Postmodern architecture deliberately packages an older structure inside a new, alien skin

Evidence

Gehry: Anyway, I decided to get into a dialogue with the old house, which is no different, you know, from what I was saying about the Ron Davis house, where the interiors would join in a dialogue with the exteriors. Here I had it easy, because the old house was already a different aesthetic, and I could play off it. But I wanted to explore the relationship between the two. I got fascinated with the idea that the old house should appear to remain totally intact from the outside, and that you could look through the new house, and see the old house as though it was now packaged in this new skin. The new skin and the windows in the new house would be of a totally different aesthetic than the windows in the old house. So they would constantly be in tension, or whatever, with each other. I wanted each window to have a different aesthetic, which I couldn’t accomplish at that time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 286

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete instance of the ‘new skin’ practice that Jameson reads as postmodern packaging — useful concrete example for the parody/pastiche distinction since the two aesthetics coexist in tension rather than merging.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘wrapper’/‘core’ relation parallels the grafting metaphor from ‘Grafting & Growth’ — an old form preserved while a new infrastructure wraps around it.
• XREF: connects to: In postmodern architecture physical materials cease circulating while traditional infrastructures persist — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 202; Late modern and postmodern architecture differ on allusion to the past — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 61; Jencks defined postmodern architecture as stylistic double-coding of old and new, high and low — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 61 (+1 more)