Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture

Fabrications
ISSN: 1033-1867 (Print) 2164-4756 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfab20
Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture
Andrew P. Steen
To cite this article: Andrew P. Steen (2015) Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture,
Fabrications, 25:1, 130-145, DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2015.1006762
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1006762
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Figure 1: Arata Isozaki, Kamioka Town Hall axonometric, 1976.

Reduction Series Town Hall, Kamioka Town Hall, silk screen, ink on paper, image size 550x550, 1982. Ñ Arata Isozaki &
Associates. Courtesy of Arata Isozaki & Associates.
130 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ

Radical Eclecticism and
Post-Modern Architecture
Andrew P. Steen
Abstract
Charles Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture – first published in
English in 1977, republished in 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987 and 1991 – was
commissioned by Architectural Design editor Haig Beck on the strength of Jencks’
article, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” This article featured in AD’s special issue
on the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, published in January 1977. According to
Beck, the book was expected to develop the article. This paper considers the
relationship between “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture. It interrogates the nature of the link between ostensible
progenitor and product, focusing on the use of the term and concept Radical
Eclecticism in both texts. The paper finds substantial differences between the
respective positions of “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and The Language of
Post-Modern Architecture. It argues these differences are such that the latter is not
best considered as a development of the former. The nature of the differences
between article and book gives cause for a reappraisal of the rhetorical basis to The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture.
I.
According to Architectural Design editor Haig Beck, the working title of Charles
Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture1 – first published in 1977,
subsequently revised and republished in 1978, then again in 1980, 1984, 1987 and
1991, and translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish,
Russian, Spanish and, partially, in Chinese and Italian – was “Radical
Eclecticism.”2 Jencks was commissioned to write the book by Beck as a follow-up
to Jencks’ article “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” which had been included in
AD’s special issue on the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.3 Beck had originally
asked Jencks to write an article to theorise what Beck calls the “eclectic
modernism” in the work of Isozaki: the “melange of references and borrowings
[that] included Constructivism, Metabolism, the New York Five, Aalto, the
Spaniards, Archigram, [Le] Corb[usier], and Italian Rationalism.”4 In Beck’s
words, the commissioned book was to “develop this theory.”5
The development of the article “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” into the book
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture is the subject of this essay. The
following pages will assess the latter, larger work against its less expansive
predecessor, on the strength of which it was commissioned. Two questions will be
addressed. Is The Language of Post-Modern Architecture an extension of “Isozaki
and Radical Eclecticism,” a faithful addition of complexity? Or are the two at odds:
Fabrications, 2015
Vol. 25, No. 1, 130–145, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1006762
Ñ 2015 The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
ANDREW P. STEEN 131

are their respective arguments and positions contradictory? Analysis will proceed
from the article, and move onto those aspects of the book most relevant to the
article and the ostensibly consistent theory of Radical Eclecticism that Jencks
presents.
II.
Jencks begins “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” by classifying the work of Arata
Isozaki as “Instant Revivalism.”6 The base to this classification is unconventional.
The elaboration of the term Jencks gives in his introductory paragraph reveals the
scope of Isozaki’s architectural restorations: Le Corbusier, Superstudio, the Italian
Rationalists, and “nearly every avant-garde ‘Master’ . . . [of] Modern
Architecture.”7
The list of referents is far-reaching. The names extend from the heroic days of
Paris and Dessau in the 1920s to the then-contemporaneous Florentine avant-

