designs were adapted from Greek and Roman examples but not simply by recreating them, as was done in neoclassical architecture. Another return was that of the “wit, ornament and reference” seen in older buildings in terra cotta decorative façades and bronze or stainless steel embellishments of the Beaux-Arts and Art Deco periods.
In post-modern structures this was often achieved by placing contradictory quotes of previous building styles alongside each other, and even incorporating furniture stylistic references at a huge scale. Contextualize influenced the ideologies of the postmodern movement in general.
Contextualize was centered on the belief that all knowledge is “context-sensitive”. This idea was even taken further to say that knowledge cannot be understood without considering its context.
