Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, 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.
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s 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 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 post-modern.
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, also known simply as GSAPP, is regarded as one of the most important and prestigious architecture schools in the world. It is also home to the Masters of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design, Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, and Urban Planning.
Robert Arthur Morton Stern, usually credited as Robert A. M. Stern, is a New York City–based architect, educator, and author. He is the founding partner of the architecture firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, also known as RAMSA. From 1998 to 2016, he was the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
The New York Five was a group of architects based in New York City whose work was featured in the 1972 book Five Architects. The architects, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier, are also often referred to as "the Whites." Other architects and theorists have been associated with the group, including Werner Seligmann, Kenneth Frampton, Colin Rowe, and Gwathmey's partner Robert Siegel.
Kenneth Brian Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He is the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. He has been a permanent resident of the United States since the mid-1980s. Frampton is regarded as one of the world's leading historians of modernist architecture.
Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins in timber and as the flour milling capital of the world. It occupies both banks of the Mississippi River and adjoins Saint Paul, the state capital of Minnesota.
The Shelbourne Hotel is a historic hotel in Dublin, Ireland, situated in a landmark building on the north side of St Stephen's Green. Currently owned by Kennedy Wilson and operated by Marriott International, the hotel has 265 rooms in total and reopened in March 2007 after undergoing an eighteen-month refurbishment.
Sylvia Lavin is a Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, School of Architecture. She was previously the head of the Ph.D. in Architecture program from 2007-2017 and Professor of Architectural History and Theory at UCLA, where she was Chairperson of the department of Architecture and Urban Design from 1996 to 2006. Lavin is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a Visiting Professor of Architectural Theory at Princeton University School of Architecture. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was Professor of Sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is Adjunct Professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is Founding Editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.
Jane M. Blocker is a Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory and the Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she is affiliated with the Moving Image Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. In a note on the back cover of Blocker's What the Body Cost Lucy R. Lippard writes of her: "Jane Blocker is as good a writer, scholar, and original thinker as feminists could hope for."
Galia Solomonoff AIA is an Argentinian-born architect and the founding creative director of New York-based architecture and design firm Solomonoff Architecture Studio. Her notable projects include Dia:Beacon; the Defective Brick Project; multiple residential projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn; and competition proposals for international institutional projects.
Rosemarie Haag Bletter is a German-born American architectural historian, university professor, writer, and lecturer.
Salomon Frausto is an American architectural theorist, editor, curator, and educator.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an artist, preservation architect, theorist and educator, commonly associated with experimental preservation and the journal Future Anterior. He is best known for his “The Ethics of Dust” ongoing series of artworks derived from the cleaning of monuments, which was exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Westminster Hall, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and SFMoMA, amongst others. He is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Kathryn Margaret Rudy FBA FRSE is a manuscript historian at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is best known for her forensic approach to medieval books, and has pioneered the use of the densitometer to measure the grime that original readers deposited in their books. Her research focuses on the medieval reception of manuscripts, how they were manipulated and handled, and how book-making skills were lost with the advent of the printing industry.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is a Professor of Art History and Architectural Historian at University College Dublin. She is an expert in American and German modernism, and is interested in modern sacred architecture. In 2018 She was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal for Humanities.
Buell Hall is an academic building on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University in New York City. Built in 1885 as Macy Villa, it is the oldest building on Columbia's campus, and the last remaining building at Columbia which dates back to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, on whose grounds the university is now located. It now houses La Maison Française, the oldest French cultural center on an American university campus, as well as the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Jeremy Edmiston (1964) is an Australian American architect, founder and principal of System Architects and former director of the Masters of Architecture program at the Anne and Bernard Spitzer School of Architecture at City College, New York. He is considered a pioneer in digital prefabricated design and construction.
