Situating the postmodern: the delay of the architectural avant-garde beyond the Western world

Abstract

Postmodern tendencies in architecture have revealed the most palpable sense stakes in cultural politics in the 1970s. Tracing the trajectory of postmodern development in architecture and cultural thought of the West, this paper argues that the development of postmodern tendencies in architecture and the arts outside the West is a delayed development of both the radical avant-garde and the neo-conservative strains in cultural politics. This delay is not a negative time lag per se, but is directly a coincident alignment of postmodern strategies with the cultural politics of the self in postcolonial geographies that continue to provide a fertile ground for such expression at a larger scale. Hence, outside the West we have seen in the 1990s the blooming affirmative expression in Nationalist architecture, or large civic projects and other forms of collective or pocket collective cultural expression, in both highly mannered radical avant-garde or decidedly neo-conservative appearance.