Post-Modern Buildings in Britain E-Book

Geraint Franklin

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

An illuminating look at a controversial architectural style – and its finest examples Post-modernism was the 1980s' counter to Brutalism but fell out of fashion until its best buildings began to disappear. Now is the time to reassess its values. Historians Geraint Franklin and Elain Harwood discuss its background and key architects before celebrating Britain's finest examples. Individual entries are beautifully illustrated, many with new photography, including the SIS Building made famous by James Bond, John Outram's awe-inspiring pumping station in London's Docklands and Judge Institute in Cambridge, and the late works of James Stirling and Michael Wilford, including No.1 Poultry – an extraordinary corner of the City that in 2016 became England's youngest listed building.

Leseprobe

Contents

Origins

Houses and Housing

St Mark’s Road Housing Jeremy and Fenella Dixon

Thematic House Charles Jencks with Terry Farrell Partnership

Greenbank House James Gowan with Antony MacIntyre

16–20 Church Crescent Colquhoun & Miller

Hillrise Road housing LB Islington Architect’s Department

Architect’s own house Richard Pierce

Shadwell Basin housing MacCormac Jamieson Prichard & Wright

Mercers’ House John Melvin & Partners

Landscapes

Little Sparta Ian Hamilton Finlay

Garden of Cosmic Speculation Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick

Civic Buildings

Katharine Stephen Room Joanna van Heyningen and Birkin Haward

Pencadlys Cyngor Gwynedd (County Hall) Merfyn H Roberts and Terry Potter with Dewi-Prys Thomas

Richmond House Whitfield Associates

Epping Forest Civic Offices Richard Reid

Bishop Wilson Memorial Library Colin St John Wilson & Partners

National Gallery Extension Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates

Church of St Paul Peter Jenkins of Peter Inskip & Peter Jenkins

National Museum of Scotland Benson & Forsyth

Commercial Buildings

NFU Mutual HQRobert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall & Partners (Alan Crawshaw, partner in charge)

Legal and General House Arup Associates

Horselydown Square Julyan Wickham and Associates

Marco Polo House Ian Pollard

Homebase Ian Pollard

Italian Centre Page & Park

Minster Court GMWPartnership

Three Brindleyplace Demetri Porphyrios

James Stirling

Neue Staatsgalerie

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Clore Gallery

Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB)

Electa Bookshop

1 Poultry

Terry Farrell

TV-am studios

Thames Water Authority Operations Centre

Comyn Ching

Henley Royal Regatta Headquarters

Embankment Place

Alban Gate

SIS Building

CZWG

Phillips West 2

Janet Street-Porter House

Craft Design and Technology Building

China Wharf

The Circle

Cascades

200–260 Aztec West

Westbourne Grove Public Conveniences

John Outram

McKay Securities

New House

Harp Heating

1200 Park Avenue

Isle of Dogs Pumping Station

Judge Business School

Sphinx Hill

East Workshops

Legacy

Queen’s Building Short Ford & Associates

Avenue de Chartres Car Park Birds Portchmouth Russum

Geffrye Museum Extension Branson Coates

Blue House FAT

Islington Square FAT 218

Hypocaust Pavilion muf architecture/art

Sunshine Children’s Centre Featherstone Young

Fullwell Cross Interventions DK-CM

The Green AOC

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, built 1975–9

By the 1970s there was a widespread sense of a crisis in modernism. The high-tech of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, new materials such as plastics and principles of sustainable architecture all offered a way out. The decade also witnessed a revived use of brick that led to explorations into neo-vernacular, Arts and Crafts traditions, classicism and conservation. Out of this disorder one trend weaved elements of old and new, not into a consistent idiom but into an eclectic architecture that was, at its best, individual and adventurous.

Post-modernism in architecture is characterized by its plurality, engagement with urban context and setting, reference to older architectural traditions and use of metaphors and symbols to suggest several ideas at once. Its unexpected exaggerations and distortions of conventional proportions suggest links to the mannerism of the late Renaissance, while unusual delineations of space have been likened to the 17th-century Baroque style. These traits were beginning to appear by 1977 when Charles Jencks, an American critic and historian based in London, published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

Post-modern architecture can be defined by its relationship with modernism. On one level it was a reaction to the excesses and broken promises of the modernist establishment. Charles Jencks claimed the dynamiting of part of the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, in 1972 as the death of modern architecture. But in truth, each post-modernist had their own Pruitt–Igoe moment. Reactions varied; some reformed and enriched modernism from within, widening its scope through historical or regional connections. Others felt that the original aspirations of modernism could only be realized through alternative strategies.

