An Archeology of Postmodern Architecture: A Reading of Charles Jencks' work

Abstract

A powerful sense of discontinuity and rupture, a simultaneity of theory and practice as well as a critique of bourgeois art forms are some of the common features that modern and postmodern discourses share. Despite the similarities between the two movements, they tend to be portrayed and defined in perfect opposition to each other. Charles Jencks is one of the more prominent theorists who emphasized the differences between the two movements and declared the failure of modernism as a sufficient reasont to legitimize the advent of postmodernism. This work attempts to understand the emergence of postmodernism through its relationship to modernism while examining the discursive dimension of the two movements. The goal of this thesis is not aimed at determining to what extent postmodernism was necessary or avoidable, definable or unintelligible, real or merely fictive. In deference to Michel Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge it examines the reasons and conditions of its emergence, identifying the sites of continuity and rupture between modernism and postmodernism and studying the discursive formations witin modernism that facilitated the appearance of postmodernism. It carries out this investigation hrough the writings of Jencks and in reference to three distinct yet overlapping phases that mark their evolving relationship; representing, definining and classifying.