ABSTRACT

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel at the edge of downtown Los Angeles is one of the more iconic hotels in the United States. The hotel consists of four mirror-skinned, glistening, thirty-five story towers and has been described by Frederic Jameson, in a very controversial analysis, part of which was cited above, as an important postmodern structure, though it also contains modernist elements. It is the disorientation that people experience in the Bonaventure's lobby and the amusement park qualities and shifting perspectives people feel while walking in the lobby that are important postmodern features of the hotel. The chapter discusses some of the differences between postmodernism and modernism that were mentioned in the chart. Las Vegas discusses the chapter on the city, is a place where the eclecticism shown in the Johnson building is found permeating the whole strip.