[1] The movement was formally introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas.

The book was instrumental in opening readers' eyes to new ways of thinking about buildings, as it drew from the entire history of architecture—both high-style and vernacular, both historic and modern—and In response to Mies van der Rohe's famous maxim "Less is more", Venturi responded, to "Less is a bore."

The call for a post-modern style was joined by Christian de Portzamparc in France and Ricardo Bofill in Spain, and in Japan by Arata Isozaki.

After studying at the American Academy in Rome, he worked in the offices of the modernists Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn until 1958, and then became a professor of architecture at Yale University.

In his early career, he, along with the Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier, was considered one of the New York Five, a group of advocates of pure modern architecture, but in 1982 he turned toward postmodernism with the Portland Building, one of the first major structures in the style.

In 1935, he co-authored the famous catalog of the Museum of Modern Art exposition on the International Style, and studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard.

However, in the 1950s, he began to include certain playful and mannerist forms into his buildings, such as the Synagogue of Port Chester (1954–1956), with a vaulted plaster ceiling and narrow colored windows, and the Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska (1963).

The building's most prominent feature is a purely decorative top modeled after a piece of Chippendale furniture, and it has other more subtle references to historical architecture.

The gatehouse, called "Da Monstra", is 23 feet high, made of gunite, or concrete shot from a hose, colored gray and red.

His most prominent project was the Guggenheim Bilbao museum (1991–1997), clad in undulating skins of titanium, a material which until then was used mainly in building aircraft, which changed color depending upon the light.

[13][16] In May 2004, Pelli was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth where he designed Weber Music Hall.

One Canada Square at Canary Wharf in London (opened in 1991); Plaza Tower in Costa Mesa, California (completed 1991); and the NTT Headquarters in Tokyo (finished 1995) were preludes to a landmark project that Pelli designed for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In 1991 Robert Venturi completed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, which was modern but harmonized with the neoclassical architecture in and around Trafalgar Square.

James Stirling the architect of the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany (1984), described the style as "representation and abstraction, monumental and informal, traditional and high-tech.

In 1968, the French architect Claude Parent and philosopher Paul Virilio designed the church Saint-Bernadette-du-Banlay in Nevers, France, in the form of a massive block of concrete leaning to one side.

Parent's buildings were inspired in part by concrete German blockhouses he discovered on the French coast which had slid down the cliffs, but were perfectly intact, with leaning walls and sloping floors.

An example is the Binoculars Building in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry in collaboration with the sculptor Claes Oldenburg (1991–2001).

Frank Gehry's Venice Beach house, built in 1986, is littered with small ornamental details that would have been considered excessive and needless in Modernism.

Scarpa's cemetery achieves the solemn mood with the dull gray colors of the walls and neatly defined forms, but the bright green grass prevents this from being too overwhelming.

[citation needed] Postmodern buildings sometimes utilize trompe-l'œil, creating the illusion of space or depths where none actually exist, as has been done by painters since the Romans.

This eclecticism is often combined with the use of non-orthogonal angles and unusual surfaces, most famously in the State Gallery of Stuttgart by James Stirling and the Piazza d'Italia by Charles Moore.

[citation needed] Modernist architects may regard postmodern buildings as vulgar, associated with a populist ethic, and sharing the design elements of shopping malls, cluttered with "gew-gaws".

The divergence in opinions comes down to a difference in goals: modernism is rooted in minimal and true use of material as well as absence of ornament, while postmodernism is a rejection of strict rules set by the early modernists and seeks meaning and expression in the use of building techniques, forms, and stylistic references.

A new trend became evident in the last quarter of the 20th century as some architects started to turn away from modern functionalism which they viewed as boring, and which some of the public considered unwelcoming and even unpleasant.

[d] In Modernism, the traditional column (as a design feature) was treated as a cylindrical pipe form, replaced by other technological means such as cantilevers, or masked completely by curtain wall façades.

Another return was that of the "wit, ornament and reference" seen in older buildings in terra cotta decorative façades and bronze or stainless steel embellishments of the Beaux-Arts and Art Deco periods.

In postmodern structures this was often achieved by placing contradictory quotes of previous building styles alongside each other, and even incorporating furniture stylistic references at a huge scale.

In 1966, however, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner spoke of a revived Expressionism as being "a new style, successor to my International Modern of the 1930s, a post-modern style", and included as examples Le Corbusier's work at Ronchamp and Chandigarh, Denys Lasdun at the Royal College of Physicians in London, Richard Sheppard at Churchill College, Cambridge, and James Stirling's and James Gowan's Leicester Engineering Building, as well as Philip Johnson's own guest house at New Canaan, Connecticut.

The job of defining postmodernism was subsequently taken over by a younger generation who welcomed rather than rejected what they saw happening and, in the case of Robert Venturi, contributed to it.

James Stirling's Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University features a rounded corner and striped brick patterning that relate to the form and decoration of the polychromatic Victorian Memorial Hall across the street, although in neither case is the element imitative or historicist.