By the end of the 1970s it was clear that Post- Modern was a recognisable
style which was not going to go away, however much its opponents
attacked what they felt were its superficiality and obsession with
historicism. It was even suggested that modern architecture (as
represented by the International style) had died at 3.32 p.m. on 15 July
1972, when several buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rise apartment
complex in St Louis, Missouri, were blown up. Designed by Minoru
Yamasaki, an impeccably credentialled modernist, Pruitt-Igoe had
undoubtedly become an uninhabitable shambles, owing to socio-economic
factors as much as to architectural style per Se. Be that as it may,
with modernism now proclaimed dead and with post-modernism starting to
gain ground, a style name was needed to identify a new breed of
buildings which seemed to owe more to the deceased modern movement than
to anything else. The label Late Modern was therefore created.
Late Twentieth-Century Late Modern buildings avoided most of the
allusions, irony and self- mockery of post-modernism, although they
sometimes paid homage to Inter-War Functionalism. They also modified the
uncomplicated, predictable matchbox shapes of the International style by
slicing, chamfering or serrating them, by stressing the 45-degree angle
in plan and elevation, or by relinquishing the rectangular prism in
favour of pyramidal, cylindrical or free-curved shapes. Late Modern
architecture was nothing if not sleek and glossy. It strove to convey
the image of the formidable technology of the computer and the
satellite, a technology that was not yet practical for everyday use in
the building industry even though it appeared overseas in such tours de
force as the HongKong and Shanghai Bank and the Lloyds of London
Building. A run-of-the-mill commercial building of the 1980s was likely
to wear a tinted, mirror-glass façade which—like the sunglasses of the
well-groomed, ambitious Late Modern people behind it—reflected the world
outside and enigmatically hid what might have been no more than an inner
emptiness.
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