Architectural Postmodern World and City of Glass Revisited

Abstract

Within the Architectural Postmodern World Systems, Fredric Jameson raises the issue of the “inner” and “external” reality constituting a picture book, representing the textual “reality” of architectural design. Architecture of the cities, outer or inner places, the concepts of the “inner” and “external” become an idiosyncratic code and analogy, a neologism as a textual wrapper. Jameson asserts that the consequence of the wrapper:wrapped dialectic process is the strategy of the process denoting the paradox of the postmodern novum claiming its historical originality. According to Michel Foucault the sites and architectural space grids constitute the dialectics of mutual neutralization and the invention of the set of relations that designate a mirror reflecting architectural heterotopias as the utopian counter-sites. Such a place is New York City, the city of dreams and shattered illusions, or as Paul Auster would put it, “City of Glass”, which brings about a deep-rooted feeling of utter displacement, disorientation and Lacanian loss. New York’s urban mesh functions as both a prison and a map. In the light of these hypotheses, the paper seeks to present megalopolis as a metaphor of human condition. Jameson’s and Baudrillard’s postmodern idiosyncratic codes, sign-production, time-space compression and discursive signification process remain to be further reexamined within the field of cultural, more precisely anthropological studies.