Postmodern Architecture

Exhibiting the Postmodern traces the origins and significance of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Situating the 1980 exhibition The Presence of the Past against the larger historical backdrop in which architecture exhibitions appear, and considering their proliferation in the postmodern era, this book claims that the exhibition, beyond heralding a shift in the history of curating, marked both the beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning of the postmodern turn in architecture. Looking at the institutional changes, exhibition techniques and exhibition spaces, as well as the discourses and controversies between advocates of modern and postmodern architecture, this book narrates the development of architectural exhibitions as a ‘genre’ of cultural manifestations, while expanding on both the history of the Venice Biennale – and, more generally, of Italian architecture in the 1970s – and the history of postmodernism. It also reveals how the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale announced a changing relationship between the worlds of art and architecture, and the consequent transformation of the architectural product as end object.

Na década de 1980, manifestações que visavam uma reavaliação do conceito de brasilidade, adentrou o campo do debate arquitetônico. Sob influências da crítica internacional pós-modernista à Arquitetura Moderna, estas manifestações resgataram e revalorizaram elementos da tradição arquitetônica brasileira, assim como a relação entre o edifício e o contexto, usuário, memória. Em Minas Gerais, o arquiteto Sylvio Emrich de Podestá associou-se a Éolo Maia e Josefina Vasconcellos no grupo mineiro 03 Arquitetos, ficando reconhecidos como “arquitetos pós-modernos mineiros”. A arquitetura desenvolvida por Sylvio de Podestá neste período, desencadeou questionamentos ao demonstrar uma grande habilidade no domínio da prática projetual. O presente artigo, analisa o projeto de duas residências; Residência Hélio/Joana (1981/1982) e Residência Rosinha (1980); contribuindo para a compreensão mais aprofundada de sua obra. Para tanto, seguiu-se três etapas: redesenho, modelagem, análise gráfica. Os resultados obtidos permitem estabelecer uma correspondência entre as questões levantadas no período pós-moderno e a obra do arquiteto, levantando discussões sobre sua prática projetual, dentro do contexto desta manifestação na arquitetura brasileira.

Santrauka. Vienas svarbiausių istorinės architektūros bruožų – geometriškumas – buvo išryškintas modernizmo architektūros teorijoje. Remiantis geštaltpsichologijos teorija, elementarios geometrinės formos ir pagrindinės erdvinės charakteristikos
suvoktos kaip antropomorfinis architektūros aspektas: net ir šiandien jos laikomos architektūros kompozicijos pagrindu.
Nepaisant to, šiuolaikinės postmodernizmo ir dekonstruktyvizmo architektūros kūrėjai bei kritikai akcentuoja erdvinio naratyvo,
kuriamo ne tik erdvės percepcijos, bet ir erdvės santykio su socialinėmis ir kultūrinėmis reikšmėmis, svarbą. Naratyvo,
kaip architektūros kompozicinės ypatybės, naudojamos dekonstruktyvizmo ir postmodernizmo architektūros kompozicijose, pavyzdžių galime aptikti tiek užsienyje, tiek Lietuvoje.
Reikšminiai žodžiai: naratyvas, dekonstruktyvizmas, postmodernizmas, šiuolaikinė ir istorinė architektūra.

One of the most important features in historical architectural
compositions is geometrical rendition of architectural space and volume. This feature was highlighted in terms of architecture of Modernism. According to the theory of modern architecture and
Geschtalt Psychology, elementary geometrical forms and main
spatial features were underlined and accepted as anthropomorphic principle of architecture. Even today main spatial characteristics are accepted as a key principle of architectural composition. However, architects and critics of contemporary – post-modern and deconstructive – architecture emphasize the value of architectural
narrative achieved not only through perception of space,
but also by its relationship to social and cultural meanings and subtext of architecture. A narrative, as architectural feature, is realized in some compositions of the deconstructivist and postmodern architecture, both worldwide and in Lithuania.
Keywords: Deconstructivism, Postmodernism, narrative, contemporary
and historical architecture.

