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Postmodern Café

London Design Festival, Victoria and Albert Museum, London,

The Postmodern Café is the London Design Festival entrance to the V&A exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–90. The project features colour fields façades merging modernism and postmodernism, incorporating arches, vinyl graffiti and stripes

Genres work
Themes arches colour fields forms
Typology bar and restaurant
Intervention types alteration furniture
Stages interrupted unbuilt
Places london

Work

Antonino Cardillo

Less is more.

— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, On Restraint in Design (1959)

Less is bore.

— Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)

Mies + Venturi. Modern in plan and ‘Post’ in elevation, Postmodern Café is a divertissement, a quest between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi.

Urban baroque strategy. Two façades capture glances across the V&A’s 1970s Exhibition Road hall.

Symmetry and negation. Although symmetrical, they are perceived from diagonal points of view. The front view seems to be denied by the pathway.

Inflection. On the façades, figures converge toward the centre. Though symmetrical overall, each side is unequal.

Archetypes. Like huge frescoes, the façades recall the pre-modern bond between painting and architecture. Vinyl graffiti refigure themes of Tympanum and Arch: two contrapositive triangles in a Suprematistic broken tympanum and a stretched arc framing a shard of the Aston Webb screen behind.

Stripes. Crossing the space, there are stripes everywhere, evoking ephemeral structure on a shoreline and retroactive presages close to Gio Ponti and Postmodernism: art is fluid. Although categorised, it escapes boundaries.

Postmodern Café
Whole hall seen from above; stripes on the floor
Postmodern Café
Counter with the blue broken tympanum projected on its front and on the wall behind
Postmodern Café
Sequence of arches towards the Aston Webb screen; two backlit green columns
Postmodern Café
Colour fields: pink and blue of the arch, yellow of the bands and green of the tympanum
Postmodern Café
Two façades seen diagonally; tympanum beside the arch
Postmodern Café
Colour fields: pink of the arch, blue of the tympanum, green of the lunette over the logotype

Testimony

The project did not proceed due to the fact that we could not secure your approach because of insufficient budget. As you know, in August we took a considerable amount of time to try and develop a way of pulling off the cafe concept. However, the simple situation remained – there was insufficient budget to realize your designs – even when the scope of the design was reduced. Also, I know you were unhappy with being associated with a significantly reduced [built] design. It was a disappointment to all of us that we could not go ahead with the project as planned.

[email], London Design Festival, London, 28 Sept. 2011 [English]

Victoria and Albert Museum Exhibition Road Screen
London Design Festival 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Aston Webb, Exhibition Road Screen, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1909. The glazed corridor behind it, added around 1983 with the Henry Cole Wing, and the screen’s base wall were demolished in 2014. Photography: Antonino Cardillo, 2011

Data

  • Time: Design (Jul – Aug 2011); CGI (Aug 2011)
  • Place: Victoria and Albert Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL, United Kingdom
  • Area: 250 m²

Credits

  • Architecture: Antonino Cardillo
  • Patron: London Design Festival (director: Ben Evans; deputy director: William Knight; project manager: Ruth Dillon; festival assistant: Siobhan Henderson and Enis Karavil; consultant curator: Suzanne Trocmé; head at the V&A: Victoria Broackes; officier at the V&A: Sophie Reynolds) via Suzanne Trocmé
  • Graphic design, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • Translation: Charles Searson
  • Thanks to Suzanne Trocmé

Poetics

2023

This lecture traces a decade of research aimed at reintegrating psychology, anthropology, historiography and archaeology into architecture, a discipline fragmented by modern specialisation. Of the Postmodern Café, the unbuilt entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition on postmodernism, it says the occasion was fundamental: reflection on the postmodern leads, for the first time, to investigating the ‘formal’ nature of colour as a narrative of architecture, breaking free from the ‘ignorance of white’. Colour identifies positions and figures, such as the arch and the tympanum, though the work still belongs to the researches of the Bauhaus.

L’antropologia nell’architettura, Museo Agostino Pepoli, Trapani, (en, it)

Historiography

2011

To complement the V&A’s keynote exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–90’, the LDF invites you to the specially commissioned Postmodern Café, designed by architect Antonino Cardillo.

The London Design Festival 2011 Guide, London, September 2011, p. 183 (en, it)

Exhibitions

2023

Museo Agostino Pepoli

Following an introduction by anthropologist Rita Cedrini, Antonino Cardillo presented his built works in the lecture ‘An integrative journey’, part of the encounter L’antropologia nell’architettura at the Museo Agostino Pepoli in Trapani. The Postmodern Café appeared under the title ‘London Design Festival 2011 Hub’.

Trapani, (en, it)

Publications

2023 – 2011

Theoretical writings

  • , ‘Un percorso d’integrazione’, lecture as part of the encounter , part of the series of cultural events of the Museo Agostino Pepoli, Trapani, 26 May 2023; transcript published on , 20 Sept. 2025.
  • , ‘Reality does not exist’, live interview as part of Mitte/Rand Salon, interviewed by Tim Berge, Berlin, 21 Nov. 2017; transcript published on , 6 Oct. 2025.
  • , ‘’, build Das Architekten-Magazin, no. 5/11, interviewed by Ralf Ferdinand Broekman, Olaf Winkler, Wuppertal, Oct. 2011, pp. 44‑51.

Bibliography

2011

Reception in press and internet