garde. Yet Jencks’ term is not intended to rest on a narrativisation of history. The
“Instant” of “Instant Revivalism” is not meant as a temporal measure. It is rather a
marker of perfection. According to Jencks, Isozaki’s works evoke Le Corbusier, or
Superstudio, or Italian Rationalists like Giuseppe Terragni, with uncanny and
perhaps shocking accuracy. The echoes are immediately experienced, without
interpretive effort. Isozaki’s Kamioka Town Hall (1976–78) (see Fig 1), for
example, might “instantly” bring to mind Le Corbusier. The distance from Jencks’
earlier theoretical vehicle “adhocism” is appreciable: Isozaki’s slick resolution and
coherent imagery is far from that collage-based aesthetic.
Despite this provision, “Instant Revivalism” as a term is vulnerable to attack.
Jencks might have opted for “intertextuality,” as used by Julia Kristeva in the late
1960s and the 1970s; or employed more generic terms like “quotation,” or
“allusion.” Scholarship conducted by Linda Hutcheon in the 1980s and 1990s
suggests “parody” or “irony.” Yet Jencks chooses “Instant Revivalism.” The
vulnerability of this term shows the rhetorical load it carries.
Jencks uses the term “Revivalism” to make an analogy between Isozaki and the
established “Revivalists” of the early nineteenth century. To make the analogy
work, Jencks must reduce the twentieth-century avant-gardes and the “Masters”
of architecture to representative “styles.” Jencks can then argue both Isozaki and
early nineteenth-century Revivalists execute a one-to-one application of style to
project. Thus, he suggests, in the same way an early nineteenth-century Revivalist
like John Nash might appropriate “High Gothic,” “Queen Anne,” or “Beaux Arts
Classicism,” Isozaki appropriates “Le Corbusier,” “Superstudio,” or “Italian
Rationalism.”8 Jencks asserts that each of the completed works of Nash or Isozaki
is intended as a pure expression of one chosen style.
Jencks nevertheless claims Isozaki’s version of “Revivalism” is distinctive,
different from the mode practised in the early nineteenth century in one

important regard. Jencks’ early nineteenth-century Revivalist would commence
designing with “the ‘right style for the job’”9 – the style best suited to the public
function of the building, as determined by the existing set of conventions. For
example, Nash designed an urban townhouse in a Neo-Classical style, a rural
country house in keeping with an Italianate villa, and based his Brighton Pavilion,
a seaside palace for the English royal family, on a colonialist’s take of the “Hindu”
style (see Fig 2).10 Jencks’ Isozaki is bound by no such socio-cultural imperatives.
He might use a “‘Master’ style” for a project sympathetic to the original designs of
the “Master”; or he may employ the style “where it is rather unsuitable.”11 The
conditions of reception the two analogues worked in are also contrasted in
“Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” While practitioners like Nash were criticised by
“purists” like C.R. Cockerell for being “unscholarly,” in Jencks’ account, no such
constraints are placed on Isozaki. A Japanese context “expanding fast” and
answering only to “[t]he dictates of speculative capital” does not require such
niceties.12
In addition to the attribution of “Instant Revivalism,” Jencks notes Isozaki
might be deemed “Mannerist.”13 His work, along with “a few other individuals
(Kurokawa, Kikutake and the Spanish firm of Martorell, Bohigas & Mackay),”
displays a pluralist tendency focused, according to Jencks, on “elaborating
languages which have already been established.”14 Importantly for this discussion,
Jencks stresses this tendency is “developing within Modernism.”15 By being
referential, it is both contributing to and destabilising that paradigm. Recent
Figure 2: John Nash, “Detail of Cross Section of Royal Pavilion.”

Courtesy of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove.
ANDREW P. STEEN 133

scholarship might classify this faction as “neo-avant-garde,” along with other Le
Corbusier appropriators like James Stirling or the Smithsons.16 The presence of
the Modern Masters may not, for Jencks, approximate the poetic effects of Harold
Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence of 1973,17 but the pre-existence of architectural
references as discernable and potentially reproducible aesthetics forces itself on
the body of work produced by these late twentieth-century Mannerists.
III.
On the strength of his account of Isozaki and his alleged fellow late twentieth-
century Mannerists, Jencks builds a case for classifying “the present state of the
[architectural] avant-garde.”18 Despite admitting that “historical parallels are
always somewhat misleading,”19 he constructs another analogy. This one
associates the then-current state of architectural culture with the state that existed
in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, several decades after Nash’s revivals.

