Description
Book SynopsisIn The Story of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, the authority on Post-Modern architecture and culture, provides the defining account of Post-Modern architecture from its earliest roots in the early 60s to the present day.
Trade ReviewThe Power of the book lies not so much in the sharpness of the author s criticism of the present as in the generosity and perceptiveness of his anticipation of the future . Arichitectural Review, Nov 2011. 'Charles Jencks s summary of the post-modern architectural movement promises clarity and straightforwardness. There is a little of each but not too much . Country Living, Nov 2011
Table of Contents8 Preface Post-Modernism Resurgent?
The Back Story
Some Debts Acknowledged
And Especially Madelon
16 Part I The Perfect Storm of Post-Modernism
The Moral Failures of Modernism
The Recurrent Deaths of Modernism
The Triumph of Nothingness
Revisionists and Le Corbusier Lead the Revolt
Complexity and Double-Coding – the First Post-Modern Synthesis
The Shape of History – Big, Medium and Small Waves
50 Part II Searching for Difference, Finding Commonality
Global Pluralism
Radical Eclecticism, the First Response to Homogeneity
Contextual Counterpoint
Post-Modern Classicism – the Ironic International Style
Media Events and Money
A Diversion on Cost and Taste
James Stirling Synthesises Contextualism and Pluralism
The Complexity Paradigm Extended
Modernists Becoming Post-Modern
Time-Binding Opposites
114 Part III Towards a Critical Modernism
What is a City? A Complex Adaptive System
Heterotopias and the Heteropolis
Expressively Green and Inexpensive
Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito and the Porous Route Building
Peter Eisenman, the Landform and the Critical-Creative
160 Part IV Complexity and Nature’s Ornament
The Complexity Paradigm
Fractal Architecture and the Metaphysics of Seamless Continuity
Opening Up the White Cube
Four Degrees of Ornament
200 Part V The Coming of the Cosmic Icons
The Iconic Building and its Discontents
The Bilbao Effect
Multiple Meaning and Enigmatic Signifiers
Worthy Icons?
Paranoia, Veiled Themes and Cosmic Iconology
Premature Conclusion: the Iconology of Post-Modernism?
248 Notes
260 A Post-Modern Bibliography
266 Picture Credits
268 Index
