Fredric Jameson, 1934–2024

“It is in the realm of architecture,” Jameson wrote in the New Left Review in 1984, in an essay that would become the first chapter of Postmodernism, “that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated.” Postmodernism has a chapter on architecture, alongside others on film, video, economics, literature, theory, and other subjects, but, he continues, “it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism […] initially began to emerge.”

A few pages later, he sketches an analysis of a “full-blown postmodern building,” but instead of one by Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, or Michael Graves, he hones in on the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles by architect/developer John Portman. In his famous analysis of the hotel's mirrored glass exterior and disorienting interior, Jameson finds a “postmodern hyperspace” that “succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” 

In these few short passages early in Postmodernism, Jameson succinctly articulates the schism between modernism and postmodernism and touches on the role of architecture in a culture dominated by capitalism, ideas he would critically and densely explore in the book, but that also he would build upon in other essays, reviews, and lectures in later years. Beyond Postmodernism, a few of Jameson's academic texts and reviews relevant to architecture include:

• “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, edited by Joan Ockman. Princeton Architectural Press, 1985.
• “The Constraints of Modernity,” in The Seeds of Time. Columbia University Press, 1994. Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Kenneth Frampton are discussed in the chapter.
• “Space Wars,” in London Review of Books, April 4, 1996. Jameson reviews The Invisible in Architecture, edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn, and The Classical Vernacular by Roger Scruton.
• “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” in New Left Review, Mar/Apr 1998.
• “Future City,” in New Left Review, May/June 2003. Jameson reviews two “Harvard Design School Project on the City” books: Great Leap Forward and Guide to Shopping.
• “Perfected by the Tea Masters,” in London Review of Books, April 5, 2007. Jameson reviews Japan-ness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki.

Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14, 1934. He earned a bachelor's degree at Haverford College in 1954 and then both a master's degree and a Ph.D. at Yale University, the latter in 1959. Travels to Europe during his studies exposed him to the Marxist theories he would later apply to the postmodern condition, but his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, basically his dissertation, was published in 1961 and was purportedly devoid of any Marxist ideas.

Intense study of Marxism followed, spurred on by various events in the 1960s, resulting in his next book, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, in 1971, while Jameson was teaching at the University of California San Diego. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” a lecture by Jameson, was included in Hal Foster's influential 1983 book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, alongside Kenneth Frampton's “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” which he would later critique. Jameson would later contend that his contribution to The Anti-Aesthetic formed the basis for his 1991 Postmodernism book.

After teaching at UC San Diego, Yale University, and UC Santa Cruz, Jameson headed to Duke University, in 1985, to become Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies and establish the school's literary studies program. Jameson taught at Duke until his death, at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22. Even in his late-80s, Jameson was a prolific writer, with two books published just this year: Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization, released in May, and The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought, set to come out next month.