Word: modernist
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Most of these architects are under 50, which is young in a profession whose only guarantee of big jobs is the slow growth of practical reputation. Apart from age, the main thing they have in common is a fascination with architecture as language. When tradition (including the Modernist tradition) appears in their work, it is quoted rather than adhered to. There is no common style. Above all, they have no uniting ideology, as the Bauhaus or, on a less exalted level, the corporate American architects of the '50s had. Yet they are regularly grouped under one umbrella phrase: Post-Modernism...
Influenced (as it profoundly was) by the chaos of World War I and the Utopian dreams of postwar social reorganization, internationalism and communality, Modernist architecture was obsessed with the blank slate. Le Corbusier was thus able to dream...
...universal glass box, cut-rate Mies (for real Mies was real architecture, and too expensively finished for most developers to tolerate), would cover any function: airport, bank, office block, church, club. It tended to be what the Germans labeled Stempelarchitektur, rubber-stamp building. Thus a debased form of Modernist dogmatism, what Charles Jencks called "the rationalization of taste into clichés based on statistical averages of style and theme," turned out to be the official style of the '50s and '60s. When repeated ad nauseam by architects all over the U.S. during the building boom of the 1950s...
Thus the work that did most to precipitate the Post-Modernist attitude in America was not by Johnson...
...exalting the density and plurality of "everyday" architecture above the singleness of the Modernist ideal, Venturi's ideas joined up with the Pop movement, which by 1966 had already peaked in America. Venturi was roundly damned for this by Modernist critics, as Pop painting had been damned by formalist critics seeking to preserve the "purity" of canonical, Greenberg-style color abstraction. But young architects and architecture students thought otherwise; by the early 1970s Venturi, who had built very few buildings, had attracted a considerable following as a theorist and critic...