One-Way Street

A House of Dreams

The poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in the introduction to his translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Furniture (1852), asks, “Who among us, in his idle hours, has not taken a delicious pleasure in constructing for himself a model apartment, a dream house, a house of dreams?” We dream of ideal houses to this day. Thousands of magazines, books, and websites are dedicated to helping us construct dream houses. However, we have very different dreams about ideal houses than they did in Baudelaire’s and Poe’s day.

“The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling,” Walter Benjamin wrote in the Arcades Project. The nineteenth century “conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case . . . embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.”

But by the 1930s the idea of dwelling had changed. The 19th century’s strict divide between public and private began to break down. Instead of a place of consolation for the travails of early capitalism, by the mid-20th century the home had become a place of rational convenience as appliances gradually took over for domestic servants. In the 19th century furniture and household objects were generally simple and durable, and people formed deep attachments to them, handing them down to succeeding generations. By the 20th century mass produced furniture and domestic objects flooded the home, making it harder to form attachments to them. The home was less of a refuge than a worksite for entrapped housewives vacuuming and dusting all their stuff. At the same time, changes in home fashions rendered once cherished objects obsolete. The shag carpeting and avocado appliances in my childhood home have no meaning other than embarrassment.

My parents don’t live there anymore, and all the traces of our 15 years there have been erased. Because the house was built in 1970 rather than 1950, it hasn’t been torn down yet, but eventually it will be demolished to make way for a larger and better-equipped house, whether anyone needs one or not. Rational convenience has tipped over into something irrational. Americans have kitchens outfitted with vast expanses of granite and restaurant-quality appliances, yet we're spending less time preparing food than ever before. How many of these gleaming spaces produce anything more elaborate than microwave popcorn?

In new homes size conveys comfort, historical styles convey stability. And yet the American home is a profoundly transient place. Susan Susanka, the Minneapolis architect and co-author of The Not So Big House book series urges us to create houses that “express the way we actually live,” which, in reality, means living as if we were going to hand our house over to someone else tomorrow. Resale value trumps all domestic comforts. Houses are not designed to be lived in by a family of four on a Tuesday in May, but for an MLS listing sometime in the future. The more affluent we are, the more likely we are to move, and the more likely we are to buy a house as if someone else is going to live there. The American home is a commodity like any other, forever ready to be passed on to its next owner. This is why every twenty-first century two-bedroom condo in every major American city has granite countertops in the kitchen: not because they’re universally appreciated for their functionality, but because they enhance resale value. Developers know this better than anybody, and it’s easy for them to ignore municipal misgivings about neo-Gothic details on a three-car garage. They’re not building homes, they’re building assets. Baudelaire wouldn't been surprised: our dream homes are still inside our heads.

Fun Friday

At the end of every week my family has "Fun Friday," an evening of pizza, popcorn, and movies. My kids are age two and five, so the movies are invariably animated and the pizza cheese only. (I make a pizza with grownup toppings for my wife and me.) In the spirit of Fun Friday, here are some tasty items for your own Fun Friday.

Michael Hulse, who translated Herta Müller into English, says the 2009 Nobel Prize winner may be obscure, but not to everyone everywhere. Only four or five of her novels have been translated into English, yet all of them have been translated into Polish, for instance. Shamefully few novels are translated into English, Hulse says, and the ones left behind are usually dismissed as too difficult or too culturally specific. He also argues that since English is the most international of languages, it should disseminate works from less widely-spoken languages (Swedish, Estonian, etc) through translation.

Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's biography of the Gilded Age architect Grosvenor Atterbury has just appeared. (Buy here, read about here.) Atterbury apprenticed at McKim, Mead & White, where he learned how to design houses as a long series of rolling bays sheltered by a deep shingled roof, a prototype of the McMansion style. He was also the architect for Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, developed as part of the Garden City movement: curving streets, green parks, compact lots, mixed housing types.

Alain de Botton has a weakness for tough-minded philosophers. He introduces La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the 17th-century book that gave the French their taste for philosophical reflection. La Rochefoucauld's brand of bracing skepticism is laid out in forceful, sometimes sardonic aphorisms. He was equally unsentimental about helping others ("We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others") and falling in love ("There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard that there was such a thing").  

