ABSTRACT
For several years now there has been a debate within architecture about whether or not we have lost a sense of community or of the social in our architectural production. While this debate is an old one—stretching from the aestheticized socialist utopias of Le Corbusier to the many urban planning debates of the Post-Second World War building boom—a more recent version of this dyad has been the question of whether or not postmodern architecture represents a real turn toward the social—to a human scale in architecture and the built environment—or towards a completely two-dimensional architecture of surface detail and meta-commentary—of the illusion, if you will, of concern for the populace that manages to be popular without being seriously committed to anything. While there are many spokespersons for both sides—pro- and anti-postmodernist architecture—such as the Prince of Wales and the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton, respectively, the question of the social in architecture has continued to push itself on architectural theory not only in the form of a continued increase in the use of the themed environment, but also in the development of “postmodern” communities such as Seaside, Florida, and Celebration, USA at Disney World, where the simulacrum of community-as-architecture is used to convince residents that they are in a place where their role is scripted in such a way that they must act as—among other things—good neighbors and active citizens. The architecture, in other words, attempts not only to evoke nostalgia—a city square, community events, codes for building, and so forth—but also to offer the illusion of choice. In Seaside, for example, residents are encouraged to design their houses with pseudo-Victorian detailings, but the details and the color choices are dictated by the architects’ designs. That is, one is being offered the illusion of choice—a capitalist condition long noted, but seemingly in effulgence once again as we continue to remain enmeshed in postmodern thinking.
