Architecture's Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern?

Author: Reinhold Martin
Year: 2006 (Grey Room 22, 6–29)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/martin-2006-architectures-image-problem.md

Summary

Martin asks whether architecture was ever truly postmodern, revisiting the duck/decorated shed distinction (Venturi & Scott Brown), Jencks's "language of postmodern architecture," and Jameson's reading of the Bonaventure, in order to expose the "image problem" at the heart of postmodern architecture. He shows how architectural postmodernism's claims to authenticity migrate from space/structure into the image/sign, and connects this to a systems model (cybernetics, ecology/oikos) that naturalizes consumerist variety — culminating in a consideration of Latour and the imaging of science (Venturi & Scott Brown's laboratories) that feeds imagery back into "laboratory life."

Key Claims

• The duck and the decorated shed: in a "duck," form/function/meaning are inseparable (the building is the sign); in a "decorated shed" (Guild House), symbolism is applied like a marquee and a "floating" signifier opens up. Venturi and Scott Brown "effectively accuse" Rudolph's duck of occluding structure, while claiming Guild House's decoration is authentic — transposing modernist "jargon of authenticity" into the realm of ornament and signage: "they essentially claimed to be building authentic images."
• Jencks and the systems model: Jencks describes architecture as a "language" and postmodern "double-coding," but his "evolutionary trees" and "three systems" of production naturalize consumerist variety: "eclecticism is the natural evolution of a culture with choice." "There is nothing radical about 'radical eclecticism'"; it "encodes an unspoken anxiety" — the fear not of revolution but of "a revolutionary image." The system (cybernetics, ecology, oikos) domesticates any mutation.
• Jameson / the Bonaventure: the hotel "models the vast decentering of global capital"; postmodern space as the "breakdown of the signifying chain" and crisis of historicity — architecture as "the privileged aesthetic language" of the postmodern sublime.
• Latour and the imaging of science: against the "insufficiently real" signs of semiotic postmodernism, Latour's "nature-cultures"/"quasi-objects" offer authentication over authenticity. Yet Venturi & Scott Brown's laboratories "feed such imagery back into science" — the "signs of life"/domesticity organize "laboratory life," "more than mere ideology... they are real." "The imaging of science" via architecture.

Connections

Concepts: Iconic Architecture · Critical Architecture · Ideology · Spectacle
Authors: Reinhold Martin · Charles Jencks · Fredric Jameson
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) · The Language of Postmodern Architecture (via Loeckx & Heynen)

Direct Quotes

"[T]hey essentially claimed to be building authentic images."

"There is nothing radical about 'radical eclecticism.' It is an almost explicit disavowal of the aesthetic utopias of modernism."

"[A]esthetics and technoscientific knowledge are inseparable here ... they are real, in the operative sense that the building deploys the communicative functionality of images over and above the mechanized functionality of space."

Open Questions

• Does Martin's demonstration that postmodern architecture "builds authentic images" (and that Jencks's ecology domesticates the new) account for the contemporary iconic/Instagram economy — the "image problem" now centralized in the spectacular icon?