Indeed, Jencks specifically equates the condition of his present, as pronounced in
January 1977, with that current in the year 1870.20 Springboarding off an
historical analysis, given graphic form by a figure he constructed with the aid of
Edward Stokes, Jencks thus moves to present the premise of a projective theory.
According to the thesis underlying “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” the
progression of stylistic complexity in architectural culture follows a predictable
pattern. Jencks states the thesis directly: “after the establishment of a general
paradigm . . . there is usually a general trend towards elaboration, complication,
mannerism and derivations from outside sources – heterogeneity.”21 In other
words, following a period dominated by a single refined style, architectural
designs become increasingly contrastive. For Jencks, the style that still forms the
base to 1977 is one, singular, reduced example: “the International Style.”22 Jencks’
present avant-garde has thus been evolving for several decades, gaining
complexity.
It is worth noting that a trend towards complexity only represents half the
theory. The grounds for differentiation are relative and to a point cumulative, but
the movement need not begin with one simple dogma and move towards
heterogeneity. Jencks’ system allows for movement in both directions: from
simplicity to complexity; and from complexity to simplicity. It predicts
oscillations. Jencks alludes to this point when he states that the process of
elaboration will continue “until the whole system is shifted towards simplicity.”23
According to the theory, then, a trend from complex to simple is a natural result of
a field of styles within which differentiation has grown unwieldy and “too
complicated to perceive.”24
But in “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” Jencks forecasts a continued upswing
of complexity. Based on his analogy with 1870, he asserts that the stylistic palette
of architecture will become increasingly varied or “eclectic” in the upcoming years.

For Jencks, Isozaki’s work is representative of this development; and so is the
work of Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi and Charles Moore; and
so are books like Walter C. Kidney’s The Architecture of Choice: Eclecticism in
America 1880– 1930 and exhibitions such as MoMA’s “The Architecture of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts.”25
The climax Jencks proposes in his article is based on the projection of this
trend. He suggests that architectural culture is “safe to say, at a juncture where
nearly anything is possible, and especially an eclecticism that goes beyond the
pleasant mixing of recent styles – a radical eclecticism.”26 While “nearly” allows
some qualification, stating this idea is “safe to say” is rhetorical bluster: if the
assessment were a well-established fact it would not be worth the construction of
theory. Jencks requires the projection to carry some degree of intellectual risk.
The “juncture” is not yet existent; but current conditions offer the potential.
A truly “radical” eclecticism is held latent within the existing environment.

With this information, the meaning of the article’s title becomes clearer.
Despite using a conjuncture suggestive of similarity not difference, the works of
Isozaki, like those of his early nineteenth-century Revivalist predecessors, are not
being positioned by Jencks as representative of Radical Eclecticism. The coupling
of Isozaki “and” Radical Eclecticism is discordant. It establishes in discourse a
mismatch. Far from being radical, Isozaki does not even produce individual
architectural works that are truly eclectic, according to Jencks’ definition.
Isozaki’s serial homogeny – his practice of committing to exclusive references in a
linear succession – results in an eclectic body of works, but does not provide
architectural culture with any singular examples of crossbreeding, or mutation, or
even distortion.
The mid-to-late nineteenth-century architects can at least claim a level of
eclecticism for Jencks. But their pastichery merely resulted in “Weak
Eclecticism.”27 Indeed on the weakness of their architecture, Jencks finds that
“the term eclecticism was invariably misapplied for 50 years . . . to what were
essentially single-line, successive revivals.”28 The nature of Strong or for Jencks
Radical Eclecticism is suggested through contrast to the Weak version, in which
“[t]here was little mixing of styles, or syncretism, and when it did occur it was
usually just laxness, weakness, or a matter of getting the revived style slightly
wrong to make it more comforting.”29 Building on “syncretism,” Jencks defines
Radical Eclecticism as “a real mixture – a thoroughgoing heterogeneity,” “explicit,
full-blown and precise” in its use of historical references, exploitative of “the
language of bourgeois society,” and “multivalent, rich in meanings which were
interrelated rather than totally integrated within a consistent package.”30 A true
Radical Eclecticism would produce complex wholes that defy coherent
categorisation. Jencks supplies no actual examples of this class of architecture in
his article.
ANDREW P. STEEN 135

