Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects

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Before architectural postmodernism was named as such, the process of postmodernizing architecture had already begun implicating architectural work in the increasingly information-driven logic of the late twentieth century. Though radical, the effects of this process have long been excluded from the predominant histories of postmodernism, which continue to rely on notions of individual and creative genius, architectural autonomy, and stylistic genealogies.

Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects places material devices, such as Pantone chips, research grant applications, questionnaires, Xerography, and travel photography, at the forefront of a counter-narrative that recasts these informatic procedures as fundamentally architectural and as the primary of catalysts of the loose agglomeration of styles that was once called postmodernism.

Two essays for Architecture Itself: “The Swan Plays Itself” (regarding Michael Graves’ Swan Hotel at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida); and “Architecture in the Black” (regarding John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel and Fredric Jameson’s Hotel Bonaventura.)

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The Swan Plays Itself

(Lingering notes on pan flute.) On screen: a pair of swans in silhouette against a brightening sky; then a curtain opening onto a view of Spaceship Earth, the geodesic sphere that towers over Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center theme park in Florida; then a PeopleMover tram passing over a bridge held aloft by two pirate ships; then a middle-aged man jogging along a terracotta colonnade; then the sun rising on the Swan, one of two enormous hotels designed by architect Michael Graves for Disney. Wang Chung’s 1986 song, “Let’s Go,” starts to play and the images begin to cut more quickly—119 shots in five minutes—in sync with the song’s up-tempo percussion line: a man donning a white cotton robe emblazoned with the Swan logo, a woman taking notes on Swan-branded letterhead, a flyover shot of sliced fruit laid out at a breakfast bar that is watched over by a melon carved into the shape of a swan.

All of this takes place in the first minute of a promotional video created in 1990 for Westin, the hotel management company, for the openings of the Epcot-adjacent Swan Hotel and its nearby counterpart, the Dolphin Hotel.[i] But unlike the animated features that made Disney a cultural juggernaut and a corporate behemoth, this video is targeted at a decidedly older audience. The pitch is for a business crowd, offering the Swan up as an ideal venue for important meetings and conventions. The building has all of the requisite facilities, and then some, which the video demonstrates by following a day in the life of a group of business travellers as their every desire is anticipated and sated by a veritable army of resort employees dressed in smart uniforms bearing the logo of the hotel: a pair of salmon-coloured swans facing off above a squiggle of salmon-coloured waves. The motif is ubiquitous in the video, repeated in the swan-shaped fountains in the lobby, stamped on the dishware, printed on tennis bags, and cast in chocolate.

Even the VHS cassette’s plastic clamshell case bears a close-up of one of the hotel’s titular swans, beak turned downward and gazing straight out. In reality, each of the swans—only statues, of course, since whether by intention or coincidence there are no actual swans here—are perched atop the ten-story hotel and themselves stand another fourteen-metres high, gazing down on guests like the cygnine jailors of a pastel panopticon. Graves designed these swans using the latest in computer-aided design technologies, and while they are certainly a sight to behold, their monumental scale gives no impression of their vast emptiness: just metal skin laid over a structural skeleton.

As with all things Disney, it is the image that matters most. In the theme parks, this presents itself with the economy of the Mickey Mouse logo, which is stamped on all things purchasable or otherwise consumable. The iconic design is so ubiquitous that it is placed exactly where you would least expect it; it is a game among some particularly zealous Disney devotees to spot these “Hidden Mickeys,” instances of the logo that are placed in obscure locations, sometimes even camouflaged. On this side of the park gates, there is no break from the branding: Mickey is everywhere, as if simply a condition of space itself.

But at the Swan, this formula is turned the other way around. Where the Disney parks exemplify the concept of branded space, the Swan is a prototype for a brand built around a space—or, more precisely, a building. The Swan’s logo is first and foremost a signifier of the architectural-scale statues, long before it calls to mind anything with feathers. Put simply, at the Swan, the building is the branding is the building.

