ABSTRACT
One of the most seductive themes running through debates around postmodernity is the story of the collapse of grand narratives and their totalizing projects. This tale finds its most dramatic moment in the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St Louis in 1972. This demolition is widely presented as marking the moment when modern architecture ‘died’ (Jencks 1984:9) and the clean, austere machines for living in gave way to the plural, personalized styles of suburbia and the playfulness and excess of Las Vegas. The prisoners in modernity’s Bastilles of the imagination are freed from their incarceration. The general yields to the local, the standardized to the customized. Identities proliferate. The repressed return. As JeanFrançois Lyotard argued in 1985, ‘the grand narratives that characterise western modernity… [were] concerned precisely with the overstepping/ surpassing of particular cultural identity towards a universal civic identity’ (quoted in Kahn 1995:8). Now there is only the endless play of difference.
