Architecture 101: Fredric Jameson and the Art of Reading Buildings

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Structure is… of all the humanities that closest constitutively to the financial, with which, within the type of commissions and land values, it has a nearly unmediated relationship… But that is the purpose at which we should remind the reader of the plain, specifically that this complete international, but American, postmodern tradition is the interior and superstructural expression of a complete new wave of American army and financial domination all through the world: on this sense, as all through class historical past, the underside of tradition is blood, torture, demise and horror.

– Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) 

I visited Los Angeles for the primary time within the winter of 2017. There have been loads of locations I needed to see — The Museum of Jurassic Know-how, Griffith Observatory, In-N-Out Burger — however the attraction that the majority fascinated me was the Westin Bonaventure Lodge in Downtown Los Angeles, a mirrored fortresslike construction designed by John Portman that I had examine in Fredric Jameson’s landmark 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” 

This essay had been assigned to me in faculty as a part of a seminar course that centered on vital idea and structure. The identify of the course escapes me now, however not the professor, a local of Los Angeles who conveyed her concepts about structure, city planning and consumerism by the use of energetic anecdotes a few childhood spent towards the backdrop of gated communities, superhighways and wildfires.

Since then, my sense of Jameson has without end been linked to a sure imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles, a gothic one which I first grew to become conversant in via movies. In classics like Chinatown and Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles is portrayed as a cursed place, a metropolis based on an originary crime or sin. In such movies, it’s not possible to not learn Los Angeles as a metaphor for the American empire and capitalist modernity extra broadly. 

Jameson would by no means have described the symbolism of Los Angeles as crudely as I simply did, however his well-known evaluation of the Bonaventure Lodge prompt that he noticed town this manner too — as a spot that’s outlined by its ghosts. Certainly, it was admirers of Jameson, particularly Mark Fisher, who developed the now fashionable tendency of Gothic Marxism, the view that there’s something spooky or spectral about capitalism, an financial system that runs on useless labor. (Jon Greenaway’s latest guide Capitalism: A Horror Story is a good primer to this mind-set, as is Fisher’s The Bizarre and the Eerie.) 

The horror of the Bonaventure Lodge, Jameson wrote in his well-known “Postmodernism” essay, is a horror of incomprehensibility. Whereas many are conversant in the thought of postmodern buildings containing stylistic “references” that don’t, collectively, add as much as a coherent system, the disaster of which means mirrored within the Bonaventure has extra to do with its complicated floorplan and awkward relationship to the encircling neighborhood.

This latter level is vital, as for Jameson the important function of the Bonaventure is its rejection of the skin, its try to perform as a complete world in itself, a mini metropolis the place individuals can store, congregate, and stare upon each other throughout looping skywalks and mezzanines. The truth that it’s Downtown LA outdoors, and never Cleveland or Singapore, is kind of incidental, and Jameson reads loads into the truth that the entrance entrance to this lodge is difficult to seek out. He speculates that Portman may need seen the necessity for doorways virtually as a humiliation, “for [the hotel] doesn’t want to be part of town, however moderately its equal and its substitute or substitute.”

Jameson continues: “However this disjunction from the encircling metropolis may be very completely different from that of the nice monuments of the Worldwide Model: there, the act of disjunction was violent, seen, and had a really actual symbolic significance — as in Le Corbusier’s nice pilotis whose gesture radically separates the brand new Utopian house of the fashionable from the degraded and fallen metropolis cloth which it thereby explicitly repudiates (though the gamble of the fashionable was that this new Utopian house, within the virulence of its Novum, would fan out and rework that finally by the very energy of its new spatial language). The Bonaventura, nonetheless, is content material to ‘let the fallen metropolis cloth proceed to be in its being’ (to parody Heidegger); no additional results, no bigger proto-political Utopian transformation, is both anticipated or desired.” 

So the Bonaventure aspires to be a world unto itself, however not a picture of a brand new world. It’s a house for escapism, leisure, a floating fragment that refuses to be outlined by its context, both by trying to narrate to it or by rejecting it outright because the modernists had carried out. On the highest degree, there’s a rotating bar the place one can gaze out on the metropolis from a secure distance. 

Exterior view of the Westin Bonaventure Lodge, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, by way of Wikimedia Commons

For Jameson, the Bonaventure represents the disaster of capitalism within the late twentieth century, a interval he describes as “late capitalism” however which has additionally been known as neo-liberalism or post-Fordism. The thought is that that is an period when the worldwide system is skilled as huge and overwhelming to topics in developed nations, particularly staff, who’re much less succesful than in earlier intervals of greedy their class place by collaborating in organizations like labor unions. Politics turns into tougher even to theorize as faceless firms assume increasingly energy over on a regular basis life. (Assume Ned Beatty’s well-known speech in Community). On this atmosphere, tradition more and more turns towards solipsism and spectacle.

To me this all sounds very “LA,” dystopian but additionally glamorous, like taking a look at your personal reflection within the mirrored sun shades of an detached celeb. Jameson was a midwesterner who spent his educational profession at Duke College in North Carolina, however for me he’ll all the time be the theorist of Southern California. As a lifelong denizen of the East Coast, I too solely know Los Angeles as an outsider. 

To summarize the breadth of Jameson’s work or his affect is past the scope of this text and albeit my talents. My brush together with his writing was solely a little bit greater than informal. However it might not be an exaggeration to say that it modified me. After studying him, I by no means once more noticed structure as something aside from deeply tied to politics, and particularly the political unconscious. Buildings are additions to cities meant to final for a few years. No matter architects suppose they’re doing, they’re, in a really actual sense, designing proposals for the longer term. And fascinated with buildings this manner can yield insights on a number of ranges. 

I overlook what drink I ordered once I visited the rotating bar on the high of the Bonaventure Lodge. I do keep in mind pondering that this constructing, which appeared hyper-contemporary to Jameson in 1984, had come to appear, in 2017, comfortably retrofuturist. Maybe in attempting to create an entire and sealed atmosphere, Portman had tried to exorcise the ghosts of the previous, the stain of the encircling metropolis. However now, unmistakably, there have been ghosts right here too.

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Cowl Picture: Element of the Westin Bonaventure. Photograph by Joe Howell, CC 2.0 by way of Pexel.