A couple of years ago, I spent a few days in Montreal. One evening, a visit to a rooftop restaurant unfurled a spectacular vista, with the wraparound terrace taking in the view from all sides. A few of us, strangers and tourists, gathered to watch the late summer’s slow golden hour light weave through the city and across the harbour. Amidst the pleasantries, I gestured to the riverfront and the unmistakable form of Habitat 67. Not one for small talk, I turned to the guy next to me. There, I said, gesturing to the shoreline, stands one of the most important buildings of the 20th century.

“What makes it important?” It was a simple question, and one that came from a place of seemingly genuine curiosity rather than doubt or skepticism. It threw me for a loop. I didn’t know how to answer, running through a rambling mental rolodex. The architect, Moshe Safdie, was just 24 years old, still a grad student, when he won the commission, a stark contrast to today’s conservative procurement culture. But come on, who wants to hear about procurement? Eventually, I stammered out something along these lines: The project was a capstone of Expo 67, distilling the era’s watershed sense of civic optimism within a futuristic form. And as anyone can see, it’s a unique-looking building — and a natural conversation-starter. 

I got a polite nod in return. I tried reaching for more: The project was also an attempt to integrate the form of a post-war American house (complete with a private green space) within a dense urban paradigm. As Safdie himself had put it, “for everyone a garden.” I felt a sense of relief — at least this was something. I can’t remember if we talked about anything else, but that was the end of architecture. It was a fleeting exchange, a conversation with a stranger I’d never see again. 

As time passed, the encounter increasingly felt like a metonym for a broader professional failure. I’d been an architectural journalist for almost a decade, but one of the rare occasions when someone invited me to explain design, I came up flat. Most of the time, people don’t ask. With answers like these, who can blame them? And to be honest, I wasn’t writing about architecture so much as around it. Measured in online readership, my most successful pieces tended to focus on the spatial and political organization of the built environment — whether via the revival of public housing, zoning codes, the rise of community land trusts, or the geography of online shopping. To be published in a magazine, it all had to look good, of course. But beyond immediately tangible material realities — like the carbon savings of adaptive reuse or ease of circulation — or the edict that form follows function, the question of what it all meant seldom involved aesthetics. And anyway, it’s a lot easier to get people excited or incensed about a new bike lane than about how a building looks.

Then I read Fredric Jameson. Best known for his seminal 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — expanded from a 1984 essay of the same name — the critic and political theorist was renowned for his analysis of art and literature through a historical lens, situating cultural expression within a macro-economic context. For Jameson, understanding a painting or a novel also meant understanding the economic order it came from, a process that then revealed — often surprising — political ideologies of the system that produced it. In particular, Jameson focused his attention to the aesthetic break from modernism that characterized the latter decades of the 20th century, arguing that the turn to historical pastiche, irony and fragmentation reflected the era’s post-industrial, neoliberal economy.   

The best known analysis is hinted on the book’s cover — and first articulated in the 1984 essay. Jameson establishes a dialectical comparison between Vincent Van Gogh’s Shoes and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Van Gogh’s 1886 painting depicts a pair of worn-out work boots, bent out of shape, laces strewn, and deposited on a floor. We can practically picture “the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil,” Jameson writes. Whatever backdrop we conjure, the artwork invites what Jameson describes as “hermeneutical” readings. The shoes aren’t just shoes, they are “a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality.” 

Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes tells a different story. Jameson describes the composition as “a random collection of dead objects,” shorn of the contextual depths of Van Gogh’s brush. And where Peasant Shoes can — like much of the artist’s oeuvre — be interpreted as a straightforward ode to the working class, the black background of Warhol’s 1980 painting resists such spatial politics. Floating as disembodied entities in space, the postmodern Diamond Dust Shoes are little more than objects to be admired. Inasmuch a material context can be gleaned in the darkness, it is the technological form of the film negative — the material of representation itself — rather than any lived world. Like the mechanical reproduction of film, the cluster of shoes is depicted as a collage of copies, becoming little more than an infinitely replicable representation. We can intuit nothing about the wearers or their lives.

