‘Treason' Or ‘Things People Liked'?

The first exhibition devoted to the British Post-Modernism Movement shows it was not only about style, but about reconnecting with the past

- Ken Powell

It was A. W. N. Pugin, the great father of the Gothic Revival, who first introduced a moral tone into the debate about style in architecture, condemning those who went ‘whoring after strange styles’. A similar air of outrage drove the veterans of the Modern Movement to lambast the rise of Post-Modernism in the 1980s. ‘A violation of sanity; in short, treason’, thundered Aldo van Eyck, and for Berthold Lubetkin (of Penguin Pool fame), Post-Modernism was not only aesthetically repulsive, but also a threat to the gospel of social progress central to his vision of Modern architecture. Richard Rogers, taking up the cudgel, dismissed Post-Modern architecture as ‘the superficial aesthetic of shoddy commercial design…. obsessed with money and fashion’.