Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 36

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^^ogular Culture Review

Whether it is seen as a gigantic, god-like image on a stadium
screen, or projected into technology itself—the 1990 Mazda RX-7, for
instance, advertised as "an extension of yourself—postmodern man's
"twin" is also his "Other." This is postmodernism's central
ontological paradox; the other end of the tunnel which Marshall
McLuhan a generation ago claimed we had entered at mid-century.
Robert Venturi suggests that icons of architectural surfaces in two
dimensions represent nothing less than a paradigm shift in American
consciousness;
[The] architecture of styles and signs is anti-spatial;
it is an architecture of communication over space;
communication dominates space as an element in the
architecture and in the landscap^e.
Venturi offers an example of what he calls "conununication over
space";
A driver 30 years ago could maintain a sense of
orientation in sp>ace. At the simple crossroads a little
sign with an arrow confirmed what was obvious. One
knew where one was. When the crossroads becomes a
cloverleaf, one must turn right to turn left, a
contradiction-----But the driver has no time to pwnder
paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous
maze. He or she relies on signs for guidance-enormous
signs invest spaces at high speeds (8-9).
Even as the sign subsumes three-dimensional space for the
freeway driver, Venturi adds that for the shopper or consumer, "[The
sign] is more important than the architecture" (31). It is this familiar
bias for the sign in everyday postmodern life that Roland Barthes
calls "human space";
To visit the [Eiffel] Tower, then, is to enter into
contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for
the majority of monuments, but rather with a new
Nature, that of human space; the Tower is not a
trace, a souvenir, in short a culture; but rather an