Modernité en transit - Modernity in Transit

8: Meganarratives of Supermodernism: The Spectre of the Public Sphere

Meganarratives of Supermodernism 235 8 Meganarratives of Supermodernism: The Spectre of the Public Sphere* Mark Kingwell University of Toronto, Canada Modern, Postmodern, Supermodern I t is a truism, but a worthwhile one, to note that the concept of postmodernism was adumbrated in architecture before appearing elsewhere, a language and a style before it was a condition or a form of knowledge suitable to, or demanding of, report (Jencks, 1978; Lyotard, 1984). To be sure, as Jameson (1984) acknowledges in his preface to the English translation of the latter text, the specifically architectural use of the adjective is distinct, indeed narrower, in referring mostly (and often indeterminately) to a cluster or trend of building designs that sought release from the rigid sleekness of normative architectural modernism by mixing and quoting various styles and through liberal use of materials. Lloyd Wright’s organicism, for example, is transitional in a wide historical sweep that moves from the utopian aspirations of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, * “Meganarratives of Supermodernism: The Spectre of the Public Sphere” was first published in PhaenEx, vol. 1, no 1, Automn 2006, p. 197-229. to the contextualism and allusiveness characteristic of latecentury building. Such narratives are of course themselves worthy of suspicion if not incredulity; they are, like the detective’s solution, imposed post facto as a form of libidinal release under the aegis of telling a coherent story, which is to say making sense. (“[T]he experience of a linear ‘organic’ flow of events is an illusion [albeit a necessary one] that masks the fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events,” Zizek notes. “What is masked is the radical contingency of the enchainment of narration, the fact that, at every point, things might have turned out otherwise” [Zizek, 1991, p. 69].) And yet, despite differences of specificity in usage, the mixture of bricolagiste style with a perceived collapse of undiluted “rational” aspiration makes postmodern architecture not unlike postmodern thought more generally; and, as with the often remarked but never resolved slippage between modernism (in architecture, in poetry) and modernity (in politics, in society ), the style a fitting and dynamic relative, perhaps co-determinant, of the historical condition. Jameson (1984) rightly argues that postmodern architecture was, at least in part, an intellectual reaction against the perceived failure of utopian social-revolutionary agendas associated with Le Corbusier and Mies (and, less accurately, Wright). “[T]he new buildings of Le Corbusier and Wright did not finally change the world, nor even modify the junk space of late capitalism ,” he says, “while the Mallarmean ‘zero degree’ of Mies’s towers quite unexpectedly began to generate a whole overpopulation of the shoddiest glass boxes in all the major urban centers of the world” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xvii). This is what we may label the standard view, with an aggressive and idealistic modernism burning itself out in an excess of postwar construction, such that critics soon saw that “its Utopian ambitions were unrealizable and its formal innovations exhausted” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xvii). So the story goes. And according to this dominant narrative—a narrative which we shall employ, per Zizek (1991) as at once contingent and necessary—architecture now progressed, Mark Kingwell 236 or anyway moved on, from this adolescent utopian ambition and onto a different stylistic crisis, with the leading figures now united not on anything like a style, or even a theory, but in what might be called an attitude, in many cases meeting the conditions of displacement and disintegration characteristic of globalized development with a large-scale and stylistically form of building Marc Augé and Hans Ibelings, among others, have labelled “supermodernism ” (Ibelings, 1998, p. 54ff.; Augé, 1995), citing among others the work of Jean Nouvel and Dominique Perrault. In addition, these constructions are often found as part of the “centreless” conurbation Jencks dubbed the “heteropolis ” (Jencks, 1993), the City-of-Tomorrow masses in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and Shanghai’s Pudong New City, often exhibiting what I have elsewhere called “monumentalconceptual architecture”—signature buildings, many of them gestural, on a vast scale (Kingwell, 2003–2004). This is, we might say, architecture of meganarrative, not metanarrative . Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind was recently in the public eye for his World Trade Center reconstruction project and subsequent ouster by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the long-standing, skyscraper, masterfirm from Chicago, which gained control of...