Lecture: Design and Postmodernity

Martine Dawley -Architectural Critic and Writer. Unconcious celebration. Design informing us about history - not the other way around.

Spaces of Modernism - umm, coulding find this book. Maybe it's in the Course Outline.

-ity: state, value, system, ideaology of root word.
-ism: the association, manifestation

e.g. materiality vs materialism

1960’s - Systemisation of design not possible.

1940’s - USA post WWII. Norman Rockwell. Capitalist Society. Levittown House. 17000 identical housing in an urban grid. Nature and women suppressed.

Postmodernism - about choice.
Feminism - about choice.
Therefore Feminism is Postmodern.

Second wave of feminism - quest for sameness. Women lib primarily focusing on males vs female issues. From 1970’s onwards it focused on other - disabled, race, gender(?). i.e. the marginal.

1960’s attention on surface as most/products equal in terms of function and efficiency. Attention to style as a differentiator.

Richard Hamilton
Ray Lichenstein - pop art.

Abstract Expressionism
1972 Coca-Cola vs de Kooning; Untitled

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

1964 Terence Conran, Habitat. LSD, riotous colour, stop needing started wanting
[ maybe an important transition time. Could be relevant for essay topic].

Mass Communication. Surface+Space=Power

1962 NASA Moon Landing. Neil Armstrong
1952 Ant Chair - Arne Jacobsen
1957 Egg Chair - ditto
1970 Apollo Space Rocket Design

Ettore Sottsass
Father of postmodernity. Red typewriter 1969 for Olivetti.

Memphis -Egypt. Piranesi influenced by Egypt as well.
Ornament becomes the object.

1971 Nixon - suspended convertability of US dollar into gold.
1973-1986 - oil crisis. Price of oil rose quadrupled.
NZ - Robert Muldoon Prime Minister and also Finance minister. Implemented protectionism that ended in 1984. NZ design stagnation until 1984 when Robert Muldoon replaced.

Cold War. 1940 to mid 1990. Ended really with the destruction of the Berlin wall.

1947-55 Korean War
1957-75 Vietnam War

Yamusaki - World Trade Centre

Postmodernism alienates and is subservient to capitalism.

1972 Charles Jencks end of modernism. After is post-modernism.
1976 Apple Macintosh is the biggest selling home? computer in the US.
1984 Apple Mac

Materialism
Philip Johnson - aluminium. Post war uses.

Robert Venturi - One of the three major writers of the century. Complexity and Contradiction.

Association important in structuralism. Simplification of signs. Iconography,

Michael Graves - Portland, Oregon, Municipal Building 1980.
Aldo Rossi - Modena Crematorium 1972-1976, 1978.

Structuralism
Faucault, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes

Semiotics - what an object means to you
[ I though this would be worth further investigation for essay].

Sign, Signified, Signifier
Roland Barthes

Media has subverted what fashion is. Code or association (dova) determines meaning.
Language determines the understanding of the sign. The word is meaningless. It is the association that is important. In language there is only signifiers.

The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard

Michel Faucault (1926-1984).
The guard house. Observation/surveillance. Postmodern narrative is situational, provisional, temporary with no claim to universality, truth, or reason.

The holiness of science revealed as bas or distortion.

Structuralist narrative stressing the performative - doing what you say e.g. launching a ship.

Simulcra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard, 1988
Functional Value
Exchange Value
Symbolic Value
Sign Value
Real vs Representation
Simulacrum - representation of something that is real.

Frederick Jameson - Anti-capitalist. “Post-Modernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism”. Hi-tech fantasies are morally questionable Difference between copy and original is redundant. Breakdown of symbols, and symbol recognition.

[The last two books sound very interesting. I have got the Baudrillard one, but interested in Frederick Jameson as well].