Bjarke Ingels and the Return of Representation: A Challenge to the Post-Critical

Abstract

In the 2000s, the post-critical position emerged as a rejection of architectural criticism. Post-critics prophesied the merging of design and discourse, and the emergence of self-explanatory works of architecture. This paper argues that Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s rise to global stardom disproves the tenets of post-criticality, since Ingels successfully raises all the “un-architectural” representational strategies from the dead. Similarly, Hans Ibelings’s notion of a contemporary “Supermodernism” is dismissed. In Ingels’s architectural production – particularly his way of metamorphosing photographic pictures into entire facades – we witness a resurfacing of postmodernist strategies first promulgated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Contextualism and replication emerge as two postmodern themes that continue to haunt architecture and urbanism, in spite of the “exorcism” performed by post-critics. Lastly, this paper suggests that we need to reexamine the notions of postmodernity and postmodernism through the theoretical lenses provided by Reinhold Martin and Hal Foster, respectively.