Jordy: Federic Jameson week2

The Bonaventure Hotel

Populist aspect:

“They no longer attempt, as did the masterworks and monuments of high modernism to insert a different, a distinct, an elevated, a new utopian language into the tawdry and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city, but rather attempt to speak that very language.”

- Aspires to be a total space, a complete world (miniature city)
- Collective practice (hyper crowd)
- Does not wish to be part of a city (its equivalent, replacement, or substitute)

Modernists elevate themselves from the city (le Corbusier’s Pilotis)
Postmodernists wish to exist within the city fabric (no utopia transformation is desired)

i.e. glass skin: a placeless association from its neighborhood: reflects everything that surrounds it

Postmodern hyperspace: “…succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to maps its position in a mappeable external world.”

If the postmodernists are struggling to find their own paths, (i.e. death of the subject: "it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing") then why are spaces being designed to as confusing and disorienting? Why not seek to answer questions about the architecture, rather then present representations of our own confusion and disorientation. I understand that the postmodern hyperspace is a reaction to what is occuring in the larger cultural context, but i do not understand the need or utility of this reaction. How does poorly designing the entry to a bunch of stores create a postmodern condition (pg. 174)?

The author suggests that we are in a need for new perceptual tools to understand hyperspace. However, I question the logic or even need for such tools. The construction of hyperspace in the Bonaventure Hotel is a cultural construction. What is the connection between our culutre's highly consumptive capitalist economy and the need for space that represent those conditions?
What is the connection between high turn over capital and spaces that are disorienting?