Thus while “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” begins with a celebration of
Isozaki’s virtuoso renditions of Le Corbusier, Superstudio and Italian
Rationalism, it proceeds to lambast the “fragmentation and discreteness” of then-
current examples of pluralism, “each [a] monument to an ideology . . .
hermetically sealed in its own consistency,” not linking with “the past or the
surrounding context.”31 It is Jencks’ “hope” that after the installation of his theory
of Radical Eclecticism, “[t]here may be no more grand cohering orthodoxies
which tyrannise the world.”32 Fixed “purist” referents would become subject to the
vagaries of class, geography and temporality; and complexity would reign.
IV.
The connection between “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and the first edition of
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, published in 1977, is flimsy. While
the book’s avowed “vagueness and implied pluralism”33 is arguably an appropriate

position to take to counter the certainties of heroic Modern architecture, this text
is commonly considered vague and provisional.34 In The Idea of the Postmodern,
Hans Bertens asserts that “[i]t is in the second edition of The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture (1978) that Jencks begins to find his stride and that a clearer
version of his postmodernism emerges.”35 It is tempting to suggest the vagueness
and provisionality of the text is appropriate for its ideological aims. But for its
architectural readership, the first edition lacks resolution and is underdeveloped.
The date on the first edition’s introduction – September 197636 – encourages
speculation on the supposedly causal relationship between article and book.37
Beck’s crediting of the remarkable three-month turnaround between the book’s
commission and the manuscript’s submission may be explained by an alternative
scenario: the book, in draft form, may have existed prior to Beck’s AD issue on
Isozaki. While this chronological riddle is intriguing, it is not within the scope of
this paper to solve.
As opposed to the 1977 first edition, the second edition of 1978 can be seen to
have strong links to Jencks’ article on the Japanese architect and the avant-garde.
This “revised and enlarged” edition, taken by Bertens, Margaret A. Rose and
indeed Jencks himself, as the more resolved and more representative version of
the book,38 comes to a close with the section “Conclusion – Radical Eclecticism?”
These six pages relate unmistakably to the pages within AD on the misaligned
couple, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” Again Jencks asserts that “[e]very
indication points towards increasing complication in formal and theoretical
concerns”; and predicts “that the present developments towards complication and
eclecticism [will] continue.”39 And again he makes use of an historical analogy to
support his assessments and propositions. The “laxness” of the nineteenth-
century eclectic’s characteristic practice of “vague pastiche” is put on display.40
The reductive and oversimplified approach of conventional “Modern Movement”

architects is also established as a reference point against which to draw a
distinction.41 For these reasons, the 1978 edition of The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture forms the base to this discussion.
There are some obvious differences between the book’s conclusion and the AD
article with which it is so reminiscent. Most strikingly, while the consumption
practices of “middle-class urbanite[s] . . . from Tehran to Tokyo” are called on,
“Conclusion – Radical Eclecticism?” contains no mention of the Japanese
architect Isozaki.42 The book’s concluding section is by no means less referential.
Luminaries like Robert Venturi and Charles Moore are drawn into discussion, as
are lesser-known names such as Bruno Reichlin and Thomas Gordon Smith.
Jencks also engages in some self-promotion: he includes his own Garagia Rotunda
project to elaborate his argument, though he stresses “[he] wouldn’t claim this
studio as a model of Radical Eclecticism.”43 The key figure in the “Conclusion” is
Catalan. Jencks isolates “the venerable buildings of Antoni Gaudı́” as “convincing

examples of Radical Eclecticism.”44 Indeed he goes as far as nominating Gaudı́ as
realising “perfectly successful work[s] of architecture.”45 Thus whereas the article
resolves itself only in the potential of “new messages,” the book section points
vaguely towards sensuous buildings in Barcelona. The geographical and formal
distance between la Sagrada Familia (see Fig 3) and Kamioka Town Hall is vast.
But the more noteworthy distinctions between the article “Radical Eclecti-
cism” and the book section “Radical Eclecticism?” are subtler. In the conclusion to
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Jencks highlights the relatability of
Figure 3: “Sagrada Familia 02” photographed by Bernard Gagnon.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sagrada_
Familia_02.jpg&num;mediaviewer/File:Sagrada_Familia_02.jpg.
ANDREW P. STEEN 137

