Architects are happy to take ideas from all traditions, making buildings in an identifiable 'postmodernist' manner, which would once have been condemned as an incompetent anthology of features. In design, postmodernists took as their starting-point ideas first developed during the 1960s, reviving a whole series of ideas, imagery and materials which had been rejected by the Modern Movement. The furniture of the Italian Memphis Group is typical, mixing unconventional materials such as plastic with expensive wood finishes, reviving historical detailing, combining different decorative patterned surfaces and challenging such conventions as that all the legs on a chair should always be identical. In a similar way, postmodernist painters and sculptors select from the entire repertory of traditional and experimental techniques, the whole range of folk styles, past styles and themes, confident that their audience will appreciate every nuance of allusion or re-creation. Musicians write jingles, pop songs and symphonies with equal panache, and are happy to draw on every kind of creative resource from big tunes to serial music , from counterpoint to rap.
Writers embrace or pastiche techniques drawn from every period and every level of culture.
They import, for example, experimental narrative strategies into popular fiction , or genre conventions into more 'serious' work, without feeling the need to declare or explain what's happening. There is, in short, not a postmodernist movement but a continuum. Architecture Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought 2. Drama Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought 3. Duro, Paul PD Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought 4.