Modernity versus Postmodernity

Last year, architects were admitted to the Biennial in Venice, following painters and filmmakers. The note sounded at this first Architecture Biennial was o'he of disappointment. I would describe it by saying that those who exhibited in Venice formed an avant-garde of reversed fronts. I mean that they sacrificed the tradition of modernity in order to make room for a new historicism. Upon this occasion, a critic of the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, advanced a thesis whose significance reaches beyond this particular event; it is a diagnosis of our times: Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity. This statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even of posthistory. From history we know the phrase: