Adjaye Modernism An intellectual movement (popular in the early 20th century). It held an idealist, even utopian world view, that the stat of things in the present are better than they were in the past; Society is improving and in this process modernity should be embraced. Modernism: Less is More (Mies Van der Rohe)
Reason Historical Progress
What is objectivity? Post-Modernism: Less is a Bore (Robert Venturi) Post-Modernism Began on March 16, 1972. An intellectual movement (mid to late 20th century). Broadly defined as a form of skepticism towards grand narratives, which are ideas that post-modernists claim, are unfairly said to be true for everybody. Grand narratives:
• Identity • Historicity, Historicism • Iconicity • Identity • Symbolism • Solidity & Permanence, ‘Monumentality’ • Complexity & Contradiction AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee
Office Building, New York, United States
Area : 820000 ft²
Year : 1984 AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee In 1979, Philip Johnson on the cover of Time Magazine holding a model of the planned skyscraper. This image portrayed a turning point in American architecture that transcended stylistic and formal trends. It heralded the dawn of a new era of iconic architecture intended for mass consumption. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee Madison Avenue, midtown Manhattan; the open pediment atop Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s 1984 AT&T Building (now the Sony Tower) singlehandedly turned the architectural world on its head. It explicitly contradicted modernist imperatives announcing that architecture was experiencing a new evolutionary phase: Postmodernism: an approach to design defined instead by a search for architectural meaning. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee Johnson and Burgee’s deployment of historicity— both on the pediment and throughout the building below it—constituted nothing less than the fulfillment of an intellectual revolution that had been agitating for more than a decade. In the late 1960s, a crisis of meaning had taken over the architectural community, ignited by the failures of modernist urbanism and theory to fulfill its own idealistic social goals. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee
the communicative power
of architecture as a cultural and artistic production. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee
the Postmodernists explored the capacity of the
sign to imbue buildings with cultural significance. Historicity and decontextualized references thus became the commodified ingredients of a new architectural recipe designed to counter functionalism's lifeless affect. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee Having established himself as one of America’s leading modernists through works including the Seagram Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and his influential exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, his reversion to historical forms in the late 1970s personified the establishment’s discontent with the then-stultifying formal language of corporate modernism.
His vision for the AT&T Building (and industrial skyscrapers in
general) would instead look to the past, borrowing architectural devices from such disparate sources as Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and even nineteenth-century New York. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee The entrance portico suggestive of great Italian arcades immediately removes visitors from the modern Manhattan neighborhood. The entrance engages a circular motif with a set of semicircular arches—the outer of which rises seven stories above the sidewalk—and a massive, round window placed above the door. The simple geometry of these elements is indicative of both a return to the perfect forms pursued by Renaissance mathematician-architects and a desire to break free from modernism's characteristic orthogonality. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee the structure of the building is modern, built using a conventional steel framing system inset behind the facade. The steel body is clad with slabs of pink granite, an older and less industrial material that projects an aura of solidity and permanence. Although the relative thinness of the columns clearly alludes to these modern structural methods, the material finish visually alludes to an older method of masonry construction on an enormous scale: The "decorated shed“. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee "monumentality" in the scale of the building's compositional elements: the hundred-foot entrance, the thirty-foot carve-out in the pediment, and the sheer height of the thirty seven-story building, Johnson and Burgee employ deliberate architectural strategies to magnify the visual massiveness of the building. Vertical banding running up and down the sides of the building dramatizes its height, as does the deliberate omission of any setbacks that might interrupt the monolithic stone block. AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee Postmodernism was rooted in an accessible common history. The combination of commercial appeal and an anti-modernist appreciation for the artistic role of the architect facilitated a greater change yet in professional culture: from there emerged an increasingly reductive portrayal of architectural production as the work of a single, brilliant mind, laying the regrettable groundwork for today's all-too- familiar cult of icon-obsessed "Starchitecture." AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee HISTORICISM, HISTORICITY
IDENTITY
COMPLEXITY & CONTRADICTION
AT&T Building / Philip Johnson + John Burgee
Postmodern Architecture - Why did this movement take
place? https://youtu.be/f9B3R0bMxUQ
Post-Modern Architecture: More is More | Historic
England https://youtu.be/1LvRoyXxwC4 An Architecture of Identity: Sir David Adjaye
A Vision of History and Culture: The Smithsonian Museum
of African American History and Culture @30:00 https://youtu.be/ijRQ0XcKA4U
Sir David Adjaye – Building Transformative Narratives |
The Hour Glass https://youtu.be/uQIrcvW9cSM Thank you for listening!
(Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 41) Ildikó Csepregi - Incubation in Early Byzantium_ The Formation of Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections-Brepols (2024)
(Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 41) Ildikó Csepregi - Incubation in Early Byzantium_ The Formation of Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections-Brepols (2024)
