ABSTRACT
The term 'modernism' is far from easy to define for it has been used to refer to a whole variety of movements which would often seem to have little more in common than that they have taken place in the twentieth century. Post-modernism as a movement is most dramatically clear in the realm of architecture. It is a spirited reaction against the international functionalism which through the various powerful exponents of modernism, from Le Corbusier to Nikolaus Pevsner, had been widely seen as the necessary architecture of all advancing industrial and technological societies. The post-modernist architects advocated against the monolithic style of rectangles and glass a self-conscious and ironic return to the classical traditions. Under post-modernism people are in danger of having a society based purely on simulacra, an image-culture of reflections, without interior significance, without depth or symbolic power; an echo-chamber without a meaning.
