Re-digging Graves: The Latent Kenosis of Postmodern Historicism at "Castalia" in The Hague

Abstract

Wearing lapel buttons that read I Don’t Dig Graves, delegates at the 1983 convention of the American Institute of Architects protested the Honor Award being granted to architect Michael Graves for his design of the Portland Building, a project in the then-still-maturing Postmodern style.[1] The objection, however, was directed more to this style than to Graves. It had gradually emerged in response to developments that included Robert Venturi’s denunciation, some seventeen years earlier,[2] of Modernism’s oversimplifications and his call—ironically, much as the Modernists had called—for what might retrospectively be considered a keno-sis of architecture; that is, a self-emptying of architecture, particularly to rid itself of staid and static truths. With that could come an architecture of kenosis, one that opens-up to, fills with, and properly responds to both the fullness (complexity) and incongruity (contra-diction) of the always dynamic situations it encounters.[3] Yet this historicist strain of Post-modernism, as advanced by Graves and many others (mostly in the US), appeared as anything but kenotic—self-assertive rather than receptive to the other—seemingly able only to add to the incongruity of the built environment and willing only to address a particular aspect of its fullness, that of historical antecedents. Despite the passage of time, the Portland Building has remained a lightning-rod for the derision of this style, but there is another building by Graves that, only because of the passage of time, has come to offer a more insightful perspective. In the distinctly European context of The Hague, the distinctly American architect reprised his trademark caricaturisation of historical motifs in a 1998 government office building known as Castalia (see fig. 1), achieving results that, quite unpredictably, reveal latent but consequential kenotic effect.