Ana paula pacheco

The Post- Modern fashioned in the view of Charles Jencks

Architecture Knowledge and Writing Ana Paula Beghetto Pacheco

One could argue that Charles Jencks’s (1939-) book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first published in 1977, is one of the theoretical founding treaties of postmodernism. It narrates the historical development of post-modern architecture. Besides the essay itself, Jencks also explores other forms of narrative, by making use of images and captions. The author writes in an informal and personal way, showing his views on the development of post-modern architecture and orienting the practice of architects interested in taking part in that the movement.

The present essay aims at analysing how Jencks developed his theoretical framework, pursuing a better understating of his explicit and implicit rationale in regard to the postmodern architecture. Its scope focuses on the first part of the book: The Death of Modern Architect.

Jencks, an American theorist, is recognized as one the main representatives of the postmodern theory in Architecture. He symbolically dates the end of modernism on 15th July, 1972, at 3.32 p.m., when the Pruitt-Igoe Housing (1952-55), an awarded building by Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1086), was blown up.

The housing project for working-class people,

comprised of anonymous corridors and ‘streets in the air’, was emblematic of the application of modernist principles to mass construction.

“Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalized, mutilated and defaced by its black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”1 Afterwards, the author, in a simplifying and generalizing approach, lists several postmodern buildings – by architects such as Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Michel Graves, to mention but a few –, with different aesthetic characteristics, but similar architectural language. His narrative and critique is an equation deliberately easy to be 1

Jencks, C. (1981). The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Wisbech: Balding and Mansell, pp.

9.

The Post-Modern fashioned by the view of Charles Jencks Ana Paula Beghetto Pacheco assimilated by the reader. Jencks characterized the postmodernism in a way that it could be recognized as a coherent discourse, endowed with its own semantic and linguistic features, by the same token discrediting the modern movement. For instance, in the book introduction he describes Mies Van Der Rohe (1943-1957) as exclusivist in comparison with a “totally inclusive”2 postmodern architecture which allows “even its purist opposite a place when this is justifiable”3.

Mies Van Der Rohe is also accused of making the most univalent formal system, which is, according to Jencks, “the general aspect of an architecture created around one (or a few) simplified values”4. For him, Univalent form is one of the characteristics of the modern movement which caused the impoverishment of architectural language. The main features of Mies’s work, such as the use of a few materials and the right-angled geometry, resulted in an uneconomical and dysfunctional glass and steel box that became the most applied formula (or form) in modern architecture, what Jencks calls “office building”, leading the reader to believe that the simplicity of Mies’s architecture is simply wrong.

The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus located in Chicago would be an example of another aspect of the concept of univalent: the weak relationship between the social and psychological meanings of buildings. For the American theorist, the IIT is a perfect example of an inarticulate building by Mies. He argues, in this sense, that each building of the campus does not communicate their function, thus causing what he names a “universal language of confusion”. “[...] the bizarre confusion to which this can lead is shown by Mies himself in the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago, a large enough collection of varied functions for us to regard it as a microcosm of his surrealist world. [...] A characteristic rectangular shape might be deciphered as a teaching block where students churn out one similar idea after another on an assembly line – because the factory metaphor suggests this interpretation.”5 Jencks states that univalence could be found in other post-war architects, such as American Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Ulrich Franzen. Such flaw, the simplistic use of meanings, would be also verified in Aldo Rossi’s and the Italian 2

Ibid., 15.

3

Ibid., 15.

4

Ibid., 15.

5

Ibid., 17.

2

The Post-Modern fashioned by the view of Charles Jencks Ana Paula Beghetto Pacheco Rationalists’ work, who, according to him, failed in their attempt to continue the classical patterns of Italian cities, reproducing instead the 1930s Fascist architecture. In the author’s view, the misuse of clear meanings was inherent to all important architects of the 1960s. For Jencks, it was the great issue of the post-war period, “at the end, the better the modern architect, the less he can control obvious meanings.”6 The author, this way, interprets the modernist architects’ failure in understand the multivalent nature of the language, which, according to him, is ‘radically schizophrenic’ (tradition X fast changing society).

Image 1.7

On the one hand Jencks demands the restoring of an innovative and genuine architectural complexity, able to reconcile the multiple aspects of architecture; on the other hand, he affirms that this complexity has to be converted into simple concepts and solutions, in which the idea of multivalence should convey the balance between simplicity and complexity.

Charles Jencks defends that architecture has to express meanings in which form is a result of an oratory. In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, he creates an intellectual 6

Ibid., 21.

7

Jencks, C. (1981). The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Wisbech: Balding and Mansell,

pp.17.

3

The Post-Modern fashioned by the view of Charles Jencks Ana Paula Beghetto Pacheco discourse that addresses the issue of character in architecture and points it out through examples - as the above mentioned - to demonstrate the inadequacy of modern architecture to communicate meanings. Advocating the opposite of what the modern architects proposed, Jencks defends an architecture related to history, emphasizing the importance of its associations with the past. Such a posture may be perceived as an aggrandizement of reviving old styles, as verified in Europe with the formalist reminiscences of classicism. Jencks’ formalist and historicist discourse is often passionate and transcends reason, transpiring the heat of the current discussion at his time. It also happened with modernists, but perhaps not in a so marked degree.

Jencks, C. (1981). The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Wisbech: Balding and Mansell.

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