What placed postmodernism more in the service of the corporation than of society at large was that it was client facing, not user facing: it established cultural conditions in which a corporate officer could choose to believe they were, Medici-like, acquiring a work of art with all its useful cultural connotations of wealth and taste, but without encountering the structural tensions between architectural avant-gardes and establishment patrons that were a risky feature of mid-twentieth-century patronage. Because they were designed for appearances from distances, the buildings of postmodernism were generally not places for a public, for a deep and inhabitable threshold between interior and exterior; they were not places that would require a literal and perhaps figurative negotiation between public good and private interest. The facade was now a pictorial membrane, to be looked at but never freely crossed.

And what of the era’s other strangely serene presiding figure, Reagan himself? As early as February 1989 the architectural historian Mary McLeod could write architectural history in real time by interrogating in the journal Assemblage what was already received wisdom:

“Postmodern architecture is the architecture of Reaganism.” Among many leftist architects and critics, this kind of statement has become a cliché. The proud historical nostalgia, the fabricated traditions, the pandering to a nouveau-riche clientele, the populist rhetoric that often sounds more paternalistic than democratic, the abandonment of any social vision — all seem related in some way to the conservative turn in American politics.

Postmodern architects were self-consciously attempting to make history by remaking history, and at speed: to retroactively de-radicalize modern design into just another in a long secession of formal styles, and to instrumentalize historicist associations to add the suggestion of gravity and authority to new structures that were materially flimsy and significantly unconcerned with their users’ experiences. Like Reaganism, architectural postmodernism can be understood as a delivery system for a powerful affect. Its genius was in enlisting a compelling combination of explicit optimism and tacit pessimism — even nuke-’em nihilism. “There was something at once exhilarating and resigned in this rediscovery of history,” noted McLeod of postmodern architects’ radical retrograde; “it suggested that the present was no better than the past, that aesthetic and political choices might be arbitrary.” Today these two attitudes — of insistent cheer and the putative realism of the would-be world-weary — align all too clearly with Reagan’s deployment of retrograde aesthetics and affective nostalgias in the service of a revolutionary unmaking of American governance. Postmodern architecture as the architecture of Reaganism: perhaps this is that rare cliché that has only become ever more searingly true over time.