Reconsidering Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building and The Postmodern Condition

Jean-François Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" (1979) gave a concise definition of the postmodern aesthetic: “The Postmodern would be that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.” One year earlier, Philip Johnson unveiled his design for the AT&T Building with a Chippendale cornice and granite cladding, which New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable called a “standup joke ... a superficial shocker.” These two works coincide with late 1970s polemics around the death of modernism and the failure of its utopian mission, and the emergence of postmodern historicism.

More than four decades later, the AT&T Building, an icon of Postmodernism, has been designated a landmark after its current owner proposed alterations that threatened its dubious integrity. This paper takes the debates over the AT&T Building as an occasion to reconsider canonical conceptions of the postmodern and their implications for preservation. Lyotard theorized the postmodern as a movement that jettisoned narratives of certainty and wholeness in favor of instability, fragmentation and difference, producing a deep skepticism of all metanarratives. Johnson’s building demonstrates an ambivalent impulse toward stability, employing references from classical, fascist-era architecture, even while flaunting good taste with its cartoonish top. Does the postmodern AT&T Building resist narratives, as Lyotard asserted? In this post-postmodern moment, what does it mean to preserve a work based on the architect’s intentions given Johnson’s embrace of inauthenticity and artifice?