Output details
16 - Architecture, Built Environment and Planning
University of Westminster
Radical post-modernism: architectural design
This publication was produced as a collaboration between architectural critic Charles Jencks and Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob of FAT Architecture. In it, Jencks, one of the earliest exponents of postmodernism, and FAT, since 1995, one of its most prolific and high-profile practices, join forces to revisit postmodern ideas in the context of 21st Century media, digital media and computer aided manufacture. This retroactively examined postmodernism’s premises, its legacy and its contemporary and future relevance. The issue is split into three sections. The first explored the current architectural landscape and defined Radical Post-Modernist tendencies within it. In this section, Griffiths contributed to FAT’s essay ‘Post-Modernism an incomplete Project’ (pp. 18-23) and co-curated a survey of the work of a diverse international group of Radical post-Modernists. The second section examined the tactics, strategies and tropes of Radical Post-Modernism. Griffiths’ essay on the ‘figural section’ (pp. 68-77) examined various manifestations of the billboard and the mediated image in FAT’s work. In the final section dealing with the historical legacy of Post-Modernism, Griffiths contributed to the discussion of FAT’s brand of fit-for-purpose Radical post-Modernism (pp. 78-89) and to the article ‘reradicalising post-modernism’ (pp. 122-127), which looked back in retrospect at FAT’s top-ten Post-Modern moments.
