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Irony; or, the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern on postmodernism to have emerged recently—the Figure 1. Irony; or, the
Architecture architect, professor and writer, Emmanuel Petit Self-Critical Opacity of
Postmodern
Emmanuel Petit applies a literary term to determine an historical
Architecture, Emmanuel
Yale University Press, 2013 period (Fig. 1). Using the concept of irony, Petit Petit; cover (courtesy of
ISBN 9780300181517 revisits the intellectual project of the postmodern Yale University Press).
pp. 262 period and unravels altogether new perspectives
on the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, Stanley Tigerman, Arata Izosaki, Peter
Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas.
In their catalogue for the 2011 Exhibition
‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion’ at the
Victoria & Albert Museum, Glenn Adamson and
Jane Pavitt insisted on the essential ambiguity of
postmodernism’s definition. It is, they suggest,
not clear what postmodernism was or even if it
ever really existed. At the centre of the problem
was the question of the name—‘And what is it
called?’ asked Pavitt and Adamson.1 Around
1975, first in an article, and later in his famous
1977 book The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, Charles Jencks, coined the new archi-
tectural term ‘Postmodernism’, gathering together
under a single concept very different or even diver-
gent realities. Postmodern architecture (or rather
‘post-modern architecture’, as Jencks would
express it) could be a range of things: eclectism,
historicism, adhocism and, of course, humour
through self-criticality. Jencks’s definitions set the
pattern for the understanding of architectural
postmodernism, along with the 1980 Venice
Architecture Biennale and, in a wider cultural
context, the publication of Lyotard’s The
With Irony; or, the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmo- Postmodern Condition, a report on knowledge
dern Architecture—one of many academic books commissioned by the Conseil des universités du

# 2014 Léa-Catherine Szacka 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.932043

 458

Book, exhibition and

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Figure 2. Raimund Québec. It is this long-standing consensus that Petit

Abraham, Monument and others are now reassessing.
to Aviation, 1979,
Petit proposes postmodernism and irony as two
International Landmark
Competition (p.11) notions intimately connected to each other and
(courtesy of the Estate wishes to ‘retheorize architecture with this in
of Raimund Abraham). mind’. In so doing, the author gives us one more
demonstration of architecture as an epistemological
rather than an ontological project: in other words,
not only as the art of building but also as a way of
thinking. Opening his book with the fall of the
World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, Petit attempts
to delineate chronologically a contemporary age of
irony. An unavoidable parallel between the destiny
of two of Yamasaki’s main projects—the dynamiting
of the Pruitt Igoe housing complex in Saint Louis in
1972 and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York
in 2001 – bookends the period. Petit quotes Gerry
Brooks, the editorial director of Broadway Books, architectural object built to be destroyed. The
himself referring to Jencks’ famous proclamation of steel construction (15 m high and weighing 1.5
modernism’s death: ‘irony died on 9/11/01’. tons), accompanied by a manifesto stating that
Having said that, Petit asks whether irony was ‘the ‘architecture must blaze’, was set on fire in the
very attitude that kept the towers standing until Technical University of Graz’s courtyard on 20th
the moment a brutal end was put both to the build- December, 1980, at 8.35 pm. Also insisting on
ing and to irony?’ (p. 6) (Fig. 2). the notion of architecture as event, Bernard Tschu-
The two high-profile destructions of Yamasaki mi’s postcard-size Advertisements for Architecture
buildings served as a clever sleight of hand for from 1976–77 were ironic for they ‘called attention
Petit, somehow to avoid providing a textual defi- to architecture’s paradoxical double grounding in
nition of irony. Instead, Petit counts on a discussion the timeless, abstract sphere of thought and the
of particular pieces of architecture and their discur- ephemeral, sensual physical world’ (p.8) (Fig. 3).
sive context to make such a definition emerge. To Petit goes on to present the Austrian Raimund
do so he introduces a series of examples pointing Abraham’s 1979 project Monument to Aviation, a
to the fragility of architecture and negotiating prophetic photomontage showing an aeroplane
‘the paradoxical encounter between the logic of colliding with a wall.
ideas and the order of things’ (p. 8). The first All these examples are marked by intensity and an
example is Coop Himelb(l)au’s, Blazing Wing, an extreme violence. On another note, the last two
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Figure 3. Bernard
Tschumi,
Advertisements for
Architecture, 1976–77
(p.9) (courtesy of
Bernard Tschumi
Architects).

