8
arts
the smoke
a postmodern adventure With the end of the holiday season, it is now time to go back to the library. For me, and for many other humanities students too, this means going back to such dreaded terms as “performative”, “Nahträglichkeit” and, of course, “postmodernism” – sometimes all huddling on the same page. To counter the bookshelf blues and my PoMo fears, I propose a tour of London’s grandest postmodern skyscrapers, as well as some related ironic cameos. For if postmodernism’s highly wrought discourses scare me in the library, its flesh-and-bone constructions can almost make one laugh. Architectural postmodernism was playful from its beginnings in the 1960s, when American architect Robert Venturi substituted Mies van der Rohe’s modernist slogan “less is more” with its parody, “less is a bore.” Influenced by machine aesthetic, modernist buildings spotlighted cutting edge materials with minimal decoration and hard lines. Rejecting the perceived dogmatism of this older style, postmodernism embraced the city as an organic work of art. It moved away from a visionary utopian towards an acceptance of the real
HOMEBASE KENSINGTON, 1988 195 WARWICK RD CLOSEST TUBE: WEST KENSINGTON, EARL’S COURT What is on sale at this Homebase (top right): furniture, or artefacts from Tutankhamen’s tomb? Architect Ian Pollard seemingly designed the building for the latter, transforming a low-rise, square mall into an ancient Egyptian fantasy. At the car park entrance, columns with papyrusshaped capitals hold up the Homebase logo. The architrave provides maximum visibility to the corporate name, while the gigantic frieze of Egyptian gods in the car park suggests the lavish grandeur of ancient Egypt. Reduced to its most familiar images, antiquity is homely rather than historically correct. Appealing and unashamedly kitsch, the building is attractive and funny. But the playful decoration is charged with meaning. Underhand, the building equates shopping with tourism and consumerism with discovery. If we flock to see Giza at the British Museum, then maybe we should flock to buy our furniture here?
EMBANKMENT PLACE, 1991 ONE EMBANKMENT PLACE, CHARING CROSS CLOSEST TUBE: CHARING CROSS Embankment Place (below), designed by Terry Farrell and Partners, is more subdued in colour than most postmodern
and the popular. Las Vegas’s eccentric casinos became a model for study, with their lavish evocations of distant historical and geographical locales taken as a blueprint for kitsch pastiche. Las Vegas’s casinos are a good reminder of architectural postmodernism’s association with market confidence, big money, and the Thatcher era. From national museums to banks’ headquarters, most of the buildings on this tour originally hosted the institutions of increasingly authoritarian states, or the offices of conservative economic empires. Learning from the existing cityscape rather than plotting its overhaul and freely re-using past styles rather than preserving their historical specificity, postmodernism gave a “value-free” veneer to corporate intentions. Ridiculous as the overstated playfulness of these buildings is, there is always a subtle brief of corporate vision. And with that, this tour should make us think.
/ COSTANZA BELTRAMI / COURTAULD / ARTS EDITOR / IMAGES: YUTETSU AMETANI
buildings. Shaped like a gigantic train shed representing Charing Cross station below, it has also been compared to a gigantic jukebox – despite its use of sleek high-tech materials, its primary point of reference to remains postmodern pop.
MARCO POLO HOUSE, 1987 QUEENSTOWN ROAD CLOSEST STATION: BATTERSEA PARK Across the river in Battersea stands another lavish building by Ian Pollard. While Homebase was a playfully overstated historical reconstruction, here the mood is more serious. Originally intended as an office block for Marcopolo Satellite Broadcasting Company, the construction shuns the clerical to imitate a royal palace. Its subdued colour scheme matches the trees of the park across the road, but its marble cladding epitomises a decade of conceited star buildings and urban excess. In proper postmodernist fashion, the building plays a game of witty quotation: the ornamental gable at the top references New York’s Sony Tower, one of the first and most iconic postmodern skyscrapers, and perhaps even eighteenth-century Chippendale furniture. Yet the quotations are transformed into a game of inversion: the utilitarian dresses up as palatial, the skyscraper lays horizontal, and the Chippendale cabinet is outside on the street. As Ian Pollard said,
“Marco” is after all “a fun building”, a mustsee now that it is set for demolition.
STREET-PORTER HOUSE, 1987 44 BRITTON STREET CLOSEST TUBE: FARRINGDON Despite its grand aspirations, postmodernism has sometimes been downsized to decorate the home. CZWG Architects designed this unusual townhouse for the television executive Janet Street Porter. Triangular windows and diamond-shaped window tracery mirror the house’s irregular and cramped City site. Such unconventional tracery is both a statement of modernity, and a mock evocation of the lattice frames of old medieval homes. Simulating airiness and sunlight, the brickwork is graded in colour, becoming lighter towards the top of the building. Each window-frame seems to support a rustic wooden beam, perhaps quoting prehistoric architecture, perhaps evoking the homeliness of a mountain refuge. Again, post-modern architecture is here revealed as a colourful game of echoes.
NO. 1 POULTRY, 1997 1 POULTRY CLOSEST TUBE: BANK One Poultry was only completed in 1997, several years after its designer James Stirling’s death, at a time when
postmodernism’s popularity was beginning to wane. Built in pink and yellow limestone, it has been described as cartoon-like. Its colours are more acidulous than vivid. If its golden mouldings evoke Egyptian splendour, the tower is strongly reminiscent of a submarine turret. Indeed, the whole building seems menacingly belligerent, its double-sided clock a direct quotation from the Fascist-era central post office in Naples. With semi-deserted shops at its base, it is more suggestive of authoritarian coldness than any of the other buildings mentioned on this tour, an association sadly reinforced by the news that the terrace restaurant at the very top has become a suicide spot for City workers.
MINSTER COURT, 1992 1-2 MINCING LANE CLOSEST TUBE: MONUMENT / TOWER HILL Postmodern architectural quotations are not only taken from ancient Egypt, as in One Poultry, or from Art Deco, as in Vauxhall Cross and the nearby development One America Square. Mimicking the steepness of medieval gables, Minster Court (above) has been described as “postmodern gothic”. The three gigantic horses decorating the building’s plaza symbolise the “horsepower” originally moving international trade, and directly quote the ancient Greek horses which decorate St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.