Collage & architecture

About this book

Jan Digerud and figurative postmodernism: "My world is in fragments, smashed into pieces so fine I doubt I will ever re-assemble them" wrote the film director Derek Jarman in 1987. The statement tends to pop up whenever postmodernism is attempted described or diagnosed. Jarman seems to pin-point the dystopia of postmodernism: Utopia is dead and the only thing left is the ironic play with fragments. Or could Jarman's fragments be understood differently? Did postmodernism's cultural re- and deconstructions amount to, not just a dystopic critique but also a cornucopian projection of new, imagined totalities? Looking at the work of Jan Digerud one gets an inkling that that may be the case. To be sure: postmodernism in architecture was posed, first and foremost, as a critique--a break with an abstract and elitist modernism and a reconquest of the historical figure. With thinkers such as Pablo Portoghesi and Christian Norberg-Schulz at the helm, postmodernism was a call to arms, a double warfare on utopian high modernism and impoverished late modernism alike. In Stanley Tigerman's photo montage, Mies' IIT-building sinks into the sea like a modernist Titanic, while Leon Krier's fat, red cross annuls Le Corbusier's green city for eternity. The siege culminated in Charles Jencks' iconic announcement of the death of modernism on the 15th of July 1972, "at 3.32 p.m. or thereabouts", illustrated by stills from the demolition of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis.--Preface by Mari Hvattum.