Figure 4. Oswalt
Mathias Unger’s
column for the Strada
Novissima, Venice
Architecture Biennale,
1980 (photograph,
courtesy of Charles
Jencks).

column and a truncated one, showing that

examples Petit gives—Michael Graves’ Fargo-Moor-
head Cultural Center, 1978 and Oswald Mathias
Unger’s façade for the Strada Novissima, 1980—
refer to the vulnerability and fragility of the column
and ‘invoke and negate at the same time one of
the literal pillars of classical architecture—its
element of vertical support, the column’ (Fig. 4).
[3] In the postmodern era the column is transformed
into a symbol of fragility. Graves replaces the
material of the column by water while in 1980, in
the Strada Novissima, both Oswald Matthias
Ungers and Hans Hollein played with a hollow
columns are not always stable or structural.
Petit exploits the association between a so-
called ‘postmodern’ architecture and the literary
trope of irony, yet he is certainly not the only
scholar who wishes to revisit postmodernism in
an attempt to move away from style to a concep-
tual framework. Others have recently published
in-depth thematic studies analysing and retheoris-
ing what still appears as a blurred period of our
recent past. In 2010, Reinhold Martin published
Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism
Again, a book aiming at an historical reinterpreta-
tion of some of postmodernism’s most important
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Book, exhibition and
film reviews
themes. Positioning postmodernism as a discursive
formation rather than a style—as it had long been
considered—Martin connects architecture to
current debates on biopolitics, neoliberalism and
corporate globalization as they are haunted by
the problem of utopia. Suggesting that Postmo-
dernism might have been a brief interruption or
detour in modernity’s path, a period during
which architecture ‘exhibited an almost neurotic
preoccupation with the discipline’s own history’,2
Martin offers a journey through some of postmo-
dernism’s main key words: territory, history,
language, image, materiality, subjects and, of
course, architecture.3
The same year and with the same publisher
(University of Minnesota Press) Jorge Otero-Pailos
proposed Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenom-
enology and the Rise of the Postmodern, reconsi-
dering phenomenology as a critical movement in
postmodernism and as an intellectual approach to
history. Here, navigating through the life and
oeuvre of figures such as Jean Labatut, Charles
Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth
Frampton, Otero-Pailos provides a unique perspec-
tive on postmodernism, away from some of the
main buildings associated with the name. Like
Martin and Petit, Otero-Pailos wants to retheorise
postmodernism, but he does not aim at encom-
passing the totality of this discontinuous entity.
He rather wants to put more emphasis on empiri-
cism and the body’s experience of architecture,
focusing on the hitherto little-explored red threat
between Labatut, Moore and even Norberg-
Schulz and Frampton. Rich in archival findings and
exclusive iconography, this book offers a new
perspective on postmodernism, and one that is
framed by a generation of architects whose aim
was to write history. And the list of recent
publications that tackle postmodernism continues:
Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-
Garde, by K. Michael Hays (2010, The MIT Press);
Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern, edited by
Claire Zimmerman and Mark Crinson (2010, Yale
University Press); Rome, Postmodern Narratives of
a Cityscape, edited by the film scholars Dom Hold-
away and Filippo Trentin (2013, Pickering &
Chatto), etc.
Petit situates his book within that constellation,
and wonders what was the place of irony within
architecture in the 1960s and 1970s? Referring to
Jameson, Tafuri and Frampton, he insists on the
hatred of Marxist thinkers for the concept of irony,
which distances itself from the activist programme
of the modern avant-garde. While Tafuri associates
the architecture of Archigram and Hans Hollein as
an ‘international of Irony’ denoting a ‘post-1968 dis-
abused lack of commitment’, Frampton saw the
architecture of Venturi and Scott Brown as ‘mere
rhetoric’ which ‘withdraw[s] value judgment from
architectural analysis’ (p.71). Petit later in the book
proposes irony as the sister of pastiche, winking at
Jameson’s 1982 essay ‘Postmodernism and Consu-
mer Society’. In this text, Jameson proposes two fea-
tures that will give a chance to sense the specificity
of the postmodern experience of space and time:
pastiche and ‘schizophrenia’. With pastiche, states
Jameson, stylistic innovation is no longer possible
so all that is left is to imitate dead styles.
Conceptually groundbreaking, Irony; or, the Self-
Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture leaves
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no surprise in terms of format as each chapter pre- Figure 5. Venturi, Scott

