What Would Happen to Postmodernism?
In the late 1970s the postmodernist movement had made a tremendous impact on American architecture. Observers wondered whether the postmodernist architectural upstarts of the 1970s, such as Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi, would effect a wholesale architectural revolution in the 1980s. A hint of what was to come in the 1980s could be discerned in Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s postmodernist design for the AT&T Building in New York City (1978). A white neoclassical skyscraper capped by a cornice borrowed from eighteenth-century furniture, Johnson’s “Chippendale skyscraper” portended a shift from the modernist ethos of austere, sterile, form-follows-function minimalism to a new postmodernist eclectic, playful, and accessible style. Johnson’s shift to postmodernism signaled a sea change; he had been among the most influential architects in introducing modernism to America in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1980s almost the entire profession followed suit.
