Posts Tagged V&A
V&A to celebrate British design with Olympics-spanning show
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 7, 2011
The Haçienda club, Concorde and Harlow to feature next year's showcase of design from 1948 Games through to those of 2012
There will be Concorde, an E-type Jag, a recreation of Manchester's The Haçienda nightclub and …well, Harlow, included in what is expected to be the most comprehensive survey of postwar British innovation and design ever staged.
The V&A announced on Friday plans for its big show next year which will showcase more than seven decades of the best British design with a timeline that runs from the austerity Olympics of 1948 to the less austere 2012 Games.
The exhibition's timing, in the depths of economic turmoil, could not be better in that it will show that some of the best ideas have emerged from the worst of times. It will, said co-curator Christopher Breward, "demonstrate that in times of economic downturn, actually that idea of the British inventor, the British maverick, the old Victorian idea of the engineer-hero has both a long history and is a very important way of looking beyond the immediate financial mess".
The show, he hoped, have "a positive message. The evidence is there in the objects".
The exhibition launch was held on the top floor of the Gherkin, a building that will feature in the forthcoming show. From there other important examples of postwar architecture which will be in the exhibition could just be made out through London's dingily grey morning skies: the Lloyds building; Erno Goldfinger's brutalist 1960s Balfron Tower and Zaha Hadid's Olympic park aquatics centre, for which the V&A has commissioned a new model.
The show will also feature the growth of new towns with models and drawings for urban utopias such as Milton Keynes and Harlow which has the Frederick Gibberd-designed residential block The Lawn, one of the earliest examples of British high-density housing.
There will be about 350 exhibits on show, over two-thirds of them from the V&A's vast collections and it will cover everything from fashion to fine art to video games.
Breward said The Haçienda was so important in youth culture that it had to be an important part of the show and the club's original designer, Ben Kelly, is working on the V&A show. "You'll almost feel like you're there," said Breward. "Within an exhibition context."
There will be the more obvious exhibits – Dyson's bagless vacuum cleaner, say – as well as unsung heroes such as the Topper dinghy and the Moulton folding bike.
Ghislaine Wood, the show's other curator, said the show represented three years of work and it had been a good opportunity to research the V&A's own collection. "We have acquired contemporary material right from the beginning of the V&A's history and it is at moments like these that you realise how important it is to keep collecting contemporary work."
• British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age will be staged between 31 March and 12 August.
Neon light – Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert museum – video
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 26, 2011
Sarfraz Manzoor meets co-curators Jane Pavitt and Glenn Adamson, architect Charles Jencks and ceramicist Carol McNicoll at the V&A in London
Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 16, 2011
Fun, bright, clever, but disposable and disturbing, postmodernism was all swagger and stance. But was this pre-digital phenomenon killed off by the internet?
The Sony building stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and 56th Street in midtown Manhattan. At 197m, it's a little higher than its immediate neighbours, but there are at least 60 taller buildings in the city. It is an inoffensive, creamy colour. At ground level there's a spectacular atrium. Yet when it was completed in 1984, it was considered the most shocking building in the world.
The reason is the top. You have to walk a block or so away to get a sense of it. The building, originally known after its first corporate owner, AT&T, is crowned by a broken pediment; a circular space has been carved out of the apex of the triangle which tops the façade. It's a simple, rather beautiful gesture. It is also a huge act of betrayal by the architect and the most visible trace on the New York skyline of postmodernism, a cultural current that is the subject of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, a major new exhibition at the V&A.
Why betrayal? The architect was Philip Johnson, who in 1932 had curated an extraordinary architectural show at the Museum of Modern Art. Images and models of buildings by Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and others led a generation of architects to make an absolute break with the styles of the past and embrace the tenets of modernism, chief among which was the idea that form should follow function. Johnson termed this new wave the "international style", a name which stuck as the skylines of major cities (notably Chicago) were transformed by constructions of plate glass and structural steel, buildings which banished decoration, mere skin and bones enclosing volumes of space.
Initially a radically utopian architecture, dreaming of a rational future uncluttered by superstition and ornament, the international style had, by the 1970s, become a rather joyless orthodoxy. For every triumph of the movement, such as Mies and Johnson's Seagram building or Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, there were 10 undistinguished tower blocks, whose indifference to their context seemed less an expression of universality than of the arrogance of planners. Britain suffered particularly badly, as shoddy system-built high-rises gave modernism a bad name from which it has never entirely recovered.
For the man who had brought the international style to North America to put an ornamental pediment on his building was like Mondrian deciding to put a vase of flowers in a corner of his black and white grid. The AT&T tower became known, sneeringly, as the Chippendale building, because it reminded observers of the ornamental broken pediments the 18th-century cabinetmaker often put on highboys and bookcases. A building that looked like a piece of furniture? It seemed trivialising, a tasteless joke.
But Johnson was not the only person finding his sense of humour. Suddenly serious architects were adding colour to their creations, making little historical references, nudges and winks. All sorts of things that had been off-limits came back: trompe l'oeil, vernacular, pastiche. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published a theoretical book about the tackiest built environment in the world, the Las Vegas strip. They called it, provocatively, Learning from Las Vegas. The strip, they argued, with its riot of billboards and neon, was (literally) a place of signs rather than things, where the buildings were only a minor part of an environment of semiotic seductions, designed to be legible to a person travelling by at 35mph.
