25 already I had a teacher telling we were in post modernism. I also never grasped the definition of it, if it has any. Can we really be that long in a same "era"?
Yeah I hear ya. I think it’s generally a lot of notions. The general zeitgeist and a bunch of other of Heidegger’s ideas and those he influenced.
I do think there are real distinctions though. You see it profoundly in literature. Modernist literature has many different concerns in terms of structure, narrative, form, etc. Postmodernist writing just completely deconstructed it and reformed it.
And I think that’s a big part of postmodernism - deconstruction. You see it in so many artifacts, social systems, and day-to-day life.
Saying that I think we are in more of a hyper modern world today which is an extension of post but even more broken down and individualized and virtual. A works where we have multiple identities and exist in multiple places at once in different forms.
Funnily enough I remember when deconstructionists hit Architecture. My school had a wild deconstructionists architecture department. Led by Larry Mitnick.
I have a friend in the program whose dad was a "Post-Modernist" Yalie architect horrified at what his son was calling architecture. Eventually he went to Yale like his dad...
I prefer to think of that period as deeper understanding of the patterns that humans in a society must endure while living in a totally built world.
I still remember him lecture me on up and down during a summer program in 11th grade. He also told me I should spend my life studying corners. Still inspiring words to this day but I knew I just had to be an industrial designer.
I have to give gratitude to HN for providing me a context to share my thoughts on deconstructionist and design.
This I'm sure drives my resistance to new terms. I see the simplicity of Modernism as the least number of rules. This provides the designer to conceive of the manufactured through the required parameters.
I wish architects could design decent residential houses at scale but alas, costs are often the overriding driver. Even still, it seems like many houses are designed from the inside out today.
Some of the ways post modernism has influenced these kids of things is via the new materials available. So we end up with a lot of things that are approximations of modernist and earlier things. Like doors and windows. A modern cheap door that is stamped plastic and filled with styrofoam is made to look like the way we remember doors looking. It may have fake wood grain to imply it's wood like doors were always made. It will have styles and rails like classic doors but they serve no purpose other than to look approximately like an actual door looked like.
Or corners, as you pointed out. A stone corner would use coining to achieve structural integrity. But now a stone veneer wall approximates that technique because we just think that's how stone walls should look. It just results in everything looking very inauthentic and I think that has an effect on us. Like comparing a real European town built hundreds of years ago to something that imitates one at a theme park. Uncanny valley territory.
Architects don't see or touch normal residential houses. They only get called in to work on high end custom homes.
Normal residential homes are designed and built by companies that are devoid of real architects and engineers, and specialize in doing things as cheaply and quickly as inhumanly possible and at mass scales. Production building companies are totally happy to break as many laws as they can in the process, so long as they don't get caught, or the fines are sufficiently low enough that it just becomes just a part of doing business.
An interesting question is whether the need for sustainable buildings will ever create an authentic solarpunk aesthetic. I notice various new apartment buildings now featuring green glasses (e.g. in balconies) for that entirely fake feel good factor. On the other hand new materials for insulation, new (old) techniques for cooling etc. certainly give enough ideas. There is even a new european bauhaus :-) [1]
What is funny about this is that ruthless efficiency in nature creates beauty. Ruthless efficiency in human development pushes the inefficiencies into another unmeasured cubicle.
