We talked about Edward W. Soja in class today and his six discourses of the postmetropolis. The six are flexcity, cosmopolis, exopolis, metropolarities, carceral archipelagos, and simcites. Soja goes on describe each in depth but he states a few things in his introduction that caught my eye. Soja said that one can not mix the old with the new because they would be incompatible. And he goes on to say that instead of doing so we should deconstruct and reconstitute the forms of urban analysis. I thought about Jane Jacobs' Life and death of Great American Cities, when she said that it would be nice to start a city all over again but it would cost entirely too much. However, I believe it is more of a mental than physical approach. We have talked about buildings that has authority or silent authorities and in the following video, Edward W. Soja describes the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and its structure that has invisible authority, boundaries, and the overall post-modernism. One example, he describes a lounge-like spaces that welcomes people to sit but has concrete chairs that makes it impossible to get comfortable in.
Soja also describes the complexity of the building and how everything is sort of hidden from plain sight. In comparison to the various buildings that resembles Roman architecture, there are beginning to be less and less like it.
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