ABSTRACT
Oxymoron, or quick paradox, is itself a typical postmodern trope and disharmonious harmony' recurs as often in its poetics as organic whole' recurs in the aesthetics of classicism and Modernism. Thus, with Postmodern Classicism the meanings, values and forms of modernism and classicism are simultaneously transformed into a hybrid combination. The most commonly-held aim of postmodern architects is to achieve an urbane urbanism. Urban contextualism gains near universal assent. Almost as favoured as contextualism is the postmodern trope of anthropomorphism. Hence the postmodern emphasis on anamnesis, or the historical continuum, and another of its defining rules the displacement of conventions, or tradition reinterpreted. Postmodernists, like the modernists before then, or for that matter any historical movement, are definable by stylistic formulae which they invent or adapt. Postmodern then meant a culture that was post-Western and post-Christian: a culture that had a strong sense of its departure point, but no clear sense of destination.
