The Dissolution of Place

Architecture, Identity, and the Body

Shelton Waldrep

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317035466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.

1
The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space

MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

The historicizing of modernist and postmodernist architecture has been ongoing at least since both movements began, and the debate between them has clouded much of what we think of as the central tension within contemporary aesthetic theory. Modernist architecture contained within it at least the possibility of serious social commitment and a desire for radical change in society while postmodernism ultimately gave way to language games and meta theories that were themselves ultimately flashy and self-contained. In a sense, modernism and postmodernism were both the opposite of what they seemed to proclaim. That is, visual modernism, in all of its abstraction and conceptualizing, maintained connections to the outside world, to actual social issues, however naïve the belief might seem that architecture or painting could solve the world’s problems by aesthecizing them. Postmodernism, at least in its glossy 1980s version, seemed ultimately a corporate style that debased itself and finally turned its back on any social responsibility at all beyond self-consciousness and an opening up of the playfulness of formal design.1 Postmodernism was a reaction to the formalist doctrines of modernism, but those doctrines, however ultimately rigid when adopted by less-talented advocates of figures like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, were based upon principles of social change (at least for Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and others) and not mere form.2 Postmodernism seemed instead to embrace private culture and to be dependent upon the wealth of the 1980s and 1990s for its existence. While both movements may be said to have gone through their respective phases, it is also possible to say that they are both still extant. The language and vocabulary of modernist architecture can certainly be said to resurface in the work of many artists practicing today, while postmodernism continues in the work of theming and in the general emphasis on allowing architecture to draw inspiration from any moment in the architectural timeline. In fact, one might argue that postmodernism allowed for the return of modernism by doing away with the necessity to follow any particular style. In that sense, postmodernism has never ended.

There has been much debate about the legacy of modernism and its history after CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). While different interpretations of the origins don’t necessarily agree—Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s The International Style, S. Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, for example—generally, three competing schools have arisen with different versions of what to do with modernism: the Italian Rationalism school, of which Manfredo Tafuri is an example, calls for more sensitive sociological awareness; the postmodern school, of which Charles Jencks was a championer and Charles Moore and Michael Graves its builders, has become popular with both the public and big business with an eclectic “historicist” style; and the late-modernist architects, Kenneth Frampton as nominal historian, are essentially all those architects who have continued to be modernists and have wanted to recoup its glory without recreating its obvious problems. Coming after the social awareness brought about after the late 1960s and 1970s, all three schools call for more attention to be paid to architecture’s audience: the people who have to live in or with the buildings. However, although each group claimed a best way to accommodate the environment, site, or community, their aesthetic goals were far apart. In his The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (now in its 6th edition), Charles Jencks attacked early modernist architecture (CIAM) and the Rationalist school as being elitist, cerebral, and unpractical. Jencks was successful at spreading the popularity of the style he called “Post-Modern.” While Jencks was brave in his attempt to run headlong against institutionalized modernism, his tone now seems reactionary—very close to Tom Wolfe’s execrable From Bauhaus to Our House—and his hypocritical attack on the “corporate glass boxes” was to prove ironic considering how quickly postmodern architecture become not only the darling of downtown finance but also soon developed a sameness and blandness of style nearly as insipid as the worst corporate modernism (like the World Trade Center before nostalgia for its passing made it beloved in hindsight) without ever having as great a phase as modernism did at its height with Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. By the time Jencks wrote Architecture Today, he had divided the postmodern into more discreet units (making distinctions between the various proliferations of postmodernisms). Perhaps acknowledging that there was an opposition, he called it “late modern,” as opposed to just “modernism.”

Thinking of architecture as a matter of conflicting schools of thought obviously has its limitations and occludes the many other ways to conceptualize the cultural production of architecture—smaller self-conscious sub-units (Archigram, for example); individual buildings and designers who work against the grain of predominate styles or outside of them (Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn); and architecture that exists outside of the notion of built form—as performance, site, landscape, event, place, or disruption. To some extent, architecture has always contained these individually destabilizing aspects within itself. A figure like Corbusier is as linked to cinematic procession and landscape design (in his rooftop patios, for example) as he is to the making of new sculptural or architectural forms. We need to pay more attention to the many ways that architecture contains within it more effects than we can presuppose by focusing attention only on architecture as form. Likewise, we need to explore more fully architecture as an influence on the non-built environment: cinema, television, literature, music, and any places where architecture intersects with these media either literally (a theme park, a set design or location for a film) or figuratively.3 Architecture does not exist separately from its environment, however much its designer may wish it did. The context for architecture, however, may not be within proximity of the building or site but somewhere in the wider world. Architecture is, in this sense, global. Linked by their creators and styles, buildings converse not only with their immediate environs, but with other buildings like them elsewhere. Analyzing individual buildings thus requires placing them within this wider system of references. Reading them as texts allows us to see the multiple ways buildings intersect with meaning outside of what is tied directly or solely to built form.

