As a style, postmodernism is a delight; as a way of thinking, it is incoherent. This is readily apparent at the Victoria and Albert’s museum exhibition “Postmodernism, Style, and Subversion.” The postmodern artifacts, the tiny films, and the plans, models, and photographs of postmodern buildings are an inspired collection, but the general commentary is garbled. What the postmodern artists have said about their own work often makes little sense and the analyses of the theorists of theory cited make no sense at all. They explain postmodernism in terms of social change without producing proper empirical data to backup their case. Their abstract claims are not even airy but hang in a gravity-free vacuum. Visitors will need to concentrate on that which they can see for themselves. In fairness, the brief accounts of particular items given alongside them are often very cogent and helpful, and a visit is a treat.
The exhibition begins with a blown-up photograph of a blown-up building. An entire wall is given over to the dynamiting of Minoru Yamasaki’s modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing block in Saint Louis, Missouri on or about 15:32 hours on March 15, 1972. Designed in 1951, it had lasted only sixteen years since completion. Charles Jencks called this moment the death of modernism. It was and it wasn’t. It certainly indicated the death of a progressive ideology, of the idea that modernist building design and planning would lead to utopia. Yet where similar buildings have been demolished, the fault of the architect