Like all stylistic labels the term ‘post-modernism’ is overused, but it has more value than most, with the supreme advantage of being contemporary rather than retrospectively applied by historians. Outside architecture, it relates to movements in other arts, literature and philosophy. The term is an old one, used in painting in the 1880s, literature from the 1930s and popular fiction from the early 1960s.1 Joseph Hudnut applied it to buildings in 1949 in his 1945 article on ‘The Post-Modern House’2, a criticism of the mechanized architecture he had taught at the Bauhaus.3 Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘post-modern’ the architecture he considered ‘the legitimate style of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties’ – the refined modernism of architects such as Arne Jacobsen or Powell and Moya – when in 1966 he attacked the brutalists or ‘anti-pioneers’.4

From 1975 the strands were brought together by Charles Jencks, a figure who has become more closely identified with post-modernism in architecture than any other, and who defined it in terms of a ‘double-coded language – one part modern and one part something else’.6 C Ray Smith had used the alternative ‘supermannerism’ in a series of late-1960s articles gathered into a 1977 book of that name.7 In the early work of Robert Venturi and especially Charles Moore, Smith identified the layering or separation of elements, the use of cut-out shapes and over-scaled lettering – termed ‘supergraphics’ – and references to aspects of mass culture, such as comic books. In 1977, the architect Robert A M Stern used the term in the manner that has become universal:

Post-modernism recognizes that buildings are designed to mean something, that they are not hermetically sealed objects. Post-modernism accepts diversity; it prefers hybrids to pure forms; it encourages multiple and simultaneous readings in its effort to heighten expressive content. Borrowing from forms and strategies of both modernism and the architecture that preceded it, post-modernism declares the pastness of both. The layering of space characteristic of much post-modernist architecture finds its complement in the overlay of cultural and art-historical references in the elevations. For the post-modernist, ‘more is more’. 5

The most distinctive strand of post-modern architecture originated in the United States. Louis Kahn provides an important bridge between modernists and post-modernists in offering a common source of inspiration, and his emphasis on separating the service areas that supported the functioning of a building greatly informed Richard Rogers and the high-tech movement. In the 1960s Kahn adopted increasingly bold geometric shapes and a monumentality that fused modern and ancient traditions. His teaching assistant at the University of Philadelphia, Robert Venturi, flattened and stacked these geometries, introducing diagonal movement into the plan, as Kahn had done. The latter’s Esherick House in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (1961) exudes the universal qualities of strength and formality whereas, at the end of the same street, Venturi’s house designed for his mother (the Vanna Venturi house, 1959–64) offers a series of layered skins, with symmetrical elements countered by informalities and idiosyncrasies and its show front split open to reveal a monumental chimney, a take on a settlers’ vernacular.

Vanna Venturi House, designed by Robert Venturi for his mother from 1959, built 1962–4

Two years later, in 1966, Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a study of architecture that focused heavily on the Baroque era but which also embraced Alvar Aalto and Edwin Lutyens. A paperback second edition appeared in 1977. He suggested how ‘an artful discord gives vitality to architecture’ and a richer experience in urban design. The sources of stateside post-modernism ranged from the colonial classicism and flat, boarded Shingle style of the New England school of architects to the Bauhaus, Art Deco and Pop Art. Yet although modernism and post-modernism shared connections with Kahn, Gunnar Asplund and the Italian rationalists of the 1930s, battle lines soon developed within the American avant-garde, for example between the ‘white’ post-Corbusians (led by Peter Eisenman) and the ‘grays’ (Romaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg, Charles Moore, Jaquelin T Robertson and Robert Stern) whose one-off private houses were – like Venturi’s – less pristine as images but suggested a greater richness and ambiguity in their symbols and layered historical references.

When Denise Scott Brown took a teaching job in Los Angeles she invited her future husband, Robert Venturi, to join her in a research programme in Las Vegas. Venturi had already written on the value of ‘honky-tonk elements in the landscape’ but his, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972, further challenged the boundaries between the high art of the academy and the low art of small-town America. Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction had criticized the ideas of another Louis Kahn follower, Peter Blake, whose God’s Own Junkyard in 1964 had derided the kitsch of Long Island’s Big Duck, a farmer’s market of 1930 in the form of a giant, walk-in duck.8 The collaborators contrasted the duck building, which for them suggested the modernist integration of structure, space and programme into a single, symbolic object, with the ubiquitous clapboard shed signified only by an applied façade or a roadside sign.

Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s acceptance of the ordinary and the everyday found parallels in the recognition of older buildings and thence the retention of characterful but unexceptional stretches of traditional Main Street. Jane Jacobs had argued against their wholesale replacement, asserting that town centres needed buildings of different ages and rents if they were to have a visual and economic diversity, her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 marking the beginnings of the conservation movement. Stuart Cohen and Colin Rowe described architecture and urban design as a collage of shapes and ideas, and in ‘Collage City’, an article that led in 1978 to an eponymous book with Fred Koetter, the English-born Rowe argued for urban design based on fragmentation, ‘bricolage’ and a variety of meanings to secure this diversity.

Charles Moore was another former teaching assistant to Louis Kahn, and his 1961 house in Orinda, California shares references to temples and Roman domestic architecture with Kahn’s bath house at Trenton, New Jersey. After becoming Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Moore transformed a small 19th-century house in 1966–7 with light shafts, over-scaled geometrical cut-outs, bright colours and supergraphics. The same elements brought irony to the collegiate setting of the Faculty Club at the University of California, Santa Barbara of 1967–8. Moore’s idea of an inclusive and diverse architecture manifested itself in a public square celebrating New Orleans’s small Italian community, the Piazza d’Italia of 1975–9. He placed colonnades and a bell tower resembling theatrical sets around a fountain designed as a three-dimensional map of Italy, their capitals serving as uplighters and trimmed in neon, while water spurted from medallions modelled on Moore’s own face.

In Italy, architects championed a different form of post-modernism, seeking not to add to modernism but to strip classicism back to its essence, without the obsession for details found among traditionalists. For Paolo Portoghesi, post-modernism was about the re-emergence of archetypes and conventions, a means of communication or ‘civilisation of the image’.9 He combined an architectural practice based in Rome with a study of architectural history, in particular the work of Francesco Borromini, a leading figure in the emergence of the Baroque architectural style. Portoghesi’s own work combined historic references and flowing space, as in his mosque and Islamic centre in Rome of 1975–6, light and uplifting if very Western in its inspiration. In Milan, Ernesto Rogers had referenced early Gothic symbols in his Torre Velasca as early as 1958.

Rogers’s pupil Aldo Rossi argued that the historical city offered a vocabulary of types along with a grammar for their combination. Published at a time of unprecedented urban reconstruction, his 1966 book Architettura della Città suggested that modern architecture might learn from the collective and communal values of the city, the continuity of its fabric and its compound of anonymity and monumentality. In 1971, while recovering from serious injury after a car crash, Rossi designed an extension to the San Cataldo Cemetery at Modena, an enigmatic assembly of forms dominated by a cubic, ochre-rendered ossuary. This roofless house of the dead offers a poetic metaphor for Rossi’s description of the city as a repository of collective memory.

Rossi, Massimo Scolari and others organized the international architecture exhibition at the Milan Triennale in 1973, later published as Architettura Razionale. Others associated with the movement termed La Tendenza or, more often, neo-rationalism included Carlo Aymonino, Giorgio Grassi and Vittorio Gregotti in Italy; Josef Paul Kleihues and Oswald Mathias Ungers in Germany, and Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhardt in Switzerland. Léon Krier, Maurice Culot and Demetri Porphyrios pursued a form of neo-rationalism more closely allied to a revival of the classical orders. In 1975 Krier organized his own ‘Rational Architecture’ exhibition at the Art Net gallery in London as a corrective to Rossi’s; it featured his own schemes alongside works by Scolari, Grassi, Ungers and his former employer, James Stirling. In the Italian-speaking Ticino canton of Switzerland, a fast-growing economy and a local school of architecture generated a distinctive architecture that combined stark volumes of brick and stone with classical references. At Mario Botta’s Bianchi House at Riva San Vitale (1972–3), the Danilo House at Ligornetto (1975–6) and the Medici House at Stabio (1980–2) voids are carved out of solid cubes and cylinders. In later and larger works an affinity with the brick geometries of Louis Kahn is even more apparent.

The Austrian architect Hans Hollein provides a link between Europe and America, having studied, and later taught, in the United States. His early works, such as the Retti candle shop (1965), the Schullin I jewellery store (1974) and two offices of the Austrian Travel Agency (1978) – all in Vienna – and the Abguineh Museum in Tehran, Iran (1978) combined irony, symbolism and a sensuous materiality. In furniture and industrial design other Italian designers pursued bold, gestural shapes, as with the work of Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, while Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves, Hollein and others produced designs for Alessi and Sottsass’s company, Memphis. Exaggerations of scale were also a feature of post-modernism in Japan, where cubic grids and divergent materials and colours were superimposed on to brutalist concrete forms, a tradition well established in the country after many of its leading architects had worked for Le Corbusier.