This is the essence of postmodernism: the idea that there is no essence, that we're moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways. Nothing is direct, nothing is new. Everything is already mediated. The real, whatever that might be, is unavailable. It's an exhilarating world, but uncanny too. You look around at your beautiful house and your beautiful wife and you ask yourself, like the narrator of the Talking Heads song: 'Well, how did I get here?" After that, it's only a short step to deciding that this is not your beautiful house and your beautiful wife at all. The world of signs is fast, liquid, delirious, disposable. Clever people approach it with scepticism. Sincerity is out. Irony is in. And style. If modernism was about substance, about serious design solving serious problems, postmodernism was all manner and swagger and stance.
The curators of the V&A show have sensibly decided to steer away from art and literature (which could fill a second exhibition), and to present postmodernism as a set of design strategies, visible across the spectrum from fashion to graphics to furniture. They have also cheekily periodised it, choosing a 20-year time frame, which they gleefully ignore when it suits them. The result is revelatory, a ground-breaking history of a recent cultural past that has, almost without us noticing, gone from the cutting edge to the museum.
For designers, postmodernism meant making material things that felt like signs of themselves. The Italian pranksters of the Memphis group defined the aesthetic of the late 70s and early 80s with household objects that looked as if they'd materialised from cartoons, absurdly juxtaposed simple forms presented in bright, artificial colours. LA-based Peter Shire created candy-coloured furniture that always seemed on the verge of retreating back into two-dimensionality. His Bel Air chair of 1982 is the very avatar of postmodern weightlessness, an object that could exist at any scale, at home by a pool, in an aquarium, at the bottom of a cocktail glass. But postmodernism, protean, ever hard to pin down, wasn't just about a cartoon future. The taste for historical pastiche, for country kitchens and neo-Georgian kitsch, was also part of the same tendency. Laura Ashley, Merchant Ivory and the fake past of Poundbury are (whether Prince Charles knows it or not) just as postmodern, in their way, as the fashion designs of Rei Kawakubo or the graphic riot of Arata Isozaki's Team Disney building.
If postmodernism could be fun and bright, it was also disturbing. In a friction-free world of signs, what happened to value? Nowhere did this question arise more forcefully than in Oliviero Toscani's advertising campaigns for Benetton, in which deliberately-confrontational images of Aids patients and death row inmates were used to sell pastel-coloured knitwear. The cynicism of Toscani's work seemed to suggest we were now living in the corporate world of Videodrome, David Cronenberg's 1983 horror film about a sleazy producer discovering an anonymous cable channel broadcasting extreme sexual violence. The relentless march of money across the cultural landscape of the 1980s, with figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring describing brief and tragic arcs, seemed to many a fundamental debasement of the idea of art. To others, it was just fun.
Fittingly, for a cultural moment where everyone appeared to be playing themselves, postmodern performers such as Grace Jones, Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi developed a style of self-presentation that, for the first time, floated free of human limitations. On MTV (on air 1981) and magazine pages designed with the new Apple Macs (on sale 1984) they appeared both more and less than human, like the replicants from Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner. Postmodern bodies often suggested machinery, as in the deadpan totalitarianism of the bands Kraftwerk and Devo. The most human of acts, such as singing and dancing, became infected with something robotic and unheimlich: David Byrne's jerky dancing and oversized organisation-man suits, Laurie Anderson's vocoder voice singing lullabies about Superman and big science, Boy George's liquidation of gender, Madonna's hyper-disciplined blonde bombshell, who seemed closer to the man-machines played by Arnold Schwarzenegger than the pop pin-ups of the previous generation. Jean-Paul Goude's manipulated, post-produced photos of Grace Jones, her limbs elongated, her oiled skin suggesting chrome and spray paint, stand among the most powerful documents of the period. Jones was pointing the way towards something both troubling and exhilarating, something which as the 80s became the 90s, became codifed as the "posthuman".
Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, the curators of the V&A show, point to the video for New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" as a paradigm of postmodern visual style. Its director, the New York artist Robert Longo, produced a palimpsest of decontextualised, pixellated imagery, incorporating a signature of his Men in the Cities series of images of contorted, falling figures dressed in business wear. Post 9/11 this is uncomfortable to watch, which makes it even more curious that Mad Men, the popular TV drama, alludes to Longo's figures in its title sequence, which has a businessman falling past a façade that inescapably calls to mind the most famously absent international style buildings in Manhattan, the twin towers of Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center.
For many, the events of 11 September signalled the death of postmodernism as an intellectual current. That morning it became clear that "hostility to grand narratives", as Jean-François Lyotard defined it, was a minority pursuit, an intellectual Rubik's cube for a tiny western metropolitan elite. It seemed most of the world still had some use for God, truth and the law, terms which they were using without inverted commas. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was widely ridiculed for declaring that the attacks signalled "the end of the age of irony", but his use of the po-mo buzzword proved prescient. If irony didn't vanish (though during the crushing literalism and faux-sincerity of the Bush-Blair war years it seemed like a rare and valuable commodity), postmodernism itself suddenly seemed tired and shopworn.
Use Google's ngram viewer to look at the incidence of the word "postmodernism" in books since 1975 and you find a sharp rise, peaking in around 1997, then an equally sharp decline. Plot this against the use of the word "internet" and the comparison is startling. Almost unused before the mid-80s, "internet" overtakes "postmodernism" in 2000, and carries on rising. All avant-gardes are in the business of futurism. They make an attempt to inhabit the space they predict, and in so doing, they bring it into being. Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It's as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.