Some years before the spectacular success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Swan suggested the path that a significant part of the profession would take, becoming caught up in an architectural icon economy premised on the production of spectacular buildings that would yield spectacular images. Long before Instagram, these iconic structures were erected to bait their mass remediation in photographs and films, to generate their fame, and ultimately to draw tourists who would inevitably make their own images, too. The architectural production of spectacle was concomitant with the development of contemporary global tourism.

The Swan is unambiguously a sensational object of touristic attention, but we might ask how it came to be this way. Was Disney’s goal to make a building famous, or to make a famous building? In any case, architects are situated squarely in the middle: the office of Michael Graves supplied an object whose ridiculousness guaranteed its novelty and notoriety, and Disney’s mammoth promotional machine ensured that millions would take note.

Indeed, the Swan is one instance in which architecture entered into the postmodern image economy at the end of the 1980s: first by becoming a subject of advertising, then by absorbing the logics of advertising into its arsenal of disciplinary techniques, which is to say, into design. Alongside the Westin-produced promotional film—evidence from a case in which “architecture itself” becomes advertised—the building bears traces of its designers’ application of marketing lessons. Graves’ team embedded the Swan motif into every detail of the resort, to the extent that it seems that no guest is ever any farther than arm’s reach from a swan of some sort, whether as topiary, fountain, or graphic appliqué.

Of course, Graves did not invent branded space, but what is remarkable in this case is the perfect concordance of two media regimes, one from within architecture and the other from without. In the latter, the video attests to a corporate desire to drum up buzz around a new architectural product; in the former, Graves’ architectural scenography, overloaded as it is with self-referential symbols, produces the building as a stage set for its own remediation and ensures that this imaging of the building will always and inevitably promote its omnipresent brand. It is these two interlocking parts that distinguish the Swan as a well-oiled, self-reinforcing media environment.[ii] Between Marshall McLuhan’s media environment, Guy Debord’s claims on spectacle, and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, we find the Swan, a building that has—and is—its own commercial.

In the movie version, the Swan is flawless, as are the guests and employees who populate it. Everything fits into the picture with terrifying exactitude. It is “curated.”  There are no minorities at the Swan and the only kind of love it hosts is straight and white. Even in the video’s closing moments, in an overhead shot of Pleasure Island’s Mannequins nightclub—so named for the humanoid ersatz—everyone present seems to know the choreography and manages to stay in step. That the soundtrack is an anthem of escapism only adds to the heterotopian fever-dream: “[…] share a sweet isolation; Let’s go there today.”[iii]

But is the straight-to-VHS version of life at the Swan meaningfully different from the real thing? Both the video and the building it depicts are subtended by the logic of advertising, and each plays a part in producing an inhabitable image of a yuppie Fantasyland.[iv] But recall that what distinguishes the tableau vivant from the theme park is the embeddedness of its viewer: at Disney, you can inhabit and explore the picture, and even lose sight of the frame. Indeed, this was Disney’s great innovation with respect to the theme park: to flip the script, so to speak, and install context as the content—as with Cinderella’s Castle—and this is exactly the governing dynamic of architecture’s media function at the Swan. It is context that becomes content, whether in video or experienced in the flesh, defeating Walter Benjamin’s thesis that architecture is the prototype of an art received in distraction.[v] Michael Graves designed the building to be a self-obsessed scene-stealer, so when it came time to cast the film, the choice was clear: the Swan plays itself.

Notes

[i] The Dolphin Hotel is conspicuously absent from the Swan Hotel video; properly “conspicuous” because the two hotels are directly adjacent to one another and, like the Swan, the Dolphin is also dominated by enormous, sculptural evocations of its namesake. The careful exclusion of the Dolphin from images of the Swan speaks to the degree to which the hotel’s representation was itself carefully designed and curated. This is no shock, of course, because the Swan’s stiffest competition would be, inevitably, the Graves-designed Dolphin next door.

[ii] There are at least two useful ways of thinking of the term. In the first, “media environment” can refer to a milieu of mediation, such as the kind that we are immersed in every single day. This would be, after Georges Canguilhem and Bernard Stiegler, the environment of human artifice that inflects how a subject operates in and through technology. See Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu” Grey Room no. 3 (Spring, 2001): 6–31; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). In a second definition, derived chiefly from Marshall McLuhan, a media environment refers to a situation in which mediation is understood as the principal dynamic defining an environment or milieu. Accordingly, McLuhan’s “counter-environment,” can be a type of media environment in which the hegemonic effects of a given media technology are made visible in contrast to another, often older one. See Marshall McLuhan, “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion” Perspecta 11 (1967): 161–167. Guy Debord’s theses on spectacle are also relevant here, and are essential to Jean Baudrillard’s well-known musings on simulation at Disney. See Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967), and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994).

[iii] Lyrics excerpted from Wang Chung, “Let’s Go.” In Mosaic. 1986.

[iv] McLuhan’s dictum that “the content of any medium is always another medium,” holds in the case of the theme park—taken as a media system—which turns drama, architecture, graphics, music, and even aroma toward the synaesthetic production of fantasy.

[v] The architecture of the Disney Parks has a clear pecking order that separates starring roles from supporting actors and extras. “Feature buildings” such as the Swan or Cinderella’s castle—called “weenies” in the homespun jargon of Disney Imagineering—are essential to wayfinding and constitute the major attractions in each park. By contrast, background buildings, often hidden by obfuscatory landscape features or painted in inconspicuous colours—Imagineers commonly employ two homemade tints, “No See-um Gray” and “Go Away Green”—constitute an architecture designed not to be received at all. For further reading on Benjamin’s “distraction” thesis, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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“Illustrative operating pro forma for a 1,500-room convention hotel” from John Portman, Architecture as Developer (1976).

 

 Architecture in the Black           

Ingredients for a building that “does not wish to be part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute”: thirty-five floors, one thousand, three hundred and fifty-eight rooms, twelve elevators, one full city block, air conditioning, and mirror glass—hotel, California. It is a well-worn cliché, in writing on architectural postmodernism, to invoke Fredric Jameson’s famous analysis of the John C. Portman, Jr.-designed “Bonaventura Hotel,” in Los Angeles.[i]

The cause of this writerly phenomenon likely has less to do with the acuity of Jameson’s architectural criticism—which Charles Jencks, postmodernism’s other longtime theorist, claims Jameson plainly gets  wrong—and more to do with his affirmatively situating architecture as a properly cultural object.[ii] Jameson’s manoeuvre planted architecture in the expanded field of criticism in the mid-1980s and provided a template for critique in which buildings could be read as symptomatic expressions of late-capitalism’s ills.[iii] In the intervening decades since 1984, when “Postmodernism” was first published in essay form, Jameson’s structural-critical approach has—for better or worse—mostly held out over Jencks’s historicizing tendency.[iv] Better, perhaps, because structural critique has challenged historians and theorists to grapple with the embeddedness of their objects in multiple and mutually implicated contexts; but worse because Jameson’s sophisticated example has sometimes invited the lazy thinking that allows for buildings to be simply taken as isomorphic indexes of the determinant economic structures in which they are embedded.[v] Moreover, Jameson’s conclusions on the building—he employs the descriptors “placeless,” “confusing,” and “impossible”—have become dogma and are in some respects better known than the building—incidentally, these are also the most common gripes on Yelp. Paradoxically, the brilliance of his analysis has had the historiographic effect of precluding substantive engagement with the Bonaventure. Like the mirrored glass that envelops the building, Jameson’s strong reading repels a renewed critical gaze: “You cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it.”[vi] Indeed, hidden behind a screen of familiar complaints and foregone conclusions, historians have lost sight of the Bonaventure itself, allowing the hotel to become a cliché.

