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MIX IT UP Post modernism was not a style but a tolerance of history, personality and taste, says Terry Farrell
IT SEEMED obvious to put together a book to run alongside the UK’s first review of post modernism for two decades. The review should be as wide as possible – city, place, architecture, design and interiors and relating these to the modern-era arts. A maximalist reaction to an age of reductivist limitation. In the end however, I started the book with a much narrower field and let it grow outwards. Post modernism was all-encompassing, not a style but an era, about holistic connectivity and the broadening of all viewpoints. I focused on interiors as connectivity could be studied from the smallest scale and expanded. The observation by Alberti that ‘the city is like some large house, and the house... like some small city’ supplies the central theme. The book deals with
continuums of scale and time, of changing uses, particularities of context, history, and how nothing is ever really ‘finished’. Self-ordering and organic responses to life’s chaos are embraced and expressed. I have included three types of interiors – homes, museums and workplace – with projects that range over three decades. Against Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living in’ the post modern view of ‘home’ is quite different to the modernist ‘object’. Adaptations are fascinating – the interface between the original design purpose and today’s use, and the layers of what happened in between, are extremely stimulating. Look at how the Architectural Association
occupies a row of 18th century family houses adapted to its use. There’s a kind of organic stewardship which reminds me of Darwin’s ‘tangled bank’ with an order that is not based on pre-design, but one in which adaptive design is continuous and mutating. One characteristic of a post modern era is tolerance of different tastes and the idea that homes, interiors and cities are the product not only of a historical variance over time, but also of personality and taste. The context of place, of identification with the city around a building, is part and parcel of the post modern idea of buildings as place-makers. ‘Ideal’ cities commissioned from scratch take time to develop the layered quality that makes them human. After World War II, the
anonymous box increasingly became the norm for the office building and was adopted for both the corporate owner/
occupier, such as Seagram and Lever, and for the speculative blocks which became ubiquitous in cities like New York, London and Tokyo. It was at this time that I began to take an interest in urban planning and became engaged in a debate over ‘designed’ modernist city planning and more natural organic city planning. All my life I have felt passionately that whatever the merits of modernist architecture, they do not apply to city planning. Modernist buildings work in the city context by juxtaposition. They need an old city as a contrast, like the Pompidou Centre or the London Eye. It is almost as if they work as surreal displaced objects; the traditional city is maintained, even reinforced, by their renegade presence. The four museums in
the book – two in London, one in Edinburgh and one in Newcastle – grew from
Fascinating adaptions: the Royal Institution, London.
existing buildings and their context. The explanation and enjoyment of the exhibits relies on layered storytelling and the juxtaposition of objects, and celebrates richness and complexity. I have never held with the view that art or historical artefacts are best set against an anonymous background. Actually, I believe that the best galleries and museums are in old buildings and the more idiosyncratic they are or the more contrast there is in the building narrative, whether it’s a power station, a garage or a grand aristocratic house, the better. Similarly, the best are compilations and bundled together in an overlapping way: the Maeght Foundation in France, the V&A or Soane museums in London. I believe a postwar generation of curators, like the museums’ designers, favoured anonimity because they wanted total control over the object, its setting , its reading and context. Such an approach misses so much, and without the post modern revolution we would not have the much greater joy and pleasure that historical narrative and context give our homes, workplaces and museums. n
Terry Farrell: Interiors and the Legacy of Postmodernism is published by Laurence King and will be available from October 2011.
POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION 1970-1990 24 September 2011-15 January 2012, V&A, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL
www.vam.ac.uk/
WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011
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