Charles Jencks dates the symbolic end of modernist architecture and the passage to the post-modem as 3:32 p. m. on July I5th, I972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development (a version of Le Corbusier’s “machine for modem living”) was dynamited as an unlivable environment for the low-income people it housed. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon officially declared the urban crisis over. Nineteen seventy-two is not a bad date for symbolizing all kinds of other transitions in the political economy of advanced capitalism. It is roughly since then that the capitalist world, shaken out of the suffocating torpor of the stagflation that brought the long postwar boom to a wimpering end, has begun to evolve a seemingly new and quite different regime of capital accumulation.
David Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization Reflections on “Post-Modernism” in the American City”
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990), pp. 251-272
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd7VOz_Wstg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4JjMPACg4