These projects reach beyond architecture as object and toward something incomplete, uneven, operating knowingly and boldly in a context of doubt and uncertainty. They speak in different voices to different groups, playing strategy games with the planning department with one hand while making balloon animals for the kids with the other. Solving nothing but achieving a lot, they make places more complicated and more interesting than when they started rather than aiming at tidy resolution. They are adept at dealing with the kinds of places left behind by the stalled or absent project of post-war development.
'The Postmodern Plan' is an essay first published in Architecture Today Issue 221, September 2011.