his present to “the period [between] 1870–1910.”46 By his account, during these
decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, “at least fifteen styles were in
opposition . . . and complication and eclecticism were rife.”47 By framing his
discussion around “the period 1870–1910,” Jencks positions the year 1870 as the
beginning of a window that closes in forty years time. Comparing back to “Isozaki
and Radical Eclecticism,” it is evident that the use of the year 1870 has undergone
significant revision. There, as noted above, Jencks argues that architectural
culture is “entering a period . . . akin to that of 1870.”48 In other words, he uses
1870 as an open-ended marker of transition. In marked contradistinction to the
construction of their respective titles, then, in “Radical Eclecticism” the potential
is left open, while in “Radical Eclecticism?” the window is framed with closure.
The significance of the period frame, rather than a singular year, leads to an
altered historical survey. Somewhere in the forty year period, Jencks writes, “[t]he
general trend of all styles towards heterogeneity was reaching a peak . . . In fact all
styles were hybrid and becoming syncretic if not eclectic.”49 This history is then
applied descriptively to the present: “[t]oday precisely such borrowings are
occurring.”50 This suggests Jencks believed the diversity and incongruity was
coming to a head. By contrast, in the article in AD, the year 1870 is held in parallel
with the activity of the New York Five Whites and the Grays, presumably
commencing with the CASE meeting at MoMA in 1969 and continuing to Jencks’
present. The year 1870 is highlighted such that his recent past brackets the date
that occurred exactly one hundred years after the referenced year, i.e., 1970. The
work of the Whites and Grays is “mannered” but is “adding various complications
to an essentially modern style.”51 Syncretism is here a goal to be aimed at with the
prospective foundation of Radical Eclecticism.
Along with a changed perspective on periodisation and historical echoing, the
significance of the term “eclecticism” itself shifts between “Radical Eclecticism”
and “Radical Eclecticism?” In the article that advances from the guarded,
Mannerist, “Instant Revivalism” of Isozaki, there are few limits placed upon
eclecticism. Jencks celebrates the fact that Nikolaus Pevsner’s “warning against
the dangers of Historicism” has in the years recent to Jencks’ assessment “gone
more and more unheeded.”52 When placed in dialog with the Japanese architect,
the radicality of Radical Eclecticism allows “anything”53 without restraint. The
Radical Eclecticism of the article promotes freedom of expressive means.
However, the appreciation of the potential of plurality, and complexity, and
increasing differentiation is far less pronounced in The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture. Jencks stresses in his book’s conclusion the importance of balancing
architectural “neologisms” with “clichés” retained as such and not laced with
irony.54 Post-Modern Radical Eclecticism is measured, balanced.
The difference between the conceptualisation of the limits of eclecticism in
“Radical Eclecticism?” and in its article predecessor comes into full contrast in a

bracketed clause passed over as ellipsis in a quotation above. In characterising the
stylistic plurality existent between 1870 and 1910, Jencks specifies “at least fifteen
styles . . . (no doubt too many)” – including High Gothic, Second Empire Style,
and Queen Anne Style “as seen in Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco.”55
According to this parenthetical assessment, the mechanism of differentiation that
Jencks presents as being central to the progression of architectural culture from
simple to complex was, in this historical period, dysfunctional. While in his
theorisation of the state of the avant-garde of which Isozaki was a part this level of
semantic confusion is a historical eventuality to guard against, in his presentation
of a theory of Post-Modern architecture based on language, Jencks stresses the
pressing need to establish firm boundaries. The “fifteen styles” of 1870– 1910 were
“no doubt too many” to allow for comprehensible categorisation.
The shifts between “Radical Eclecticism” and “Radical Eclecticism?” are
representative of an altered rhetorical agenda. Where Jencks’ article on Isozaki is

