In The Story of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, the authority on Post-Modern architecture and culture, provides the defining account of Post-Modern architecture from its earliest roots in the early 60s to the present day. By breaking the narrative into seven distinct chapters, which are both chronological and overlapping, Jencks charts the ebb and flow of the movement, the peaks and troughs of different ideas and themes. * The book is highly visual. As well as providing a chronological account of the movement, each chapter also has a special feature on the major works of a given period. * The first up-to-date narrative of Post-Modern Architecture - other major books on the subject were written 20 years ago. * An accessible narrative that will appeal to students who are new to the subject, as well as those who can remember its heyday in the 70s and 80s.

After developing for thirty years as a movement in the arts, after being disputed and celebrated, Post-Modernism has become an integral part of the cultural landscape. In this witty overview, Charles Jencks, the first to write a book defining the subject, argues that the movement is one more reaction from within modernism critical of its shortcomings. The unintended consequences of modernisation, such as the terrorist debacle and global warming, are typical issues motivating a Critical Modern response today. In a unique analysis, using many explanatory diagrams and graphs, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. Critical Modernism emerges at two levels. As an underground movement, it is the fact that "many" modernisms compete, quarrel and criticise each other as they seek to become dominant. Secondly, when so many of these movements follow each other today in quick succession, they may reach a 'critical mass, ' a Modernism2, and become a conscious tradition.

The New Paradigm in Architecture tells the story of a movement that has changed the face of architecture over the last forty years. The book begins by surveying the counter culture of the 1960s, when Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi called for a more complex urbanism and architecture. It concludes by showing how such demands began to be realized by the 1990s in a new architecture that is aided by computer design-more convivial, sensuous, and articulate than the Modern architecture it challenges. Promoted by such architects as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Peter Eisenman, it has also been adopted by many schools and offices around the world. Charles Jencks traces the history of computer design which is, at its heart, built on the desire for an architecture that communicates with its users, one based on the heterogeneity of cities and global culture. This book, the first to explore the broad issue of Postmodernism, has fostered its growth in other fields such as philosophy and the arts. First written at the start of an architectural movement in the mid-1970s, it has been translated into eleven languages and has gone through six editions. Now completely rewritten and with two new chapters, this edition brings the history up to date with the latest twists in the narrative and the turn to a new complexity in architecture.