Few postmodernist buildings remain in state

Style is both fashion and aesthetics. Style helps name our homes, and in a real estate boom, we hear that branding louder than ever. You have seen the names in real estate ads; “a terrific colonial” or “a classic Victorian” even “the perfect mid-century modern.”

But the style called postmodernism or PoMo is never used to sell anything. Postmodernism is eerily like disco. Between 1975 and 1990, parts of music and architecture veered into a popular culture of expression, rather than the norms of rock and modernism. No one wanted to be called a communist in the 1950s, and no architect wants to be labeled a postmodernist in the 21st century. Like democracy in America after World War II, architecture had a norm, a fundamental canon: modernism. Some architects rejected the modernist straitjacket and aggressively used style, intense color and cartoonish exaggeration. Ultimately this heresy had all the appeal of the cousin at Thanksgiving dinner raging at the politics everyone else shared and no one wanted to talk about.

Postmodernism was a brief insurrection against the architectural establishment: modernism. Just as modernism was a revolution against traditional style-based design, PoMo tried to end the orthodoxy of modern architecture.

In a state celebrated for modern architecture, like New Canaan’s Glass House by Philip Johnson, or New Haven’s Ingalls Rink designed by Eero Saarinen at Yale, Connecticut has some incredible examples of PoMo architecture. Among many others, there are four exquisitely postmodern buildings in Connecticut that display the features of an architectural movement that has all but vanished. Not modern, not traditional, these buildings manifest the brief attempt to be a commentary on what architecture can be, using triggers from the past and a little absurdity in detailing.

Goffe Street Fire Station, New Haven

A terrific PoMo building built in Connecticut is the 1974 Goffe Street Fire Station in New Haven, designed by Robert

Duo Dickinson/ For Hearst Connecticut Media Built in 1974 the Goffe Street Fire Station in New Haven was designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.