Postmodern, or “PoMo” architecture, is often derided as gaudy and excessive. But as The Guardian notes, this architectural style is having a revival – just in time to save some of its greatest treasures.
“In the U.S., the future of many PoMo landmarks now hangs in the balance, from Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York to Helmut Jahn’s Thompson Centerin Chicago; products of a period that is still struggling to be taken seriously,” The Guardian writes.
“As a movement, postmodernism has been unfairly vilified because of what it came to represent,” the website continues. “It emerged in the 1970s as a radical riposte to the bland hegemony of modernism, which had seen cities covered with increasingly mundane concrete slabs, often thrown up with little sensitivity to their context. It set out to return historical reference, context and meaning to architecture, shaking up a staid discipline with humor and verve. It celebrated surface, pattern and iconography, favoring stagey fittings in moulded fibreglass, pink plaster and leopardskin laminate over raw timber and exposed concrete.”