Word: postmodernity
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...civic center in Tsukuba, "science city," looks, positively baroque in its exuberance. It consists of a 1,200-seat symphony hall, convention facilities and a 15-story hotel tower, circling a sunken court lined with shops. The rock garden and waterfall are stylized Japanese. The architecture is playful postmodern with the now standard affectations and allusions to Palladian renaissance. But Isozaki's stylishness is not random. Only a Japanese architect and his craftsmen could use materials as diverse as titanium-glazed tile, glass terrazzo, onyx, inlaid marble of different colors, and gold and silver doorknobs to create an effect...
...schedule and within budget. Yet the storm of controversy the building has raised is likely to rage long after its official dedication on Oct. 2. The issue is style. With this one brazen gesture, the architect, Michael Graves, 48, attempts to supplant modern architecture's heroic industrialism with postmodern architecture's heroic . . . what? Perhaps it might be called Pop surrealism that uses classic design elements the way Walt Disney cartoons used the physiognomy of a rodent to create Mickey Mouse. For all its playfulness, however, the Portland Building is dangerous. Modern architecture is ripe for a radical change...
...MOMA exhibition should turn a fresh light on Neutra's achievements. It may even do more: in the current identity crisis of our art and architecture, Neutra's buildings prove that the point, in the end, is not modern or postmodern. It is good architecture or bad . - By Wolf Von Eckardt
...result is visual gobbledygook. An example is the new crop of "postmodern" buildings. They are three-dimensional collages of discrepant ornament and styles. The design of most new interiors, furniture, cars, appliances and printed matter also continues to follow ill-mannered fads rather than good form. A confusion of design with mere styling, packaging or form-giving still haunts our culture...
...castle in Bayonne, N.J., concocted from pendages; and the astonishing acrobatic stance of a new room cantilevered from the roof of a bungalow in Birmingham. These transformations are a spontaneous expression of the "complexity and contradiction in architecture" that Robert Venturi, in his famed book of that title, asked postmodern architects to design into their buildings. But no postmodernist would dare produce the assaults on aesthetics that some of these homeowners do. Their houses wear curlers to the block party and are unself-conscious about it. As one Vergara subject cheerfully replied when asked about the style of her renovated...