Sonja Hnilica and Riklef Rambow

Golden Years? How Postmodernity

changed the Theoretical Discourse
on Architecture and the City

Editorial
Theoretical discourses play a prominent role in the postmodern architectural
debate. It is not only the “return of history” to architecture that can be noted
in postmodernism, but equally the introduction of philosophical concepts
into architectural discourse—and in a hitherto unprecedented breadth. Cer-
tainly, architectural theory has a very long history, which we can trace back
to antiquity, as a glance into the still valid standard work Geschichte der Ar-
chitekturtheorie. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (History of Architectural
Theory from Antiquity to the present) by Hanno-Walter Kruft, which was
first published in 1985, easily shows. Incidentally, the fact that Kruft was in-
spired in the mid-1970s, of all times, to undertake such extensive studies of
historical source writings in architectural theory (by questions from students
who were pressing for a theoretical reflection of their subject, as he writes)
is probably no coincidence either 1. In his opus magnum, Kruft also impres- 1 See Kruft 1995: 7.

sively demonstrates that for the longest time the emphasis of theory forma-
tion had been on aesthetics2. 2 See Kruft’s definition: “Architectural
theory is any comprehensive or partially
This began to change in the decades between 1960 and the turn of the written system of architecture based on
aesthetic categories. Even if aesthetics is
millennium: Theories from all directions were virtually absorbed: semiotics, reduced to function, this definition remains
valid.” (Kruft 1995: 13; translation into
post-structuralism, Gestalt theory, systems theory, phenomenology, cultural English by the authors)

theory, chaos theory, to name just a few. Concepts were imported from many
different disciplines (from psychology as well as from political science, phys-
ics or sociology). Suddenly anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars …
spoke at architecture conferences. The integration of the most diverse fields
of knowledge expanded the boundaries of what was considered worth dis-
cussing in architecture far beyond aesthetic questions. At first glance, this is
astonishing, because at the same time there was a return to formal questions
and aesthetics, and indeed to architecture as a genre of art in general. At the
same time, however, reading became popular at schools of architecture, ar-
guably more than ever before or since. In many cases, this intellectual debate

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 was probably based on the desire to substantiate aesthetic decisions in a way
that was compatible with the intellectual moods of the time. With the pass-
ing of the modern narrative, function and rational expediency lost their bind-
ing force as a basis for decision-making. Only very few actually were able and
willing to implement the radical offer of an “anything goes” in their own prac-
tice, i.e. to endure the epistemological pluralism of a Paul Feyerabend with
its consequences of extreme openness, tolerance of ambiguity, and pleasur-
3 See Feyerabend 1975. able indecision in the long run.3 Instead, a competition of theory-based in-
terpretations soon set in, which, at least in parts of the discourse, was in no
way inferior to the objectionable dogmatism of modernity.
Consequently, the writing guild enjoyed a high reputation among archi-
tects. And architects also started to write themselves. The trend turned away
from the manifesto-like, short form of the modern avant-garde with its apo-
dictic truths, its demands and instructions for action, towards the narrative,
the metaphorical, the ironic, the associative. Titles such as Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture (1966) by Robert Venturi or Collage City (1978)
by Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe are required reading at many schools of ar-
chitecture until the present day.