If we want to see behind the mirrored glass, it pays to abandon the path laid by Jameson, who famously had trouble finding the front door.[vii] Rather than search for new ways to get in, our best bet might be to, instead, work from the inside out. Bearing in mind The Eagles’ warning from “Hotel California,” “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,”[viii] the question becomes: how can one escape the Bonaventure? We would do well to follow the example of John McClane, the protagonist of the Die Hard franchise, who early on in the first film came to the realization that sneaking down hallways is not the only way to move through a building. As McClane crawls through ventilation ducts in the sequels, he becomes intimately familiar with the obscure spaces and technologies—the logics—that undergird buildings.[ix] For our purposes, McClane’s fugitive practice offers an alternative to Jameson’s bewildered dérive through hyperspace. By turning our attention to infrastructure, the hidden preconditions for the effects that Jameson catalogues, we can find new ways of escaping the Bonaventure’s critical impasse.

What then, is the essential infrastructure of the Bonaventure Hotel? Any real estate developer would tell you that the foundation for a good project is a healthy pile of money, one that is ideally someone else’s. In the case of the Bonaventure, which was developed by its designer, John C. Portman Jr., both financing and form were the purview of a single Janus-faced figure who simultaneously had eyes on the budget and the design. Accordingly, the most consequential infrastructure here is neither the building’s bulky air conditioning and its tangle of ducts, nor its elevators—what Portman, artist in addition to architect-developer, liked to call “gigantic kinetic sculptures”—nor even the actual foundations, but rather a document: the pro forma.

A financial statement, the pro forma validates the feasibility of a development project by weighing expected revenues derived from program—such as a number of hotel rooms that rent for a given nightly rate—against the outlays of construction and the costs of realizing an architectural scheme. The pro forma is the two-dimensional arena, arithmetic often worked out by hand on paper, in which the cost of construction is tabulated against the prospect of a return on investment. It is a diagram that brings competing forces into a new equilibrium, the successful design of which ensures that the architecture will end up in the black.

Fundamentally, the pro forma is a list. It breaks down a hypothetical building into a number of discrete parts; ingredients for a “machine that makes the land pay.”[x] These parts are sources of spatial revenue, like hotel rooms, restaurants, parking spots, or health clubs, which each generate income and offset operating expenses such as maintenance and debt service. Most buildings can be analyzed by means of the pro forma, but when wielded as a practical instrument it becomes the fundamental precondition for Portman’s two-pronged practice, what he calls “architect as developer” in his 1976 book of the same name.[xi] This is because the pro forma transforms financial calculation into a design problem—a set of constraints to be resolved—at the same time that it translates architectural questions into monetary variables. As employed by Portman & Associates, the pro forma was not merely a means to test a building scheme, but rather the initiating document of a project that preceded any idea of form. The pro forma, an artifact of financial design, is consequently the first drawing of the Bonaventure.

Drafting the pro forma for the Bonaventure Hotel was a design process in itself. Mickey Steinberg, a longtime associate of Portman’s, recalls that as many as fifteen drafts—comparable to the number of design iterations a floorplan might undergo—would be produced in the course of planning a single project.[xii] Aside from literally putting finance and design onto the same page, the document also has the reciprocal effect of defining its author. If an architect has historically been thought of as the person who draws plans, the architect-developer is defined by their authorship of the pro forma. By taking a financial interest in his projects, Portman not only drew the ire of the American Institute of Architects, but he also devised the documents necessary to perform in this role. By virtue of this administrative infrastructure, Portman’s spaces transacted seamlessly between contexts of design and finance—through the lens of the pro forma, “hotel room” refers simultaneously to a space slipped into Bonaventure’s concrete structure and a value plugged into the rectangular cells of the ledger sheet. Indeed, this was Portman’s innovation on Gilbert’s formula: the pro forma is a machine that makes the land pay the architect-developer.

