by Jon Lackman | 21 November 2007 | Architecture, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of New German Critique (99), editor Andreas Huyssen writes:
Since the waning of the debate about “postmodernism” and the rise of “globalization” as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s provocative quip that any work of art has to be postmodern before it can become genuinely modern has come true in ways he could hardly have foreseen. There is much talk these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity, alternative modernity, countermodernity, and whatnot. Modernity and its complex and conflicted relationship to modernism are being reassessed in architecture and urban studies as they are in literature, the visual arts, music, anthropology, and postcolonial studies …
Th[is] issue leads with three essays on architecture. Architectural discourse was both central and symptomatic in the rise of postmodernism, and it remains so as we reflect back on what earlier accounts of modernist architecture have left out …