Individual buildings may exist as part of an architect’s personal style, like so many expressions of authorial intention, but works of art individuate a great deal according to the activities for which they were built—worshiping, gathering, shopping, entertaining, and so forth—as well as by the uses to which they are actually put by the people who frequent the spaces. Architecture is in a continual process of being written, rewritten, and revised according to the multiple meanings that overlap in any one particular architectural site. Similarly, just as there are multiple meanings for each building, there is no one monolithic version of modernism (or postmodernism).4 It may be possible to say, however, that at least since modernism architecture has slowly moved from a modernist sense of time grounded in a specific place, toward a sense of space, not just a postmodern space outside of time, but space reimagined entirely as virtual and cinematic environments. That is, space seems now embedded in time and architecture itself and to exist less and less as actual built form and more and more as a structural metaphor embedded within visual forms that use architecture as a type of representation.

SPACE AND PLACE

Definitions of space are numerous and have become a fundamental part of any examination of the built environment since the advent of modernism and its counterpart, postmodernism. What is meant by space, however, is never completely clear as it can be placed against the older idea of place to mean the more unstriated notion of modernist space as a sort of generic anti-place, or it can be seen as the philosophical concept that is always paired with time or the temporal.5 In either usage, space can be thought of as always existing in some sort of dialectical relationship with the notion of the erasure of something distinct yet on whose definition it seems to depend for meaning. In the modernist era, space is about the erasure of the Victorian dominance of time and place: a baroque, encrusted, multifarious, and even eccentric concept of objects, buildings, and places as a wealth of patterns, surfaces, textures, and shapes is replaced with an aesthetic of “less is more,” where the forms and their relationships to their environments or contexts have been re-ordered in a classical definition that emphasizes some type of truth to the expression of forms, materials, and settings. The erasure of detailing and the advent of new forms of signification that came with modernism can be said to continue into the post-World War II contemporary era and to define the notion of the intermediate “non-place” of Marc Augé: airline terminals, the highway, the Internet, all of which in one way or another clearly disrupt the notion of place as it is usually thought of as a part of the contiguous spatial environment that we loosely define as real.

This notion of contemporary space as the debased continuation of modernist space arguably undergoes another transformation in the context of postmodernism when the pre-modernist figurative returns with a vengeance. Once again, the return of space as anti-modernist postmodernist place is a return of the repressed or the apparent return to human scale and proportion, decoration and detail. Though certainly postmodernism can be seen, depending upon the critic, as either subversive and ironic or reactionary and conservative, history has shown that postmodernism, whether it still exists or not, has, at least as a world-wide aesthetic system, shown itself to be fragmented and ultimately resistant to the notion of social progress that modernism, however naively, tried to enact through form. Seeing postmodernism as merely the obverse of modernism is not accurate, however, as it can be argued that postmodernism is not actually a return to the temporal outside of or in contrast to the spatial. In fact, what Jameson calls “the postmodern world system,” “resorts to new techniques of distortion by way of a suppression of history and even … of time and temporality itself.” The seeming move back toward the figurative or toward the realism or naturalism of the Victorian era

is not really figurative in any meaningful realist sense or at least that it is now a realism of the image rather than of the object and has more to do with the transformation of the figure into a logo than with the conquest of new ‘realistic’ and representational languages. It is thus a realism of images or spectacle society … and a symptom of the very system it represents in the first place.6

To Jameson, the figure represented is Guy Debord’s spectacle as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: Letter from Portland, Maine
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space
• 2 The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World
• 3 The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas
• 4 In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body
• 5 Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos
• 6 Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body
• 7 Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick
• Coda: Virtual Communities
• Bibliography
• Index