ABSTRACT
Architectural modernism – as everyone who has read a book on postmodernism
knows – died in 1972 when an unpreposessing and hitherto utterly insignificant
housing estate was blown up in St Louis. When the demolition contractors fired
the detonator they flattened not only the Pruitt-Igoe housing but also, according
to the postmodernist account, the final pretensions to authority of a modernism
that was condemned as intellectually bankrupt and barren. The great reforming
hopes of the 1920s, of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, had run aground on the rocks of social pragmatism. In the process the
dreams of an architecture that might improve the general lot of humanity were
exposed as elitist and reductivist, with an unfashionable tinge of Calvinist
dogma and asceticism. After the dust had settled and the twisted steelwork been
cleared away, the site was cleared for the patricidal infant postmodernism,
which offered pluralism in place of monotony, and joy, delight and wit in place
of the purged white walls of a second reformation. As they swaggered their way
on to the empty building site, with Serlio up their sleeves and styrofoam
voussoirs under their arms, the apologists of postmodernism brought with them
a simplified history that traduced the true complexity and inventiveness of
modernism. The architectural revolution that had dominated the century was
presented as the ‘victory [of] the square, the crate, the box – the multipurpose
case as universal packaging’,1 or as ‘a Protestant Reformation putting faith in the
liberating aspects of industrialisation and mass-democracy’, led by the likes of
‘John Calvin Corbusier’, ‘Martin Luther Gropius’ and ‘John Knox van der Rohe’.2
