section_path: History/Postmodernism
section_name: Postmodernism
paragraph_text: Postmodernism
  
  Many architects resisted modernism, finding it devoid of the decorative richness of historical styles. As the first generation of modernists began to die after World War II, the second generation of architects including Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, and Eero Saarinen tried to expand the aesthetics of modernism with Brutalism, buildings with expressive sculpture façades made of unfinished concrete. But an even younger postwar generation critiqued modernism and Brutalism for being too austere, standardized, monotone, and not taking into account the richness of human experience offered in historical buildings across time and in different places and cultures.
  
  One such reaction to the cold aesthetic of modernism and Brutalism is the school of metaphoric architecture, which includes such things as bio morphism and zoomorphic architecture, both using nature as the primary source of inspiration and design. While it is considered by some to be merely an aspect of postmodernism, others consider it to be a school in its own right and a later development of expressionist architecture.
  
  Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism, with architects like Charles Moore in the United States, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Vittorio Gregotti, Michele Valori, Bruno Zevi in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents. Postmodernism produced a style that combined contemporary building technology and cheap materials, with the aesthetics of older pre-modern and non-modern styles, from high classical architecture to popular or vernacular regional building styles. Robert Venturi famously defined postmodern architecture as a "decorated shed" (an ordinary building which is functionally designed inside and embellished on the outside) and upheld it against modernist and brutalist "ducks" (buildings with unnecessarily expressive tectonic forms).