Architecture shook off its rigid postwar uniform in the 1960s, when a handful of designers decided that glass towers and blank facades had stopped speaking to the people who used them. Modernism’s promise of pure function had produced efficient boxes, yet many felt those boxes ignored memory, color, and humor. The pushback arrived under the loose banner of postmodernism, a loose coalition of architects who treated buildings as places for conversation rather than silent monuments.
Robert Venturi led the charge with his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and the later Learning from Las Vegas. He argued that everyday signage, strip malls, and historical motifs already carried meaning for ordinary viewers; architects might as well borrow from that visual language instead of pretending it did not exist. The result was an approach that mixed classical columns with neon palettes, oversized keystones with industrial materials, and serious structural logic with deliberate visual jokes.
Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, completed in 1984, became the most visible example. Its polished granite skin and the broken pediment at the crown openly mocked the flat-roofed towers nearby. What looked like a corporate headquarters also functioned as a three-dimensional cartoon of eighteenth-century furniture. A few years earlier, Michael Graves’s Portland Building had performed a similar trick on a smaller scale: pastel ribbons, a giant keystone, and a cheerful color scheme turned a government office into something closer to a friendly roadside sign.
The movement’s playful surface drew sharp criticism. Detractors claimed the emphasis on image produced thin details, leaky roofs, and little regard for energy performance. By the late 1980s the same economic boom that financed these eye-catching towers also made them easy targets for charges of excess. Yet the underlying permission postmodernism granted—to reference the past, to communicate with non-experts, to treat facades as layered rather than stripped—never fully disappeared.
That permission surfaces today in projects that layer recycled ornament with high-performance envelopes or that splice local craft traditions into parametric skins. The buildings may no longer wear pastel pediments, but they still treat architecture as a medium that can carry multiple readings at once. When a contemporary tower incorporates a fragment of cornice or a supergraphic that nods to regional history, it continues the same impulse that first appeared when modernism’s straight lines began to feel too quiet.