Jay Steffy, Interior, Circa 1980
I can't find much on Jay Steffy's design philosophy but I read his 1980s interior as postmodern.
"Postmodernism had begun as a radical fringe movement in the 1970s, but became the dominant look of the 1980s, the 'designer decade'. Vivid colour, theatricality and exaggeration: everything was a style statement. Whether surfaces were glossy, faked or deliberately distressed, they reflected the desire to combine subversive statements with commercial appeal. Magazines and music were important mediums for disseminating this new phase of Postmodernism. The work of Italian designers – especially the groups Studio Alchymia and Memphis – was promoted across the world through publications like Domus. Meanwhile, the energy of post-punk subculture was broadcast far and wide through music videos and cutting-edge graphics. This was the moment of the New Wave: a few thrilling years when image was everything." ( 1 )
"The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization." ( 2 )
Piazza D'Italia, Charles Moore and August Perez III, 1978
Robert A. M. Stern: Residence and Pool House
Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, 1982
M2 building, Kengo Kuma, Japan, 1991
"Less is More" "Less is a Bore" LOL:
"If the Modernist movement could be epitomized in a single phrase, many would choose Mies van der Rohe’s succinct utterance, “less is more.” Three authoritative words, three stern syllables: The slogan came to embody the very architectural language it engendered, spawning a whole generation of architects who sought to strip back buildings to their bare essentials.
Mies and many of his Modernist peers advocated the abolition of the superfluous, arguing that ornamentation was a distraction from the beauty of structural rationality, or — worse still — an unethical symbol of extravagance.
Of course, as with any ideological action, there is a reaction, and this is where American architect Robert Venturi came in. Together with his wife Denise Scott Brown, the late Robert Venturi strove to rewrite the book (sometimes quite literally) on modern architectural design, challenging the principles of the Modernist movement with experimentation and witty provocation.
Venturi pinpointed Mies’ sound bite as a key source of influence and countered with his own, simultaneously playful and cutting in its candor: “Less is a bore.”
Venturi’s instantly memorable quote — its fame perhaps only surpassed by Mies’ oxymoronic original — became the mantra for an entire architectural movement. Postmodernism ushered in an age of warmer architecture, buildings full of character that displayed a greater sensitivity toward context, urban landscapes ingrained with more humor and humility than the earnest monuments of 20th-century Modernism.
... For [Venturi], this was the architecture of gentle anarchy, of free-spirited optimism, of unbridled joy." ( 3 )
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