The golden nugget dilemma

First, let me start off with a question: Are all of our readings going to be like this? On all of the readings so far, in the first few pages, I’ve felt like giving up on the reading, with less than half of it being internalized, even when reading twice or thrice. But then, it happens. A few pages in, or in the case of Jencks’ chapter, at the end, it hits! There’s an idea that makes total sense – I can internalize it and build off of it – but it took thirty minutes of confused re-reading to get there. Are all of our readings going to be like this, or is this theory shock?

In Jencks’ chapter, that golden nugget starts on page 291, where he essentially tells us postmodernity is the return of that which has already been modern once before – with a twist, or as he puts it, “tradition reinterpreted” (Jencks 1992, 291).

That’s already a revelation, but get this: on the next page, he tells of a “return to the absent center” (Jencks 1992, 292) in postmodernism. Jencks first applies this with an architectural context, listing buildings like the Humana Building (pictured below):

Courtesy: MichaelGraves.com (Fair Use Portfolio Work)

But the architectural context is a gateway to the real meat of Jencks’ message. Later in the same paragraph, he says, “Just about every postmodern architect who makes a central plan then doesn’t know what to put in the honorific place [the absent center]. This paradox is both startling and revealing: a desire for communal space, a perfectly valid celebration of what we have in common, and then the admission that there is nothing quite adequate to fill it” (Jencks 1992, 292).

WOW.

Of the other ten formulae listed in this chapter, all of them can be put under (or into for visualization sake) this absent center theory.

For me personally, the absent center is an extremely fascinating topic that I’ve already been exploring for a few years – just maybe not in this context. With the advent of ‘modern’ technology, I think our mind centers are becoming more and more absent. Consciousness and mindfulness are terms people are talking about more and more in our current evolution of postmodernity. To think that Jencks, who, from what I can tell, wrote this in 1992, already recognized that then – is mind boggling. We are far more absent than we were then, now.

This absent center is finally being brought to the surface. Most people recognize that technology has created this emptiness that we have trouble filling, which is why practices relating to mindfulness, like yoga and meditation, are so popular nowadays.

Yet the architecture and the theory predicted and struggled with this far before there were iPhones or self-driving cars.

Now that’s a golden nugget.