Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or 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 claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. 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.
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered as a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.
Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Archigram was an avant-garde British architectural group whose unbuilt projects and media-savvy provocations "spawned the most influential architectural movement of the 1960's," according to Peter Cook, in the Princeton Architectural Press study Archigram (1999). Neofuturistic, anti-heroic, and pro-consumerist, the group drew inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was expressed through hypothetical projects, i.e., its buildings were never built, although the group did produce what the architectural historian Charles Jencks called "a series of monumental objects (one hesitates in calling them buildings since most of them moved, grew, flew, walked, burrowed or just sank under the water." The works of Archigram had a neofuturistic slant, influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration.
Charles Alexander Jencks was an American cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres. He published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as a theorist of Postmodernism. Jencks devoted time to landform architecture, especially in Scotland. These landscapes include the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and earthworks at Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. His continuing project Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in 2015 near Sanquhar.
Neomodern or neomodernist architecture is a reaction to the complexity of postmodern architecture and eclecticism in architecture, seeking greater simplicity. The architectural style, which is also referred to as New Modernism, is said to have legitimized an outlook of comprehensive individualism and relativism.
Harold Foss "Hal" Foster is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Starchitect is a portmanteau used to describe architects whose celebrity and critical acclaim have transformed them into idols of the architecture world and may even have given them some degree of fame among the general public. Celebrity status is generally associated with avant-gardist novelty. Developers around the world have proven eager to sign up "top talent" (i.e., starchitects) in hopes of convincing reluctant municipalities to approve large developments, of obtaining financing or of increasing the value of their buildings. A key characteristic is that the starchitecture is almost always "iconic" and highly visible within the site or context. As the status is dependent on current visibility in the media, fading media status implies that architects lose "starchitect" status—hence a list can be drawn up of former "starchitects".
Architectural Design, also known as AD, is a UK-based architectural journal first launched in 1930 as Architectural Design and Construction. The journal is currently published by John Wiley & Sons, and has been edited by Helen Castle since 2001.
Bernard William Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country's most important thinkers. His book Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 is a key text in Australian art history, and influence on Robert Hughes. Smith was associated with the Communist Party of Australia, and after leaving the party remained a prominent left-wing intellectual and Marxist thinker. Following the death of his wife in 1989, he sold much of their art collection to establish the Kate Challis RAKA, one of the first prizes in the country for Indigenous artists and writers.
Robert E. Somol Jr. is an architectural theorist currently serving as the director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 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.
Edwin Heathcote is a writer, architect and designer. He has been the architecture and design critic of The Financial Times since 1999, and is the author of books on architecture and design. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of online design writing archive readingdesign.org.
Kenneth Michael Hays is an American architectural historian and professor. He currently serves as Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is also co-director of the school's doctoral programs, namely Ph.D and DDes or Doctor of Design.
Metamodernism is a term that refers to a range of developments observed in many areas of art, culture and philosophy, emerging in the aftermath of postmodernism, roughly at the turn of the 21st century. To many, it is characterized as mediations between aspects of modernism and postmodernism; for others the term suggests an integration of those sensibilities with premodern cultural codes as well. Metamodernism is one of a number of attempts to describe post-postmodernism.
Kazi Khaleed Ashraf is a Bangladeshi architect, urbanist and architectural historian. Writing from the intersection of architecture, landscape and the city, Ashraf has authored books and essays on architecture in India and Bangladesh, the work of Louis Kahn, and the city of Dhaka. His various writings on the architecture of Bangladesh have provided a theoretical ground for understanding both the historical and contemporary forms of architecture, while his written and design work on Dhaka advances that city as a "theorem" for understanding urbanism in a deltaic geography. Ashraf and contributing team received the Pierre Vago Journalism Award from the International Committee of Architectural Critics for the Architectural Design publication Made in India. He has also co-authored a number of publications with the architect Saif Ul Haque. Ashraf has recently established an international publication series called Locations: Anthology of Architecture and Urbanism that will present works and features from around the globe.
New Classical architecture, New Classicism or Contemporary Classical architecture is a contemporary movement in architecture that continues the practice of Classical architecture. It is sometimes considered the modern continuation of Neoclassical architecture, even though other styles might be cited as well, such as Gothic, Baroque, Renaissance or even non-Western styles – often referenced and recreated from a postmodern perspective as opposed to being strict revival styles.
The One Dimension Group was a modern art collective founded in Iraq, by Shakir Hassan Al Said in 1971 which attempted to combine medieval Sufi traditions with contemporary, abstract art. Although the One Dimension Group was founded in Iraq, its members originated from across Arab nations, and its influence was felt across the Arab art world.
The Hurufiyya movement (Arabic: حروفية ḥurufiyyah, adjectival form ḥurufī, 'letters' is an aesthetic movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century amongst Muslim artists, who used their understanding of traditional Islamic calligraphy within the precepts of modern art. By combining tradition and modernity, these artists worked towards developing a culture specific visual language, which instilled a sense of national identity in their respective nation states, at a time when many of these states where shaking off colonial rule and asserting their independence. They adopted the same name as the Hurufi, an approach of Sufism which emerged in the late 14th–early 15th century. Art historian Sandra Dagher has described Hurufiyya as the most important movement to emerge in Arabic art in the 20th century.
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is a 1978 book, written by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The book serves as a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan between 1850 and 1960, analyzing the development of architecture and urban design throughout New York's history from the founding of New Amsterdam by the Dutch, to the design of the Headquarters of the United Nations by Le Corbusier. Rem Koolhaas describes the concept of 'Manhattanism', the theory of the creation and functioning of the city of New York, at length in the book.
The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture, published in 2011, was the last book by Charles Jencks. Jencks discusses the history of Post-modernism, especially in the fields of art and architecture during the last five decades. Jencks argues that since the beginning of the millennium, post-modernism has experienced a deep rebirth which should be studied.