After abandoning the cinema for years, Peter Greenaway is back with J'Accuse, a Dan Brown-style examination of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. (A still from the film is at top.) Greenaway argues that a murder has been committed before our eyes in the painting, and all 34 characters in the painting are suspects. If J'Accuse isn't playing at a theater near you and you've never seen a Greenaway film, for your own Fun Friday watch Drowning by Numbers (1988) and/or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) for a good introduction to his work. But send the kids to bed first.

Announcements:

Half Gallery in New York City will hold an opening reception for its Ry Fyan show on Monday, October 26. Details here. (At left: Fyan's The Reasons I Can't..., [2009])

Guernica magazine, a terrific art and politics journal, will host a Guernica at 5! benefit on Wednesday, October 28 in Brooklyn. Among those making an appearance are Jonathan Ames, the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, and the 3-piece band Brazilian Girls (only one woman, and no one is Brazilian, in case you were wondering). Details here.

The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO will hold a Portraits Exhibition starting November 6 and ending on the 28th. The exhibit is juried by Mary Ellen Mark. Among the 2,500 images from seven different countries on display is a portrait by Whitney Yeager, a talented photographer who also happens to be my sister-in-law. Her contribution is at left.

Metropolis magazine has issued a call for entries for its 2010 Next Generation Design Competition. The theme is One Design Fix for the Future. Come up with one design for an object that will have a positive positive impact in the future and you could win $10,000.

Speaking of competitions, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture won the competition to design Rotterdam’s Stadskantoor, a multi-use municipal building in OMA's home town. Reinier de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas designed the proposal. De Graaf says, "Rather than posing as the city's next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right."

How Do I Look?

There are a number of concepts in Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but the two most important are distraction as a mode of reception and the mechanical reproduction of artworks. Architecture, as we have seen, is experienced in a state of distraction. But what about architecture and reproducibility? Benjamin has much to say about the relationship between art and photography, but what about the relationship between photography and architecture?

We have many photographs of the exteriors of nineteenth-century buildings, but relatively few images from their interiors, especially the interiors of middle-class homes. One reason may have something to do with the trace, Benjamin’s term for the impression left on objects by human activity.  “If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s,” Benjamin explains,

for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive from it may well be, “You've got no business here.” And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark--the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the monogrammed antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire.

The inhabitant’s marks on the objects of a room are traces, residues of a life. This is why whenever something breaks, we get angry because a trace has been lost forever.

It’s not that traces can’t be captured by photography. Rather, in order to create a reproducible image, one that would be of interest to the public, it is necessary to eliminate all traces of particular individual’s daily life.

Modernist architecture views the trace the same way as photography does. Benjamin writes, "This is what has now been achieved by the new architects, with their glass and steel: they have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces." Benjamin declares that the “new” architecture—i.e., Modernist architecture, a term he never uses—will “transform humanity utterly.” By this he means that Modernist architecture will make bourgeois life more transparent, less inward-looking—in short, more politically engaged. The Paris arcades were an exemplary space in this regard because they were public spaces that were as comfortable as private ones. The arcades were the family room turned inside out.

However, after World War II the “new” architecture became the International Style, which became international because the style lent itself to being photographed. A new kind of photographer appeared during this time: the architectural photographer. The box cameras they used generally used black and white stock, the perfect vehicle for International Style buildings, with their boxy, unornamented shapes and translucent facades. Furthermore, Modernist buildings were unified images, with all traces of past use strictly eliminated.

Later, color photography popularized Post-Modernist architecture, with its colorful bricolages of past styles. Architectural elements became so many images to be manipulated to fit into a larger whole, ready to be photographed for later use in marketing materials. The Greek column, for instance, lost its ritual value as an element in a temple, and has become a decorative feature to be strewn about a building anywhere an architect pleases. Arthur Erickson even dispensed with the column’s structural function in his Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC (1989; at left).

Since World War II architecture has increasingly de-emphasized functional and symbolic values. Large commercial and public buildings are now designed primarily to be photographed. Like actresses in Hollywood films, they are always ready to be seen by the camera. They don't great people with "welcome" anymore. Now they ask, "How do I look?" Buildings and artworks are the only objects still commonly made by human hands, and yet both have been profoundly shaped by the technologies of mechanical reproduction.

Architecture and Distraction

The cinema was the preeminent mass experience of the first half of the twentieth century, but architecture, according to Walter Benjamin, is also a mass experience, and a much older one. He argues in the Artwork essay that the cinema was designed to be received in a state of distraction. The same hold true for architecture. He writes, “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consumed by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Buildings, Benjamin says, are experienced through sight and touch. Both of these senses are susceptible to habituation, especially touch. Even the distracted experience of touch, Benjamin claims, can have “canonical value.” Historical changes in perception, such as the changes brought about by photography, are not disseminated by contemplation. New ways of perceiving become widespread only through habit. If a way of seeing can’t be appropriated through distraction, then it won’t last. It also won’t have any political importance.

