PS26 The Geopolitical Aesthetics of Postmodernism

“The manufacturer is the new patron. He stands now at the fountainhead of the building industry...He now makes the aesthetic as well as the technical and economic decisions.”¹

The above quote epitomizes many of the tendencies associated with post-Modern architecture: the withdrawal of architect’s societal role, the submission to the force of the corporations, and the “unthinking" of Utopia. The statement, in fact, was made early in 1961 in the 6th Union of International Architects (UIA) Congress in London, by the curator Theo Crosby. Closely examining the Congress’s exhibition and plenary sessions that were attended by influential figures including Buckminster Fuller, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Ernst Neufert, this paper parses out how this event for Cold-war architectural diplomacy incubated ideas would lead to the post-Modern turn of architecture in the following decade. Standardization and prefabrication were used by architects from both sides of the Iron Curtain to lament International Style architecture — the primary expression of Modern architecture since the inter-war era. Standardization was also regarded as an effective way to rectify previous stylistic blunders, in particular, the Stalinist Social Realism in the Soviet bloc. At the same time, a group of West-European neo-avant-garde artists and architects were hoping to use the Congress as a platform to articulate a less deterministic valuation of the built environment. This paper considers the geopolitical, technological, and architectural conditions on the two side of the Cold-war divide that drove architecture's break from Modernism. Through the UIA Congress, this study offers an alternative pre-history of post-Modern architecture by exploring a multitude of rhetorics about standardization: as a method of organizing production, a means to reconcile with post-war mass industries and a shield to protect architecture from political manipulation. 

1.Theo Crosby, “Conclusion” Architectural Design 31 (Nov. 1961):509.

A special 1970 issue of Fortune, titled “The Conglomerate Commotion,” described a mania of large-scale American industrial organizations aggressively merging with and acquiring firms in completely unrelated industries and geographies in order to obtain what business executives referred to as “geopolitical” power. With hundreds of diverse subsidiaries and indeterminable rates of acquisitions, these conglomerates, from Union Carbide to Litton Industries to Teledyne, demanded new laboratories and office buildings that defied modernist tendencies of material standardization, reproducibility, and homogeneity. Instead, the buildings produced for many conglomerate businesses between the 1960s and 1980s were described by urban geographers and historians, including Frederic Jameson and Reinhold Martin, as the aesthetic and material epitomes of postmodernism, since they boasted highly reflective, hermetic surfaces that protruded, curved, and folded—simultaneously revealing and concealing the late capitalist logics beneath them. This paper reveals how the aesthetic and material decisions for these new buildings were not based upon abstract economic conditions of late capitalism, as was described by Jameson, but instead on the geographically and politically-motivated structures and procedures of conglomerate business. This paper focuses on the laboratories designed by architects Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden during the late 1960s, while they worked at the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM), for companies such as the microelectronics conglomerate Teledyne Systems in Northridge, California. It reveals how the geopolitical motivations of conglomerate business produced and reinforced postmodern architecture, but also, at the same time, how the terms of conglomerate business began to influence the practices and discourses of architects: at DMJM, the firm was described as a “conglomeration” of firms—including architecture, real estate, and data processing firms—that broadened the firm’s so-called “geopolitical markets,” while beyond DMJM, others, including Charles Jencks, used the term “conglomerate” to describe postmodern forms more broadly.

Articulating a kind of Soviet postmodernism, architect Mikhail Barkhin, in 1979, asserted that the newest tendencies in socialist construction hinged on the recovery of the human scale, an emphasis on expression and the celebration of the compositional beauty of architectural ensembles. Six years later in 1985, the Russian version of Jencks’ Language of Post-Modern Architecture appeared, and architectural historian Andrei Ikonnikov published his Art, Environment and Time, proffering a late-socialist equivalent of Giedion’s triad. Both Barkhin and Ikonnikov displayed a particular kind of historicism—the past held interest for them insofar as it coincided with the colonial other. Ikonnikov singled out the “Hunting Lodge” of the Vinni sovkhoz in Estonia as the antithesis to postwar functionalism, which had produced buildings that, lacking historical reference and embodying closed form, contrasted with the way in which the “Hunting Lodge” combined traditional wooden architecture with an openness of form guaranteed by the user’s direct participation in its construction. Ikonnikov brought such postmodernist icons as Moore’s Piazza d’Italia into dialogue with examples from the Soviet context, like the development of Baratashvili Street and Kibalchich Ascent in Tbilisi, which was undertaken by Sh. Kavlashvili from 1979 to 1981. As for Barkhin, he foregrounded the building complex surrounding Karl Marx Square in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan and Lenin Palace in Almaty, Kazakhstan, celebrating them as the signifier of a new direction in architecture.

Is it possible to understand late Soviet architecture in postcolonialist terms? My paper will examine and suggest ways to interpret the complex imbrication between postmodernism and imperialism as it pertains particularly to the tail end of Soviet history.

In 2010 a monument to Tadeusz Kościuszko, an 18th century military hero, was unveiled in Warsaw’s Iron Gate Square. Aesthetically at odds with the socialist-modern residential buildings flanking the space, the figure of the general overlooks the plaza while sculptures celebrating his virtues adorn the monument’s base. Stylistically conventional and uninspired in its placement, the composition is incongruous both formally and in its derivative origins: the multinational Citi Bank funded the project with the stipulation that the design be an exact replica of Washington D.C.’s Kościuszko monument, which was unveiled in 1910.
Almost entirely rebuilt after WWII, much of Warsaw’s urban fabric attests to its years under socialism but since 1989 the built-environment has also become reflective of Poland’s transformation since renouncing communism in favor of democracy and capitalism. Amid these changes, historic districts and landmarks refute the postwar communist heritage and seek to reaffirm connections to the past and the removal and construction of monuments has proved to be a powerful way for the city’s physical spaces to participate in nation-building, and the reclaiming and rewriting of history. Iron Gate Square’s built environment exemplifies these tensions and serves as a paradoxical backdrop for the simulacrum of a national hero. My analysis of this space relies on archival research and foregrounds the square’s history including that of its former commemorative marker, a late-socialist monument that stood on the site from 1985-1991.By illuminating these circumstances, I argue that the Kościuszko monument can be understood as a belated, extreme, and regressive form of postmodernism that utilizes public space to advance a nationalist and conservative reinterpretation of Polish history and values. An emblem of corporate interests, this imported copy simultaneously resurrects, revises, and obscures vital episodes of Warsaw’s past.