Many of the city’s skyscrapers, I learned, were seen as contributions to the postmodern architecture movement. “PoMo,” in the shorthand favored in the architecture world, began to emerge in the 1960s as a reaction to the white-walled minimalism of modernist architecture, epitomized by Mies van der Rohe’s oft-quoted dictum “Less is more.” Early PoMo architects like Charles Moore and Robert Venturi rejected this formula — “Less is a bore,” Venturi famously quipped — and sought to inject color, iconography and kitschy nods to historical ornamentation into their designs. In the Southwest, this tendency bloomed in the 1980s during the savings-and-loan boom. Unlike modernists, PoMo architects conceived their buildings as dynamic…