Reviewing “Architecture in the Antipodes” in 1984, RIBA journal editor Peter Murray, put Peter Corrigan in a van of Australian architects searching for an architecture that was positively, proudly and distinctively Australian. Besides through his completion of a postgraduate programme at Yale under Charles Moore, and his work experience in the offices of Paul Rudolph, Victor Gruen Associates, and Philip Johnson, Corrigan played a crucial role as an attractor and translator of a postmodernist model of regionalism in Melbourne and Australia in the latter half of the 1970s and well into the 1990s, through various media: journals in which he published or that he co-founded like Smudges, discussion groups like Half-Time, conferences such as the “Pleasures of Architecture”(1980) conference, and most importantly university lectures and his legendary studio training at RMIT.
While the current literature on Corrigan points especially to his familiarity with the ideas of Venturi and Scott-Brown as the main source for the way in which he a celebrates the unique ordinariness of suburbia in his architecture, his long-standing engagement with stage design since his student years seems to have been even more important. Australian identity was also one of the main themes that The New Wave theatre explored, in particular the Australian Performing Group (APG) in which Corrigan was deeply involved intellectually. Following Caspar Neher, he adopted as a stage designer the Brechtian technique of unveiling the constructed nature of the theatrical stage, which rhymed well with the self-parodic stereotyping of larrikinism through performance and gesture in the APG plays. Transferring carnivalesque, grotesque and burlesque design experiments from theatre to the field of architecture, Corrigan forged a unique brand of regionalism that challenged the dualistic centre-periphery model accepted by modernists such as Robin Boyd who assessed Australian suburbia as inhabited by a public that “knows no better, has seen no better design.” Corrigan’s anti-authoritarianism led him to a subversive postmodernist stance that found in the suburban ‘periphery’ the material to find a way out of the casting of Australian architecture as peripheral.

Published after two international conferences dedicated to the issue of the relation between mediums and architecture, this work examines the productive forces behind the architectural discourse between the 1960's and the 1980's. Observing the roles of Alvin Boyarsky, Charles Moore, Ettore Sottsass et Alessandro Mendini, Reima Pietilä, Peter Eisenman, and others in exhibitions and journals, this publication shows how the aforementioned were able to shape the architectural discourse and production of their time by using magazines and exhibitions as privileged spaces for the fabrication of postmodern architecture.

Editors: Véronique Patteeuw, Léa-Catherine Szacka

Authors: Berry Bergdoll, Eva Branscome, Stephanie Dadour, Irina Davidovici, Daniela Fabricius, Kim Foerster, Elisabeth Keslacy, Michael Kubo, Andrew Leach, Igor Marjanovic, Sylvia Micheli, Patricia Morton, Véronique Patteeuw, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Léa-Catherine Szacka.

It is commonly thought that Postmodernism played only a marginal role in Switzerland. However, a closer look at the architectural discourse of the 1970s and 1980s shows frequent evidence of Postmodern thinking, such as an emphasis on the communicative potential of architecture, the enhancement of the everyday environment and the “Pop” references — themes that are present in the Swiss reception of Robert Venturi (1925–2018) and Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931). This essay sheds new light on the transfer of ideas from Venturi and Scott Brown into Swiss architectural discourse, drawing on unpublished archival material and interviews with educators and critics who were active at the time. Courses taught at the ETH Zurich, publications in architecture journals, and the 1979 exhibition Venturi and Rauch. Architektur im Alltag Amerikas are considered, indicating a continuous presence of these ideas in Swiss discourse from the late 1960s up to the 1990s. Attempts to incorporate these ideas into Swiss architecture were followed by subsequent marginalization, possibly due to oversaturation and the appeal of a new form of abstraction starting in the late 1980s – a shift from symbolical ordinariness to pure simplicity. In spite of the marginalization of Venturi and Scott Brown, notable figures on the Swiss scene have praised them as key figures in the development of contemporary architecture. This paper suggests a new reading of recent history and argues that it was richer and more complex than has previously been acknowledged.

