The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

92 The passage from modernity to postmodernityPostmodernism in the city93Plate 1.24 Baltimore goes to the City Fair: a collage of scenes of a managedand controlled urban spectacle (by Apple Pie Graphics)Plate 1.25 Harbor Place attempts a post modernist atmosphere of leisuresprawled around modernist scenes of urban renewal.much more care to create a positive and high quality image of place,and have sought an architecture and forms of urban design thatrespond to such need. That they should be so pressed, and that theresult should be a serial repetition of successful models (such asBaltimore's Harbor Place), is understandable, given the grim historyof deindustrialization and restructuring that left most major cities inthe advanced capitalist world with few options except to competewith each other, mainly as financial, consumption, and entertainmentcentres. Imaging a city through the organization of spectacular urbanspaces became a means to attract capital and people (of the right sort)in a period (since 1973) of intensified inter-urban competition andurban entrepreneurialism (see Harvey, 1989).While we shall return to a closer examination of this phenomenonin Part III, it is important here to note how architecture and urbandesign have responded to these new-felt urban needs. The projectionof a definite image of place blessed with certain qualities, the organizationof spectacle and theatricality, have been achieved through aneclectic mix of styles, historical quotation, ornamentation, and thediversification of surfaces (in Baltimore, Scarlett Place exemplifiesthe idea in somewhat bizarre form, see plate 1.27). All of thesetendencies are exhibited in Moore's Piazza d'ltalia in New Orleans.We here see the combination of many of the elements that have beenso far described within one singular and quite spectacular project(plate 1.28). The description in the Post-modern visions catalogue(Klotz, 1985) is most revealing:In an area of new Orleans requiring redevelopment CharlesMoore has created the public Piazza d'ltalia for the local Italianpopulation. Its form and architectonic language have broughtthe social and communicative functions of a European and,