in part appreciative of the work of the Japanese architect but largely focused on its
unrealised potential, his book’s conclusion, while using the decades-old referent
Gaudı́ as a romantic landmark, is intent on constructing a guide to production.
The critical work is thus open-ended, and the theoretical work is conclusive.
Again, the grammatical construction of the two titles is revealed as opposing the
rhetorical ambition of the text for which they stand: the former offers its reader a
question; the latter provides its reader an answer.
V.
“Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” is a work of criticism. Its argument looks to
arouse its reader. It prompts enthusiasm for a future marked by architectural
complexity and cultural richness. “Conclusion – Radical Eclecticism?” on the
other hand sums up a presentation of a partially descriptive theory. Its argument
is designed to discipline its reader. According to Jencks, the components of the
working model are already in place: “[t]he various formal, theoretical and social
threads are there.”56 All that is required is for the various “aspects” to be “woven
together” by Post-Modernism converts.57
The movement from “Radical Eclecticism” to “Radical Eclecticism?” is
designed to help bring about a new Post-Modern paradigm. While Jencks’
criticism in AD evokes the fated projection of history, his resolved theory in The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture takes history on board, trying to account
for the effect it will have on architectural culture. In fact, not only account for, but
ward against. The significance of his rule of oscillation, and his paralleling of
1977– with 1870– 1910, is exposed: by his reckoning the complexity of the system
is soon destined to reach a point where reduction will again occur. This reduction,
inevitable within the existent paradigm, will ruin the potential of sustained
eclecticism. Like the regime change initiated under heroic banners such as
ANDREW P. STEEN 139

“ornament is crime,” Jencks sees a return to simplicity on the horizon, at the edge
of his implied window, presumably around the year 2010.
In one sense, a question posed in this paper’s introduction has gained
resolution. The relation between “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism” and The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture as expressed in its “Conclusion – Radical
Eclecticism?” has been exposed not as mere extension but rather as discursive
transmutation. Similarities in content have been revealed as incidental to a
reorientation of rhetorical ambition. Objects of evidence have been repro-
grammed. The critic Jencks and the theorist Jencks use the same bank of
information, but they use it to promote contrasting interests. This is perhaps not
unexpected. But it does not conform to a model whereby one text is merely
extending the other. Despite this finding, the question of whether or not “Radical
Eclecticism” and “Radical Eclecticism?” are conceptually uniform, in keeping with
the fundamental positioning of their relationship as one of a “development,” has

not been answered. What is still at stake is the “radicality” of Radical Eclecticism
articulated in Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, as against that
projecting out of his AD article. New evidence is required to answer this question.
Turning forward to the thesis of the book as it is presented in its
“Introduction,” such evidence is found, and such a judgment is possible. The short
answer to the question of whether article and book are consistent, whether the
radical character of the piece of criticism launched off Isozaki and that of the work
of theory leaning towards Gaudı́ are akin, whether the open-ended article titled by
statement and the closure-emphasising book whose conclusion is titled by an
interrogative are alike, is no. Before the polemical use of the imploding Pruitt-Igoe
tower block photograph (see Fig 4), and the concomitant, facetiously precise
dating of the death of so-called Modern Architecture – “July 15, 1972 at 3.32 (or
thereabouts)” – Jencks gives his reader a concise summary that effectively
distances The Language of Post-Modern Architecture from “Isozaki and Radical
Eclecticism” to such a degree that the connection between the two gains more
sense through contrast than connection.
The definition Jencks provides for Post-Modernism is rendered with a degree
of flexibility throughout the book. The new body as it is held in discourse contains
many cultural connotations, and can be approached from a number of angles.58
But the constitution of a generic Post-Modern work is not represented with such
vagueness. Jencks generously gives his reader “a short definition”: “[a] Post-
Modern building is . . . one which speaks on at least two levels at once.”59 This
short definition of a Post-Modern building is immediately complicated by the
attribution of two distinct audiences: one, architects or those with developed
architectural interests; the other, lay people. Jencks describes a “discontinuity in
taste cultures” that pervades the social reception of architecture.60 The Post-
Modern building, according to Jencks, speaks to both of these audiences and