Whether or not a distracted perception will have a transformative political importance is a different issue altogether. Take, for instance, Stereoscope's Project Blinkenlights in Toronto in October 2008, in which the Toronto City Hall was transformed into an interactive (through users’ iPhones) light show and video game. The technology was amazing, and more examples are on the way, no doubt. But did Project Blinkenlights make its viewers more involved citizens?

Large public buildings are becoming less tactile because of security concerns and swine flu hysteria. At the same time, they’re becoming more distracting, especially sports stadiums. The new Cowboys Stadium recalls the elephantine domes of the Sixties and Seventies. With its sprawling concourses, glassed-in suites, and trademark giant overhead monitor, the stadium offers almost limitless opportunities to make a Cowboy fan forget that the team hasn’t won a playoff game in 18 years. All the new sports stadiums built recently in the United States may offer better parking and more toilets than their processors, but they’ve made it more difficult to concentrate on the action on the field.

But what about architecture and reproducibility? More on that in my next post.

The Spire Shall Rise Eventually (Maybe)

Blair Kamin reports on Santiago Calatrava's visit to Chicago last week. The architect insists that the Chicago Spire project is still viable. A spokesperson for the developer, Garrett Kelleher, claimed potential customers are still dropping by the sales office, even though all the already built condos on the Chicago market, stacked on top of each other, could make a Spire twice as high as the planned one.

Like most architects, Calatrava is patient, and he urges us to be as well. The Spire project is only four years old, and he's worked on projects that have taken more than three times that long. “My personal wish is that it is not dead,” he says of the Spire project.

MAS Context: Work

For your reading pleasure this weekend, take a look at MAS Context's third issue, Work.

MAS Context is a journal produced by designers for designers, so there's an outside-looking-in feel to the articles in Work. This is exemplified by Andreas Larsson's photographs of empty offices. He's never worked in an office, so he finds corporate offices intriguing. Over the years he's collected images from "a spectrum of empty spaces, raw and uncluttered, waiting for work to begin." As somebody who has worked in a traditional office space, empty offices have a much more sinister association: they're the spaces my co-workers used to occupy before the corporation tossed them aside to improve their quarterly numbers.

Designer Liz Potokar considers how offices are occupied. She provides a brief history of office space, from the “Great Workroom” at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building built in the late 1930s to the "third place," distributed work spaces made possible by laptops with wireless connections. Most raw processing of data is now done by computers, so it's no longer necessary to design a work space in which people keep their heads down and process paper. As a result, collaboration is the primary value of office space.  Most recently, sustainability has become the buzzword in office design. Potokar suggests designers should embrace a “chassis-planning concept,” which refers to the ways interiors and exteriors interact.

Perhaps the ultimate "third space" is the street. Maria Moreno-Carranco visits Santa Fe, a "megaproject" on the outskirts of Mexico City. It's a standard-issue office/mall/planned community development, but generally more upscale than average Mexicans can afford. However, working class Mexicans have carved out a place in the strictly controlled public space of Santa Fe.  Moreno-Carranco talks to a street vendor who makes a nice living operating what amounts to a 7-Eleven out of her car. 

David Schalliol also looks closely at built environments, in this case isolated buildings once conjoined buildings separated from their immediate neighbors. Schalliol claims these create a "tension" that demands to be resolved. These buildings are "representatives of the state of work in a community. They suggest that work is desired and offer cues about who is privileged to access it." Small commercial buildings are low-cost, "meso-level" structures, usually on mixed commercial and residential streets. Often built by sole proprietors, the buildings can be idiosyncratic. Schalliol says we can also read the history of buildings through subsequent use and alteration, but he never offers a reading of a building himself.

Another suggestive project comes from Dean Storm. His "Wayfinding" video documents his summer internship at the Chicago firm Spirits of Space. Storm is an architecture student interested in the intersection of architecture and cinema, so he travels around Chicago with a video camera, paying particular attention to the newest structures in the city, like StudioGang's Aqua Building and Ben Van Berkel's Burnham Plan pavilion. As one might expect from an architecture student, Storm has an excellent eye for mise-en-scene. The relationship between film and architecture interests a lot of people, myself included, and Storm's well-crafted video is an intriguing first look. I don't think it's an exaggeration to claim that all contemporary architecture is informed by reproductive technologies. In fact, Spirit of Space has a video in the issue that recalls the "city symphony" films of the 1920s in which urban experience is rendered as panorama, as spectacle.