Spaces for theory

This ubiquitous need for theory was also reflected structurally in the academic
world. To illustrate this fact, a few architecture faculties in Germany and its
neighbouring countries may be singled out as examples. The “Institute for
the History and Theory of Architecture” (gta) at ETH Zurich, which was mod-
elled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had already existed
since 1967. In the same year, Jürgen Joedicke began teaching in Stuttgart at
the “Institute for the Foundations of Modern Architecture” (IGMA), which he
had founded. He was one of the first to explicitly teach a theory of architec-
ture that was not primarily based on historical thinking. Joedicke’s approach
was initially firmly rooted in modernism. However, by wanting to place mod-
ern architecture on a scientific basis and reflect on it critically, he undoubt-
edly contributed to its transition into postmodernism. He thus stands for an
influential strand of development that is often forgotten when looking back
at postmodernity, namely an evolutionary derivative of modernism that re-
frains from an explicit break and instead keeps standing epistemologically
and methodologically firmly on the ground of modern thinking.
Elsewhere, too, architectural theory was only slightly interwoven with ar-
chitectural history. The chair Josef Paul Kleihues held at the TU Dortmund
from 1974 onwards was called “Building Planning and Architectural Theory”
until the mid-1980s and had a strong practical orientation, since Kleihues, as
a practising architect, mainly taught design. Parallel to this, during the 1970s
and 1980s architectural theory became a research subject for art and archi-
tectural historians. In addition to Hanno-Walter Kruft (TH Darmstadt, Uni-
versity of Augsburg), Werner Oechslin (since 1985 at the ETH Zurich) and
Jan Piper (TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen) should be mentioned here. During

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the 1990s, many faculties in Germany established specific chairs of architec-
tural theory based on the Anglo-Saxon model. At the TU Berlin, Fritz Neu-
meyer was the first professor of “architectural theory” from 1993 onwards, in
1996 Eduard Führ was appointed at BTU Cottbus and Ákos Moravánszky at
ETH Zurich, in 1998 Kari Jormakka at TU Vienna, to name but a few others.
Journals also played an important role in the discourse on architec-
tural theory.4 Architectural journals considerably expanded their spectrum 4 See Patteeuw, Szacka 2018.

of content. The usual architectural reviews and project descriptions, photos

and plans were replaced by essays on overarching issues in the new theoret-
ical journals. Magazines such as the Italian Domus or the British Architec-
tural Design became venues for the negotiation of postmodern concepts. In
Germany, the journal Arch+, founded as early as 1967, developed into an im-
portant forum for postmodern debates towards the end of the 1970s under
Nikolaus Kuhnert and Sabine Kraft. Until the 1990s, international theoreti-
cal debates were presented here to a German-speaking audience, for exam-
ple with thematic issues on Charles Jencks, Vilém Flusser or Rem Koolhaas.
Important new periodicals include Archithese, founded in 1971 by Stan-
islaus von Moos and Hans Reinhard5, and the New York-based magazine Oppo- 5 See Schaad, Lange, Torsten 2021.

sitions. A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture (1973–84), to which

Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Kurt W. Forster and Anthony Vidler con-
tributed significantly. In 1981, Werner Oechslin and Ulrich Conrads (the long-
time editor-in-chief of Bauwelt) founded the journal Daidalos, Architektur
Kunst Kultur, with others. In the twenty years that the journal existed, a wide
range of topics were discussed across disciplines: such as memory, hearing,
atmospheres, drawing, size, landscape, the human body or the underground.
Theoretical debates were also held in the context of events: Josef Paul
Kleihues brought an international audience to the West German “province”
from 1975 onwards on the occasion of the “Dortmunder Architekturtage”
(Dortmund Architecture Days) and “Dortmunder Architekturausstellungen”
(Dortmund Architecture Exhibitions), which he initiated6. By putting themes 6 See Meseke 2008.

such as “axis and symmetry” or “classicism” on the programme, Kleihues de-

liberately broke with the dogmas of modernism. In addition to architects, he
invited art historians, philosophers, sociologists, and artists, and showed ar-
chitectural drawings by Hans Hollein, James Stirling, Ieoh Ming Pei, Rich-
ard Rogers, Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi and Gottfried Böhm
in Dortmund’s Museum am Ostwall. Kleihues established international con-
tacts in this context, which he was later able to build on as director of the In-
ternational Building Exhibition (IBA) Berlin 1984/87.
Another aspect should be mentioned: exhibiting architectural drawings
and models as works of art in a museum, as Kleihues did in Dortmund, was­—
as is often overlooked today—still a provocation in the 1970s. In the field of
exhibitions, a similar tendency can be observed as in the production of the-
ory. Architecture exhibitions experienced a heyday in the 1980s, and they had
little in common with the also highly remarkable architecture exhibitions of
the 1920s. In the interwar period, the architects of the modern avant-garde

