The dissolution of place
Subtitle: architecture, identity, and the body
By: by Shelton Waldrep
Series: Ashgate studies in architecture
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Burlington
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9781409417682; 9781409417699
Subjects: Place (Philosophy) in architecture; Architecture; Modern Architecture; Psychological aspects
Description: Postmodern architecture has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist vs postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The architectonics of post/modernist space; title: The global theme park: Disney in the world; title: The architecture of time: postmodern casinos in Las Vegas; title: In Her Majesty's secret closet: Bond's body; title: Reverse empire: architecture in Native American casinos; title: Philip Johnson and the architecture of the body; title: Bodies in space: architecture and the films of Stanley Kubrick; title: Coda: virtual communities.