“The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés—valid banalities—in new contexts as his condition within a society that directs its best efforts, its big money, and its elegant technologies elsewhere, can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society’s inverted scale of values.”


Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction


“Because collage is a method deriving its virtue from its irony, because it seems to be a technique for using things and simultaneously disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy which can allow utopia to be dealt with as image, to be dealt with in fragments without our having to accept it in toto.” 


Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City


Late twentieth-century American architecture is so saturated with various forms of irony that it seems suspiciously like the single unifying theme of the age—the zeitgeist of a period in which intellectuals hoped to elude such categorizations. This Postmodern trend, what could be called the “Ironic Order” (a pun first employed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in reference to the deformed, wood-clad Ionic column used on their addition to the Art Gallery at Oberlin College, 1973), is integral to the reaction to the utopianism and positivist logic of the Modern Movement that is alluded to in the opening quotes. From iconographic anomalies, such as the Venturi/Scott Brown column, to syntactic minimalist conundrums, such as Peter Eisenman’s enigmatic column suspended over the main stairs of the Wexner Center at Ohio State University (1986–89), to a third “high-tech” column in Will Bruder’s Phoenix Public Library (1995), which instead of receiving a maximum of compressive forces at its head pierces the ceiling and is crowned by a metal ring connecting to a lightweight tension structure, irony, the practice of saying one thing while meaning another, can be identified as a conscious goal of architectural expression.


During the last twenty-five years, when architecture culture generally returned to an appreciation of history and populist politics, ironic attitudes were the natural by-product of three conditions: (1) history is notoriously ironic in its telling, as the historian always knows the outcome and organizes the facts to support ironic conclusions; (2) the advertising culture that has completely saturated all forms of media relies on irony to create distinction; (3) twentieth century high art movements, in particular Pop Art inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s antiart polemics, are wedded to notions of irony. The first of...