8 Preface Post-Modernism Resurgent?
The Back Story
Some Debts Acknowledged
And Especially Madelon
16 Part I The Perfect Storm of Post-Modernism
The Moral Failures of Modernism
The Recurrent Deaths of Modernism
The Triumph of Nothingness
Revisionists and Le Corbusier Lead the Revolt
Complexity and Double-Coding - the First Post-Modern Synthesis
The Shape of History - Big, Medium and Small Waves
50 Part II Searching for Difference, Finding Commonality
Global Pluralism
Radical Eclecticism, the First Response to Homogeneity
Contextual Counterpoint
Post-Modern Classicism - the Ironic International Style
Media Events and Money
A Diversion on Cost and Taste
James Stirling Synthesises Contextualism and Pluralism
The Complexity Paradigm Extended
Modernists Becoming Post-Modern
Time-Binding Opposites
114 Part III Towards a Critical Modernism
What is a City? A Complex Adaptive System
Heterotopias and the Heteropolis
Expressively Green and Inexpensive
Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito and the Porous Route Building
Peter Eisenman, the Landform and the Critical-Creative
160 Part IV Complexity and Nature's Ornament
The Complexity Paradigm
Fractal Architecture and the Metaphysics of Seamless Continuity
Opening Up the White Cube
Four Degrees of Ornament
200 Part V The Coming of the Cosmic Icons
The Iconic Building and its Discontents
The Bilbao Effect
Multiple Meaning and Enigmatic Signifiers
Worthy Icons?
Paranoia, Veiled Themes and Cosmic Iconology
Premature Conclusion: the Iconology of Post-Modernism?
248 Notes
260 A Post-Modern Bibliography
266 Picture Credits
268 Index