The profound contradictions of Brazil have become a chance to question the recent developments that occurred in the social housing field.
A deeper look in the national social housing program reveals the same ambiguity between an accelerated development effort and the backwardness of the poorest social classes. Moreover, the analysis of the Brazilian position on the social housing  programs of the last decade, can be a good chance to examine the national counter-proposal to the ambiguous Brazilian favelas.
Since 2009 the national program Minha casa Minha vida has been trying to answer to the millions Brazilian homeless. In order to challenge these figures, the government aims at giving a new home to one million poors by 2016. An effort which would be able not only to overcome the residential demands but also to create a million jobs in the construction sector.
The ambition of this program though has to face its counterpart: an extreme serialisation of  houses that imply the impoverishment of the cultural, social and aesthetic values of the society which inhabits them. 
The standardisation of the house in a “copy/paste” program and the pattern technique that the program is based on are the first symptoms of an ironic déjà-vù.
The mistake of believing in the miraculous power of Architecture to solve social issues seems to be repeated. If the doubt persists, let’s replace the term Architecture with  low cost houses. The stereotypes hidden behind them, scream loudly: “I’m a beautiful house!”
And a question spontaneously rises : “Are you?”

Whatever ‘ugliness’ is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture.

This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions. Together they offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century to illustrate the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts (such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the vernacular, the impure and the sublime).

In writings such as Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) and Peter Blake’s God's Own Junkyard (1964), post-war urbanization or suburbanization is cast as a terrible or horrifying form of ugliness. By contrast, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond, and Rem Koolhaas took up the complexities and contradictions of that urban ugliness as a generative compositional tool for architecture. This chapter examines how they conveyed their non-judgemental stance towards ugliness through comic tenets of satire, irony and wit. This concluding essay rethinks the ugly as being caught between the axes of the ordinary and the monstrous, the axes that gave this volume its structure, through a dynamic modulation between the register of terror and the comic.

Chapter keywords: Edmond & Corrigan, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, Robin Boyd, cathexis, architectural humour, architectural joke, architectural horror, displacement.

"By Mark DeKay. Edited Susanne Bennett

"This book offers practical and theoretical tools for more effective sustainable design solutions and for communicating sustainable design ideas to today's diverse stakeholders.

It uses integral theory to make sense of the many competing ideas in this area and offers a powerful conceptual framework for sustainable designers through the four main perspectives of: behaviours; systems; experiences; cultures.

It also uses human developmental theory to reframe sustainable design across four levels of complexity present in society: the Traditional, Modern, Postmodern, and Integral waves. Profuse with illustrations and examples, the book offers many conceptual tools including:

• twelve principles of integral sustainable design
• sixteen prospects of sustainable design
• six perceptual shifts for ecological design thinking
• five levels of sustainable design aesthetics
• ten injunctions for designing connections to nature.""

"Charles Moore is central to understanding the continuum extant between Modern and Postmodern
architecture. This is not simply because he practiced architecture from the mid-1950s through 1993,
spanning the time period between these two styles; it is also because his architecture, writing and teaching
bridged the practical and theoretical tenets of both movements. Moore maintains a unique position among
his contemporaries in that he was both a modernist and postmodernist in many ways. Deeply influenced by
modernists William Wurster and Louis Kahn, Moore also drew upon Roger Bailey’s appreciation for history
and the Beaux Arts curriculum as well as Jean Labatut’s phenomenological emphasis on human experience
of historical places.1 The design-build mentality that Moore adopted from Roger Bailey and William Wurster
along with the purity of form derived from Louis Kahn’s teaching, reflect the inherently modern qualities of
his designs. His explorations with interior and exterior space, color, light and creating a “sense of place”2
represent the postmodern innovations that Moore brought to the field. He was an inclusivist,3 which
signifies a departure from his predecessors and an approach that greatly shaped his lasting influence.
This research seeks to answer how Moore’s role in the context of the late twentieth century is central to
understanding the significance that his work, writing and pedagogical influence had on contemporaries and
students alike. And furthermore, can that understanding inform the way in which his work can be
approached in the preservation context? To that end, this thesis presents Moore’s biographical background
and contextual history along with a discussion of three commissions that were central to his body of work:
Kresge College (1973) at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Piazza d’Italia (1978) in New Orleans,
Louisiana; and the Moore/Andersson Compound (1984) in Austin, Texas.
The temporal and ephemeral qualities inherent in much of Moore’s work were characteristic of the time
period and paralleled in the work of other architects practicing at the time, most notably Robert Venturi.
These qualities pose unique challenges to preservation from a theoretical and practical perspective. This
research presents a lens through which those challenges and opportunities can be understood and further
explored.
Moore’s influence is evident in the work of many of his students, a great number of whom are successful in
their own right, including Billie Tsien, Brian Mackay-Lyons, and Turner Brooks. His lasting impact is also
apparent in the ongoing success of his former firms: Centerbrook Architects in Centerbrook, Connecticut;
Moore Ruble Yudell in Santa Monica, California; and Andersson/Wise Architects in Austin, Texas. These firms
continue to thrive twenty years after Moore’s death, reiterating the continued influence that Charles Moore
has had on architectural practice and teaching.
Despite Postmodern architecture’s relatively “young” age in preservation terms (the majority of the
building stock is less than fifty years old – the threshold for National Register designation except in
exceptional circumstances4) – it is an important moment for preservationists to begin discussing this period in architectural history. The material lifespan of these buildings is significantly compressed and
therefore merits a proactive approach. And while Postmodernism is often derided as a fad, its significance
in architectural history as well as its socio-political context merits opportunity for substantial scholarship
toward a better understanding of the movement, its architects, and its role in the development of
subsequent generations of architecture."