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 essentially wanted to educate a broad public on how to furnish their homes—
and thus how to live. In the major exhibitions of postmodernism, on the other
hand, architecture was embedded in a broad discourse on art and theory, and
the medium of architectural drawing was aestheticised as a work of art in its
own right. The Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM, German Museum of
Architecture) in Frankfurt/Main, for which founding director Heinrich Klotz
built up an extensive collection of postmodern architectural representations,
opened its doors in 1984 and the opulent inaugural exhibition “The Revision
of Modernity. Postmodern Architecture 1960–1980” was an immediate suc-
7 Seee Klotz 1984, Elser 2014. cess with the public. It was perceived as a programmatic manifesto.7
After the postmodern discourse on form and ornamentation on the scale
levels of architecture and the city as well as the relationship of architecture
to history and tradition have been discussed in issue 41, issue 42 presented
here is dedicated to another aspect of this discourse that is no less signifi-
cant in retrospect: it is focused on the question of how postmodernism has
changed the way of thinking and speaking about architecture, of represent-
ing and communicating it. We have assigned the selected contributions to
two focal points and captioned them Representations, Media, Communica-
tion and Discourse, Reception, Transformation, respectively. These two fo-
cal points, which are of course not clearly separable but overlap and are mu-
tually dependent, add essential facets to the umbrella topic Identifications
of Postmodernity. If identification means the assignment of an observed en-
tity to a concept, then the studies presented here help us to understand post-
modern architecture less from the perspective of its material appearance and
more from the perspective of the discourse formats accompanying it. In do-
ing so, it becomes clear at several points that the changes in the way architec-
ture was thought about, discussed, represented and communicated, includ-
ing how the relationship between architecture, city and society was refigured,
exert a stronger influence on the situation of architecture today than the for-
mal, aesthetic and stylistic innovations associated with the epoch.

Representations, media, communication

The first part is opened by a detailed and wide-ranging investigation by Kasper
Lægring, which bears the crisis of representation in its very title. Lægring
questions Charles Jencks’ view, still prominent today, which sought to di-
vide the variety of postmodern strategies into sometimes highly pointed cur-
rents and then juxtaposed them in direct opposition, for example the “his-
toricist” approach of Venturi and Scott Brown with the “ad hoc urbanism” of
Rem Koolhaas and OMA. With this strategy, Jencks was able to successfully
reduce the complexity of postmodern strategies and stage debates with high
public appeal, but he arguably also contributed to the schematisation and ul-
timately the banalisation of postmodernism. From Lægring’s point of view,
it is much more productive to focus on commonalities instead of constructed
opposites, and he recognises these in the use of collage as a thought pattern
and design principle. According to the author, collage has been recognised by

