Postmodern Architecture vs Radical Architecture
ポストモダン建築 / ラディカル建築／イタリアン・ラディカル
Both sit in Modern Architecture, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Postmodern Architecture
Rebels against modernism's universality, reintroducing historical quotation, ornament, sign, color and irony to city and building.
Radical Architecture
Objects to functionalism and consumer society, critiquing architecture's own premises with fictional cities, furniture, photographs and collage.
| Postmodern Architecture | Radical Architecture | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s–1990s | late-1960s–1970s |
| Family | Modern Architecture | Modern Architecture |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Historical quotation / Ornament returned / Strong color / Double meanings | Speculative cities / Anti-functionalism / Vast grids / Play and critique |
| Best used for | Retail and theater fronts that must read as a sign from the street. · Additions in historic districts that quote local types while still declaring themselves new. | Exhibition projects meant to make people doubt the premises of planning and consumption. · Furniture and photomontage that publish an imaginary city as a starting point for argument. |
| Type | Set headings in serif capitals and treat them as ornament with their frames. | Write in manifesto voice, short and flat, set beside the image as a note. |
| Composition | Build a strong front, marking center and entrance with pediment and pilaster. | Run one even grid to the horizon and drop small figures to break scale. |
| Material | Tinted stucco, colored stone, metal trim switching color plane by plane. | Photomontage, flat black and white planes, mass produced furniture overwritten. |
| Caution | Pasting on pediments and pilasters without knowing what they quote loses the irony and leaves a dated theme park facade, so read what in modernism is criticized and who the building addresses. | Borrowing the giant grid imagery without naming what it criticizes turns a stance of doubt into futuristic wallpaper. |