Postmodernism

On this cast

• Oversized chimneyA chimney pushed right up through the split gable, bigger than it needs to be: the house as a child's drawing.
• Flat stuccoSmooth walls painted in bands of colour. The façade is treated as a billboard, not as structure.
• Split pedimentA classical gable cut down the middle and pulled apart. You recognise the sign, and the joke.
• NotchA round bite out of the top, like the 'Chippendale' crown of the AT&T Building in New York.
• Abstract pilastersGiant flat strips with blocky capitals: columns reduced to a cartoon of themselves.
• GarlandA stylised swag of fruit and ribbons, straight from the Portland Building.
• Applied archA thin arch drawn on the wall that carries nothing. A quote, not a structure.
• Giant keystoneA keystone blown up to many times its normal size, holding nothing in place.
• Flat lintelThe real span is this flat beam; the arch above it is decoration. Venturi's Mother's House plays exactly this game.
• Big square windowA large picture window on the axis, cut like a hole in a cardboard façade.
• Punched windowsSmall square windows stamped into the wall, of different sizes on purpose.
• Round windowA porthole on one side only. The symmetry is broken deliberately.
• Strip windowA modernist ribbon window quoted on the right, next to the classical parts: styles mixed in one front.
• Entrance beamA heavy beam with oversized dentils over the door.
• Stubby columnsFat, short columns with slab capitals. The order is recognisable, the proportions are not.
• DoorA deep, dark opening on the centre line.

How to spot it from the street

1. Classical elements used flat, huge or broken
2. Bold colours and painted bands
3. Symmetry set up and then broken
4. Styles mixed on purpose

Where it came from

In 1966 Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and answered Mies van der Rohe's 'less is more' with 'less is a bore'. His house for his mother in Philadelphia (completed 1964) has a split gable, a chimney pushed through it and an arch drawn on the façade that carries nothing.

Charles Jencks popularised the label with his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). Michael Graves's Portland Building (1982) and Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (1984), with its 'Chippendale' top, made it famous. Read it as quotation: classical parts appear, but enlarged, flattened, coloured and arranged so that you notice them.