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the supposed antipodes as a contemporary answer to the diagnosed “crisis of
representation”. Lægring finds collage-like strategies in essential protagonists
of early postmodern thought, starting with Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in
their programmatic text Collage City, through Oswald Mathias Ungers’ stud-
ies on the urban archipelago to Koolhaas’ surrealist montages being them-
selves influenced by Ungers. According to Lægring, these connections only
gain contour when the principle of collage is interpreted hermeneutically in
a fundamental sense. With reference to the philosophers Odo Marquardt and
Thomas P. Brockelman, Lægring develops a description that identifies the use
of collage as an architectural instrument of cognition as a central feature of
postmodernity and shows how this strategy has changed all subsequent dis-
courses in such a way that we can no longer go back behind it today.
It has already been mentioned that the architecture galleries and muse-
ums we are familiar with today have emerged predominantly since the 1970s.
On the one hand, this was related to a newly awakened appreciation of the
historicity of architecture, but on the other hand also to the phenomenon of
“paper architecture”, the increasing detachment of the value of the design
drawing from the exclusive goal of realisation. Prepared by the utopian de-
signs of groups of the sixties such as Archigram or Superstudio, it became
accepted practice to understand architectural drawings as conceptual works
of art that could be exhibited and traded in galleries. In the process, the de-
gree of abstraction varied greatly, from site- and context-less spatial config-
urations to proposals for concrete competition situations that could be built
in principle. Alexandru Sabău discusses the variety of different procedures
and approaches in the field of “paper architecture” referring to a concrete his-
torical constellation, namely Romanian architecture in the 1970s and 1980s
with the culmination of the 1989 revolution. The situation of Romanian archi-
tects in the late phase of the socialist Ceaușescu regime was extremely difficult
and the confrontation with postmodern developments from the countries of
the Western hemisphere was only possible under more difficult conditions.
Nevertheless, there was a strong interest in current developments, and ar-
chitects in offices and at universities found numerous ways to inform them-
selves and to circulate postmodern ideas and adapt them to local conditions
and their own needs. The medium of drawing played an essential role in this
process. It was essential for the survival of the progressive Romanian archi-
tects of this era to develop, at least temporarily, an understanding of archi-
tecture that focused entirely on representation and discourse and declared
realisation to be of secondary importance. Sabău conducted interviews with
important protagonists of this era and reconstructs the prevailing discourse
formations and goals very precisely. In the process, many aspects that are typ-
ical of postmodernism in general are once again sharpened from a specific
angle. The heterogeneity of postmodern motivations, ways of thinking and
strategies becomes recognisable as a liberating and emancipating expansion
of the space of possibility, but at the same time it also becomes clear that this
space of possibility was used quite differently by the various actors. Accord-

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 ingly, individually, at the end of the postmodern high phase, the classical ar-
chitectural career can stand just as well as an academic or artistic practice
that attempts to permanently radicalise the aporias and paradoxes of post-
modern thinking in a self-reflexive way.
The detachment of architectural drawing from the purpose of building
enabled its presentation in exhibitions and galleries and its perception as an
independent work of art and as a contribution to discourse. In the context of
postmodernism, however, the exhibition medium also experienced a consid-
erable increase in significance in other respects. Samuel Korn traces this inno-
vation, which continues to have effects on present practices, in his contribu-
tion using a concrete case study. It is about the exhibition MAN transFORMS,
which the Austrian architect Hans Hollein, undoubtedly also one of the essen-
tial figures of postmodern architecture, curated in 1976 at the newly founded
National Museum of Design of the Smithsonian Institution in New York,
which had emerged from the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, as a
programmatic prelude. Samuel Korn shows how Hollein develops a strategy
of the fragmentary to meet the requirement of a holistic notion of “environ-
ment” or environmental design. Hollein, who biographically marks a striking
turning point from modernism to postmodernism in that he radicalizes and
at the same time ironizes the immanently totalitarian design claim of classical
modernism through his well-known dictum Everything is architecture (Alles
ist Architektur), had the opportunity to think the medium of exhibition in a
completely new way with the commission for this epoch-making presentation.
As Samuel Korn demonstrates in detail, he solved this task by interpreting the
exhibition as an “ecosystem”, which assembled a great variety of artefacts and
media in an associative manner and presented them in an artful arrangement
in which the meaning of the individual exhibits largely recedes behind the sys-
temic context and the interpretive, fragmentary and sign-like character of the
arrangement. This curatorial approach, it can be argued, is an appropriate re-
sponse to the increasing fragmentation of the world and to the postmodern
insight that claims to truth can henceforth only be formulated with reference
to a specific observer’s perspective. An interesting side aspect of this new un-
derstanding of the exhibition is that Hollein as a person and artist does not
retreat behind the quasi self-dynamically developing arrangement of the ex-
hibition—as the simultaneously emerging discussions about the “death of the
author” would suggest—but, on the contrary, becomes the proponent of a de-
velopment that stylises the curating of exhibitions itself as an art form and in
this way can subsume it into a comprehensive understanding of architectural
(or artistic) practice. Hollein’s own career from provocateur to acclaimed Aus-
trian state artist illustrates this aspect of postmodernism in an impressive way.
Hollein's career draws attention to the rapidly growing importance of the
multiple forms of mediation in the incipient postmodern era. The opposition
to the (allegedly or really) repressive dogmatics of modern architecture cre-
ated a power vacuum and an uncertainty that demanded interpretation. New
forms of presentation and representation, of explanation and obfuscation were