Addition to the San Cataldo Cemetery by Aldo Rossi, designed 1971, 1976; built 1978–85 (uncompleted)

House for Liliana and Ovidio Medici (Casa Rotunda), Stabio, Switzerland, by Mario Botta, 1980–2

The twin traditions of post-modernism contrast in the emphasis they placed on ornament and image, both big in the United States, versus the inheritance of the city, which was particularly important in Europe. Britain, as in many aspects of life and culture, combined elements from both continents when its own post-modernism took shape in the later 1970s. The North American influences proved easiest to understand and absorb, whereas the European stream was more illusive and its urban aspirations were frustrated by first being confined to projects. The two cultures were bridged by the brain drain of British and continental architects invited to teach at East Coast universities – such as Colin Rowe, who taught at Cornell University from 1962 to 1990 – and by Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Manhattan, New York, which provided connections to European theory and philosophy and published an influential journal, Oppositions.

The international factions of post-modernism converged at the first international architectural Biennale held in Venice in 1980. A committee led by Paolo Portoghesi invited architects from around the world to contribute to a display themed as ‘The Presence of the Past’. An accompanying catalogue set out four different aspects of the movement; a fifth aspect that was critical of the genre was not submitted, its author, Kenneth Frampton, having withdrawn from the organizing committee. Portoghesi laid out the Arsenale’s historic rope works as the Strada Novissima, a concourse in which 20 architects (none of whom were British) designed façades that demonstrated the richness and variety of new ideas emerging under the general heading of post-modernism. The works of British architects Jeremy Dixon, Terry Farrell, Michael Gold, Edward Jones and Quinlan Terry featured in the upstairs gallery. The Strada Novissima followed the success of another three-dimensional exhibit, when in November 1979 Aldo Rossi had floated a temporary theatre on a barge, Il Teatro del Mondo (The Theatre of the World), around the Venice archipelago. While a viewing platform offered storey-high views of Venice, the theatre’s childlike form, at once classical and yet somehow otherworldly, made a striking impact on the familiar Venice skyline.

The British journal Architectural Design held its own exhibition in 1981, choosing Jeremy Dixon, Terry Farrell, Piers Gough, James Gowan, Edward Jones and John Outram to exhibit alongside drawings by Robert Stern. These architects plus James Stirling, then building abroad, formed the backbone of post-modernism in Britain, bolstered by the theory and polemics of Charles Jencks. An accompanying debate focused on the value of post-modern classicism as a universal language for the urban landscape, in which Jeremy Dixon questioned the labels post-modern, rationalist, neoclassicist and neo-vernacular, all of which had been applied to his housing in Kensington.10 Only Gough and his practice, Campbell Zogolovitch Wilkinson and Gough (czwg), have unreservedly accepted the post-modernist label.

Meanwhile, British architects sustained themselves through the recession of the early 1980s with exhibition work and temporary buildings. Gough transformed London’s Hayward Gallery into a series of settings for the work of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, while Gowan produced a bright yellow bookshop for the Royal College of Art for a three-week exhibition in 1985, replete with portholes and flaming capitals. Buildings intended to be temporary offered the greatest opportunity for experimentation, seen in 1980 when Farrell designed two flower shops for Clifton Nurseries. The first was a curvaceous steel shed with a cut-out front, erected close to Paddington Station. The second, in Covent Garden, had Tuscan columns that directly faced those of St Paul’s Church, just across the piazza – this building lasted from 1981 to 1988, before being re-erected at the Waterways Garden Centre in Clwyd, North Wales.

The Architectural Association (AA) in London was a melting pot of ideas. Alvin Boyarsky, Chairman from 1971 to 1990 and a consummate networker, organized the teaching as a series of diverse units deliberately designed to challenge each other, with an international focus reflected in the origins and approaches of tutors and unit masters. They included Charles Jencks, who had taught there since 1968, Léon Krier, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi and Elia Zhenghelis. The AA tradition of having key graduates stay on and teach continued with Rem Koolhaas, who joined the staff in 1975, followed in 1978 by his own former student, Zaha Hadid. Tschumi’s student Nigel Coates started teaching in 1977. Staff debates continued at Art Net, the public gallery run between 1973 and 1978 by AA teacher and Archigram designer Peter Cook.

