Word: postmodernists
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...fine lessons and a few dubious habits. The Ralph Laurenized marketing of snobby antiquity is a side effect the country could probably do without. Postmodernism has become popular along with the antique buildings that inspired it, which was fine until every second shopping-center architect became a second-rate postmodernist. Now, with historicism broadly popular, modernist architectural style is on the verge of a comeback -- but a modernism that has learned from old buildings about small scale, simplicity of construction and the pleasure of materials...
...buildings are easier to dislike than those of any other important American architect. They are often dissonant and usually constructed of homely materials -- unpainted metal and plywood, asphalt shingles, stucco, rough concrete. They typify no up-and-coming architectural trend. In the postmodernist era, when much fashionable architecture has been charming and playful and not much more, Frank Gehry's difficult, edgy buildings are singular and brave...
...banners, arches, gables, windows, lights, action. Aubry's rigid canopy of pleated gold fiber glass, topped by a big wooden fish, is baffling but unequivocally vulgar--like kitsch from another planet, or a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cher. Powell's arch, with its oversize keystones, is a frolicking postmodernist fancy, circa 1980. Jahn has used the tensile imagery of naval architecture (masts, rigging, an upturned hull) to produce a fine object, jaunty but tough--a structure considerably more appealing, in fact, than his skyscrapers...
...Most startling are the long noodles in the angular forms of triangles and diamonds, even a large curving quatrefoil. They are not made anymore because "they take too long to dry," Ronza explains, "especially those with corners." All of which seems a pity, for they would certainly appeal to postmodernist eaters. Basta pasta...
...buildings designed with Partner Michael Wilford, Stirling made halfhearted concessions to historicism. His first completed U.S. commission, Rice University's 1981 School of Architecture in Houston, for example, is a staid, humbly conventional structure -- with an asymmetrically placed porthole punched in an end wall, almost as a defiant postmodernist afterthought...