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called for and for a short time were received and discussed with great open-
ness and curiosity. It is hardly surprising, however, that the desire for dis-
course and theory, for playful provocation and paradox, for epistemological
perspectives and a reinterpretation of history already mentioned at the be-
ginning soon came under pressure from power, politics and economic inter-
ests. Here, the media of representation, but above all the person of the cura-
tor, took on a special significance. In fact, the re-formation of the discourse
created spaces for a new breed of leading figures.
Giovanni Carli also looks at the relationship between power, represen-
tation and architecture in the early postmodern era and focuses on a specific
place, Milan, for this purpose, but in his case it is not the medium of the ex-
hibition that forms the centre of analysis, but that of the magazine. Carli de-
scribes the 1980s as an era of political instability and a society under per-
ceived threat, which at the same time mark the beginning of a market-liberal
economic policy, to which individualism, narcissism, consumerism and the
search for entertainment correspond on a cultural level. He refers to Da-
vid Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity and applies its theoreti-
cal tools to the magazine Domus Moda, which in many respects stands as a
symbol of the zeitgeist described. Its editor Paolo Mendini is presented as a
paradigmatic figure who has mastered the postmodern game of “smoke and
mirrors” with bravura and propagates a postmodern expanded conception
of architecture that combines exquisitely with the neo-bourgeois concepts of
a stylistically confident homo economicus. In the Domus Moda project, Mi-
lan, as the location of a globally significant fashion, design and furniture in-
dustry, becomes the quasi-natural starting point for the new concepts of a
playful, over-aestheticized architecture that soars to become the medium of
a comprehensive way of life, taking in all levels of scale from the cup to the
table and the house to the city. At least for a while, it seems possible that ar-
chitecture in this postmodern sense would be able to occupy the vacuum left
by the—supposedly or actually—failed political utopias. The first part of the
volume ends with this fractured and ironic analysis of a historical moment in
which the hedonistic facet of postmodernism came to full fruition.

Discourse, Reception, Transformation

In the editorial of the previous issue 41, the question of periodisation has been
raised. After all, there is still no consensus on what is to be regarded as post-
modernism at all. Especially if we do not look at the quotations of historical
architectures understood as “POMO”, but rather at the production of theory,
it seems quite plausible to broaden the scope of observation from the early
1960s to well into the 1990s. On the one hand, this takes into account early
theoretical writings, such as Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, published in 1961.
Guia Baratelli dedicates her contribution to such an early theoretical writ-
ing, namely the book Experiencing Architecture by the Danish architect Steen
Eiler Rasmussen, published in the USA as early as 1959. Baratelli stretches