When Jameson claimed that architecture is the art distinguished by its “virtually unmediated relationship” with the economic, he glossed over the fact that, as Portman’s example demonstrates, this art form is also big business itself. This dualism, characteristic of architecture, is matched by the duality of Portman’s professional roles and is naturalized by the pro forma’s ability to acculturate one to the other. As such, the pro forma is the infrastructural condition that opens the space for the Bonaventure to take the form that it does—not as crassly deterministic, but as a financial device whose intrinsic limits of valuation provide the running room within which Portman’s creative extravagances can take place.[xiii] Simply put, the pro forma is limited by its ability to quantify and assign value to things. Those features that escape valuation—such as the vertiginous atrium spaces that became Portman’s calling card, but which yield no revenue directly—could exist only in the margins of the pro forma, as architectural form in excess of the logic of capitalist valuation. Consequently, the Bonaventure is more than just the sum of its parts because it is intimately tied to finance in a more infrastructural way than even Jameson realized when he was circling South Figueroa Street looking for a way in.

Notes

[i] “Bonaventura” being Jameson’s spelling. The Bonaventure is the critic’s key example of a “full-blown postmodern building.” See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984): 81.

[ii] Other choice objects include Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” (1980) and Vincent van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” (1887).

[iii] In Jameson’s defense, he does not exactly flatten the status of architecture as “one medium among many,” as some historians would later on, but rather he notes that it is distinguished by its proximity to the economic. Nevertheless, this observation is only in passing, and Jameson is more concerned with the bare effects of architecture’s economic proximity than with parsing out its infrastructural dynamics.

[iv] The differences between these two models are striking, and not inconsequential to what follows. Where Jencks begins his narration of architectural “Post-Modernism” (styled capital “P,” hyphen, capital “M”) with the detonation of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in Saint Louis, in 1972, Jameson opened a tradition of postmodern architectural critique that begins with a place. Indeed, this is one way in which Jameson’s theory could be characterized as properly postmodern, as his argument rests on the fundamental premise that time is “spatialized” under postmodernization. By contrast, Jencks’s approach always preserves temporal continuities and thus remains resolutely historicist, as evidenced in the diachronic tic of intermittently declaring successive eras “post.”

[v] The tradition of suspicious reading looks for the symptomatic expression of economic complexes in cultural objects. The problems with this method are at least two-fold: first, this mode of reading always proves the same foregone conclusions to the exclusion of other possibilities; second, the formulaic version of this approach often sets an alleged cause against its supposed effect, and more or less relies upon the “magic” of juxtaposition—the lack of mediation that erroneously imagines cultural objects as superstructural mirror-images of an infrastructural base. One pitfall of this latter problem is to forget that, after Adorno, culture as such is already industrialized, meaning properly part of the base—the infrastructure—as much as it is also superstructural. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2002), 94–136.

[vi] Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 82.

[vii] “The entryways of the Bonaventura are as it were lateral and rather backdoor affairs …” Jameson, 81.

[viii] The Eagles’s song “Hotel California” was released as a single in 1977 on Asylum Records; incidentally, the Bonaventure opened the same year.

[ix] For the definitive treatment of “Die Hard” architecture, see James Stamp, “Fugitive Ducts” Volume 37 (2013): 157–159.

[x] As architect Cass Gilbert once defined the skyscraper; see Cass Gilbert, “The Financial Importance of Rapid Building,” Engineering Record 41 (June 30, 1900): 623–624.

[xi] John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

[xii] Mickey Steinberg, interview with the author, January 2018, New York, NY.

[xiii] On Adolf Loos and “running room,” see Hal Foster, “Design and Crime,” in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), 13–26.

 

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About the Book

Author: Sylvia Lavin; with contributions from Camila Reyes Alé, Giulia Amoresano, Phillip R. Denny, Oliver Elser, Sebastiano Fabbrini, Kim Förster, Margo Handwerker, Martin Hartung, Sarah Hearne, Maura Lucking, Ivan L. Munuera, Bart-Jan Polman, Anna Renken, Vajdon Sohaili, and Laurent Stalder and Samuel Korn.

Object photography: Elise Windsor
Graphic design: Studio Anna Haas
Co-published with Spector Books
Softcover, 316 pages

Exhibition: Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

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Phillip Denny, “The Swan Plays Itself.” (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2020).

Phillip Denny, “Architecture in the Black” (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2020).