Postmodernism: The true inheritor of Modernism?
In 1982, architectural historian and cultural theorist Charles Jencks took to the stage at RIBA to deliver a polemical and playful lecture: ‘Postmodernism: The true inheritor of Modernism’. The talk was part of a RIBA series titled The Great Debate, at a time when ‘style wars’ – especially the merits of Modernist versus Postmodernist architecture – divided the architectural intelligentsia.
The Cosmic House in Holland Park, London, was both Jencks’ home and a physical distillation of his ideas, designed in collaboration with the Postmodern architect Sir Terry Farrell. As the Jencks Foundation flings open the Cosmic House’s digital doors with a new online platform, we delved into the RIBA Collections stores, emerging with an original recording of the influential 1982 lecture, delivered as the Cosmic House was in its final stages of construction.
The lecture outlines Jencks’ exasperation with those who dismissed (or often vocally attacked) Postmodernism. He dismantles the idea of kitsch, interrogates competing accounts of the birth of Modernism, and provocatively labels Aldo van Eyck’s Zwolle urban redevelopment scheme in the Netherlands, “a very good Postmodern building [that] ought to be defended as such”.
The lecture is the latest in a series of recordings to be digitised from original tapes held in the RIBA Collections. In collaboration with the Jencks Foundation, we were able to make it available online for the first time, alongside a couple of the original slides from the Jencks Archive. You can listen to the talk below, or read the full transcript (PDF).
Discover more resources on Charles Jencks and Postmodernism:
- Postmodernism: an architecture style guide
- Find hundreds of books and journal articles on Charles Jencks and Postmodernism in the RIBA Library
- The newly launched Jencks Foundation website, designed by John Morgan Studio, contains editorial content, a selection of writing and drawings from the Jencks Archive, and new commissions in response to these. The website launches with two inaugural themes. ‘Architistics: Architecture’s Linguistics’ collects material related to the design of The Cosmic House and reflects Charles Jencks’ interest in the relationship between architecture and semiotics. ‘Isms and Wasms’ explores the complex constellations of movements, ideas, affiliations and associations that formed Modernism and Postmodernism