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 the time frame in the above sense by convincingly interpreting the book as a
precursor of postmodern readings of architecture and urban space. In the late
1950s, Rasmussen saw the discipline of architecture in an existential crisis,
which he sought to address by introducing new methods of teaching. He wrote
an easy-to-understand textbook for young architects in which —as Baratelli
points out—he focused on the viewer’s perception, including their bodily per-
ception and everyday actions. By integrating insights from Gestalt theory and
phenomenological approaches with art historical considerations, Rasmussen
created the foundations for a renewed understanding of architecture and urban
space beyond the abstract-modern aesthetics that were still rarely being ques-
tioned at that time. In doing so, he tied in with authors such as Camillo Sitte,
who in his 1889 book Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsät-
zen (Urban Planning According to its Artistic Principles) had also promoted
the idea of designing public urban spaces as pleasant and varied places as a
backdrop or even stage for human life in all its richness to unfold. The detailed
reading of Rasmussen’s slim but today still read booklet that Baratelli presents
here thus enriches the narrative about the origins of the “postmodern era”.
If one broadens the view of postmodern theory formation in the other
direction, i.e. towards the turn of the millennium, architectural debates and
designs can also be included in the consideration that have long since broken
with the vocabulary of forms usually understood as “postmodern”. This ap-
plies equally to the currents known in their time as “deconstructivism” and
“high tech”, which have emerged since the mid-1980s, as well as to the de-
8 See Berkemann 2021. bates on ecological building and participatory architecture.8 Should all these
approaches and tendencies be understood as part of a pluralistic postmod-
ernism, or are they to be interpreted as counter-concepts to a narrowly un-
derstood idea of postmodern style characterised by reference back to a tradi-
tional canon of forms? This debate—which is at the same time a debate about
the periodisation of postmodernism—is currently still in full swing and is by
all means controversial, as was recently demonstrated at the conference “Den-
kmal Postmoderne. Preserving a ‘non-terminable’ epoch” in March 2022 at
the Bauhaus University in Weimar/Germany.
This problem forms the background of Giacomo Pala’s contribution.
Starting with the writings of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard,
who introduced the concept of postmodernism into the debate in 1979 with
his study La condition postmoderne, he first notes that the latter explicitly
included architecture as a discipline in his considerations. And follows this
up with the question of what Lyotard’s actual interest in architecture was. To
this end, Pala not only analyses Lyotard’s writings, but also focuses on an ex-
hibition opened in 1985 under the title Les Immateriaux at the Centre Pom-
pidou in Paris. This exhibition, which Lyotard curated together with Thierry
Chaput, is today considered a milestone of scenography, and thematised the
changed living environment of a future shaped by new media and technolo-
gies. Architectural designs by Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid
and others were also shown in a multidisciplinary setting. Following his anal-

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ysis, Pala arrives at the question of whether, based on Lyotard, postmodern
architecture should not be defined quite differently—and above all much less
based on formal criteria—than is customary today.
The fact that postmodern exhibition makers saw themselves to a great ex-
tent as designers and actively contributed to the theoretical discourse has al-
ready been emphasised several times. This fact is also underlined in the con-
tribution by Sabine Brinitzer, who examines the concept of “fiction”, which
plays a central role in the writings of the German art historian Heinrich Klotz.
The starting point is Klotz’s 1984 dictum Nicht Funktion, sondern Fiktion!
(Not function, but fiction!). Dismissing one of the key concepts of modernism,
Klotz here emphazised the narrative moment of architecture. Brinitzer meticu-
lously traces the levels of meaning of the term, which ultimately always revolve
around the question of how architectural design can (again) negotiate themes
and ideas beyond the abstract, the functional, and the constructive. For Klotz,
this included what he called “image-creating ideas” as well as playing with sym-
bols and forms. Although Klotz, as Brinitzer also shows, was not the only one
to use the term “fiction” in his time, this term did not ultimately establish it-
self as a key concept of postmodernism. In any case, the go-getting Klotz prob-
ably left his mark on the German postmodern debate less through theoretical
treatises than—as already mentioned—through the founding of the Deutsche
Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main in 1979, for which he quickly built
up a top-class collection of architectural drawings and models from the 20th
century. Klotz was passionately committed to establishing the then still young
postmodern movement in German architecture, whereby he obviously acted
much more strategically and polemically effective as a speaker than as an author.
The Italian architect Aldo Rossi is a protagonist of postmodern archi-
tecture who shaped the debate both through his built work and his theoreti-
cal writings. Kenta Matsui takes this into account in a meticulously detailed
study. Matsui examines Rossi’s concept of “analogy” as a method of design.
Starting from the well-known representation La città analoga, which Rossi
made with others for the 1976 Venice Biennale, Matsui succeeds in creating
an interesting new interpretation of Rossi’s concept. He traces back how Ros-
si's interpretation of the concept of analogy changed over the decades, from
the topos of analogy in the city to analogy in architecture. Rossi was initially
concerned with theoretically grasping the juxtaposition of buildings of dif-
ferent times and epochs in a historically evolved city. But at least since his
book A Scientific Autobiography, published in 1981 for a US readership, he
increasingly aimed to explain the individual process of architectural design.
Rossi described designing as a constant recombination of elements, fed by
the reservoir of different personal memories that an architect accumulates
over the course of his life—freely combining models from architectural his-
tory and his own buildings. One can interpret Rossi as saying that the city as
a collective memory reservoir is comparable to the individual architectural
experiences of individuals collected in memory. The different interpretations
of the concept coincide in the metaphor of the city as memory.