Interpretation of historical styles in Lithuanian contemporary architecture started from ideas of postmodernism. However using features of historical styles is received with scepticism: whether it is formal following of historical forms, or is it a relevant way of creation of contemporary architecture. That is the reason for exclusive research identifying features and conceptions of this type of contemporary architecture.
The research is divided into three parts. First, interpretation of historical styles is evaluated and compared with other retrospective architectural trends of XIX – XX centuries. The fluctuation of the way retrospectivism is accepted in architecture is examined. Retrospective post-modern architecture should not be considered as anti – modern trend of architecture, conversely, it represents multiple trend of contemporary architecture.
In second part characteristics of architectural interpretation are examined. Social and cultural factors influencing retrospective architecture are evaluated. The typology of architectural interpretation is defined, by which examples of interpretation of historical styles in contemporary Lithuanian architecture are examined. Keywords: historical styles of architecture, historism, postmodernism, retrospectivism, architectural interpretation, contemporary Lithuanian architecture.

The introduction positions the interest in architectural ugliness within an attempt to historicize the anti-aesthetic impulse in postmodern art and the so-called return to aesthetics in art theory since the 1990s. It situates this volume on architecture and ugliness within this field of research as it is being extended to architectural history and theory. Informed by the antinomies between aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, modernism and postmodernism, this volume comes to terms with ugliness, less as a publicly constructed judgement with social consequences than as a resource appropriated through critical architectural practice in different modes of the design process. The introduction provides a working definition of the concepts, the monstrous and the ordinary, that structure the two sections of this volume and situates the different contributions to this volume along those two axes. It explains how the ugly is differentiated from, or modulates in, kindred aesthetic concepts and categories such as disgust, the formless, the sublime, the grotesque, or kitsch.

Keywords
Theodor Adorno, Hal Foster, criticality, the monstrous, disgust, aesthetic judgement, Mark Cousins, Immanuel Kant, postmodernism, grotesque

Cologne : Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
(= Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Edited by Christian Posthofen, 33) — 648 pages.

Reviews:

Michele Caja : “Una biografia monumentale”. In : AL. Mensile di informazione degli Architetti Lombardi, vol. 38, No. 3 (March 2008), p. 31

Peter Rumpf : “Oswald Mathias Ungers. Eine intellektuelle Biographie”. In : Bauwelt, vol. 99, No. 5 (January 25, 2008), p. 33

Wolfgang Pehnt : “Gebaute Geometrie”. In : Deutsche Bauzeitung, vol. 142, No. 3, (March 2008).

Benedikt Kraft : “Auch ein Roman”. In : Deutsche Bauzeitschrift, vol. 56, No. 3 (March 2008), p. 22

Carsten Krohn : “Das Thema der Architektur. Eine Biografie über O. M. Ungers”. In : Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Monday, June 16, 2008, p. B 5

Ulrich Brinkmann : “Jenseits des Rasters. Eine Biographie zu Oswald Mathias Ungers”. In : Archithese, vol. 38, No. 4 (July/August 2008), p. 95

Andreas Zeese  : “Oswald Mathias Ungers. Eine intellektuelle Biographie”. In : European Architectural History Network Newsletter, No. 2, 2010, pp. 50–53

Sergio Birga’s 1976 painting, “Main basse sur la ville,” features the construction of Beaubourg in the Halles Quarter, and the way postmodernism incorporates anthropomorphism in its design even after the “death” of the Renaissance subject. By showing the developers’ failed attempt to fill in the “Trou” des Halles, Birga’s painting indicates the postmodern to be a condition rather than a style, with its center a self-engulfing hole, deconstructed from its threatening banlieue. He also offers a postmodern version of the Vitruvian Man in an off-center, partial and feminine anthropomorphic model.