sents the work of one architect. These five figures
—all very different—share an understanding of
architecture as an essentially intellectual and theor-
etical endeavour, and each uses irony in distinctive
ways within their architectural thinking and practice.
For Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown irony was
an aesthetic tool and a way to foster dialogue
between different social groups. Stanley Tigerman
used irony as a comic technique and a specifically
American attitude of acknowledging the simul-
taneous existence of antithetical positions. For
Arata Isozaki irony served as a catalyst of conceptual
transfers between the Eastern and Western views of
architecture. Peter Eisenman saw irony as a model of
self-reflexivity to be emulated in architecture. And
finally Rem Koolhaas used irony to insist on architec-
ture’s capacity to emanate from the paradoxical fan-
tasies of the human imaginary. Yet if at a first
overview the account looks well-balanced and per-
suasive, in the details some examples appear stron-
ger than others.
For Venturi and Scott Brown, the architectural
project was both a creative and critical activity. In
the late 1960s and early 1970s, these architects
were amongst the first to argue for a lack of
assumed naiveté or avoidance of false innocence.
And it is this lack of naiveté, paired with an
empty reference, that Venturi and Scott Brown
used in their Franklin Court Monument (1972–
76). They methodically distanced themselves from
the silent abstraction producing irony in relation
to the context. For them, irony was perhaps
merely looking at what others had ignored so far
(Fig. 5).
Brown & Associates,
cover, Signs of Life
Symbols in the
American City, 1976,
Exhibition catalogue:
Smithsonian Institution,
Renwick Gallery of the
National Collection of
Fine Arts, Washington,
D.C. (p. 62).
The most compelling chapters are the ones dedi-
cated to Tigerman and Isozaki. Tigerman, who, of
all the architects mentioned in this book, has
received the least attention, was part of the
Chicago 7 and featured in the 1980 Venice Architec-
ture Biennale. His irony was obvious, at times sala-
cious, bold and provocative. What Petit suggests
here is that this architect became a self-declared
ironist using his Jewish condition of estrangement
(extending right back to the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem) and his simultaneous taste
for destruction and construction. ‘Irony, Tigerman
explained, was the intellectual mechanism that
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Book, exhibition and
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made this paradoxical coexistence possible’ (p. 87).
In this chapter, weighty intellectual discussion on
and around Kierkegaard, Socrates, Lipps and
Freud, is nicely balanced by a description of known
and lesser-known projects by Tigerman: for
example, the Labadie House (1976–77), an hybrid
between Mies’ orthogonality, Tigerman’s desire for
fluidity and ‘the curvilinearity of waves and clouds’
(p. 89); the Daisy House (1976–77), a construction
realised in Porter, Indiana and whose plan was remi-
niscent of ‘the duality between the antonym of male
and female sex organs’ (p. 94) ; or the the career
collage from 1983.
Isozaki’s fascination with ruins—both the ruins of
modernity (Hiroshima) and the more ancient ones of
Rome—is at the core of the Japanese architect’s
ironic attitude towards the built. In his work, the
question of modernity is addressed in the negative
—in its demise and disintegration. Irony has its cul-
tural roots in the European dialectical tradition:
‘one can return to the hypothesis that Isozaki sums
up and “translates” the ambivalent meanings of
his Japanese space-time conceptions with the
notion of irony’ (p.128). Here the irony it seems is
less obvious, appearing too intellectualised and
interpretative.
Eisenman’s irony inevitably implies a return to
language: what Tafuri saw as a sign of failure.
Petit here insists on Eisenman’s interest in ‘the para-
doxes and aporias of the meaning of architectural
forms’ and in the division between the physical
and the conceptual, a division which provokes the
conceptual instability of architectural space. If the
chapter on Eisenman is a very good summary of
the American architect’s modus operandi, providing
a rather clear and convincing explanation of an
architectural thinking which promoted ‘neither a
pragmatic practice organising the material world
nor simply an intellectual endeavour or
philosophy’ (p. 175), it is less clear what this has to
do with irony.
Koolhaas’s much more obvious irony is communi-
cated in words and images. Using narratives, Kool-
haas borrows a particular genre of irony from the
literary world. Given how well-known Koolhaas’s
work is, and the already extensive analysis which
others have devoted to Delirious New York, it
seems perhaps unnecessary for Petit to dedicate a
chapter to his writing and to projects like Exhodus,
the Koepel Prison extension and Boompjes. It is not
clear that revisiting this contributes significantly to
the understanding of postmodernism or irony.
Perhaps this chapter’s most valuable contribution is
to position Koolhaas within postmodernism—a con-
troversial proposition for some, even though Kool-
haas participated in the 1980 Venice Architecture
Biennale (Fig. 6).
The book as a whole positions postmodernism not
so much as a negation of or a radical break from
modernism but as an alternative reading of the
modern dogma. The author regards the younger
generation of architects in the 1960s and 1970s as
seeking their own identities in relation to the domi-
nant figures of their dead modernist fathers. Venturi,
according to Petit, is indebted to ‘the conceptual of
the ironic Le Corbusier’ (p. 44). Tigerman, more
bluntly than any of the other architects presented
in this book, expressed and represented in his own
work Mies’s daunting presence as it was experi-
enced by his generation of young architects in