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 Finally, Frida Grahn turns her attention to a country that is generally not
considered a stronghold of postmodernism: Switzerland. She examines the re-
ception of theories and concepts by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,
which were imported from the USA to Switzerland from the early 1960s until
the 1990s. Using extensive source studies, Grahn traces how theoretical con-
cepts that are nowadays considered typically postmodern were adopted by
Swiss theorists and practitioners in university teaching, disseminated in ar-
chitectural journals such as Archithese and in various exhibitions, translated
into designs, and controversially discussed. The Swiss players (above all René
Furer, Martin Steinmann and Stanislaus von Moos) were particularly interested
in topics such as symbolism and the sign character of architecture. The artistic
strategy of alienation and ironic quotation also gained particular importance in
the Swiss context. Grahn elaborates on the special interest of Swiss architects
in the concept of the “real” or “ordinary”, which, in turning away from the ab-
stractness and autonomy of international modernism, was able to theoretically
re-found the link to vernacular building methods. She also shows how, during
the 1990s, postmodern concepts were then increasingly viewed critically and
consequentially lost their relevance as a new interest in material took centre
stage and a tendency emerged that is now well known as “Swiss minimalism”.

Résumé
Taken together, the nine contributions to this volume do not provide a uni-
fied picture of postmodern architecture, but of course that was not to be ex-
pected in the first place. In the diversity of the developments, tendencies and
examples described and analysed, however, there appear several recurring
themes that give cause to reflect on why it is still worthwhile—or worthwhile
again, for that matter—to deal with this period today.
The intensity of the discourse, the interest in new forms of presenta-
tion and representation of architecture, the founding of institutions to per-
petuate these discourses and to research their foundations are postmodern
achievements from which we still benefit today. Not only the positions, but
also the media of communication and distribution of these positions became
more diverse and, at least for a while, also more open, anarchic, provocative.
Spaces for thought have been opened that had not existed before. From the
point of view of architectural theory, postmodernism has undoubtedly been
a fruitful period, perhaps even its “Golden Years”? Before the view back-
wards is sentimentally transfigured in this way, the contributions presented
here also show in precise case studies how precarious such conjunctures are,
and in how many ways the rudiments to future failure had already been laid
out in the beginnings of postmodernism. But failure in this context can only
ever be understood as relative. The contributions also show what strong in-
fluences postmodernism still has on today’s practices, for example in the ex-
hibition system, but also in relation to design approaches and strategies that
have since pluralised, diversified, and opened up.