Criticality was an anguished debate in contemporary architecture. A classic 1974 essay on the problem, Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” argued that neo-avant-garde architects manipulated the empty signifiers of their art and left the world at large unchallenged. Nevertheless, my chapter argues, neo-avant-garde modernists like Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Archigram, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture sincerely posited design as a mode of research into architecture’s relationships to an emergent modernity. Tafuri correctly warned that this postwar celebration of Futurism, Constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, Pop art, and technology strayed, in distinction to the interwar modernism from which it grew, toward the mimesis and celebration of capitalism and its associated social relationships. But faced with the accelerating deterritorializing effects of cultural, economic, extraurban, transnational, and technological development, this "projective modernism" was nonetheless civic, reinventing the 19th-century public-sphere typologies of concert halls, libraries, museums, and transport interchanges threatened with extinction. This pragmatic, optimistic, and liberal architecture left the boudoir, then, only to be detained in the Salon.

This is a graduate school research paper examining Aldo Rossi's Gallaratese Housing in Milan through the lens of Viktor Shklovsky's idea of estrangement as written in his manifesto "Art as Technique". I argue that Aldo Rossi was using the technique of estrangement in order to create new readings of historical typologies. Rossi is often dismissed as a historicist but I believe his technique of estrangement is very projective and pragmatic.

Με την παρούσα εργασία θα επιχειρήσω να παρουσιάσω την ιστορία της αρχιτεκτονικής του μεταμοντέρνου μουσείου και να προσεγγίσω τις ιδεολογικές και εννοιολογικές προεκτάσεις –όπου και όποτε αυτές υπάρχουν- που σχετίζονται με την αρχιτεκτονική του μουσειακού κελύφους. Αφετηρία για την επιλογή του συγκεκριμένου θέματος είναι η υποψία ότι υπάρχει σχεδόν πάντα κάποιο αφήγημα ή ρητορική πίσω από τον παιγνιώδη -και ενίοτε ειρωνικό- χαρακτήρα της μεταμοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής.

In De Arquitectura, Vitruvius lists three interrelated Latin terms – firmitas (strength or structural stability), utilitas (functionality or appropriate spatial accommodation), and venustas (beauty or attractive appearance), as being the basis of good architecture. Regarding firmitas, he implies that a good architect needs to choose the best and most solid materials, regardless of their cost. Yet, perhaps dismissing Vitruvius's advice, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most Postmodern architects went on to erect buildings that often looked more like stage sets than anything strong and durable.

Postmodern designers applied colour, pattern, and ornament to buildings, transferring ordinary and everyday popular imagery, forms, and material into high culture. By rejecting modern design and aesthetics, they also dismissed the building techniques and materials used by their predecessors. As explained by experts from the Portland-based architecture firm Peter Meijer Architect, PC (PMA), ‘there is an inherent impermanence of the original materials based on a default decision making process that limited a building's longevity to a twenty-five year life-cycle’ for Postmodern architecture. In other words, Postmodern buildings were often built as ephemeral constructions, for which longevity was not an absolute value.

Conventionally, the Estonian architecture history tends to address the late Soviet postmodernism up to the mid-1980s, and then resume with buidlings of the independent republic from the mid-1990s. The period in between constitutes a kind of gap, and indeed, there was a remarkable decline in building activities. Nevertheless, it was a highly loaded period of active production of new social space, establishment of public sphere and public space, and rethinking of the relationship between built environment and its subject. Those processes continue to have a noted impact on our spatial and social environment up to this day. The doctoral thesis challenges this conventional periosidation of the history of Estonian architecture and art, focusing on the era between two more or less clearly defined social formations – the interregnum of 1986–1994 which must not be treated as a temporary transition on the way to ’normalcy’ but as a specific period of abundant creativity worthwile in its own right. During this dynamic era certain late Soviet practices continued while accelerated appropriation and interpretation of new western impulses took place. The transition from one spatial regime to the other did not happen as a clear and definitive cut but rather as a process that was hybrid, fluid and uneven. The dissertation demonstrates how the production of new space took place on various interconnected levels: built and planned, dreamt and imagined, performed and enacted, as well as theorised and reflected.

