The image of a southern city: Architecture, culture, and sense of place in New Orleans, 1884-1984.

Abstract

New Orleans's architectural history evidences profound shifts in twentieth-century culture from the advent of modernism in America to the construction of its Piazza d'Italia, completed in 1978 and heralded as a formative moment for postmodern architecture. Although often characterized by its resistance to larger constructs of American and Southern culture and place, New Orleans today possesses both the best remnants of the traditional city and the worst harbingers of the anti-city. Moreover, its built environment is as popularly intriguing as it is architecturally significant. As a result, the city has retained great visibility and cultural authority for more than a century. These factors invite critical consideration. Within a chronological structure framed by the city's two world's fairs, the 1884 Industrial and Cotton Centennial and the 1984 Louisiana World's Exposition, this dissertation investigates the architectural history of New Orleans, the ways in which it is represented and replicated, and the larger ideological purposes those images serve. First, the dissertation explores the manifestation of modernism in New Orleans's architecture, and the dialectic interaction between regionalism and modernism in the South. After establishing this context, the study reads the contemporary city, exploring the intertextuality of modern and postmodern architecture and society. To understand the intersection of these physical and cultural circumstances, this inquiry views New Orleans through a cross-disciplinary lens, drawing from the literature and methods of cultural studies, Southern history, and contemporary architectural theory in addition to executing historiographic and archival tracking and formal and textual analysis of buildings, literary sources, and mass-mediated representations of the city. This study argues that New Orleans's centrality in contemporary American culture is a result of the degree to which it offers a microcosmic portrait of the trends that characterize the late-twentieth century city, its changing built forms, social constituencies, and economic structures. It concludes that the shift from the ethics of modernism to those of postmodernism, a culture in which the chief form of cultural production is consumption, has irreparably altered New Orleans's sense of place, which now transcends the temporal and spatial limitations that traditionally wed built form and cultural production to place.