Interior of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion Exhibition at the V&A Museum. Photo: Dezeen
Gehry House, by Frank Gehry, Santa Monica. Photograph featured in V&A Postmodernism Exhibition. Photo: Quintin Lake
My photo of Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica house is printed alongside other icons of deconstructionist architecture by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The curators were keen to include Gehry’s residence as it symbolizes an “early venture in bricolage and the postmodern”. The house built in 1978 represented the first and radical steps of Deconstructivist movement in architecture more info and photos on the building.
My personal sentiments on postmodernism which developed as an architecture student are encapsulated by Alastair Sooke who wrote in the Telegraph
Charles Jencks, the architectural theorist credited with inventing the term “postmodernism”, once pointed out that what is exciting and avant-garde one moment tends to feel like old hat the next. No doubt he is right: younger generations often berate the immediate past to assert their own identity. Even so, walking through the V&A’s new exhibition, which traces the rise and fall of postmodernism across different disciplines during the Seventies and Eighties, I was tempted to ask: has there ever been a more irritating movement in the history of art and design?”
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990
24 September 2011 – 15 January 2012 at V&A South Kensington info
Geometry & Silence 