Postmodernism

The EAHN Interest Group “Postmodernism” brings together scholars committed to critically reassessing and expanding the history of postmodern architecture. It provides a forum for exploring the cultural, political, and environmental conditions in which postmodern architecture emerged, and for reflecting on how its diverse practices and narratives continue to be of interest for architectural history and heritage debates today.

The recent decade has seen postmodernism revisited in exhibitions, preservation campaigns, and critical studies. The group responds to this momentum by examining a series of intersecting priorities: the heritage and conservation of postmodern buildings, many of which are at risk; the movement’s entanglement with neoliberalism, identity politics, environmentalism, and late-socialist imaginaries; the need to decentre Euro-American accounts and engage with plural and more local and regional perspectives; and the importance of material- and project-based inquiry into fragments, archives, and micro-histories.

We are equally attentive to the role of mediation, studying how exhibitions, magazines, and catalogues shaped architectural knowledge and framed postmodernism for its publics. Pedagogical shifts of the period—new curricula, studios, and experimental learning environments—are re-examined for their impact on design culture, while strategies of citation, replication, and pastiche are reconsidered not as derivative, but as active reappropriations of history and meaning. Finally, the group emphasises dialogical and co-authored histories, acknowledging conversations and collaborations between architects, critics, curators, and communities as vital sources for understanding the multiple voices and negotiations that defined postmodernism.

The group engages directly with urgent historiographical, cultural, and ecological questions, while rethinking postmodernism as a plural and contested phenomenon. Scholars from all geographical, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives are warmly invited to participate in its activities, including sessions and discussions held at the EAHN bi-annual conferences.