Chicago. Petit points out (as Charles Jencks likes to
do) that Tigerman’s famous 1978 photomontage
‘The Titanic’, showing Mies’s Crown Hall upended
like a sinking ocean liner, could equally be seen as
sinking or rising.
Isozaki too plays with familiar modernist tropes,
inverting Giedion’s ‘space, time and architecture’
with, respectively, ‘darkness’, ‘termination’ and
‘ruins’. Eisenman’s appropriation of his historical
precedent involved invoking and then rhetorically
negating it not through literal but transformative dis-
tancing and inversion. His project in Canareggio,
produced for the 1978 Summer workshop ‘Dieci
Progetti per Venzia’ was, for example, a reinterpreta-
tion of Le Corbusier’s 1965 ‘ghost’ project for a
Venetian hospital. Different was Koolhaas’s ‘dis-
463
The Journal
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Volume 19
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torted radicalization of Mies and Le Corbusier’ Figure 6. Drawing by
(p.183). Here, Petit explains how Koolhaas used OMA for the Strada
Novissima façade at the
elements of Mies’s and Le Corbusier’s architectures
First International
as a language of fundamentals readily available for Architecture Exhibition
formulation and elaboration in his Villa dell’Ava in —La Biennale di
St Cloud. Thus postmodernism is what Jencks Venezia, 1980
would call ‘a both/and’: it was both killing the (copyright OMA).
fathers while encompassing modernity as an unfin-
ished project.
Irony was often talked about in philosophy
during and beyond the postmodern period. Yet,
according to Petit, irony’s effects become most
visible ‘when measured against architecture’s
stronghold of stability’ (p. 25). However, far from
a strictly architectural discourse, Petit surfs on lit-
erary criticism, philosophy and theories of
humour. He takes us on a voyage through Kierke-
gaard’s thinking, the caricatures of Saul Steinberg,
the history of Judaism and so on. As already
pointed out in Domus magazine,4 the book,
whilst rich and varied, may appear too dense with
non-architectural references drawn from wider
postmodern and modern culture. In fact, while cle-
verly problematising the discursive shift in architec-
ture and trying to make coherent the incoherence
and pluralism of postmodernism, Petit is at times
almost avoiding architecture. This is a pity, as
some of the book’s strongest moments come
when Petit refers concretely to plans, sections or
elevations, showing how ideas are articulated
through the language of drawing.
In the late 1980s it was widely claimed that post-
modernism was displaced by deconstructivism,
ushered in by the 1988 Exhibition with that title at
MoMA. With Irony or, the Self-Critical Opacity of
 464
Book, exhibition and
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Postmodern Architecture Petit proposes new
beginning and end points for postmodernism,
from 1972–2001. There is a certain irony in the
fact that Petit’s redrawing of the chronological
boundaries of postmodernism has about it a some-
what modernistic clarity. His argument for a longer
postmodernism is persuasive, however, drawing
deconstruction into an expanded postmodernism:
‘As is the case with Peter Eisenman, Tigerman’s
“deconstruction” phase is a thematic extension of
his postmodern ideas—despite the stylistic shifts of
their architecture between the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s’ (p.114).
This book is an important contribution to the
re-examination of postmodernism which is currently
getting underway. A moment when architects
questioned and theorised their modernist antece-
dents and their own practice is now being further
questioned and formulated by new generations of
scholars. It remains to be seen how the lessons of
these investigations will manifest themselves
within the world of contemporary architectural
theory and practice.
Léa-Catherine Szacka
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Norway
(Author’s e-mail address: lcszacka@gmail.com)
Notes and references
1. Jane Pavitt and Glenn Adamson, Postmodernism: Style
and Subversion, 1970–1990, Victoria and Albert
Museum, 2011, p. 13.
2. Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Post-
modernism Again (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
p. xviii.
3. Each of the book’s seven chapters explores one of these
key words.
4. Matt Shaw, ‘The Irony of Modernity’, book review in Domus
Web (23rd August, 2013) <http://www.domusweb.it/en/
reviews/2013/08/23/irony.html>, accessed 31/12/13.