Modernity and Its Other

The modern/postmodern debate has been fueled by the appearance of a new world order. And, in the aftermath of sociopolitical events such as the May 1968 student uprising in France, the antiwar movement in the United States, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a new set of cultural thematics has emerged. Gevork Hartoonian explores how major postfunctionalist architecture has addressed themes in postmodern culture, and in so doing argues that it is an architecture that should be viewed as historical - the gestalt of social/cultural phenomena - and not merely the product of various stylistic choices. In presenting a critical position that favors the tectonic over the aesthetic in treating the development of postmodern architecture, Hartoonian undermines the dominant "isms" in architectural discourse. Modernity and Its Other provides cogent review and analysis of the historicity of postfunctionalism; the project of the historical avant-garde to overturn tradition - even that of modernity itself; the historical technological shift of culture toward commodity; and the historical deconstruction of modernist logocentrism. Hartoonian discusses post-functionalist architecture in the context