Modernism and Post Modernism in Architecture

Abstract

Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism.

Michael Polaner's post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polaner offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or classical ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism.

As we near the end of the twentieth century, we are increasingly hearing references to something called "post-modernism." Presumably post-modernism is something beyond modernism. The modern age, which had become so familiar to us, is now history. It has passed almost unheralded, and now we must adjust to something new. Whether this is a source of lament or rejoicing depends on how we understand modernism. Our quest for cultural self-understanding forces us to come to terms with the issues that Michael Polaner, almost half a century ago, insisted was of greatest urgency. (Richard 343)

We must understand our present situation in historical context, and unless we are to be passive victims of our future, we must work to shape our vision of destiny according to values and ideals which we freely and deliberately choose and openly acknowledge. In order to understand post-modernism, we must get a bearing on modernism. Indeed in the words of Fredric Jameson, "It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place"(Habermas 22)

The quest for a definition of post-modernism is a bit like trying to find one's way out of a fog without navigational aids. The vision of reality offered to us by the modernist accounts of objectivity show us only the fog and not our location in it. It is these accounts of objectivity offered by critical thought which Polaner explicitly repudiated in his post-critical epistemology. I therefore suggest that using the clues Polaner offers us, we should be able to see clear of the cultural fog of the false objectivity of impersonal knowing. Polaner's post-critical epistemology offers us a coherent vision of what is now being called post-modernism. (Judith 88) For Polaner, knowledge is not an impersonal undertaking but a very personal affirmation of that which we claim to know. Critical thought, which we equate with modernism, attempted to distance the knower from the known. Polaner's post-critical knowledge recovers the human dimension of knowledge by demonstrating that even in science, held to be the most precise form of knowledge by the modernists, the scientist relies on tacit unspecifiable clues in pursuit of discovery and any claim to knowledge must be accredited by the community of knower. (Diani 343)

Toward A Definition of Post-Modernism

The first harbinger I recall of post-modernism as a cultural phenomenon comes from the late novelist Walker ...