• For a Guardian Extra ticket offer on Postmodernism at the V&A, click here
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 16, 2011
The design world hits high-voltage this week, with flash openings at historic houses, electric cars racing to the future and RIBA unveiling the British pylons of tomorrow
London Open House takes place this weekend, allowing us to see inside hundreds of historic buildings normally closed to the public. Some, such as the hugely popular Midland Grand Hotel (fronting St Pancras station) and Jimi Hendrix's flat in Mayfair's Brook Street are sold-out, but the choice of buildings to visit is still vast.
What about that trip to Ruislip you never promised yourself, to see 97 Park Road, an unexpected house built by Connell Ward and Lucas in 1936 in the style of Le Corbusier's white Parisian villas of the 1920s? This is the best-preserved of a row of three houses that dumbfounded its neighbours (Ruislip is awash with mock-Tudor and neo-Georgian homes) when they were built. Today, though, it is No 97 that is so very desirable.
Or how about the political and architectural drama of Wrotham Park in Barnet, a magnificent English Palladian country house designed by Isaac Ware in 1754 for Admiral John Byng. The house has featured in numerous films and TV shows including Gosford Park and Sense and Sensibility; doubtless you will spot others. Voltaire satirised poor Byng's death in 1759's Candide: "In this country [England], it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."
British design is to be encouraged in future at the Commonwealth Institute, Kensington, open to the public this weekend for the last time in its original state before John Pawson converts it into a new home for the Design Museum. With its dramatic hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof (as beautiful to look at as the words that describe it are clumsy), this "tent in the park" pavilion was designed by RMJM; it first opened in 1962.
Details of Open House, Dublin were also revealed this week. Clearly a passionate event, it offers (along with visits to many historic and new buildings) a "Destruction of Dublin" walking tour: all too much of the Georgian city has been destroyed by mindless new development over the past 50 years. Not an event, then, for those heading to Dublin for hen or stag parties and the "craic", but a time to get intelligently under the city's grey stone skin.
This Way Up: 15 Years of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council is a show opening in Hoxton, east London, as part of the London design festival. It tells the story of the Council's attempts to get British creativity noticed by people worldwide. Designs by Tom Dixon, Peter Kennard, Pearson Lloyd, Sebastian Bergne, Nigel Shafran, Michael Marriott and Anthony Burrill will be on show together with four one-off dresses by Basso and Brooke, inspired by their British Council exchange to Uzbekistan.
Designers will be on hand to recycle materials left over from British Council exhibitions. Other objects will be auctioned off, including "everything from giant rolls of Sellotape to fascinating chairs commissioned for shows in Venice," says Vicky Richardson, the British Council's director of architecture, design and fashion. "We wanted to clear out all this stuff, but we didn't want to throw anything away." The money raised will fund a new British Council scholarship giving young British designers the opportunity to work in Brazil.
Audi evoked memories of the intriguing relationship between architects and automobiles when it announced its Urban Concept car this week in time for the Frankfurt motor show. This lightweight, electric two-seater has been designed, says Audi, according to Mies van der Rohe's guiding principle "less is more". More than Mies, though, it calls to mind Le Corbusier's influential, if overlooked, 1929 design for a city car.
Even Le Corbusier never had the hard task of designing an electricity pylon. Contemporary architects, however, have been much involved in the competition organised by RIBA and the Department for Energy and Climate Change for a new standard British pylon. Models by the six pylon finalists will be on show at the V&A during the London design festival. The most convincing is Silhouette by Ian Ritchie Architects and engineers Jane Wernick Associates. It takes the form of a needle-like steel obelisk with well-resolved arms to carry the cables; seen in profile, it would be fairly unobtrusive. Other designs are a little top-heavy (T-Pylon by Bystrup Architects), too flamboyant (Flower Tower by Gustafson Porter with Atelier One and Pfisterer), or simply too dramatic for mass production (the taut, bow-like Plexus by AL_A and Arup). Whichever design wins – final judging takes place on 11 October 2011 – it may yet be back to the drawing board if the existing standard design, dating from 1928, is to be superseded, both technically and aesthetically.
The connection between architecture and engineering is realised memorably in the design of Norman Foster's 1978 Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. This week the Twentieth Century Society announced it was putting forward the building for listing. Expect Grade I status. Unlike Wrotham Park, 97 Park Road or the Commonwealth Institute, this hi-tech masterpiece is open to the public throughout the year.
Hungry for design? Take a seat at the London design festival
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2011
From bizarre banquets to a Lego greenhouse, there's more to the capital's design event than chairs. Here are some highlights
If the words "design festival" bring to mind a big room full of 8,000 different types of chair, things have moved on. Having decided eight years ago that design needed to get out more – out of the showrooms and out of its obsession with chairs – the London design festival is now more of a city-wide cultural event, exploiting the virtual boundlessness of its stated subject. There's too much to keep track of, 300 events over the next nine days, so here are some highlights.
Marcel Wanders
If you're after some design celebrity, look no further than Wanders, the Dutch designer who's as charming as he is protean. He's the designer you'd want to be: he's fashionably refashioned every conceivable household object, and boutique hotels are queuing up for his Midas touch. He leads this year's programme of festival breakfast talks, and he'll also be found at the Galeria Illy, alongside the likes of Marina Abramovic, Martin Parr, Ross Lovegrove and David Adjaye. Meanwhile you'll find a submerged Moooi showroom, complete with Wanders's mermaids, at Tom Dixon's Dock.
