La Vida Loca. In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters
I’d flown in began to draw together until they formed a collective meta-
chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer,
provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human:
hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and
warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in
the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.^4In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist machinery of the
locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only be represented in
motion, something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space is concentrated.
NOTES
1 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, Mass.: 1972.
2 The originality of Charles Jencks’s pathbreaking Language of Postmodern Architecture
(London: Academy, 1978) lay in its well-nigh dialectical combination of postmodern
architecture and a certain kind of semiotics, each being appealed to justify the existence of
the other. Semiotics becomes appropriate as a mode of analysis of the newer architecture by
virtue of the latter’s populism, which does emit signs and messages to a spatial ‘reading
public’, unlike the monumentality of the high modern. Meanwhile, the newer architecture is
itself thereby validated, in so far as it is accessible to semiotic analysis and thus proves to be
an essentially aesthetic object (rather than the tranaesthetic constructions of the high
modern). Here, then, aesthetics reinforces an ideology of communication and vice versa.
Beside Jencks’ many valuable contributions, see also Heinrich Klotz, History of Postmodern
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Pier Paolo Portoghesi, After Modern Architecture
(New York, 1982).
3‘To say that a structure of this type ‘turns its back away’ is surely an understatement, while to
speak of its ‘popular’ character is to miss the point of its systematic segregation from the
great Hispanic-Asian city outside (whose crowds prefer the open space of the old Plaza).
Indeed, it is virtually to endorse the master illusion that Portman seeks to convey: that he has
re-created within the precious spaces of his super-lobbies the genuine popular texture of city
life.(In fact, Portman has only built large vivariums for the upper middle
classes, protected by astonishingly complex security systems. Most of
the new downtown centres might as well have been built on the third
moon of Jupiter. Their fundamental logic is that of a claustrophobic
space colony attempting to miniaturize nature within itself. Thus the
Bonaventure reconstructs a nostalgic Southern California in aspic:
orange trees, fountains, flowering vines and clean air. Outside in a
smog-poisoned reality, vast mirrored surfaces reflect away not only the
misery of the larger city, but also its irrepressible vibrancy and quest
for authenticity, including the most exciting neighbourhood mural
movement in North Africa). Mike Davis, ‘Urban Renaissance and the
Spirit of Postmodernism,’ New Left Review, 151, May–June 1985: p.
112).Fredric Jameson 233