Welcome To Mo-Po

Postmodernism, the laughingstock of architectural aesthetic tendencies, refuses to go away. Three books document the movement at its moment of re-revival.

- Thomas de Monchaux

Millennial pink, that fashionable and unavoidable hue of a faded rose, was not invented by millennials. It was used back in 1979 by the Miami architecture firm Arquitectonica, adapted from the signature color of Mexican Modernist Luis Barragán, for the glass brick and stucco walls of the Pink House—an Art Deco–meets–Neoclassical villa in which stout palm trees do the work of a Doric colonnade.

Similarly, today’s trendiest designers and coolest architecture students draw exactly in the style perfected by Arquitectonica in representations of its celebrated 1982 Atlantis condominium complex—the one you see on Miami Vice—in which 45-degree isometrics cleverly resolve grids and semicircles and pyramids, plus squiggly addenda like outboard spiral staircases, into an animated yet orderly composition of pastel purples, pinks, and reds. The Pink House and Atlantis appear on page 154 of the recent book Revisiting Postmodernism (RIBA Publishing) by British architect Terry Farrell with Adam Nathaniel Furman, in which Farrell notes of Arquitectonica’s stylish touches, “It was the inexplicable purposelessness and yet wholly intriguing qualities of these elements that caught the popular imagination.”

“After Po-Mo,” Farrell quotes a 2011 observation recorded by architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, “comes Po-Po-Mo. And after Po-Po-Mo— comes No-Mo! So that’s where we now are.” But seven years later—even as some of the movement’s original monuments, like Philip Johnson’s Chippendale-pediment-topped AT&T Building, begin to face their own preservation controversies—the No More of No-Mo seems to have been succeeded by More Postmodernism. Call it Mo-Po.