The monographic thesis encompasses five loosely connected case studies. The chapter Unbuilt space analyses the most vivid examples of the large amount of unrealised architecture projects and urban designs, focusing on aspects such as production of new public space, identity building and the architects’ agency. Utopian space looks at artist Tõnis Vint’s vision of a new high-rise urban settlement on Naissaar island near Tallinn, proposed as a free trade zone, considering the case in the context of international economic developments and New Age ideologies. Discursive space focuses on the two first instances of Nordic-Baltic Architecture Triennials as attempts at establishing an international platform for theoretical exchange, demonstrating the different expectations of the Nordic and Baltic participants
and diverging positions regarding the issue of regional architecture in the global context. Performative space investigates the architecture and performance practices of Group T as an interconnected phenomenon, aiming at establishing temporary counterpublic spaces and an alternative concept of community to counteract the nationalistic social tendencies of the era. Institutional space looks at the renovation process of the functionalist Tallinn Art Hall as a conceptual processual work of art by George Steinmann, demonstrating the artist’s agency in establishing international transdisciplinary networks and reconceptualisating the artspace as a multivalent discursive space. The chapter also addresses the project’s inevitable entanglement with certain neocolonialist allusions and the restitutional mentality of the era, fuelled by the desire for rebirth of the pre-war republic.

The case studies demonstrate that the Estonian architecture culture from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s was far from in hibernation: quite the contrary, it was unprecedentedly vigorous and operated in active dialogue with other processes in the production of space for the new society. Making use of the radical openness of the
era, the architecture of the interregnum built upon the previous late Soviet experience and realised some of its desires. It also tested out new impulses connected with the opening up of the society. The experiments stemmed from a belief in creative individuals’ essential role
in imagining future space and their right to participate in the public sphere, thus helping to keep open the discussions of possibilities. The spaces thus produced might have been intangible but they were nevertheless vital in shaping the social life of the interregnum.

By applying the methods of categorisation, comparison and analysis of written sources, this article aims to reveal how Surrealist artistic ideas may have influenced – through the intermediary of the Postmodern movement – architectural trends up to the present time. The paper is organized into three parts, each dedicated to one of the most important Surrealist architectural concepts: the synthesis of the arts, fluidity, and formalistic superficiality and spontaneity. Each section describes how these ideas were underlined in Surrealist art and theoretical texts, compares them to some examples of Postmodern and contemporary architecture, and explains how these ideas were nurtured from the
time they emerged until the time they materialized in architectural design.

A Best Academic Paper at the Integral European Conference, the primary investigation of this paper is: How can architects address climate change by designing to place people into rich and significant relationships with Nature? Architecture is a powerful mediator of the relationship between humans and Nature. Solving climate change will mean having people take action for nature. To have people act for Nature, they must care for it. To care for it, people first have to have a relationship with Nature, which requires experiences of Nature––via architecture. However, contemporary sustainable design in the US takes a particular prospect on Nature, one dominated by performance assessment, a valid but limited approach that leaves out ecological pattern, human experiences, and the cultural meaning of “connecting to Nature.” In doing so, it fails to communicate with most of its non-scientific audience and thus disempowers its mission to solve the climate crisis by design. Because building energy use is about half of the cause of greenhouse gases, the building community has the greatest opportunity to create solutions.
The most common contemporary interpretation (or explaining narrative) of sustainable design is that it is defined by its technologies and that improving technologies will lessen architecture’s impact on Nature, and further, that technology is most often defined as energy technology and measured in terms of energy performance. Untangling the stories driving energy use and technology in buildings across generations helps us understand the alternative stories that drive today’s “design with Nature.”
This article engages important, timeless questions from the cultural perspective where our collective stories arise: How shall we design to relate people to Nature, particularly with respect to energy? What is our understanding of this particular ‘Nature’ to which we want to connect and relate via design? What are our cultural stories and narratives that explain Nature and energy to us? The article explores different ideas of what people think Nature and energy are and their concomitant intentions for designing relationships to Nature. Each primary view gives rise to a variety of metaphors in language that can describe its understanding. When used consciously, these design metaphors are powerful tools for generating design solutions and for organizing the many smaller ideas contained in any design project. Each primary view uses its metaphors to construct a different story about energy and natural resources.
Keywords: metaphor, story, design intention, levels of complexity, traditional, modern, postmodern, integral, integral theory, nature, building energy use, climate change, carbon-neutral, net-zero