"Work" in this issue is really about the work of designers and architects and how design influences the way people make and sell things. The view of work we get in MAS Context is something on the fringes of the standard and the routinized, as something in between. Consequently, design should balance structure and openness. In the well-designed workplace, work is the bicycle in the Google conference room from Potokar's article: playful, sustainable, and focused on making something new.

Railroads to Nowhere

Continuing my posts on the prehistory of the shopping mall, which seems to be turning into a series, I would like to return again to the idea of progress, in particular Walter Benjamin’s critique of progress in the Arcades Project. For Benjamin, progress is one-sided, if not utterly illusionary. As I read his critique, progress is split into two realms: technological and social progress. In modernity these realms are asynchronous, with technological progress well ahead of social progress.

The asynchronous nature of progress is most noticeable in architecture, literature, and the cinema. I will return with examples from literature (Hemingway, to start) and film (the 1920s French avant-garde and Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, among other examples), but I’d like to continue looking at architecture.

Railroads were among the most conspicuous forms of technological progress in the nineteenth century. National progress appeared to be expressed both in the massive effort of building a national railway system and the speed at which trained traveled. The Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier declared in 1852, “One can compare the zeal and the ardor displayed by the civilized nations of today in their establishment of railroads with that which, several centuries ago, went into the building of cathedrals.” In his 1861 travelogue entitled La Vie en chemin de fer (Life on the Railways) Benjamin Gastineau claimed that railroads animated nature. “Before the creation of the railroads, nature did not yet pulsate; it was a Sleeping Beauty.”

The great railway stations of the nineteenth century became the new city gates, much as airports now serve as entry points to entire nations. (Imagine what a foreign traveler would think of the United States if all he saw of it was JKF airport.) Railroad stations were paradigmatic 19th-century objects in a couple of ways. First, their design posed a unique challenge to nineteenth-century architects in that railway stations had no models in ancient times. There were also no models from the past for skyscrapers, factories, large warehouses, and suburban houses. Building in iron, the first artificial building material, eventually became the solution, at least for the train sheds in the back. The front of many early railway stations were still cloaked in mythical garb.

The timelessness of the railway stations’ classical references obscured not only the modernity of their architectural form, but also their essentially transient, even insubstantial nature. Railroads were the origin of investments without property rights. Investors exchanged money for the fiction of a tiny, immaterial piece of real property. As structures, the railway stations were home to an urban crowd that gathered temporarily in public spaces. The urban crowds were different than the 18th-century mobs or the 20th-century masses. Orderly, individualistic and primarily middle class, the nineteenth-century urban crowds assembled but never cohered. They had neither the collective will of the mob nor the fixed identity of the masses. The urban crowd merely indulges in small change transactions and moves on.

Railroads once promised to transport people to new and exciting places. They promised a substantially different experience. Now they’ve been reduced to junk spaces peddling cheap merchandise that’s meant to be consumed immediately. Airports are no different. They, too, have become shopping malls with a parade of goods intended to distract travelers from their journeys from one no place to an identical no place at the other terminal.

National Progress on Display

Since their beginning, the world exhibitions have been about national progress on display. They are phantasmagorias promising social progress without revolution through the peaceful development of technology and industrial capacity. World exhibitions are the daydreams nations have about themselves. Despite its flashy technology and high style, the Shanghai Expo 2010 fits squarely within this tradition.

The Turkish pavilion in Shanghai presents an odd narrative, a maze of dreams. The story begins with Turkey as “The Cradle of Civilization,” a title to which the nation doesn’t have exclusive claim. The Turkish claim to be the origin of civilization is an archeological dig at Çatalhöyük, the site of a large Neolithic village. The nation of Turkey could have begun at any number of points, including Atatürk’s dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate, but the exhibition organizers chose a dense collection of mud huts beside a vanished river. After the establishment of the first settlement, the Turkish nation emerged through a series of infrastructure projects, such as the first man-made dam and the highways and water systems of Istanbul. The final section of the pavilion is a return to the future exhibit in which the mythological symbol of the phoenix represents the nation’s future as reborn out of the ashes of the present.