Perspectives: St Paul's Cathedral
How does master of minimalism John Pawson respond to the baroque majesty of St Paul's Cathedral? By showing people what is already there, he says. His intervention is in the Geometric Staircase, a spiralling stone space not usually open to the public. By putting a gigantic lens at the bottom and a gigantic convex mirror at the top, Pawson enables visitors to take in more than the unaided eye ever could, and appreciate Wren's engineering genius anew.
Textile Field
The V&A is a key venue for the festival, as signified by the spiralling wooden lattice temporarily installed at the Cromwell Road entrance, courtesy of AL_A, Amanda Levete Architects. Special exhibitions, events and installations are going on throughout the building but one highlight has to be Textile Field, by French stars Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. They've taken over the V&A's Raphael gallery, and installed a giant undulating carpet of bright colours. The purpose is not just to transform the space but to give visitors a new perspective from which to appreciate Raphael's works. How selfless.
Secret Sensory Suppers
The fabulous Masonic Temple at the Andaz hotel is a novel design venue, and it's inspired three teams to reinvent the art of feasting in this design event for all the senses. First up, virtuoso jellymongers Bompas & Parr serve up an appropriately occultish feast to accompany a screening of Jodorowsky's psychedelic brainmelter The Holy Mountain. A processional ice phallus is promised. Food blogger Caroline Hobkinson dispenses with conventional eating implements, and sound sculptors Silent Studio promise a sonically enhanced banquet.
Noma Bar: Cut It Out
Genius illustrator and regular Guardian contributor Noma Bar presents a one-man show of his distinctive figure-ground works, and gives you the chance to create your own, thanks to a bespoke cut-out machine in the shape of a giant dog. Visitors can feed it all manner of materials – paper, rubber, etc.
Lego Greenhouse
It's exactly what it says, but still sounds intriguing doesn't it? This is the brainchild of inventive young Brit Sebastian Bergne, who's installed the greenhouse in the piazza of Covent Garden. There's no cheating: it's a fully functioning structure made of nothing but Lego, with real plants inside. At night, lit from within, it will look even more remarkable, he promises.
Made By Britain: Vitsoe
Let's see if George Osborne's championing of British design makes a difference, but the manufacturers of Dieter Rams's timeless 606 shelving system are the first to receive the official stamp of approval. Vitsoe still makes 95% of its components in Britain, and its healthy exports are just what the nation needs. Vitsoe celebrates its heritage with a special installation at its West End store. Look out for future British design talent at the V&A's British-ish exhibition.
100% Design
If all you're really after is a nice new chair, this is the place you're most likely to find it. It's also where you're most likely to feel like you're in a "proper" design festival, Milan-style, as 400 leading designers and manufacturers pack out Earl's Court with their latest wares. On the chair front, look out for new designs by architect David Chipperfield, Barber Osgerby and Lloyd Pearson. Or for a more relaxed design fair, try the Tramshed.
Has postmodernist design eaten itself?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 12, 2011
Gaudy and irreverent, postmodernism was once an iconic chapter in design history. Now it sells gimmicky corkscrews. Can the V&A's forthcoming retrospective tell us why?
When Daryl Hannah decorates Charlie Sheen's apartment in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street, she whips up a quintessential postmodernist pastiche. The faux-ruined walls and clashing colours personify the aspirations of the nouveaux riches, a shallow world of image and artifice. In a rare moment of design slapstick, Michael Douglas (as Gordon Gecko) puts his drink on the coffee table and it falls through – he thinks there's glass there. You can hear the modernists tutting. With its deceptive surfaces and furniture that doesn't do what it's supposed to, postmodernism is not just the backdrop to but a metaphor for unbridled capitalism, where a plump balance sheet conceals all manner of sins and where marble-effect formica hides chipboard. But was postmodernism really so bad?
Already we're in cliche territory. If there were a critic's rulebook, it would stipulate the need to begin any piece on postmodernism with a pop culture reference and a tone of moral ambivalence. That mandatory disapproval is based not so much on the carnival of bad taste that romped through the 1970s and 80s, but on the fact that this bad taste was only skin deep. For, according to the standard reading, postmodernism was fickle and ironic, obsessed with style for its own sake. Where modernism was about high-minded notions such as essence and truth to materials, perhaps even a social agenda, postmodernism was about surfaces and signs. As Fredric Jameson put it in his brilliant Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "it is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card".
With a major retrospective of postmodernism opening at the V&A Museum later this month, the question is whether we have anything new to say about this phenomenon. Will the show reinforce old cliches, or will it manage to capture some of postmodernism's complexity?
One of the awkward things about the postmodernists was that few of their leading lights actually wanted to be one. Ettore Sottsass, arguably the godfather of postmodernist design, felt that it was an American architectural movement. And in some ways he was right. In architecture, the agenda was set across the Atlantic, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's embracing of Las Vegas neon, by the historicist references of Michael Graves, the vertiginous corporate lobbies of John Portman and the assemblage style of Frank Gehry's house. But in design, the main impetus came from Europe. There were exceptions, such as the American Peter Shire, whose Bel Air chair does a fair impression of a cornice abusing a beach ball. But when Sottsass founded the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, along with Michele De Lucchi and Marco Zanini and others, he unleashed postmodernist design's boldest force.
