ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the discourse on architecture from the postwar period to the 1980s. It shows how the insights acquired in the prewar period were taken up again, reworked to improve them, but then ultimately abandoned. The chapter focuses on the important texts for postmodernism, with its interpretation, critique, and caricature of functionalism. CIAM's decision to break up coincided with a publication that fundamentally questioned the 'functional city' and completely reoriented urban planning. Jacobs states the existence of four aspects to be necessary to create diversity in the city: mixed use, small blocks, various old buildings, and concentrations of population. 'Functional monotony' was the enemy of the 'functional unity' of the city, since the latter called for mixed use. Jacobs and Mitscherlich were the two most important exponents of the critique of the dominant urban-planning practice. Postmodernism is, like functionalism, a dubious classification within architectural theory.