According to Jameson, stylistic differences between the two paintings are reflections of deeper socio-economic realities. While postmodernism frequently remains regarded as an ahistorical and playfully disembodied aesthetic, Jameson situated its roots in the system of “late capitalism.” Today, the term is popularly used as a synonym for neoliberalism — and its attendant erosion of the social welfare state — but it more specifically refers to the distinct but closely related rise of the post-industrial knowledge economy. For us consumers, visible wealth — if not real economic value — was increasingly accumulated through the trading desk and fax machine rather than the wheat field and the factory floor. At the same time, expanding global shipping networks fueled a new consumer economy, built on cheap labour in the global south and driven by debt, credit cards and computers here. (Jameson, incidentally, was himself a charmingly late adopter of technology, reportedly using both hands to navigate a mouse across the screen like a Ouija board). 

What about architecture? For Jameson, the built environment is a unique locus of ideology. Compared to a painting or novel, the architectural profession is more explicitly beholden to capital and finance, underscoring its connection to economics and ideology. And just as art moved from modernist minimalism and abstraction to Warhol commercialism, architecture evolved from Miesian simplicity and the International Style into eclectic symbolism and postmodern collage. But beyond the canon, the postmodern movement was more acutely reflected in the vernacular architectures famously celebrated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in their 1971 manifesto Learning From Las Vegas. For Venturi and Scott Brown, the legibility — and the sheer fun — of kitsch made it a salve against an elitist architectural culture. If Warhol could elevate everyday products like Campbell’s soup cans into art, then why shouldn’t exuberant truck stops and fast food tourist traps be celebrated as populist architecture?

In Jameson’s analysis, both soup cans and roadside spectacles reflect the same vapid celebration of consumer culture. The simulacra of a Las Vegas Sphinx or Eiffel Tower offer no incisive political parody — or statement about their predecessors — only the empty pastiche of playtime. Although he recognized the harms of modernist dogma and the originality of Venturi and Scott Brown’s arguments, Jameson warned that the disassociation of postmodern aesthetics was a hindrance to political consciousness. The theme park architecture of Las Vegas may be fun to behold, but the experience can be disorienting. 

The criticism wasn’t reserved for vernacular — the metier of Jameson’s 1984 essay and 1991 book ranges from Disneyland to Frank Gehry. An analysis of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles translates the argument into a spatial logic. Completed in 1977, the high-rise hotel is arguably the Platonic epitome of Portman’s atrium typology. Inside, transparent glass elevators and dramatic escalators create a mechanized ballet. To fully experience the building, the visitor yields to its spatial logic — being at the heart of the action requires standing still and letting the moving parts do their work. “[T]he Bonaventura aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city,” writes Jameson, likening the complex to Toronto’s Eaton Centre. Moreover, there is no clear circulation to the place, a fact reflected by its unsuccessful retail program. And while the building has four entrances, each feels tucked away and almost hidden. On the street, meanwhile, passersby are met by a glass wall that reflects the city back on itself. 

Like so many Las Vegas attractions, the Bonaventure proved an enduringly popular tourist destination. It appeared in film, too, from 1990s dad thrillers like In the Line of Fire and True Lies to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the recently released A24 cult horror film MaXXXine. Yet, the Los Angeles hotel seemingly replicated the same urban hostility of its despised International Style predecessors. Here, Jameson elucidates a crucial difference. Le Corbusier’s doctrinal brand of modernism asked us to cede the older “fallen city” in exchange for a promised utopia, but the postmodern world lacks such overt ideology, and is instead “content to ‘let the fallen city fabric continue to be in its being.’”

The seemingly unstructured form of postmodern culture is a political reality in itself. If the artwork is detached and placeless or the building is disorienting, its genesis can be found in our broader inability to navigate the “great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects,” writes Jameson. 

Over 30 years after the book’s 1991 publication, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism remains a touchstone of literary and critical theory. Released a year later, Francis Fukuyama’s massively influential The End of History saw the conclusion of the Cold War as an emphatic terminus: Western liberal democracy won. It is tempting to read postmodern thought in this vein, too, with all of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes and differences spreading out into randomized infinities in a world no longer bound by dialectical struggle. Yet, Jameson effectively wrestled the postmodern genie back into the bottle of history. Though seemingly liberated from ideology and order, postmodern form was itself the product of a socio-economic system. History keeps coming. 

For Jameson himself, the critique of postmodern culture forms a mere chapter in an astonishingly rich body of work. Earlier in his career, Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981) established the groundwork for a Marxist reading of aesthetics; the latter book famously opens with the admonishment to “always historicize,” and argues that the political meaning of art — and architecture — typically resides beyond the creator’s conscious intentions. Though Jameson did not pioneer historicism as a mode of criticism, he arguably pushed it further than any other architectural thinker. Together with Manfredo Tafuri, Jameson shaped a Marxist understanding of built form for the 21st century. And while both critics saw architecture as a reflection of history and capitalism, Jameson — foremost a literary philosopher — saw the potential of art to offer hints of a better world. 