Memphis was garish and irreverent, trawling history for allusions and splattering them with previously unthinkable patterns. It was a self-conscious riposte to modernism's steel-tube sobriety. Martine Bedine's Super lamp was like a child's toy, part ferris wheel, part puppy on a leash. Sottsass's Casablanca sideboard has something Aztec about it, and that kind of arbitrary reference was pure postmodernism – it might be neo-Mesopotamian, like Sottsass's 1972 Lapislazzuli teapot, or neo-art deco primitivism like the 1982 Murmansk fruit bowl.
But what Memphis is chiefly remembered for is the plastic laminate that gave these pieces their dizzying visual effect. Thanks to this emphasis on shock-and-awe surfaces, it has become common to suggest that Memphis products were designed merely to look good in photographs – that it was mediatised furniture for an image economy. Jameson made the same point about postmodern architecture. This may be true, although in Memphis' case I'm not sure it was as conscious as that. Certainly, news of Memphis travelled fast – influencing some of the worst design of recent times – but Memphis itself was never a commercial success. The only people who seemed to do well out of it were Abet Laminati, the Italian laminates company that produced the riotous veneers Sottsass and co made all the rage.
The problem with the conventional reading of Memphis as ironic, mediatised furniture was that Sottsass, at least, was not that cynical. A romantic, he believed that domestic objects could take on an almost sacred quality. A truer postmodernist was his compatriot Alessandro Mendini, who had established the Studio Alchimia group even before Memphis. Sharing none of Sottsass's optimism, Mendini was much more the ironist and iconoclast, seizing the opportunity to break all of design's rules – such as originality. His Proust armchair, a baroque confection daubed in pointillist brushstrokes, crosses furniture with an impressionist painting. He once described it to me as "hermaphrodite design" – nothing is his except the act of creating a hybrid. It was literate, sophisticated and meant as a joke.
Just as architectural postmodernism descended into the pejorative "PoMo", with pastiches such as Philip Johnson's AT&T building (which crossed a skyscraper with a Chippendale cabinet), so postmodernist design fell into gimmicky merchandising. Mendini was a key culprit, with his toy-like Anna G corkscrew for Alessi, shaped like a woman in a dress. Even more literal was Michael Graves's kettle, also for Alessi, with its whistling plastic bird perched on the spout. Abandoning the old form-and-function dogma, design embraced its new nature as kitsch – kitsch that still sells rather well today, we might add.
From here, the link to pop and street culture is an easy one, and the V&A retrospective promises to regale us with instances of where postmodernist design culture simply became popular culture. Hip-hop sampling, Peter Saville's New Order record covers, Grace Jones's eclectic styling and the Levi's ad in which Nick Kamen strips off in a launderette are all claimed as a groundswell of the postmodern ethos. There's a good theoretical basis for a lot of that, but it threatens to confuse postmodernism with 1980s popular culture generally – and resuscitating Neneh Cherry as a postmodern icon feels like the 80s revival run amok.
In fact, revivalism seems to be one of the permanent legacies of postmodernism. Retro has become a perpetual condition. You can see it in ultra-conservative magazine design and referential fashion statements. If chameleon style-shifters such as Madonna and Grace Jones are postmodernists, then so is Lady Gaga. What is Apple if not neo-modernism, a revival of the minimalism preached by Dieter Rams and the Ulm design school in the 1960s? And the image economy (if that really is a Memphis legacy) is now so advanced that designers publish computer-generated images of work that is not only skin-deep, but doesn't even exist. In architecture, meanwhile, PoMo didn't die so much as find itself exported to the new bastions of turbo-capitalism: mirrored glass (and the lack of financial transparency that goes with it) abounds in Moscow, while the towers with the funny crowns migrated to Dubai and Shanghai. The V&A ends the story in 1990 (well, shows have to end somewhere) but postmodernism is proving a difficult habit to kick.
PoMo power: the return of postmodernism
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 3, 2011
The iconic style of the 70s and 80s is back, with a V&A show and a new generation of architects flirting with its pluralist concepts
It had to happen. Postmodernism – the style of pink-painted pediments, marbleised MDF and leopard-skin Formica, of the Chippendale skyscraper, the designer teapot and the acanthus-leaved Homebase, which seemed to give form to the consuming excess of the Reagan-Thatcher years and which the architecture and design world then dumped as summarily as a herpes-ridden lover – is back.
For some years, interesting architects have been playing with postmodernist themes. Now the V&A is honouring it with an exhibition which promises to make it look fun and important. It's only a matter of time before the former TV-am headquarters, famous for the giant eggcups on its skyline, and those of MI6, whose robotic forms a peevish critic once compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger, become listed buildings.
According to Charles Jencks, the man who applied the term "postmodernism" (or Post-Modernism, as he likes to write it) to architecture, it never went away, and he has published a book, The Story of Post-Modernism, to prove it. As evidence he cites decorative icons such as the Olympic stadium in Beijing, the Gherkin in London, and architects such as Edouard François, who has covered buildings with plants and stacks of large flowerpots. Terry Farrell, author of the TV-am and MI6 buildings, says: "Most of us are postmodernists now. We will never go back."
