2023-09-29 13:39:30
Hitler’s favorite stone is said to have been travertine. Ultimately he wanted to have “Germania” built out of it. There are still 14 columns made of the porous limestone standing on the edge of a stone construction company in Stuttgart today, which were commissioned for Berlin but were never picked up. Decades later, the British architect James Stirling had the new building of the Stuttgart State Gallery covered with the same Cannstatter travertine – a scandal.
The architects Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto, who were defeated in the 1977 competition, immediately pulled out the Nazi club to defame the winning design. They wanted to recognize the building as a monumental tomb and openly called it fascist.
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They were offended that their own museum machines made of glass and steel had not convinced the jury and that they instead awarded a building that was voluminous in stone but with a lively collage of architectural quotes and colorful pop elements. Postmodernism had – once again – achieved a victory against modernity.
Bundeskunsthalle celebrates postmodernism
The culture wars between supporters of an eclecticism that is perceived as frivolous and superficial to reactionary right-wing against the defenders of the status quo, which is viewed as democratic but is frozen in self-absorption, also plays a role in the art and exhibition hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. (The Bundeskunsthalle is the last building in the illustrious series of postmodern designed museums that were planned in the 1980s.)
But the exhibition there, “Everything at Once,” tells postmodernism not just as a history of style, but as a history of discourse. And despite the somewhat arbitrary time frame of 1967 to 1992, it appears to be far from over.
View of the exhibition “Everything at once. Postmodernism, 1967–1992” in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
Source: © Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany GmbH, Photo: Roman März
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was the godfather of the era. He asked himself what postmodernism was and came to the conclusion that it was “not the end of modernism,” but rather its “permanent birth.” His colleague Jacques Derrida introduced his postmodern method of deconstruction in 1967, the year he was born, and in “la différance” freed all visible signs of their clarity.
The American theorist Marshall McLuhan promptly reiterated his influential view of the medium as the actual message. He named them Message but with Derrida’s i/o turner in Massage um – without a talent for irony you can’t get very far in postmodernism.
Creative freedom
Fortunately, the exhibition only hints at the fact that the theoretical superstructure is not only empowering but also oppressive. Designed as an exuberant course of photographs, videos, image quotes, objects, interiors, models, furniture and works of art, it makes one thing clear above all:
Postmodernism was not anti-modern, as its contemporary critics felt, but rather drew from a large treasure trove of sources, which also includes modernity. In doing so, the artists, designers and architects made use of an intellectual and, as a result, creative freedom that the modernists, who were prone to ideological ossification, increasingly denied themselves.
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In 1966, the South African urban planner and architect Denise Scott Brown did not place herself among the uniform skyscrapers on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, but in the Nevada desert. She put her hands on her hips for the iconic photo, with the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas in the background, and celebrated the much-maligned “American Vernacular.” She and her husband, the American architect Robert Venturi, had the same enthusiasm for it as they did for the Mannerist architecture of Rome and African mud huts.
Masanori Umeda (Memphis Milano), „Tawaraya-Ring“, 1981
Quelle: Courtesy of Memphis Milano
In 1972/73, the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass drew his series “The Planet as a Festival”, an enchantingly psychedelic pavilion garden. He later became a co-founder of the Memphis group, which designed post-functional furniture made of pressboard and flashy Formica. At the same time, the architect James Wines put supermarkets in self-satirizing buildings with collapsing and heaving walls. And in 1988, John Hejduk made his eyes blink at a Berlin housing complex.
Learned enough from Las Vegas
But soon it would be over: funny. The Scottish ironist Ian Hamilton Finlay suspected the degeneration of postmodernism early on and built a kind of pillar of honor for the “architecture of our time”: At the top it says “less is more” (referring to the modern rigorism of Mies van der Rohe around 1960). Including “less is a bore” (as Robert Venturi countered the boredom of international style around 1970).
Even deeper, one reads “I am a whore” (coined in 1980 on Philip Johnson, who once actually sympathized with the Nazis and made postmodernism marketable). And Las Vegas also quickly learned from Venturi/Brown’s groundbreaking book “Learning from Las Vegas”. The latest generation of themed hotels was built in a postmodern style, but behind their Venetian-Pharaonic cladding turned out to be pure structuralism – modern wolves in postmodern sheep’s clothing.
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So postmodernism, which was able to celebrate spectacular victories for a few years, was not ultimately the winner in history. Esprit and wit can hardly compete with the efficiency of modernism, not even the disruptive ingenuity that characterizes many of the designs. If necessary, anything can be stuck onto a plain concrete grid, even if it’s copied old town facades. Who else wanted to decipher subtle quotes?
Federal Government: “Getting serial construction done”
Bonn’s view of postmodern architecture and design is nostalgic, but also points to the present. Because the time for a second postmodernism may have dawned. However, it is not being negotiated in the museum, but against the background of inflation, rising material prices, high interest rates, a lack of craftsmen, stumbling investors and bankrupt construction companies. The federal government in Berlin responded this week with a package of measures and wants to “achieve serial construction,” said Olaf Scholz. That doesn’t sound particularly encouraging.
The omnipresent (and in some respects modernist) simplicity in commercial and residential construction was only stopped by the construction crisis, neither by political regulations nor by the imagination of designers. Architects and designers are also challenged by the construction industry’s miserable climate footprint, by the need to build in a way that conserves resources and, above all, to repurpose existing buildings in innovative ways. Why not then question postmodernism?
Eastern postmodernism: Werner Rösler, “Academy of Arts at Platz der Akademie”, draft, 1980
Source: IRS (Erkner)/Wiss Collection, Werner Rösler estate (C17_04-01)
Or at least Robert Venturi. He has always opposed simplification through aesthetic impoverishment, i.e. the modern doctrine of “less is more”, because it negates the complexity of the structural requirements. In his manifesto in 1966 he wrote that architects had to express supposedly insoluble problems. Because architecture is also the “space for the unfinished, for contradictions, for improvisations and for all the tensions that can arise from this”.
“All at the same time. Postmodernism, 1967–1992”, until January 28, 2024, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
#Architecture #postmodernism