Abstract

The relationship between kitsch and architecture had a great impact on modernity. This study takes a historical-critical perspective to attempt to identify the crucial stages leading to the moment when kitsch transformed into postmodern style and found legitimacy as an independent aesthetic category. By reformulating the morphologies of kitsch, postmodern architecture has flipped the fundamentals of modernist design, replacing the idea of design-as-work with that of design-as-text. From Las Vegas to Tianducheng (the Chinese city that is a replica of Paris), this aesthetic design, which had found its operating dimension in pastiche, quotations and hybridization, proves to be one of the principles of contemporaneity. Now, the urban landscape is an uninterrupted horizon of kitsch, a handbook of stylistic contradiction. Having achieved emancipation, the surrogate has become an archetype and so architecture is seen both as an “anthological” and as a “metalinguistic” practice.