forum 1: the city
Taking a position in architectural discourse and practice continues to be of paramount importance. Many of us remember taking Positions: Cultivating Critical Practice with Ana Miljacki, and hopefully we are still building upon the perspectives that emerged during this foundational course. We would like this column to serve both as an expansion of the conversations that have taken place this semester and as a reminder to those of us, no matter where we are in our architectural journey, that critical thinking and dialogue is innate to the design process.
Therefore, the first-years are pleased to share excerpts of their writings that they have been producing throughout the semester. This will be a biweekly column, co-authored by the Class of 2026 and hopefully many cohorts to come.
The following excerpts center on “the city”:
A Jamesonian View of Bitcoin
By Jabari Canada
Fredric Jameson’s 1998 revelations about postmodernism are incredibly relevant to popular topics that have been dominating pop culture lately. A cultural phenomenon that has hypnotized both the news industry, finance firms, and society at large has been the growth of cryptocurrencies. I feel like Jameson would have a lot to say about the world’s obsession with crypto, particularly the commercialization of this technology and its acceptance by major banking institutions and average consumers alike.
In The Cultural Turn, Jameson describes multiple aspects of postmodernism across the chapter “Postmodernism and Consumer Society" but the first description that really stood out to me was his point about, “the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so called mass or popular culture” (Jameson 2). He later talks about “pastiche” and discusses Star Wars’ ability to “not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period… it seeks to reawaken a sense of the past associated with those objects” (Jameson 8). All of these points support the explosion of crypto in this techno capitalist society run by an elite cadre of technologists who often embrace libertarian and neoliberal values on their charge to raise profits, at all costs, until the end of time. (No for real, until the end of time, like check out Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison’s investments and obsession with life extension.)
To address Jameson’s first point about the erosion between high culture and the masses, crypto gained so much hype because it provided access to rapid wealth transformation and lowered the bar to entry so everyday consumers could trade assets from the comfort of their bedroom. In general, the finance industry is the epitome of high culture, with entry level analysts making twice the national average salary straight out of college, and executives easily receiving eight figure salaries. The proliferation and adoption of crypto assets did financially empower some, but more importantly, it gave the everyday consumer the ability to take part in the practice of buying and selling financial products, an activity that was reserved for high society for so long. Connecting with his thoughts on “pastiche”, the use of crypto seems to coincide with his definition of the topic.
The recent infatuation with cryptocurrencies seems very postmodern, as it breaks from a traditional form of banking while denying the belief that USD is the only valid form of currency, exhibiting the multi-truth nature of postmodernism. It seems “pastiche” that technologists, some not all - but most, would replicate many aspects of traditional banking in their new technology. On a quest to create a decentralized ledger that democratically attributes value via “proof of work” or “proof of stake” protocols, somewhere along the way the technology became centralized and the winners from the old guard, anyone with enough money to buy cheap crypto assets or afford a ton of electricity to mine bitcoins, seem to be winning again. Just like Jameson’s Star Wars reference, the language used, financial tools, and the aesthetics of trading platforms borrowed from financial markets represents the past, while tech leaders seem to be reinventing “the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period.”
I believe this explosive model of crypto would fit well in Jameson’s analysis of the “new moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism” (Jameson 20). In crypto’s case, the pursuit of a decentralized future, flush with peer-to-peer transactions, and little to no regulation by the government, was usurped by tech titans, and was divorced from its true utility along the way.
P.S. I would love to know what he thinks about Tik Tok.
Postmodernism, or Suspended Reality
By Alissa Serfozo
I’ve been going to (and consuming) Las Vegas from the get. My family takes pleasure in driving, eating, and celebrating, so they’ve conditioned me to become a third-generation LV goer. Although I didn’t understand why we’d travel four hours in the summer from one warm, contrived place (Los Angeles) to an even hotter and more artificial environment, I liked arriving in the strange desert locale. For a kid that also spent weekends at Disneyland and plein-air malls with “European” streets and artificial lakes, driving into Las Vegas was immersive and approachable, even if it’s really no place for a kid.