The growth of British post-modernism coincided with upheavals in architectural publishing. Architectural Design had been the most dynamic British magazine since the mid-1950s, but had long been in financial difficulties. It was bought in 1975 by the publisher Andreas Papadakis, who repackaged it from 1978 as a sequence of book-length double issues. Many were based around post-modernism and edited by Charles Jencks, for whom Papadakis also published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture through multiple editions, amongst other titles. As Britain’s leading magazine, the Architectural Review became increasingly international; the Architects’ Journal took over as the leading mouthpiece for British buildings and related subjects of interest. The more discursive, critical writing in the latter was supported by advances in cheap printing, particularly of high-quality colour photographs by Martin Charles, Richard Bryant and Peter Cook. Architecture Today, launched in 1989, was also solidly architectural. In 1983 Peter Murray and Deyan Sudjic began Blueprint to integrate architecture and design; while the magazine embraced all styles, the multi-disciplinary approach was particularly suited to post-modernism where the links with furniture and product design represented a whole new consumer-led lifestyle. Such links had long been made in the Italian magazines Domus and Casabella, the international style guides for the era.

British post-modernism remained more contextual than that of other countries, strong in its references not only to classicism but also to Dutch brick traditions, Art Deco, the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the Vienna Secession. A Charles Rennie Mackintosh revival was sustained by the restoration of several buildings and the incorporation of interiors from No. 78 Southpark Avenue, Glasgow into the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery extension by William Whitfield, opened in 1981. The most interesting work tends to be the least deferential, much of it planned before London’s economic boom in the late 1980s. Most is modest in scale or occupies constrained sites, for – in contrast to the United States and Europe – even the most prestigious projects were generally extensions of older buildings.

Strada Novissima, Venice Biennale, 1980, featuring (from left to right) facades by Josef Paul Kleihues, Hans Hollein, Massimo Scolari and Allan Greenberg

The revival of classical architecture in Britain, in contrast to the post-modern position, was based on an irreconcilable opposition to modernism. The architecture of the late Georgian era, imagined as if the Victorian Gothic Revival had never happened, survived right through the 20th century for some public buildings and country houses, thanks to traditionalists such as Francis Johnson. Classicism enjoyed a revival in the 1970S amid a growing enthusiasm for country houses, architectural history and conservation, supported by the historian David Watkin and the Prince of Wales (not least with the development from 1993 onwards of Poundbury, Dorset, based on Léon Krier’s theories of urban planning). They pushed to the fore those architects who treated classicism academically and seriously, such as Quinlan Terry and Robert Adam, both Rome Scholars, whose domestic work closely followed traditional models. Underlying the classical revival was an ambivalent attitude to modernity, exemplified by the breeze block cavity wall construction of much of Poundbury. By contrast, the post-modernists were firmly rooted in modernist backgrounds – as was explained by John Outram, Terry’s contemporary at the AA, ‘I used to like modernism but wanted to make it usable, unlike the double breasted Doric Brigade’.11

The position of Krier and Demetri Porphyrios is more complex. Porphyrios settled in London, where his smaller commissions firmly follow the classical tradition, as do those of Krier, born in Luxembourg and a champion of the elegant, early 19th-century neoarclassicism of Frederick Schinkel. Krier quit his university studies to work for James Stirling, just as the latter was discovering neo-classicism. Having met his future wife and obtained a teaching job at the AA he then settled in Britain for 20 years. Porphyrios has criticized post-modernism and stylistic pluralism as unserious and kitsch; nevertheless his work at Brindleyplace, Birmingham, challenges these margins. Krier’s architecture – until recently confined to paper – is an imaginative abstraction of urban building types rather than an archaeologically correct classicism.

Charles Jencks set out his evolving architectural worldview to the Royal Institute of British Architects (riba) in Hull in 1976, speaking alongside a group of architects he labelled his ‘revisionist heroes’.12 They included Terry Farrell, an architect–planner beginning to explore a variety of styles while working in partnership with the high-tech aficionado Nicholas Grimshaw, and John Darbourne, Robert Maguire and Ralph Erskine – all architects who worked in brick or concrete block, but with pitched roofs; they considered every detail of the brief and site, and met the eventual users face-to-face. While Jencks claimed for post-modernism the integrity, urban grain and brilliant colour of Erskine’s Byker development in Newcastle, these architects never questioned their modernist credentials; by the early 1980s they and similarly minded practitioners, such as Peter Aldington and Edward Cullinan, came to be labelled romantic pragmatists for the way their designs evolved in imaginative ways from a client’s brief. They produced occasional schools for Hampshire County Council Architect’s Department under Colin Stansfield Smith, whose highly regarded building programme was grounded in a respect for setting and the adoption of bold geometric shapes and traditional materials.