It all depends what you mean by postmodernism. By one definition it is a short-lived style of architecture and design, such as art deco, which flourished in the 1970s and 80s. It favoured ornament, ironic wit and bright colours. It was pop and classical at once. It revelled in being artificial and theatrical, with columns or arches supporting nothing, pumped-up cornices and weighty-looking rustication that sounded hollow when you tapped it. You could see it was a stage set, and that was the point. It set out to be everything that modernist design, which had aimed for undecorated honesty in form and structure, was not.
Alternatively, postmodernism is an attitude where surface is substance, which delights in its own hollowness. Frequent costume changes are the art of life. Its twin deities are the odd couple of the musician Madonna and the architect Philip Johnson, who in 1978 designed the AT&T building (now the Sony building) in New York – a pink granite tower with a Florentine arcade at its base and a broken pediment at its top that drew immediate comparison with a Chippendale bookcase. Johnson had previously been an enthusiastic supporter of modernism and had worked with Mies van der Rohe on the nearby Seagram building, an austere black glass box which was ostensibly AT&T's opposite. He would go through several more style changes before his death in 2005, aged 98.
For Michael Graves, whose municipal building in Portland, Oregon, was postmodernism's first major monument, it was a "critique of modernism's failure to deal with the human and the urban" and a rediscovery of the "humanistic discipline of architecture, where we are the primary subject, with scale and proportion – all of that above all else." It is about buildings people can understand and with it "how to make a window, a door, a threshold. A lot of buildings are just glass, you get your rocks off on how the glass is detailed – that's a pretty thin world."
Many of those most closely involved in postmodernism say it was countercultural and anti-corporate. In 1972, Denise Scott Brown, with her husband, Robert Venturi, wrote Learning From Las Vegas, a founding text of postmodernism which celebrated a city usually dismissed as vulgar and kitsch. She describes growing up in her native South Africa, where "the struggle was between what you saw and what you were told ought to be, between the diversity, the African folk pop-art, the beautiful landscape, and expats telling us we should behave like the English". Coming to London to study, she saw the same conflict between the "is" and the "ought to" in the lives of working-class people and the style of architecture that modernist architects tried to impose on them. "You should value what is, because people make it," she says, "not see it as bad because it is not your taste culture."
For her, as for Graves, buildings should communicate, which usually means they should be decorated in ways that mean something to their users. Just as important was their planning: they should be planned inside and out so that people are more likely to meet and interact. This, she says, is the main virtue of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, designed by her and Venturi and completed 20 years ago. "People think that all we've done is put neon on the cathedral, but it's much more than that."
For Jencks, postmodernism is about many things, especially plurality, complexity and the ability of buildings to symbolise almost anything, from the order of the cosmos to a hot dog. It was a reaction to "the triumph of nothingness", the modernist architecture which had, by the 1960s, become the official style of the establishment in both capitalist and socialist countries, a dogmatic, high church willing to compromise with business, which reached a new low when Walter Gropius, the high priest of modernist high-mindedness, designed the Playboy Club in London. The "death of modernism", according to Jencks, came in 1972, when the modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis was demolished.
But then postmodernism suffered what Scott Brown calls "the corporate takeover that we call PoMo", when Philip Johnson, whom she calls "an evil man", unveiled his AT&T designs in 1978. Jencks describes the same moment as the time when postmodernism, if it did not die, "grew old", only six years after the death of modernism at Pruitt-Igoe. From there it was a slippery slope to a new Playboy moment in Disney's rolling out of resort hotels by leading postmodernists such as Michael Graves, and the adoption of the style as the standard wrapping for large office blocks of the 1980s boom.
With dismaying speed, the style of counterculture was consumed by the corporate. The V&A's show promises to reveal postmodernism as a thing of energy and pleasure, running across art, fashion and music as well as design and architecture. Yet by the mid-80s its invention had run dry and its wit had become lumpen. It became a useful trick for globalised finance, whereby large American practices could make a tower in China look like a pagoda or one in the Gulf look like a tent. It lived on its wit and, when it lost it, it was doomed.
Yet we are all, as Farrell and Jencks say, postmodernists now. The idea that a single style could dominate, as it did at the height of the modern movement, has gone for ever. The idea that buildings communicate, however clumsily, is contained in the remarkably imperishable idea of the "iconic" building. Ideas about city planning that owe something or other to Scott Brown's principles are contained in most large-scale masterplans for new developments. The results can be monstrous or beautiful. To have more of the latter, we need to rediscover the agility of postmodernism at its best, combined with Scott Brown's belief that design has something to do with improving people's lives.
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion is at the V&A, London SW7, 24 Sep-15 Jan
Amanda Levete, architect, on her barefoot work policy: ‘It’s a great leveller’ | interview
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 3, 2011
The Stirling prizewinner and her shoeless team are pushing the boundaries of design
Approaching the HQ of Amanda Levete Architects in a converted warehouse in west London, it is hard not to fixate on dozens of shoes – trainers, high heels, espadrilles, loafers – discarded on a large doormat just inside the front door. Have I wandered into a super-trendy mosque or an avant-garde art installation? In fact, it's simply that employees are encouraged to work barefoot. Is this, I wonder, the result of some conviction that a connection with the earth inspires more creativity? "Well, it keeps the carpet clean," says Levete drily. "Also it's a great leveller, and it's relaxing: you can put your feet on the sofas."
It also means the office is incredibly quiet, although this might also be because there is a lot to do. This year the practice won the competition to build a 1,500 sq metre extension to the V&A Museum, and Levete is busy putting the final touches to a 12m-diameter circular timber construction that will stand outside the V&A's entrance from 17 September as part of the annual London Design Festival (Levete is married to Ben Evans, the festival director).
