Postmodernism started in architecture.

Most postmodern architects have their education and roots

in modernism. There is no sudden disrupture. Postmodernism is both the continuation and the
transcendence of modernism; or as Jencks summarized it ‘PM was the contrast of Modernism and its
Other’.

Charles Jencks defines postmodernism as: 'Double coding: the combination of modern techniques
with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the
public and a concerned minority, usually other architects'.

Double coding means establishing links of the present with the past, of new techniques with old
patterns, of the elite with the popular. It has always been the task of architecture to fit new buildings
into old structures and thus relating the present with the past. Postmodernism is an era without a
dominant ideology but with a pluralism of styles.

Jencks said, ‘the typical double-codes of hyphenated Post-Modernism were new/old, high art/ low
art, professional/common, elite/populist, abstract/iconic and Non-Modern/Modern’ talking about
the divisions that arose because of the hierarchy in class and society. These divisions were starting to
demand an amalgamation of both ideologies and elements to give rise to say an alien form, unique
in every way, but still accommodating of everyone and relatable to everyone.

The postmodern era is the period of information, office workers, differentiated structures,
globalism, and fragmented culture. It is also the era of the 'lost fathers'; the end of dominant
ideologies. It is a time of continual choosing. No orthodoxy can be adopted without self-
consciousness and irony. All traditions seem to have some validity.

Post Modernism did not come to being post the Modernist ideology. What came after Modernism
was Late-Modernism, or what in his later works Jenks refers to as Default Modernism. ‘Architecture,
the public art, often leads in local situations towards Post-Modern double coding; but the majority of
large commissions result in the aesthetic coding of Late- Modernism. These two departures from
Modernism have to be seen together and in relationship to the parent.’

Jencks argued that PM or the mixed ideology were limited to circumstances of the public realm, but as
one starts to think about the real deal – the people who made the economy run, were not yet ready to
move away from Modernism and the abstraction it offered. ‘Aesthetically Safe’ as Jencks called it, the
style gave a certain anonymity, in the sense that, if something does not belong to anyone, it belongs to
everyone.

This statement captures the essence of what Jencks’ line of thought - ‘Capitalism is the hegemony of
impersonal abstraction, of corporate good taste, of Late- Modernism. Most architecture created by
global corporations stays away from questions of meaning and is abstract for the very good reason
that a global culture does not know what to signify much beyond the power of capital.’

The architecture of buildings we live and work in, are part of our daily consumption. We partly adapt
our behaviour to the built environment. The built environment facilitates or inhibits well-being and
behavioural expressions. On similar lines, Jencks goes on to describe how the Modernist ideology
was the contributing factor to the Financial Collapse of 15th September, 2008.