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What started as a tongue-in-cheek rebuke of the staid minimalism of the Modern movement has, by many accounts, come to dominate our current globalized architectural vernacular. Postmodern architecture — with its emphasis on decoration, whimsy and reference — was the antithesis of the strict functionalist aesthetic of the International Style. Striving to incorporate signs, symbols and allusions to a number of intersecting strands of history, popular culture and tradition, postmodernism melded architectural styles into a hodgepodge of token nods towards the past.
Embraced by corporate developers and the architectural elite, postmodernism quickly took hold in major cities, replacing pure modernism as the preferred design mode of capitalist enterprises hoping to burnish its progressive credentials. Yet while postmodernism is often said to provoke a sense of familiarity and comfort in its use of pastel colors, ornamental detail and contextual significance, many of its most famous buildings are skyscrapers, a typology inextricably linked to the disillusioning effects of the modern era.
New York City, where the skyscraper has found its architectural apotheosis time and again, is home to some of the best examples of postmodernism’s paradoxical relationship to the high-rise typology. The following collection of NYC postmodern skyscrapers feature classical forms deployed as pure ornament, materials of glass and stone in splashy colors, and tapered setbacks that echo the stylistic conventions of their venerable neighbors.
AT&T Building by John Burgee and Philip Johnson (1984) via wikipedia
Any roundup of significant postmodern buildings would certainly be amiss without this iconic and revered design by none other than Mr. Glass House himself, Philip Johnson. He and late career partner John Burgee embarked on a fruitful collaboration from the late 1960s onwards that produced a number of notable postmodern high-rises, two others of which are featured below.
What makes the AT&T (now Sony) Building still so striking is its curious mix of formal, material and gestural decisions, from the scooped pediment, to the soaring entrance portico, to the structural steel frame clad in pink granite. All of these combine to form a building that is playful and lighthearted, but one which heralded the coming valorization of the postmodern movement.
Lipstick Building by John Burgee and Philip Johnson (1986)
A few blocks from the AT&T Building and completed just two years later, Burgee and Johnson’s “Lipstick Building” was dubbed as such for its utterly uncommon elliptical forms stacked into a tripartite organization reminiscent of an open cosmetics container. A red granite and stainless steel façade sheaths the oval-shaped building.
Takashimaya Building by John Burgee and Philip Johnson (1993) via panoramio.com
Built as the flagship New York location for an upscale Japanese department store, this diminutive but rigorous infill building on Fifth Avenue is an impeccable example of postmodern detailing, construction and craftsmanship.
The classical limestone, granite and glass exterior features double-height windows of gridded mullions framed by large decorative columns that bow out towards the street. Unfortunately, new owners have erected a giant glass façade onto the first few floors to accommodate changing retail use, marring this gem of a postmodern grab-bag.
461 Fifth Avenue by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (1988) via mapio.net
Another postmodern melange on New York’s famed boulevard, this SOM-designed project features a 10-story base podium in line with the street’s mid-rise 19th-century structures. An 18-story tower of glass and concrete rising from this base contains a curtain walled central section divided by a decorative steel pediment every four stories and topped off by a copper mansard roof. The concrete detailing of the spandrels continues this subtle trompe l’oeil into horizontal and vertical bands of thin stone.
Equitable Tower West by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1985) via skyscraperpage.com
At 54 stories, 752 feet tall, and 1.5 million square feet, this soaring office tower on Midtown’s Seventh Avenue was a westward expansion of the prestigious office district that characterized Sixth and Park Avenues. Featuring a privately held public atrium filled with commissioned artworks, Barnes’ structure was emblematic of the increasingly common enclosed public spaces that invited pedestrians inwards.
The building itself is of reinforced steel, its piers clad in strips of brown granite and spandrels of beige limestone, crowned by a pair of expansive semicircular windows reminiscent of Johnson’s postmodern icon to the East.
World Financial Center by César Pelli (1985–1988) via blog.salopantohotel.com
The World Financial Center is a sprawling complex of four office towers, connected together by an enclosed pedestrian “Winter Garden,” populated by palm trees and other plant species. The office towers are stepped behemoths of saw-toothed glass and granite (see a pattern here?), faceted into joined jigsaw forms, each crowned by a distinctive roof shape and meant to soften the grandeur of the now-destroyed Twin Towers.
60 Wall Street by Roche-Dinkeloo Associates (1989) via The Triumph of Postmodernism
60 Wall Street, a 50-story, 745-foot skyscraper with over 1.7 million square feet of office space, was originally built for JP Morgan Chase by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche and his partner John Dinkeloo. It once again contains the vast indoor public atrium, this time directly connected to public transit, pioneered by Roche himself at his iconic Ford Foundation. The form itself is an extruded columnar monolith of a building, clad in black glass and white granite topped by a hipped copper roof, symptomatic of postmodernism indeed.
Scholastic Building by Morris Adjmi and Aldo Rossi (2001) via Morris Adjmi Architects
Not quite a skyscraper, but rather nestled into a narrow site in the semi-low rise heart of SoHo’s cast-iron district, Morris Adjimi and Aldo Rossi’s posthumous 10-story headquarters for the Scholastic publishing house has become a case-study in contextual architectural sensitivity.
One side facing Broadway features bright red and green steel rebar spandrels, faced in terra cotta and stone pier columns. The other, facing more industrial Mercer street, is a compliment to the utilitarian loft buildings that made the area a haven for artistic and commercial production alike.
Austrian Cultural Forum by Raymond Abraham (2002) via Dmadeo
This 24-story slender high-rise in midtown Manhattan, on a similarly minuscule site plan not much wider than a townhouse, features a cascading curtain wall interrupted by symmetrical triangular appendages, an innovative response to New York’s ubiquitous setback restrictions.
One of the few built projects from Austrian-born Abraham, the building was meant to reflect the cultural memory of the country, while also being a cleverly functionalist vertical arrangement of the programmatic requirements into a structural core, rear egress stairwell and front-facing organizational space.
Westin Hotel Times Square by Arquitectonica (2002) via Arquitectonica.com
Upon completion Arquitectonica’s Times Square tower was almost universally panned by the architectural establishment, not least for its garish display of color, gratuitous formal acrobatics and consumerist whitewash of the once-gritty area. However, the building is one of New York’s most distinctive structures, an embodied reflection of the chaotic sensory overload of its surroundings.
If it’s a glossy and kitschy affair, it does so as a fitting response to its context, becoming a building as pure architectural entertainment, one of postmodernism’s most influential ideas to this day.
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