Figure 4: Demolition of Pruitt– Igoe, United States Department of Housing and Urban
Development.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pruitt-Igoe-collapses.jpg.
satiates both of these tastes. As such, it is embodies “dual coding”: it “show[s] a

marked duality, a conscious schizophrenia.”61 Throughout the book, “dual coding”
is also rendered “double-coding.”62 Post-Modern architects design architecture
that “speaks to the elite and the man on the street.”63 Jencks conceptualises the
basis to this “dualism” as highbrow capital-A architecture mixed with lowbrow
forms of “the vernacular, . . . tradition and the commercial slang.”64 While he
melodramatically stresses Modern Architecture is “fairly dead,”65 he links the
elitist half of his dualistic construct with this referent; and within the contorted
semantics of the name “Post-Modern,” which Jencks gives reading notes for in his
“Introduction,” the prefix “Post-” presents itself as that corrupting, or comforting,
or democratising component.
The “radicality” of Post-Modern buildings and Post-Modern Architecture
collapses on this presentation of “double-coding.” The nomination of “at least two
levels” obviously allows for three levels, or indeed more. The “eclectic” taste of the
“man on the street” allows for any number of challenges. Depending on the street,
the potential may indeed be “radical.” A plurality of vernacular and traditional and
commercial forms can, in theory, impose themselves at once, forming the kind of
complex whole sketched out in “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” But the
nomination of “dual” codes, the isolation of elite and lay “languages,” and the
caricatured presentation of Modern Architecture, subverts these potentials. The
ANDREW P. STEEN 141

Language of Post-Modern Architecture rhetorically limits its “radicalism” within
opposition.
VI.
Jencks’ goal in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture is apparent. Despite
his nomination of Modern Architecture’s “death” and his objectification of its
“corpse,” Jencks does not wish to kill this cultural object off.66 He seeks to launch
its final orthodoxy. His ambition is to find a mode that internalises opposition,
allowing its adherents to avoid being merely another fleeting case in a succession
of attempts to realise the new by shock or awe. By retaining the elitism that
characterises Modern Architecture, he conserves this ideal. By staging the death of
Modern Architecture, Jencks allows it to live on as a conventionalised ideological
and esthetic field. Jencks is neither being neo-avant-garde nor staging an avant-
garde revival; and he is not being mannered. He is attempting to exceed the

system. But in holding this ambition, the core of the position presented in the AD
article that led to the commission of the book, the very definition of “radical,”
undergoes a dramatic revision.
The threat of the potential collapse of Radical Eclecticism is foreshadowed in
“Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism.” It comes in the extensive caption for the figure
Jencks constructed with Edward Stokes titled “American Revivalism, 1800–
1915.” In his description of “The ‘Battle of the Styles’ of the 1850s,” Jencks notes
“13 or so competing armies” that were “tid[ied] up” by those giving discursive
treatments “into two opposed battalions”: the Classical and the Gothic.67 He then
decries “[s]uch oversimplification, typical today, as in the division between the
‘Whites’ and the ‘Grays’.”68 In “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” in other words,
Jencks shapes up against the discursive practice of dualistic reduction.
He promotes a truly open-ended intellectual practice unresolved into neat
structures.
Yet in his construction of the dualistic, double-coded, elite-and-man-on-the-
street conversant hybrid of Post-Modernism, Jencks is engaging in just such a
reduction. The many elements of “radical” eclecticism are subsumed into one
side of an opposition, working against the established standard, positioned as
retaining its own set of conventions. The level of internal complexity the
architecture of Jencks’ Post-Modernism achieves is indeed greater than that
produced by practitioners stuck within purist dogmas. But the manner in
which this closed and resolved architecture establishes itself within or
differentiates itself from the broader context of architecture is, in the end, no
more complex.
For all the proliferating promise of Radical Eclecticism, Post-Modern
architecture remains mired in the same system. Jencks’ Post-Modernism is
not multivalent, but merely bivalent; its internalisation of schizophrenia

