PoMo architecture, often derided as gaudy and excessive, is having a revival – just in time to save some of its greatest treasures

A gaggle of architecture enthusiasts are standing on the windswept edge of Greenland Dock in southeast London, shivering on their bikes and straining to see beauty in the 1980s housing development that stands across the water. “If you look closely,” says their guide, Elain Harwood, “you will see it is a combination of Miami Tudor crossed with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with a hint of the docklands warehouse.”

What had begun as a punk aesthetic became synonymous with the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

Heavily leaded windows project out in bays from the lumpen brick pile, supported on fat white columns and topped with a row of arched oriel windows. It is the curious product of the desire for waterside loft living, aimed at those who still cling to a cosy dream of Tudorbethan suburbia. The beauty of postmodernism, argued its champions, was that you could have both. And then some.

Built by David Price and Gordon Cullen, Swedish Quays was one of many aesthetically challenging stops on PoMo on Pedals, Harwood’s one-off architectural bike tour of postmodern London, a fruity journey past candy-coloured cladding and stuck-on pediments, planned to coincide with the launch of her new book for the Twentieth Century Society, Postmodern Buildings in Britain.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A slice of Battenberg cake gone astray’ … James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry in the City of London. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

“I was definitely going out of my comfort zone,” says Harwood, a specialist in postwar architecture at Historic England who has been tasked (along with co-author Geraint Franklin) with researching this most slippery and divisive of styles for a forthcoming raft of listings to be announced next year. With many buildings of the postmodern era now reaching 30 years old – the time after which they can be considered for listing by Historic England – the mischievous movement that made its name from injecting youthful wit and fun into architecture is finally coming of age.

Threatened by alterations, James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry in the City of London was one of the first to be protected when it was Grade II* listed last year. A pink-striped stone galleon of an office building, it thrusts its jaunty prow into Bank junction like a slice of Battenberg cake gone astray, beckoning people inside to discover its great circular atrium lined with glossy blue tiles and pink and yellow window frames.

John Outram’s pumping station on the Isle of Dogs received the same honour earlier this year, listed as an example of a time when public utilities could be dressed up as cartoonish temples, referencing everything from ancient Greece to jet engines and riverine mythology.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian Pollard’s Marco Polo House in Battersea, London, now demolished. Photograph: Nick Cunard/Rex Features

Ian Pollard's Kensington Homebase was a camp Egyptian fantasy, complete with friezes of gods wielding power tools

Many other playful monuments of the era haven’t been so fortunate, which is what has spurred the listings campaign. One of the first to meet the wrecking ball was Marco Polo House in Battersea, a white ceramic and tinted glass palace for TV shopping channel QVC, crushed in 2014. Its flamboyant architect-developer, Ian Pollard (who went on to find a second life as a naked gardener), was unlucky enough to have his only other building of note razed a few months later. The Kensington Homebase was a camp Egyptian fantasy, complete with columns lifted from Karnak and friezes of gods wielding power tools – a rich confection that proved too much for Historic England to stomach.

In the US, the future of many PoMo landmarks now hangs in the balance, from Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York to Helmut Jahn’s Thompson Center in Chicago; products of a period that is still struggling to be taken seriously.

As a movement, postmodernism has been unfairly vilified because of what it came to represent. It emerged in the 1970s as a radical riposte to the bland hegemony of modernism, which had seen cities covered with increasingly mundane concrete slabs, often thrown up with little sensitivity to their context. It set out to return historical reference, context and meaning to architecture, shaking up a staid discipline with humour and verve. It celebrated surface, pattern and iconography, favouring stagey fittings in moulded fibreglass, pink plaster and leopardskin laminate over raw timber and exposed concrete.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An ‘interior mined from holiday brochures’ ... Sir Terry Farrell’s TV-AM studios in Camden, London, circa 1983. Photograph: Arcaid Images/Alamy Stock Photo

While modernism had stripped everything back, postmodernism revelled in excess, raiding the fancy dress box and sampling from back catalogues with promiscuous relish, bolting on oversized cornices, pediments and other cut-out shapes in densely layered collages. “Less is more” had been the modernist maxim, to which the godfather of postmodernism, Robert Venturi, replied: “Less is a bore.”

