Hans Ibelings: Supermodernism. At the end of the last century, a new ism was proclaimed. The Dutch architecture critic Hans Ibelings wrote a book about his observations of a paradigm shift in architecture triggered by globalization. The assumption is that, if anything can happen anywhere at any time, then the postmodern claim of the identity of a place and its buildings is hollowed out. The postmodern movement resuscitated the voice of the art of building that was muted by a technocratic approach to modernization.
However justified this might be Ibelings argues that the overemphasis of the symbolic and metaphorical layer of architecture opened the gates for a wave of pseudo-meaningful, cryptic, and pretentious works, in response to rather straightforward tasks. The muted art started to babble. The deeper, the shallower.
Supermodernism, as Ibelings calls it, is a deliberately neutral architecture. It no longer needs to carry the meaningful, be a vehicle for the symbolic. This liberates the building’s designs to concentrate on the sensitive rather the having to make sense. It is not intellectual, but sensual. It emphasises atmospheres over messages.Hans Ibelings: Supermodernism. At the end of the last century, a new ism was proclaimed. The Dutch architecture critic Hans Ibelings wrote a book about his observations of a paradigm shift in architecture triggered by globalization. The assumption is that, if anything can happen anywhere at any time, then the postmodern claim of the identity of a place and its buildings is hollowed out. The postmodern movement resuscitated the voice of the art of building that was muted by a technocratic approach to modernization.
However justified this might be Ibelings argues that the overemphasis of the symbolic and metaphorical layer of architecture opened the gates for a wave of pseudo-meaningful, cryptic, and pretentious works, in response to rather straightforward tasks. The muted art started to babble. The deeper, the shallower.
Supermodernism, as Ibelings calls it, is a deliberately neutral architecture. It no longer needs to carry the meaningful, be a vehicle for the symbolic. This liberates the building’s designs to concentrate on the sensitive rather the having to make sense. It is not intellectual, but sensual. It emphasises atmospheres over messages.