ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the transition from modernism’s rejection of difference in search of essence to the evolution of postmodernist conceptions of difference as representations containing dualities. The argument is made that these ideas can be described as reductive difference. Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction (1966) frames new ideas for architecture as contradictions that might be quantified as both-and in the form of metaphorical juxtapositions. Like the modernist rejection of previous regimes precedent-driven design, a theory instantiated as being against the previous theories of modernism emerges—including Colin Rowe’s own rejection of analytic formalism in his book Collage City which includes a full embrace of the reductive difference of collage formalism. There are clear references to Martin Heidegger’s re-framing of Husserl’s essence using tool analysis to re-describe phenomenology against a singular notion of essence. Around this same time Boston Architectural College hosts an under the radar conference signaling new era in architecture, Architecture and the Computer. This event clearly announced the influence computation would have on the discipline. Indeed, as architectural theories were incorporating computational ideas, the postmodernists would soon embrace affordances that were explicitly available only because access to computers allowed new ideas and theories to be studied and actualized.
