Sketches for Critics’ Corner

At one end of the Strada Novissima was the critics’ exhibition – Critics’ Corner – showcasing installations by members of the critics’ committee invited by Paolo Portoghesi to collaborate on the exhibition. This committee consisted of Charles Jencks, the Norwegian architect and architectural historian Christian Norberg-Schulz and Vincent Scully, professor of architectural history at Yale. The British architectural historian Kenneth Frampton was also invited, but later resigned from the committee. Jencks’ contribution was an installation that consisted of a giant leaning hexagonal critic’s pencil (suggesting a parallel to the leaning bell towers of Venice), and a ‘sinking’ white book with the phrase ‘all the wasms have become isms’ written on it. The six sides of the pencil were used to illustrate the main trends of Post-Modern architecture as discussed by Jencks in his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture: historicism, straight revivalism, neovernacular, ad hoc urbanism, metaphor metaphysical and post-modern space. Meanwhile the book was used to project Jencks’ slideshow on Post-Modern architecture, consisting of 80 slides that presented architectural projects from 1950 to 1980, accompanied by a short introductory text.