Postmodern architecture stretched, questioned and challenged the aspirations of modernism, from ethics and rationality to transparency and abstraction. For many, Robert Venturi’s “gentle manifesto”, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), provided the intellectual arguments. The ruptures that had characterised modernism – that is, the rejection of history, decoration, symbolism, narrative and metaphor – were to be restitched, resulting in Venturi’s “difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion”. Put more simply, he advocated for “both/and” rather than “either/or”. References to historical forms (especially classical forms) were readmitted to architectural vocabularies, joined by sunny colours, glamorous neon and shiny things like chrome. Architecture became extraverted, witty and playful; it became populist rather than elitist.
Despite the differences between modernism and postmodernism, the line between them is sometimes blurry. At the levels of construction and structure, for example, the two are often no different. And in the late 1960s and 1970s, Ian Athfield and Roger Walker questioned and challenged almost everything, but, in an excellent survey of New Zealand modernism (docomomo Journal, September 2003), Paul Walker makes the important point that they “retained the belief that architecture could be the vehicle of a general amelioration of the social realm” – one of the key attributes of modernism.
In fact, one of PoMo’s unusual characteristics was that so many of its key figures were celebrated modernists at earlier stages in their careers. Whereas new ideas are typically championed by youngsters looking to distinguish themselves from the previous