As the inexorable pendulum of taste swings to and fro, so the cheeky pranksters became the tedious bores. What had begun as a punk aesthetic, spicing up the naughty interiors of shops and cocktail bars, became synonymous with the political era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the steroidal spawn of financial deregulation. As public sector work evaporated, PoMo became the de facto style of commercial developments of yuppie flats, a thin appliqué to be stretched over bloated office blocks. Co-opted by big business, the jokes began to wear thin. For those who lived through it the first time around, it is still hard to see the wit behind the mirror glass.

Are these PoMo palaces really worth saving? Read more

No other British architect is more closely associated with the movement’s rise and fall than Sir Terry Farrell, who has co-authored another volume, Revisiting Postmodernism, published by the RIBA this month. His TV-AM studios in Camden, London, completed in 1983, was a pop monument to the media age, with a supercharged graphic facade and a roof crowned with fibreglass eggcups. The interior was mined from holiday brochures, complete with a Japanese pavilion, Mesopotamian ziggurat staircase, Italian garden and midwestern gulch. It was an ephemeral project, since predictably mutilated, but Farrell has enjoyed a more lasting presence with his trio of monumental projects – Embankment Place, Alban Gate and the MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall, all completed in the 1990s, just as the tide was beginning to turn against the era of architectural power-dressing. When the latter building, a Mayan temple of cream concrete and green glass, was blown up in a recent James Bond film, many viewers were delighted.

“I think the PoMo label has been too rigidly seen as a style,” says Farrell. “I never adhered to that. My work was more freestyle and eclectic. I think the era’s most enduring legacy has been urbanistic, rather than stylistic, returning a sense of context and identity to how places are planned – something that modernism got so wrong with its slab blocks in open space.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, designed by Charles Moore. Photograph: RIBA Collections

His Comyn Ching project in Covent Garden is one such example, a clever reworking of a triangle of 18th-century buildings, described by Franklin and Harwood as “an exemplar of postmodern placemaking at its most intricate”. It was recently listed, when it was under threat of having its colourful additions ripped off.

Farrell’s illuminating personal take on the period in which he was both feted and vilified is complemented by his younger co-author Adam Nathaniel Furman’s voracious international survey. It is a kaleidoscopic romp that takes in everything from Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill’s pumped-up neoclassical housing estates in Paris to the wildly original work of Freddy Mamani in El Alto, Bolivia.

“Postmodernism represents an incredibly diverse range of practices, across many different countries and agendas,” says Furman, who has been an energetic champion of the movement since setting up the Postmodern Society on Facebook a couple of years ago, which now has more than 10,000 members. “It’s got a bad name from the late corporate stuff that the next generation turned into a straw man to demolish. But at its heart, it is a truly sensuous kind of architecture that celebrates pluralism and embraces the chaotic, complex, global nature of the world.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gateways by Adam Nathaniel Furman, in London’s King’s Cross. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/PA

These are principles he champions in his own work, currently on show in a colourful installation at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, inspired by the layered architectural histories of Rome, and a series of dazzling patterned gateways temporarily installed in Kings Cross, a joyful arrival to the dour brick world of Granary Square. He is joined by a clutch of other young practices such as Space Popular, DK-CM and Studio Weave, who may be reluctant to use the P-word, but whose work is characterised by a renewed interest in colour and ornament, richly fertilised by an expanded frame of reference.

Visit architecture schools’ summer shows and you will see that history and eclecticism are being embraced by a new generation, which is increasingly mobilised to fight to keep the postmodern relics while they’re still standing. Not a moment too soon.