My mom still likes to tell a story about when I helped myself to her credit card, logged onto Expedia, booked a room in LV, and was six years old. What’s more “late-stage capitalist” than a kid with a credit card? Whereas Jameson spent the 1980s dwelling on “the transformation of reality into images and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents,” my six-year-old Y2K self was playing into a similar game: logging onto the perpetual flatness (and presentness) of the inter-web and engaging in the capitalism of travel. Yet this story is not merely about youth buying into the neoliberal free-market system but also that I’ve always loved places like Las Vegas. Why? I argue that the answer draws a direct line to the POMO logic Fredric Jameson aptly describes,[1] Robert Venturi wholly evidences,[2] and Sam Jacob deliberately resists (with the benefit of historical hindsight).[3]
Las Vegas (explicitly its infamous Strip), Disneyland, and LA open-air retail and entertainment centers, especially those financed and developed by Rick Caruso (side note: this year, the billionaire developer self-financed a $104 million campaign for LA Mayor,[4] narrowly losing to Karen Bass), are each manufactured environments. They share an appetite for architecture that is self-referential, structures that are facsimiles and parodies of themselves (think of Disneyland’s Main Street or the Grove LA’s small-town trolly transit system). As a result, I believe that LV, Disneyland, and LA’s open-air malls are all postmodern, even if their origins do not stem from the architects and within the period we formally call Postmodern.
Next, I’d like to draw attention to how these spaces are experienced instead of Postmodern architecture’s conception and ideation. If we take POMO beyond face value (style), we understand that Postmodern architecture sometimes (I would even argue often) came from a place of cynicism in reaction to a specific, disorienting historical moment. But much like LV or Disneyland, Peter Eisenman and Venturi Scott Brown’s projects[5] also created a fantastical version of place, even if they were far more interested in self-referential pastiche and far less interested in generating enduring popularity. On the other hand, LV, Disney, and LA’s malls disarmingly construct a low-stakes, suspended reality that endlessly appeals to all, even six-year-old kids.
Still from The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure ride at Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim, California. Image courtesy of Author.
[1] Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Cultural Turn, Selected Writings on the
Postmodern (1983-1998), (Verso 1998), 1–20.
[2] Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, (MIT Press, 1972), 3–9,18–20, 34–35, 49–53, 72.
[3] Sam Jacob, “Postmodernism’s real qualities are mean and difficult, yet also psychedelically positive,”
Dezeen, August 2015, http://www.dezeen.com/2015/08/13/sam-jacob-opinion-postmodernism-revivalwe-
are-all-postmodern-now/
[4] Gustavo Arellano, “Column: What $104 million could buy, instead of a failed mayoral run,” Los Angeles Times, November 27,2022, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-27/rick-caruso-mayors-race-104-million-campaign-spending
[5] See: Peter Eisenman, Cannaregio Town Square (unrealized), 1978, Venice, Italy and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972.
life goes on with cynical postmodernism
By Vincent Jackow
When thinking of postmodernism, I feel the need to go back to the concept of modernism. I thus attempt to enumerate in my head Corbusier’s five pillars of Modern Architecture. But why think about modernism only through the lens of the built environment? It seems that the shift to an industrial world demanded most of the cultural disciplines to adapt to a modern condition paced by rapid socio-economic and political changes.
Now, are we still trying to figure out what modern life is, or are we already beyond that concern?
Frederic Jameson argues that the postwar ‘late capitalism’ called for a change in all the art practices in order to react against the deeply established forms of modernism. He maintains that our age of overstimulation and mass consumption, sickens people of the boring and minimalist aesthetics of modernity. This contamination hence spread to the physical buildings, inducing a mutation of spaces and blurring the boundaries between the city, the building and the body. In their study of the Las Vegas strip, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi thus observe an architecture that itself transformed into a popular product of hyper-consumption. Its buildings mimicked advertisement signs and symbols, whose budgets centered on neons and commercial artifacts, thus relegating buildings to neglected opaque plasterboard boxes. Its cities became a sequence to be explored in motion, designed for motor vehicles rather than humans.
Jameson’s and Scott Brown and Venturi’s readings anchor my historical understanding of the origins of architectural postmodernism within a commercial vernacular production of the late XX th century. But where does this end? What does it say about us? And how does it reflect on the current state of architectural practice?
I agree with Sam Jacobs in the sense that we are still in postmodernism: We are yet trying to make sense of the world around us. A world so complex and traumatizing, where we are blurred by the inertia of our capitalist system of infinite growth. Climate suicide, pandemics and generational confusion, make us fall in the refuge of cynical postmodernism. Our brains are incapable of focusing on the consequences of our present actions. We are trapped in the nostalgia of a thriving fuel based economy.
Yet within this chaos, we are reassured by a certain feeling of capitalist spatial order and comfort, driving to a mall to buy our favorite but increasingly scarce products, or working in your school’s studio with blasting AC on. (*cough*, I’ll bring two sweaters next time) We miss the past, so we behave like past times, but with more intensity. We burn more coal and gas. We build more cities designed for vehicles rather than pedestrians. We put out more Star Wars. We build more concrete buildings with insane glass panels. We still go to war to protect past privileges.
Life goes on. What are we waiting to change? Maybe I am just jaded…