Postmodern architecture
Changing pedagogies

Critics of the reductionism of modernism often noted the abandonment of the teaching of architectural history as a causal factor. The fact that a number of the major players in the shift away from modernism were trained at Princeton University's School of Architecture, where recourse to history continued to be a part of design training in the 1940s and 1950s, was significant. The increasing rise of interest in history had a profound impact on architectural education. History courses became more typical and regularized. With the demand for professors knowledgeable in the history of architecture, program were developed including the Advanced Masters-Level Course in the History and Theory of Architecture offered by Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert at the University of Essex in England between 1968 and 1978. It was the first of its kind.

Other programs followed suit, including several PhD programs in schools of architecture that arose to differentiate themselves from art history PhD programs, where architectural historians had previously trained. In the US, MIT and Cornell were the first, created in the mid-1970s, followed by Columbia, Berkeley, and Princeton. Among the founders of new architectural history programs were Bruno Zevi at the Institute for the History of Architecture in Venice, Stanford Anderson and Henry Millon at MIT, Alexander Tzonis at the Architectural Association, Anthony Vidler at Princeton, Manfredo Tafuri at the University of Venice, Kenneth Frampton at Columbia University, and Werner Oechslin and Kurt Forster at ETH Zürich.

The creation of these programs was paralleled by the hiring, in the 1970s, of professionally trained historians by schools of architecture: Margaret Crawford (with a PhD from UCLA) at SCI-Arc; Elisabeth Grossman (PhD, Brown University) at Rhode Island School of Design; Christian Otto (PhD, Columbia University) at Cornell University; Richard Chafee (PhD, Courtauld Institute) at Roger Williams University; and Howard Burns (MA Kings College) at Harvard, to name just a few examples. A second generation of scholars then emerged that began to extend these efforts in the direction of what is now called "theory": K. Michael Hays (PhD, MIT) at Harvard, Mark Wigley (PhD, Auckland University) at Princeton (now at Columbia University), and Beatriz Colomina (PhD, School of Architecture, Barcelona) at Princeton; Mark Jarzombek (PhD MIT) at Cornell (now at MIT), Jennifer Bloomer (PhD, Georgia Tech) at Iowa State and Catherine Ingraham (PhD, Johns Hopkins) now at Pratt Institute.

Postmodernism with its diversity possesses sensitivity to the building's context and history, and the client's requirements. The postmodernist architects often considered the general requirements of the urban buildings and their surroundings during the building's design. For example, in Frank Gehry 's Venice Beach House, the neighboring houses have a similar bright flat color. This vernacular sensitivity is often evident, but other times the designs respond to more high-style neighbors. James Stirling's Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University features a rounded corner and striped brick patterning that relate to the form and decoration of the polychromatic Victorian Memorial Hall across the street, although in neither case is the element imitative or historicist.
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