Schwarz
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"In the early '50s Britain remained in a state of economic austerity that made the consumerist world appear exotic to British Pop artists. For the Americans, on the other hand, the commercial landscape was almost second nature, to be treated with a show of cool. Common to both groups, however, was the sense that consumerism had changed not only the look of things but the nature of appearance as such, and all Pop found its principal subject there: in the heightened visuality of semblance, in the charged iconicity of people and products (of people as products and vice versa) that a mass media of corporate images had produced. (1) The consumerist superficiality of signs and seriality of objects also had to affect architecture and urbanism as well as painting and sculpture. Accordingly, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham imagined a "Pop architecture as a radical updating of modern design under the changed conditions of a "Second Machine Age" in which "imageability" became the primary criterion. (2) Twelve years later, in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi and Scott Brown advocated a Pop architecture that would return this imageability to the built environment from which it arose. However, for the Venturis this imageability was more commercial than technological, and it was advanced not to update modern design but to displace it; here, then, Pop began to be recouped in terms of the postmodern. (3) The classic age of Pop can thus be framed by these two moments: between the retooling of modern architecture urged by Banham on the one hand and the founding of postmodern architecture prepared by the Venturis on the other."
-- hal foster / oct '04 artforum