does not result in a radical openness, but merely another structural closure
reliant upon Modern Architecture. The fact that in his AD article Jencks
nominates the “battle” between Classical and Gothic as a “phoney war” staged
within architectural discourse gives the reader of “Isozaki and Radical
Eclecticism” and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture cause to
question the cynicism of the latter, particularly its second and most well-
received edition.
NOTES
1. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 1st ed. (London: Academy
Editions, 1977).
2. Haig Beck, “Being There: Haig Beck remembers Monica Pidgeon and his time at the AD,”
bdonline (30 October 2009). Accessed October 2014. www.bdonline.co.uk/being-there-haig-
beck-remembers-monica-pidgeon-and-his-time-at-the-ad/3152199.article.
3. Charles Jencks, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” AD 47 (January 1977): 42– 48.
4. Beck, “Being There.”
5. Beck, “Being There.”
6. Jencks, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” 42.
8. Jencks, “Isozaki and Radical Eclecticism,” 42, 44.
10. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray,
1948): 199. Quoted in Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-
Modernism (Yale University Press, 2002), 45.
16. See Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, eds.
Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman (New Haven: The Yale Center for British Art & The Paul
Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2010).
17. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973).
ANDREW P. STEEN 143

33. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 1st ed., 7.
34. Robert Levin, “Review. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles A. Jencks,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 239– 240, suggests the word
“tentative.”
35. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 2003), 57.
36. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 1st ed., 8.
37. In the dismissive review, Thomas L. Schumacher, “Review. The Language of Post-
Modern Language, revised and enlarged edition, by Charles Jencks,” JAE 32, no. 3
(February 1979): 30– 31, another duration, the mere year between the first edition and its revised
and enlarged successor, provokes the question, “why so soon?” The pre-existence of “The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture” in a draft manuscript form might help explain the
willingness of Jencks to revisit and revise so quickly.
38. Bertens, The Idea of the Post-Modern, 56– 58. Margaret A. Rose, The Post-Modern and the
Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 101 –107.
Rose quotes Jencks himself as saying that “‘to this day’ he would define post-modernism as he
did in 1978” (107).
39. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 2nd ed. (London: Academy
Editions, 1978): 127.
40. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 2nd ed., 127.
43. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 2nd ed., 128– 129.
46. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 2nd ed., 127. The nature of
this bracketing is questioned in Michael McMordie, “Review. The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture, revised and enlarged edition, by Charles Jencks,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 38, no. 4 (December 1979): 403– 404. McMordie also finds
Jencks’ argument “unproved” and his “double-coded architectural discourse a shaky
analogy” (404).
58. This might be seen as the hangover from the 1977 first edition.
62. Margaret A. Rose notes that “the concept of double-coding is . . . found in the first edition of
. . . The Language of Post-Modern Architecture . . . , but the term itself is first emphasised in . . .
Introduction to the second edition of 1978” – Rose, The Post-Modern, 254.

66. Bertens, The Idea of the Post-Modern, 58, makes this same point; and relates it to Jencks’
use of semiotics.
ANDREW P. STEEN 145

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ISSN: 1033-1867 (Print) 2164-4756 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfab20

Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture

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Figure 1: Arata Isozaki, Kamioka Town Hall axonometric, 1976.

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Paris and Dessau in the 1920s to the then-contemporaneous Florentine avant-

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Figure 2: John Nash, “Detail of Cross Section of Royal Pavilion.”

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in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, several decades after Nash’s revivals.

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A truly “radical” eclecticism is held latent within the existing environment.

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the book’s avowed “vagueness and implied pluralism”33 is arguably an appropriate

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Catalan. Jencks isolates “the venerable buildings of Antoni Gaudı́” as “convincing

Figure 3: “Sagrada Familia 02” photographed by Bernard Gagnon.

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representative of an altered rhetorical agenda. Where Jencks’ article on Isozaki is

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the fundamental positioning of their relationship as one of a “development,” has

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satiates both of these tastes. As such, it is embodies “dual coding”: it “show[s] a

ANDREW P. STEEN 141

garde revival; and he is not being mannered. He is attempting to exceed the

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ANDREW P. STEEN 143

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ANDREW P. STEEN 145

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