Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by suspicion about the use of reason and logic; skepticism toward what it considers the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of the certainty of knowledge and the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Nicholas Negroponte is a Greek American architect. He is the founder and chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also founded the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). Negroponte is the author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital translated into more than forty languages.
Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the late 1950s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The movement was introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. The style flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown & Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, neo-futurism, new classical architecture, and deconstructivism. However, some buildings built after this period are still considered postmodern.
Lawrence Halprin was an American landscape architect, designer and teacher.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
Architectural phenomenology is the discursive and realist attempt to understand and embody the philosophical insights of phenomenology within the discipline of architecture. The phenomenology of architecture is the philosophical study of architecture employing the methods of phenomenology.
High modernism is a form of modernity, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world. The high modernist movement was particularly prevalent during the Cold War, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s.
William Wilson Wurster was an American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, best known for his residential designs in California.
Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Scott Brown and her husband and partner, Robert Venturi (1925-2018), are regarded as among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and theoretical writing and teaching.
Texas Tech University College of Architecture is the college of architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The architecture program has existed at Texas Tech University since 1927. Texas Tech's Master of Architecture is a professional degree and it is accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). On November 30, 2022, the school announced it would be named the Huckabee College of Architecture.
Robert E. Somol Jr. is an architectural theorist and was director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2007 to 2022. His writing has been centrally-linked to "post-critical" architectural theory at the turn of the 21st century; the concept is similar to that of postcritique found in literary criticism.
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures. The term comes from Latin architectura; from Ancient Greek ἀρχιτέκτων (arkhitéktōn) 'architect'; from ἀρχι- (arkhi-) 'chief', and τέκτων (téktōn) 'creator'. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilisations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.
Wesley Jones is an American architect, educator and author. Founding partner of Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones, in 1987 and then Jones, Partners: Architecture in 1993, Jones is a leading architectural voice of his generation, advocating for a continuing appreciation of the physical side of technology within a world increasingly enamored of the virtual. For most of his career this has taken the form of an overt fascination with mechanical expression, both static and moving, and his designs have been celebrated for their "engaging operability” and humor. In his early writings he focused on making the case for the appropriateness of mechanical form in architecture, but his later essays have also taken on more fundamental disciplinary questions, particularly with respect to the growing hegemony of digital design.
Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon is an American landscape architect and graphic designer. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is best known for her large-scale interior ‘supergraphics’ and exterior signage at Sea Ranch, a private estate with a utopian vision in Sonoma County, California.
Merrill Elam is an American architect and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a principal with Mack Scogin in Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects where their work spans between buildings, interiors, planning, graphics and exhibition design, and research.
Christophe Van Gerrewey is a Belgian architectural and literary theorist, writer and architect. He is currently tenure track professor for architectures, criticism, history and theory at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Elizabeth Diller, also known as Liz Diller, is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979. She is also an architecture professor at Princeton University.
Christine L. Williams is an American sociologist. She is a professor of Sociology and the Elsie and Stanley E. (Skinny) Adams Sr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization include gender, sexuality, and workplace inequality. Her research primarily involves gender discrimination at work.
