In consonance with trends in other advanced cities of the world, Australia's old industrial sites are being transformed culturally, functionally and visually. The Waiter Coop Shot Tower was established in Melbourne during the late nineteenth century and continued to manufacture industrial grade lead shot until 1961. Following its listing in the National Trust Register as a historically significant building, the Shot Tower has been the subject of considerable dispute, most-especially between developers and preservationists. While the old industrial structure has now been 'refurbished' and re-contextualized within the glass and steel Daimaru shopping complex, this new cultural constellation is producing equally powerful and resonant discursive 'noise'. Advocates of the postmodern architectural aesthetic would claim that structures like the Daimaru transcend, as they transform, the stifling ideology and aesthetic of modernism. According to postmodernists like Charles Jencks and the designer of the Daimaru complex, Kisho Kurokawa, postmodernism can absorb and redeploy all heritage and time because it is not cloyed by facile progressivism, nostalgia and a chronological view of time which produces forms of preservationism for its own sake. The Daimaru complex, however, resonates with ideological dissonances. The ease with which the Daimaru deploys modernist emblemism, including the language of progress, pleasure and capitalist individualism, suggests certain continuities with the modern epoch. Of greatest concern is the 'use' of history to establish new political-economic and cultural conditions. This ideological assertion is most particularly evident in the Daimaru's subsumation of historical others - those who have been impoverished, diseased and oppressed through the economic and lingual primacy of industrial heroes like Waiter Coop. A cultural noise disrupts the harmonizing eclecticism of the Daimaru: this is the continuing clamour of the unheard. This dissonance casts doubt over the postmodernist project itself and its claim to harmonize difference and disharmony.
