Review: There’s more to postmodernism than style alone

‘We are all postmodernists now,’ declares Terry Farrell in his and Adam Nathaniel Furman’s book, Postmodernism: Architecture That Changed Our World. Yet, comparing the architecture of the postmodern era – with its formal exuberance, stylistic promiscuities and overt historicisms – to the polite, mostly neo-modernist aesthetic that pervades today, Farrell’s characterisation seems at best a stretch, and maybe actually the wrong way round. One could say that it’s actually modernism that has re-emerged triumphant in recent decades and not the insurgent architectural movement that seemingly overturned it in the 1970s and 1980s, of which Farrell was one of the UK’s leading protagonists.

However, if one considers the way context, memory, identity and above all place are now among architects’ chief concerns – albeit often rather more in theory than in practice – then what Farrell means becomes rather clearer. Postmodernism was an architectural style, but it was also something than ran much deeper: a sensibility, a philosophy even, attuned to the ways buildings relate to their contexts – whether physical or historical – and to the people who live, work and use them. If modernism had at its height sought to impose order and control onto a chaotic, fragmented and rapidly changing world, postmodernism accepted it as it was, embracing its myriad complexity.

Farrell’s own sensibility towards the city, which was at the root of his particular brand of postmodernism, was shaped early on. Growing up and studying in Newcastle on the cusp of an extraordinary moment of modernist transformation, he witnessed first hand some of the hostility that modernist architects, planners and policymakers felt towards the historic city (though this was always overstated). More profound was the glimpse of the underlying value system that drove the modernist project that determined how a city should be organised and function, and more immediately what should be razed, what might be kept – and who decided.

After Newcastle, Farrell won a fellowship to study at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he worked with Louis Kahn: ‘I liked what he said, but not necessarily what he did.’ Beyond the immediately architectural, Farrell was drawn to the wider intellectual world: Paul Davidoff’s work on civil rights, Ian McHarg’s campaigning on the environment, and the writings of Jane Jacobs. The ‘bridge-builders’ between these worlds were Robert Venturi, then writing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and Denise Scott Brown. If Venturi pointed the way for Farrell to a ‘human, balanced and integrated view’ of architecture’s potential, then the work of his tutor and friend, Scott Brown, showed how city-making was fundamentally a social project.

But postmodernism, as it came to be understood later on, didn’t yet exist, at least not in the UK. So Farrell headed initially towards the nascent High-Tech movement for the way it sought to resist the universalism of technocratic modernism and urban planning, imbuing architectural discourse with new ideas and energy. For Farrell, if rather less so for his practice partner Nicholas Grimshaw, it was, though, never about technology for its own sake, but what it unlocked in terms of efficiency, adaption and flexibility, as was borne out in many of their early projects. Farrell was starting a journey that would soon leave modernism far behind.

In 1976, he wrote an essay in the RIBA Journal called ‘Buildings as a Resource’ where he stated, ‘Our existing buildings are a valuable resource like coal in the ground or oil under the sea. … Usually, not until demolition takes place is it realised that communities are a resource in an economic sense as well as a social-cultural sense. … there has to be give and take on the planning side to allow new viable ways of using existing buildings of historical and architectural interest [to] change in order to survive.’

It’s a statement that seems obvious today (though the reference to fossil fuels is certainly of its time), but it put Farrell in opposition to much mainstream modernist thinking. It was a position shared by Charles Jencks, then also seeking to overturn modernism albeit in rather more theatrical ways. The two would nevertheless find much common in terms of approach to the city, the role of style and what we understand now as context. Farrell’s growing closeness to Jencks – culminating in Farrell’s commission to design a house for the Jencks family in Holland Park – would precipitate his final split from Grimshaw and embrace of postmodernism.

Like the Jencks house – now open as museum called The Cosmic House – Farrell’s early, properly postmodern works tended to be adaptions and reworking of existing buildings. The project at Comyn Ching triangle in Covent Garden sensitively yet provocatively reimagined a group of historic buildings that a decade earlier had been slated for comprehensive redevelopment. Then there was the epoch-defining studio for TV-am in Camden, which despite its well known stylistic exuberance, was ultimately an augmentation of existing buildings. For the Clifton Nurseries, Farrell would realise an historically resonant glass structure in Bayswater, in what one must assume was in deliberate contrast to the anonymous big-box sheds presided over by Grimshaw.

Then Farrell suddenly went big with the trio of postmodernist statement buildings: Charing Cross Station, Alban Gate and most famously MI6. Yet even at this significantly increased scale, these buildings still drew from and were carefully related to their surroundings: contextual at ground level, yet striking in the skyline, like their Victorian forebears.

Even as Farrell’s practice expanded during the 1990s and 2000s, establishing a highly successful office in Hong Kong, with the scale of the projects increasing still further and in the process reverting to a more modernist style, his work remained governed above all by a sensibility towards to city, site and context. ‘Style’ was a reflection of that. As Farrell himself stated, ‘From early on I thought that it wasn’t a question of developing a postmodern style; it was much more than that.’ And it remains so. Postmodernism may be long over, but its legacy lives on. Farrell is right; we are all postmodernists now.

Postmodernism: Architecture That Changed Our World, by Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, October 2024, is published by RIBA Publishing and includes a foreword by Owen Hopkins