Page 33 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Place, Space, and Geography 17

They refer to realities or cultural concepts from different times and differ-
ent kinds of human activity on the landscape. If you walk out the back
entrance of Back Bay Station in Boston, Massachusetts, for example, you
will see on one side red brick buildings from the nineteenth century that
once were single - family homes for the newly wealthy who crowded into

this area – a bay that was filled in to create solid land for new houses –
during an economic boom. On many of the houses, you see Christian
crosses, emblems of the religious ideology that provided the occupants with
a sense of virtue and value in their lives. Now the houses for the most part
are multifamily dwellings, split up into three apartments to accommodate
a new population of urban professionals, many of them young, and many
without children. The houses have been transformed from large family
homes to suit a different need and serve a different function; their meaning
as physical objects has changed as a result.
On the other side of the railway station you will see examples of two
more recent architectural styles, one called modern , and the other post-
modern . The modern style was dominant in the middle of the twentieth
century till its end, and it is associated with the tremendous growth of US
capitalism after World War II. It is a style you have probably all encoun-
tered in your lives – straight tall glass buildings that have little ornamenta-
tion or adornment and seem designed simply to serve a particular function.

Most are “ office buildings, ” in that they house economic organizations
such as banks and corporations whose workers have offices in the building.

If the red brick homes embody a cultural ideal of family - based capitalism,
in which the wealth generated by the economy is used to make homes
informed by Christian values whose purpose is to instill virtues in children
that sustain that particular model of social organization, the offi ce build-
ings represent a culture in which work has become more organized and
routinized, to the detriment of the ideal of individual moral development.
Most of the corporations in the tall buildings could not care less if their
workers are Christian or Hindu, Buddhist or Jain. The modernist paradigm
emphasizes rationality over religion. Architecture is no different. Function
is what matters, the work that functional people do to supply value to the
economic organization. The organization takes precedence to all other
considerations and ideals. Its sharp straight lines and effi cient looking
design speak to this imperative.
The building directly in front of you is called postmodern because it is
not simple and functional; straight lines have been replaced by multiple
diverse architectural elements and motifs that seem borrowed from several