Richard Meier - The postmodernism blip (20/36)

I think that architecture, which as I said, I think of as a continuum, had a blip in the 80s. That blip was called post-modernism, and there were a lot of people who, I guess, were disenchanted with the idea of continuum, and felt that there should be a return to previous periods in terms of how architecture was thought about, which was basically a pastiche, but I don't think they thought of it as a pastiche, they thought of it as sort of a historical revival in a sense, and I never, for a moment, considered this a viable idea, although many people went that way. I said, you know, that's not for me, and I'm not going to succumb to this kind of popular moment, and it turned out to be right, that it was nothing more than a blip, it went nowhere. But you know, it's interesting, because it didn't only exist in architecture, it existed in music, it existed in literature, to some degree it existed in painting and sculpture, I think it existed in almost all of the arts, not that everyone succumbed to it, but there were people who were, you know, doing sort of this retrograde kind of work at that time. Fortunately, I think for all of us, you know, it was short-lived.