The composite, collage, 'anything goes' approach of postmodernism has caused some critics to deny that it is a style at all, merely a broad statement applied to architecture since the 1970s, continuing through today. How can postmodernism be a style if it is no style at all? Because it arose during the historic preservation movement and embraces the old, not the new, it merely seems to feed off of the old rather than make a new contribution to the architectural cannon (Paradis, 2003). However, even postmodernism's critics admit that it would be difficult to mistake a postmodern structure for a historic structure of another era. Rather than showing one period, or reviving a period style from the past, postmodernism often exaggerates the past, and "does not necessarily try to replicate historic styles as did the period styles, but instead makes fun of it, using a wide variety of historic forms, simplifying and mixing them into an unorganized, illogical jumble of a building" (Paradis, 2003).
Rather than structures that rise organically from the ground, postmodern structures seem to be grafted onto the ground, without rhyme or reason. They may contain fixtures and artifices that appear real or functional, but in fact are not. Such jarring surfaces, apparent 'ugliness' and nostalgia for an admittedly false past in postmodern architecture that revolutionized and opened up the field from the formula of modernism has had a negative as well as a positive effect -- it has resulted in a tendency for it to be depoliticized, or even reactionary in its ideological orientation, despite the fact that it arose during a radical period of world history, where seismic changes were occurring in the social structure of America and the world.
Most notably, "Leon Krier proposed the recreation of European cities based on medieval principles and a return to a preindustrial, craft society. Krier would later become an apologist for Albert Speer's Nazi architecture, claiming that the architecture had no representative political...
Postmodern The term 'Post modernism' has emerged as a real area of academic study only from the middle of the 1980's onwards. It is a complicated and a complex term, quite difficult to define exactly, and the reason for this is the fact that the term post modernism appears not only in art but also in various other forms of functioning like for example, in architecture, sociology, in literature, in the
Rem Koolhaas: A survey of his work and aesthetic philosophy The radical Dutch architect and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas is often called one of the world's best -- and one of the world's most controversial -- architects. Koolhaas is as much known for his aesthetic philosophy as he is for his work. "Koolhaas' most provocative -- and in many ways least understood -- contribution to the cultural landscape is as an
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter argued in Collage City that the designer should intervene in the existing city by adding to and adjusting what is already there, a process more like collage than any other art form. (Barnett, 1996, p. 185) The city as "collage" is possibly the finest metaphor for the urban world. Nowhere else do so many different people and purposes come together as in the city. No other
French Romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix, is well-known from this period. Delacroix often took his subjects from literature but added much more by using color to create an effect of pure energy and emotion that he compared to music. He also showed that paintings can be done about present-day historical events, not just those in the past (Wood, 217). He was at home with styles such as pen, watercolor, pastel, and
Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous authors of the modern era. In the tradition of Gabriel Marquez, Rushdie sweeps the reader up in his novel, Midnights Children, like the book by Marquez that obviously had a great deal of influence on Rushdie, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnights Children is a postmodern look at the modern fairytale that Salman Rushdie weaves for those who wish to pick up
Beauty Beast Judgment and Superficiality in "Beauty and the Beast": Parsing a Fairytale from a Postmodern Perspective It is the conceit of nearly every epoch to assume that certain ideas, perspectives, and frameworks are new or unique to the current time, and with postmodernism this has extended to the notion of purposefully and meaningfully fragmented texts. That is, many postmodernists view fragmentation and purposeful alienation from reality -- truly, a questioning of
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