The "Timber Wave" will be built out of American red oak – the first time timber has been used structurally on such a large scale. "It's been a very steep learning curve," Levete admits. "We've been using laminates which are more often used in furniture-making, but on a very small scale, so we wanted to take it up a notch… It's interesting because normally what we do is very driven by function, and that's what separates architecture from art, it's a very different sensibility. But here we have an opportunity to really explore and experiment."
Much of Levete's work so far has seamlessly fused art and function, medium and message. At Future Systems, the groundbreaking architectural firm she founded with her ex-husband Jan Kaplický, Levete designed the shimmering carapace of Selfridges department store in Birmingham and the space-age media centre at Lord's cricket ground, which won the prestigious Stirling Prize in 1999.
"One of the most gratifying moments came when I was on a train going to see Selfridges completed and I overheard a woman saying, 'It's the first time I've felt proud to be coming to Birmingham,'" she recalls.
Levete and Kaplický divorced in 2006 after the pressures of living and working together became too intense (sadly, Kaplický died suddenly three years later). Their son, Josef, is now 16. Does he have architectural ambition? Levete grins. "Absolutely none. He says he'd rather do his maths homework than see another building."
Postmodernism – In pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 3, 2011
It gave us MI6's Thames-side temple, TV-am's eggcups and corporate icons aplenty. Now the power of postmodernism is celebrated in an exhibition at the V&A
The Saturday interview: architect Amanda Levete
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 8, 2011
Amanda Levete made her reputation working with in the influential architectural practice, Future Systems. She talks about her 'spectacular failures', and also her many thrilling triumphs
Amanda Levete is showing me a model of her most spectacular failure. We're standing in our stocking feet (her office, her rules) before a little box containing her and Anish Kapoor's 2002 design for the Princess Diana memorial fountain. It consists of a dinky red pillow lying in a model of the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park. White marble steps on one bank sweep down the water's edge to provide a viewpoint.
"It was so beautiful – a blood red pillow that would shoot a 15ft high dome of red water. We wanted to create a wonderful, ethereal place."
Pillows? Blood? Some critics were livid. How dare Levete's architectural practice Future Systems and Kapoor be so insensitive to the memory of her Di-ness as to produce a design that reminded them (poor flowers) of sex and death?
"The judges hated it," recalls Levete. "They asked 'Why red? Why not green?' Anish replied grandly: 'As an artist, I could never work in green.'"
"I was really pissed off we didn't get it," says Levete. But surely, I suggest, she's well out of it. Look what happened to Kathryn Gustafson's winning design: her ring of bright water faced a tsunami of press criticism; visitors injured themselves on the slippery granite or washed their dogs in streams designed for moody contemplation.
Better, sometimes, for architecture to remain unbuilt than be sullied by realisation. This isn't a trite point. It goes to the heart of Levete's formative architectural experiences. At the Architectural Association in the 1970s, Levete was taught by architects who preferred their projects to be hypothetical. "Not one of them, people like Rem Koolhaas and Nigel Coates, intended to build. When I left, I didn't know anything about building." Isn't that nuts? "You could argue it's a problem, but it's also not: it's the one moment you get to explore your creativity. I learned how to build later."
It also goes to the heart of her working relationship with her late ex-husband, Czech architect Jan Kaplický, with whom she designed two of the most remarkable pieces of recent British architecture: the 1998 Media Centre at Lord's cricket ground in London and the 2003 Selfridges department store in Birmingham. "Jan would have been happy not to build. He knew his place in history was assured through his drawings. He couldn't bear to visit the actual buildings. At Selfridges' opening, he stormed off because the finished structure wasn't as pure as the original work."
Levete, though, is more pragmatic. "I don't devalue the power of conceptual thinking, but for me the thrill of architecture is to see your ideas realised. To struggle against the problems out there and overcome them."
For Levete, 55, that creative struggle with an external constraint is one of the things that seduced her into studying architecture in the first place. "After I got expelled from school for sunbathing naked on the roof during a biology lesson at 16, I didn't know what to do. I got so embarrassed that all my friends were going to university that I did an A-level in art and art history, and a foundation year at art school. That's when architecture came across my radar, and when it did, I realised that I work best when I'm doing something creatively, but have a boundary to push. As an artist you have to create your own boundaries. I realised I would find that difficult, whereas architecture is creative, but it has the reality of boundaries you don't create."
But sometimes those boundaries have proven insurmountable. Another of what she calls her "spectacular failures" was a recent project for the Louvre in Paris. Her design envisaged freeing the subterranean space beneath IM Pei's transparent pyramid from its role as holding pen for angry, queueing tourists. "We wanted to create space where visitors could have a moment of repose and think about what they've seen, rather than a clogged entrance hall."
But, again, her ideas were not well received. "The judges told me, 'You're not playing the game.' I knew enough French to say: 'I didn't realise it was a game.' So bureaucratic! For me, architecture is about not playing a game by the rules, it's about challenging the brief you're given – pushing boundaries."
Enough about Levete's (alleged) failures. We're meeting because Amanda Levete Architects has just won the competition to built an extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It will be the biggest new art space in London since Tate Modern – a 1,500 sq metre gallery for temporary exhibitions with a new entrance to the building.
