Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 89

Postmodern Moods
Of Art Deco
Western societies are Eurocentric. Their designed environments
confirm symbiotic relationships to cultural continuums whose
ideologizing of the International Style dominated design and
building activities for over fifty years. Contemporaneously, the
Modern Movements associated with this style in architecture and
design, served and mirrored political, social, and economic interests,
and faithfully articulated technological prowess and individual
aspirations through the 1960s. As Postmodern Existential thought
evolved, it postulated that reality cannot be determined, and thus
reason is relative, circumstantial, and pluralistic. Modem design, on
the other hand, remained singularly dogmatic and rigid. Outside the
circles of Modernists, it was perceived to be unresponsive to
contextually defined social and psychological needs. Indeed cultural
opposition to Modernism grew more intense as it became increasingly
associated with pragmatic, unimaginative, and deadly-boring box
structures. While such perceptions, more often than not, unfairly
discredited talented Modernists, in isolated cases the assessments
concerning the lack of cultural value of these structures were not only
clear and uncontested, but also confirmed by physical abuse and
wholesale destruction of buildings by residents, and in some cases the
authorities.
One such over publicized example was the housing project of
Pruitt-lgoe in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by the prominent modem
architect, Minoru Yamasaki, which even in the minds of Modernists,
exemplified the confrontations of ideologies that occur only when a
building's design fails to facilitate and enhance the daily living
patterns of the occupants. According to students of design trends.
Modernism ended when this project was demolished shortly after its
completion in 1972.^ Subsequently, practitioners of Modem design
began to turn to eclectic experimentation in search of freedom from the
restraints of Modernism.
With the emergence of Postmodernism in the 1970s came a
romanticized synthesis of modem technology and borrowings from the
design traditions of classical antiquity, specifically those of Greece
and Rome.^ These borrowings had been digested and transformed by