Meganarratives of Supermodernism: The Spectre of the Public Sphere

Mark Kingwell

doi:10.22329/p.v1i1.35

Abstract

Political-theoretic discussions of the public sphere, common at least since Habermas as a site of both crisis and justification, are rarely if ever animated by a sense of public spaces as what phenomenology calls 'real places.' Indeed, the space/place distinction is an important lever of critique for the transcendental rationalism operative in many political theories, even when unavowed. At the same time, architectural theory, even when itself informed by a laudable marriage of concrete and abstract, often seems uninterested in pursuing the political consequences of the built environment. This paper outlines the beginning steps in a large research project that might be labelled 'the political phenomenology of the city.'

Highlights

Jameson 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. "[T]he new buildings of Le Corbusier and Wright did not 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" (Jameson, preface to Lyotard xvii)
According to this dominant narrative – a narrative which we shall employ, per Žižek, as at once contingent and necessary – architecture progressed, or anyway moved on, from this adolescent utopian ambition and onto a different stylistic crisis, with the leading figures 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 stylistic form of building Hans Ibelings
- 199 Mark Kingwell and Marc Augé, among others, have labelled "supermodernism," citing among others the work of Jean Nouvel and Dominique Perrault. These constructions are often found as part of the centreless conurbation Charles Jencks dubbed the "heteropolis," the City-of-Tomorrow masses in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and Shanghai's Pudong New City, often exhibiting what I have elsewhere called "monumental-conceptual architecture" – signature buildings, many of them gestural, on a vast scale ("Architecture")

Summary

Introduction

Many of the now-familiar architectural stars hard at work securing and realizing such large-scale public commissions were first celebrated in a 1988 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, assembled by Philip Johnson and guided by Eisenman, which marked a development of modernism from within its own radical wings. To answer that question we must examine current architectural practice but appreciate marked slippages in the notion of public space.

Results

Conclusion