Rather closer to post-modernism was the work of Richard MacCormac, who combined vernacular elements with direct classical references in his work at Oxford. Such architects formed the backbone in Britain of ‘critical regionalism’, a term coined by Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre in 1981 and most widely promoted by the British-born, American-based critic Kenneth Frampton.13 A more distinctive admixture of sources was provided by an earlier generation, when in the late 1940s Herbert Tayler and David Green took the long terraces they had seen in Ernst May’s Frankfurt suburbs and applied tiled roofs, brick patterns, trellises and undulating crinkle-crankle walls from local vernacular sources. The confection led Pevsner again to use the term ‘post-modern’ in 1962, coming closer this time to its eventual meaning. By 1980 a vernacular revival was spreading across southern England, led by Essex County Council’s Design Guide for Residential Areas, published in 1973 and becoming a developers’ style manual of pitched roofs, brick and weatherboarding. It was very easy to add classical porches or Art Deco porthole windows, as seen at Essex County Council’s new town, South Woodham Ferrers, where the supermarket took the form of a giant traditional barn with a clock tower, the first of the genre.

South Woodham Ferrers typified a new form of public sector initiative that was delivered by private developers. In 1981 RIBA finally eased its restrictions on qualified architects acting as developers, though technically they could not be both on the same site. This change encouraged innovative small housing and office schemes, mostly in up-and-coming parts of London. For Terry Farrell the private sector offered more radical options than seemed possible under a flagging welfare state. London’s derelict warehouses and gap sites provided opportunities for building new live/work environments, in addition to the shops and bars with which young architects traditionally cut their teeth. The opportunities were seized upon by a generation of architects who came of age in the counter-cultural 1960s, influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Jacobs as much as the disposable pop culture of Archigram and Cedric Price. For them, working with small-scale entrepreneurs or community groups represented freedom rather than compromise.

Many felt that the permissive and critical aspects of post-modernism were betrayed in the mid-1980s when its language was adopted and transformed by big business. While post-modernism was not certainly unique in being sucked into a late-capitalist cycle of consumption, obsolescence and disposal, those aspects of it which drew from the pop art tradition had acknowledged the inevitability of the process from the start. An internationally understood yet culturally vacuous idiom came to dominate commercial architecture, draining post-modernism of its vitality.

The large commercial practices that had made their reputations with modern office buildings, among them Gollins Melvin Ward and Seifert, were happy to adopt post-modern classicism. Large City-fringe developments such as Broadgate and the development of London’s Docklands, fast-tracked through a development corporation created in 1981 and led by first American and then Canadian developers, attracted American multi-national practices in 1986–7. These included Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Kohn Pederson Fox and Swanke Hayden Connell; their work lacked the cutting wit and irony of the early, smaller trailblazers of the style. Certain projects of Terry Farrell and James Stirling tended towards a gross classicism, while post-modernists such as Michael Graves, Robert Stern and Arata Isozaki lost credibility by designing ‘entertainment architecture’ for the Disney Corporation.

When new buildings again began to be commissioned in the early 1990s, many for a revived public sector, a neo-modernism assured in its sustainability and energy efficiency took the place of post-modernism. The results suggest that many of the lessons of post-modernism had been learned – this new British modernism was more inclusive and relaxed than the old, and free to partake of wilful forms, bold colour, diverse materials and, latterly, laser-cut patterns from local sources. The gestural range of post-modernism was perpetuated in ‘iconic’ buildings seeking to regenerate an area, such as Will Alsop’s Peckham Library of 1998–9, and as a means of expressing the ventilation pipes and turrets required by ecologically minded buildings, such as those by Alan Short and Bill Dunster.

Perhaps the widest ranging legacy of post-modernism in architecture has been its questioning of how our cities are thrown together and the creation of new pedestrian routes and public spaces. The built works of British post-modernism, always in the minority, are today fast disappearing – hence this book. But the post-modern movement’s guiding principles and strategies – chief among them pluralism, context, narrative and subversion – have never been more relevant to contemporary architecture.

Staff Common Room, Glasgow School of Art, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, project architect Andy MacMillan, 1981 (demolished)