ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a range of Jameson's key essays on architecture written at the same time and subsequent to his cognitive mapping of postmodernity during the mid-1980s. Jameson's best-known evocation of architecture is his famous description in his 1984 essay Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism of the disorienting effects of the interior of the Bonaventura Hotel, Los Angeles, which he takes to be definitive of the experience of postmodernity. Artist after artist during this period emphasized that they were producing work that existed at the level of its surfaces only; that there was, precisely, no base, only superstructure. During the 1980s, miniaturizing modernism in order to raise the interest level around postmodernism was a move embraced with enthusiasm on all, or at least most, sides. The chapter proposes to solve the base-superstructure dilemma with which Jameson so bravely wrestled by the designed merging of both terms, one laid across the other so that they achieve perfect identity.
