Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉCd'Erickson nous permet de comprendre que l'architecture postmoderneconstitue une expression richement codée qui, tout à la fois, redonne vie auxtraditions esthétiques et à la mémoire collective des gens du lieu et intensifie etsubsume les formes, les lieux et les techniques architecturaux modernes.The Modernism/Postmodernism DialecticModernism is deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the 20th century;its architectural legacy constitutes a tangible component of this culturalbaggage. The monuments of the “Modern Movement” have inherited not onlythe historical conscience of their creators, but also that of theiraudiences—present-day consumers and interpreters of the built environment.Thus, any assessment of modernism in Canadian architecture demands anexamination based on the predominant construct of contemporary culture,postmodernism. 1By the early 1980s, postmodern culture signified a perceived, radical rupturein the Modern Movement; in the realm of architecture, modifications inaesthetic production were dramatically visible (see Jameson, 1991, p. 2). As aresult, cultural critics objectified their discourse with little subtlety,juxtaposing Mies van der Rohe's sleek curtain walls, established signifiers ofan ahistorical modern architecture, with Phillip Johnson's appropriation of aChippendale pediment, an historicized harbinger of a burgeoning postmodernstyle, to cap his AT&T Building (New York, 1978-82). 2 New myths andideologies were relatively framed as the buzz words “difference” and “doublecoding”replaced “universality” and “form follows function” in the syntax ofwestern culture. Initially, postmodern architecture appeared as just anotherfad, a visually dramatic but fleeting moment in the 20th-century's concurrentquests for aesthetic novelty and technological innovation in design. Now it isrecognized on another level as “part of a slowly emerging culturaltransformation of western society” (Huyssen, 1986, p. 39).The conceptual framework of postmodern culture is implicitly wed to itsdialectical relationship with modernism. Architecturally, however,postmodernism is neither an exclusive break from nor a simple continuation ofmodernism. 3 A fundamentally abstract aesthetic and periodizing code,postmodernism is cast in its narrowest light when the term is used polemically,that is, when it is addressed as an “either/or” dichotomy of articulated I-beamsversus referential Doric columns, involving discrete problems of “style” ascelebration of surface virtuosity. So too is it self-limiting to render postmodernarchitecture synonymous with a nostalgic path backward to literal historicism.If postmodernism is to be distinguished from modernism, it is by a gradualshift of assumptions, experiences and ideas. As Huyssen (1986, pp. 181-183)observed, “modernism remains inscribed in postmodernism in an inherentlyrational cultural and aesthetic construct.” Thus defined, postmodern culturalstudies offer a fruitful revisionist framework for considering the architectureof Arthur Erickson.26