This contribution to Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen's Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, introduces Theo Crosby's 1972 exhibition (and catalog) "How to Play the Environment Game," a show that did not promote architecture per se, but rather a populist, proto-postmodern education about the built environment. For more on the exhibition, and on Crosby's curatorship, see too the 2015 paper “Theo Crosby’s Environment Games, 1956-1973," also available on this site.

Few historical investigations have accomplished the dual task of writing the history of a significant postmodern architectural moment while simultaneously unpacking its defining theoretical concepts. Maybe that historical period is still too close to our own. Or perhaps documenting an ouroboric movement such as postmodernism, one that centered on history and the revial of architectural styles, is itself the problem.

This essay, invited by the Nordic Journal of Architecture in 2011 and based on a keynote talk for the Alteration symposium, KTH School of Architecture / Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2011, argues that architecture's concern with alteration was due not simply to the downturn in new build following the 2007-8 global recession. Alteration also combines the optimism of modernism with the contextualism of postmodernism, allowing designers to intervene decisively in an uncertain world. As such, practices of alteration can be understood alongside other responses to neoliberal regimes preferring contingency to idealism, such as pragmatism, a return to "the real," and "post-criticality." And yet there is little literature on alteration as a mode of design. The essay attempts to categorize modes of architectural alterations as consonant, dissonant, and synthetic, then considers the ideological implications of thinking about historical change and intention as types of alteration. Perhaps there could eventually be a canon of distinguished revisions of buildings standing alongside the canon of new-build.

Although the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba celebrates a post-modern architectural ethos, the meditative spirit of the structure and its spaces are grounded in megalithic design, encouraging visitors to a sense of awe and of peace, even while contemplating mankind's journey to mutual respect.

Το 1933, το 4ο διεθνές συνέδριο μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής (C.I.A.M.) έγινε στην Αθήνα και έφερε δεκάδες γνωστούς αρχιτέκτονες από όλον τον κόσμο να συζητούν για τη νέα (μοντέρνα) πόλη της εποχής τους. Αυτό το συνέδριο αποτέλεσε και ένα σημείο τομής για τη μοντέρνα ελληνική αρχιτεκτονική, αφού έδωσε μια μοναδική ευκαιρία ορισμού τής ταυτότητάς της σε σχέση με τη διεθνή πρωτοπορία. Το πώς θα μιλούσε κανείς για την αξία τού μοντέρνου στην Αθήνα του 1933 –όπου σχεδόν τίποτα δεν έμοιαζε μοντέρνο– αποτέλεσε την κύρια πρόκληση για Έλληνες και ξένους αρχιτέκτονες. Η προβολή τής πίστης των Ελλήνων αρχιτεκτόνων στη μοντέρνα αρχιτεκτονική έγινε μέσα από δύο κυρίως τρόπους. Ο πρώτος τρόπος ήταν άμεσος, και βασίστηκε στην επίσκεψη στα λίγα, αλλά σημαντικά, μοντέρνα κτήρια της Αθήνας (σχολεία, πολυκατοικίες, εργοστάσια, τεχνικά έργα), τα οποία μόλις τότε είχαν ολοκληρωθεί. Ο δεύτερος τρόπος ήταν έμμεσος, και αφορούσε τη σύνδεση της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής με την παραδοσιακή ελληνική αρχιτεκτονική, η οποία τότε έμοιαζε για όλους εξωτική.

This article points uses the early work of the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki as well as first publications of the Japanese journal Global Architecture as lenses by which to discuss the history of the word ‘global.’ In these contexts, the word meant something altogether different and more complex than in the context of the U.S. I also argue that much of the theoretical flavor of what was implied by the term in the 1970s has long since been lost in the current trend of global-washing.