Isn't it a poisoned chalice? Seven years ago the V&A abandoned Daniel Libeskind's provocative Spiral extension plan. "It had got through planning and then there was a storm that made the V&A change its mind," says Levete. "But, no, I don't think that will happen to us." That storm included journalist William Rees-Mogg describing Libeskind's plan as a "disaster for civilisation". What does Levete think of Libeskind's plan? "It was iconic, but the time for iconic buildings has passed." Levete met the V&A's new brief by producing a subtler, indeed scarcely perceptible, piece of architecture than Libeskind's strutting, jutting extension, one she argues will create an "iconic space rather than be an iconic building".
Her design takes its cue from the local authority's proposed pedestrianisation of Exhibition Road. "That street will be thronged with people. Our idea is to encourage them to drift in. We want to break down the separation between street and museum. We will draw visitors in from Exhibition Road through a colonnade into a large, light-filled public courtyard, and down into the galleries."
Levete says a lot of the thinking that went into the failed Louvre bid was recycled for the V&A project. There, too, she was concerned with flows of people and light into a subterranean space. "The gallery space can either be flooded with dramatic daylight, or the glass painted black to provide the low light levels that the V&A needs for the delicate materials they sometimes exhibit."
Her aim, she says, in architecture, is to change the way its users interact. "The point of architecture is to contribute to the culture of a city or the culture of a nation. Architecture changes the way you see yourself, the way others see you. It should be respected for that."
But it often isn't. Levete is furious about education secretary Michael Gove's disparaging remarks about her profession. He recently told a conference, "we won't be getting any award-winning architects" to design new schools, "because no one in this room is here to make architects richer".
"I do find it depressing he thinks we're in it to get our snouts in the trough." But does it matter if our kids are educated in schools that look like out-of-town Tescos, so long as they can add up and speak proper? "There's no necessary relationship between how beautiful school buildings are and exam results, but what Gove is saying is: let's have more mediocrity, more crap buildings, because they don't matter, right?
"Already 80% of the profession are not good. You only have to look around London to see that. Politicians too rarely root out the crap. When I think of all the mediocrity in an area of expensive real estate like the City of London, and think how little a genius like Jan – and I don't use the term lightly – saw built in his lifetime, you can't help but think two things: one, the dice are loaded against great architecture; two: work harder."
She met Kaplický in the late 1980s. He was tall, elegant, handsome and "very Czech, by which I mean passionate and pessimistic" – the very embodiment of a romantic emigre, one who came to London after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague spring in 1968, with £50 in his pocket. He had worked in the Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers team that designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and when he met Levete had just been fired from Norman Foster's office because "he was too much of a maverick. I fell for all of that."
It's easy to overstate the couple's differences and their potential for creative symbiosis, to cast him as dour, masculine, iconoclast and tall, her as sunny, feminine, pragmatic, small – but there is something in that. She persuaded him to stop teaching and get an office where they could begin to build on the precedents established by Rogers and Foster, toward a more organic, voluptuous, formally inventive architecture. That office is the warehouse in Notting Hill where we're doing this interview.
It was here that the couple designed the Lord's media centre, an egg-like structure sheathed in aluminium panels. "That structure, probably more than any other, expresses the ideas, the aesthetic and the technical innovations that Jan had been exploring relentlessly for more than 20 years. That was also the year our son Josef was born – without question the best work we made together."
The £5.8m design almost bankrupted them, but when it won Britain's foremost architectural award, the Stirling prize, in 1999, the practice took off. But living and working together with no boundaries proved too much. "Ours was a very public falling out, played out in the office." They divorced in 2006, but carried on working in the same building. "For the last few years, there was a Berlin Wall between us in the office. Awful, awful, awful."
On 14 January 2009, Kaplický collapsed on a Prague street and died, aged 71. Hours before, he had visited his second wife Eliška and new-born daughter Johanna. Twelve days later Amanda met Eliska for the first time at Kaplický's funeral in Prague. "My greatest regret is that I didn't make peace with him in life," she said shortly after. A few months before his death, she and Kaplický had agreed he would move out of the office they had shared for 20 years, retaining Future Systems with a team of four, and she would remain in their Notting Hill warehouse as Amanda Levete Architects. "I'd hoped this would have made things easier. But we never found out if that would happen."
Levete is now married to Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival. Amanda Levete Architects is thriving. Why are so few leading architects – you and Zaha Hadid notwithstanding – women? "Women leave to have babies and don't come back. It's a tough thing to be an architect. One of the hardest things for me is that I get described as super-tough. No man would ever be described that way – at least not as a criticism." Is it fair? "I think I'm a very benign boss. I'm also very demanding."
She shows me artists' impressions of her recent work, from a cultural centre in Lisbon to a tower block in Shoreditch. And then my favourite Amanda Levete scheme – a metro station in Naples designed with Anish Kapoor. Why couldn't they have done up my tube station, Finsbury Park? "Because there are very few visionary pieces of public patronage in Britain nowadays. Gove just expresses a more general contempt."
Shame. The design looks wonderful: one entrance looks like a rusting steel pair of lips, while the other is an aluminium form that seems to float in mid-air. It's great Levete and Kapoor will finally see a joint design realised. "Only one problem," says Levete. "For now, there are no other stations. We've designed a station for a subway line that goes nowhere." Hilarious, if a little embarrassing. No wonder some architects prefer their works to remain unbuilt.