ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 challenges the common belief that Pop culture had little influence on architecture, asserting that it was deeply intertwined with architectural debates throughout its development. The chapter argues that the Pop concept, originating in the transformation of consumer capitalism after World War II and popularized by American artists, eventually found its way into architectural discourse about a decade later, notably through the contributions of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Pop culture served as a conceptual foundation for the postmodern design approaches of architects like Venturi, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, and others in the 1980s. These architects incorporated commercial or historically derived imagery into their works. By examining Pop’s relationship with architecture, the chapter suggests that the essential prerequisite for Pop’s emergence was the gradual reconfiguration of cultural space, driven by consumer capitalism, which brought together structure, surface, and symbol in novel ways.