It all changed the way I think about design and culture. Reading Jameson’s descriptions of Portman’s hotel and Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles home, my thoughts turned to my childhood in 1990s Prague. Then and now, Gehry’s Dancing House was the building of the decade. Initiated in the wake of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the complex was built as an office for a Dutch insurance company and completed in 1996. Instantly recognizable for its asymmetric shape and kinetic rhythm, it was always obvious that the building was a symbol of a new world order and Czechia’s hopeful place within it. Not for nothing, the Soviets never built anything like it.  

Together with local partner Vlado Milunić, Gehry explained that the dance between the building’s two volumes — nicknamed Fred and Ginger — represents the transition from a more static Communist existence into a dynamic western one. Yet, a broader historic view reveals deeper ideological truths. Reflecting the scale and window rhythm of its Baroque and Art Deco neighbours, the design creates a sense of continuity with its pre-Communist surroundings. There is an obvious aesthetic departure, but one that clearly picks up on the context of historic Prague. 

It is a dialogue between the handsomely restored relics of centuries past and a form that beckons the new millennium. To my mind, cohesion between the varied neighbouring buildings — Dancing House sits on a prominent corner lot — implies a natural and even inevitable evolution, suggesting that Czechia was always destined to be part of the West, and that newly introduced forms of capitalism find a local precedent in the pre-Communist era. Not coincidentally, it is a visual dialogue that omits the Soviet-era apartment blocks that house the majority of the city’s population. If the 19th century was always destined to evolve into the 21st, what happened in between was an aberration. Compared to Gehry’s own symbolic reading, a historicist view of aesthetics offers a politically and culturally richer understanding of the building and what it means. Form can tell us something — even something surprising — about the world we live in. 

Crucially, following Jameson’s school of thought allows us to translate aesthetic and cultural paradigms into a more broadly intelligible language. Although the complexity of theory is often viewed as an obstacle to public understanding of design, it can also reveal a bigger picture. You don’t need to know much about architecture — or even be interested in it — to appreciate material political implications.

After trying to parse the meaning of Dancing House, I found myself fixated on Canadian chef Susur Lee. When my family moved from Prague to Toronto, Lee was at the height of his powers, leading the trend of fusion cuisine that swept the city. Was the food great? I couldn’t tell — just like so many of us can’t tell if a building is any good. I’ve never known much about fine dining, and I don’t have a particularly refined palette. I didn’t really understand it in a culinary sense. Yet, after reading Jameson, I tried to grasp it as a cultural logic within a historic framework. Combining elements of East Asian street food and traditional French techniques in a relaxed North American setting, Lee’s gastronomy reflected Toronto’s emergence as a proudly diverse, cosmopolitan city. For the first time, I felt like I got it.

Even at the end of his life, Fredric Jameson remained endlessly productive, releasing three new books, including a forthcoming posthumous title, in 2024 alone. He died at the age of 90 on September 22, leaving behind a rich and influential legacy of thought. Even though a Jameson essay will almost inevitably leave me brushing up on my Adorno and Althusser, his work unfailingly retained a sense of wit and honesty, combining an elevated academic language with conversational and humorous moments, all supported on a deftly intricate scaffold of storytelling. “He would always use this lecture-like technique, which I imitate a lot, of introducing some concepts or texts at the beginning of the essay and then sticking a pin in them, trusting the reader to hold that thought — it’ll come back, often like a magic key, later,” writes Kate Wagner in The Nation.  

So anyway, back to Habitat 67. What do we see through the lens of history? Built at the height of the Cold War, the project can be understood as the expression of dialectical struggle. In the post-war decades, the Soviet Union launched a momentous building campaign, delivering a scale of housing that lifted millions out of poverty. It was incumbent on the American-led west to imagine a response — one that combined the scale of the Soviet Project while celebrating the culture of individualism and freedom that defined American life. These competing imperatives are synthesized in the form of Habitat 67, which meets the scale of a Soviet housing block while expressing the individual presence of every family home. Although it never spurred a viable paradigm for mass construction, its form elucidates a complex ideological narrative — one that tells us something important, and something surprising, about the state of the world it came from.