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 It would be interesting to ask to what extent postmodern influence is still
reflected in architectural education today. People certainly study differently
today than they did in 1980, but at the same time the supposed certainties of
a classically modernist education can hardly be restored. The desire to coun-
ter today’s diagnoses of crisis and the resulting insecurity by means of sprawl-
ing theoretical debates, ironization, delight in paradox, strategies of hedo-
nism and over-aestheticization can be observed at best sporadically, arguably
with a somewhat increasing vehemence in recent years. What has taken the
place of these postmodern coping strategies and why cannot be answered by
the contributions that we are happy to present in these two issues of Cloud
Cuckoo Land that deal with “Identifications of Postmodernity”. But they do
provide numerous clues as to where such an analysis could start. A look back
can certainly be inspiring here. Not necessarily to pick up where we left off.
But perhaps to bring back something of the desire to theorize, to debate and
to experiment. From the audacious idea of reconnecting concrete architec-
tural work with the existential questions of our time, and this not only in the
immediately obvious sense of resource conservation and climate neutrality.

Authors
Sonja Hnilica (Prof.Dr.-Ing. habil.) is professor for architectural history and urban build-
ing culture at the TH Lübeck. She previously taught at the TU Vienna, the TU Dortmund
and the University of Heidelberg, among others. Numerous publications on architectural
theory, as well as on urban planning and 20th century architecture. In 2018, she pub-
lished Der Glaube an das Große in der Architektur der Moderne. Großstrukturen der
1960er und 1970er Jahre (Zurich, Park Books).

Riklef Rambow (Dipl.-Psych. 1992, University of Bielefeld; Dr. phil. nat. 1999, University
of Frankfurt/Main) has been Professor of Architectural Communication at the Karl-
sruhe Institute of Technology since 2009. Previously, he taught and conducted research
at JWGU Frankfurt/Main and WWU Münster, BTU Cottbus and RWTH Aachen. His
research deals with the perception, use and communication of architecture and urban
space. Riklef Rambow was co-editor of cloud-cuckoo-land between 2001 and 2012 and
has been again since 2016.

Literature
Berkemann, Karin (Ed.) (2021): Das Ende der Moderne? Unterwegs zu einer
Baugeschichte der 1990er Jahre (End of the Modern Era? Towards a Building History
of the 1990ies). Berlin.

Feyerabend, Paul K. (1975): Against Method. Outline of an Anarchist Theory of

Knowledge. London.

Jacobs, Jane (1961): The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York.

Klotz, Heinrich (1984): Die Revision der Moderne. Postmoderne Architektur 1960–80
(The Revision of Modernity. Postmodern Architecture 1960–1980). München.

Kruft, Hanno-Walter (1995): Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. Von der Antike bis zur
Gegenwart (History of Architectural Theory. From Antiquity to the Present). München.

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 Mesecke, Andrea (2008): Die Dortmunder Architekturtage (The Dortmund Architecture
Days). In: Scheer, Thorsten (Ed.): Josef Paul Kleihues. Werke 1966–1980 (Josef Paul
Kleihues. Works 1966–1980). Ostfildern, pp. 19–31.

Elser, Oliver (Ed.) (2014): Die Klotz Tapes. Das Making-of der Postmoderne (The Klotz
Tapes. The Making-of of Postmodernity) (= Arch+, No. 216).

Patteeuw, Véronique / Szacka, Léa-Catherine (Eds.) (2018): Mediated Messages.

Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture. London.

Rowe, Colin / Koetter, Fred (1978): Collage City. Cambridge, MA.

Schaad, Gabrielle / Lange, Torsten (Eds.) (2021): Archithese Reader. Critical Positions
in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976. Zürich.

Venturi, Robert (1966): Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York.

Recommended Citation
Sonja Hnilica, Riklef Rambow (eds.)
Golden Years? How Postmodernity changed the Theoretical Discourse on
Architecture and the City

In: Wolkenkuckucksheim | Cloud-Cuckoo-Land | Воздушный замок,

International Journal of Architectural Theory (ISSN 1434-0984), vol. 26., no. 42,
Identifications of the Postmodern. Representations and Discourses, 2022, pp. 5–16.

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