The nation as hut theme is even more pronounced in the Malaysian pavilion. The nation will be represented by a single hut built out of palm oil and recycled plastic. The 3,000-square-meter hut will be the symbolic home of Malaysia’s 47 ethnic groups living under the banner, “One Malaysia — City Harmonious Living.” Interestingly, construction on the Malaysian pavilion began only days after Malaysia established diplomatic relations with China. Presenting an image of peace and unity to obscure international friction is a theme that goes back to the first world exhibition. The king of Prussia wouldn't allow any of the royal family to travel to London for the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, although his minister of war was allowed to go. The trip was profitable: After visiting a Krupps armaments display, the Prussian minister of war placed an order for 200 cast-steel cannons.

China, the host nation for the Shanghai Expo 2010, is preparing for another major celebration besides its world exhibition. In preparation for the 60th anniversary of the Communist Revolution, the National Ballet of China is rehearsing The Red Detachment of Women ballet and paramilitary policemen are practicing mass formations the outskirts of Beijing. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the government is all business. The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion is an updating of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead of art, however, the Chinese pavilion, designed by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, will house displays of Chinese technological prowess. According to the architects, the Corporate Pavilion will be a “dream of a brighter future, through sophisticated technologies.” The future of China rests in technology, which is “about the enrichment of imagination and symbolic of the industry and industrialism of Shanghai.” 

While China dreams of a future of blinking LED lights and giant water misting systems, Spain wants to etch itself in the unconsciousnesses of its citizens, like Freud’s wunderblock. The Spanish pavilion’s architect, Benedetta Tagliabue of Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, tells MAS Context that she wanted to avoid the “clichés” of Spain national identity. “The strongest symbols, such as flamenco and carnations, begin to disappear. I think those are things that remain in subliminal levels,” Tagliabue explains. She concedes that “you have to work with the clichés, because you have to, you have to be able to recognize the country from far but in our case they are subliminal, not physical.” Turkey, Malasia and China are presenting themselves as dreamscapes, and so is Spain. However, Spain will present itself as a particular kind of dream: a movie. “In the end the exhibitions are like cinemas. You always try to have some type of transparency, create the illusion of being inside, outside,” Tagliabue says. Her pavilion, which is made of wicker, will convey a national identity as an experience conveying “the idea of dynamism, the patios, the transparency between exterior and interior.” In other words, the Spanish pavilion will be like a Pedro Almodóvar film: offering up its visual splendor all at once, yet dredging up a past that’s deeply encoded.

The Spanish pavilion offers a national identity that is neither primitivist nor aggressively technological. With its Pier One architecture, the Spanish pavilion is arguably the most modern of the national visions I’ve discussed here. It isn’t an imperial spectacle like China’s pavilion, nor a post-colonial fantasia like Turkey’s or Malaysia’s. Instead, the Miralles Tagliabue EMBT pavilion is like a novel or a film, a transmissible experience.

The Folk Festivals of Capitalism

After the department stores, the most immediate successor to the Paris arcades were the world exhibitions. The first world exhibition took place in London in 1851. The centerpiece of the fair was the Crystal Palace, designed by the Duke of Devonshire's gardener, Joseph Paxton. The Crystal Palace was basically a giant greenhouse constructed in the same manner as the Paris arcades.  When the public learned that the massive scale of the structure would require the destruction of a row of ancient elm trees in Hyde Park, Paxton simply threw the iron and glass structure over the elm trees. Horace Walpole described the Hyde Park elms in the Crystal Palace as "looking almost like the lions of the forest caught in a net of glass." Others described the Crystal Palace as "incomparably fairylike."

Skeptics charged that such a huge edifice couldn't be constructed out of iron and glass, so the Crystal Palace represented a triumph over the engineering limits of the time. The Crystal Palace also proved that metal and glass were proper building materials for public buildings. Like the Paris arcades before it, the Crystal Palace was a world in miniature, encompassing both nature and culture, the finest in manufactured goods and their raw materials, all under the same roof. On a much larger scale than the intimate arcades, the London world exhibition was a plausible vision of a world remade by humans and their industrial might.  On a concrete, massive scale, the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition represented the forthcoming universe of plenty.

The 1851 exhibition was so successful that the French had to stage one as soon as they could gather enough iron and glass.  "Europe is off to view the merchandise," the French philosopher Ernest Renan sighed at the opening of the Exposition Universelle des produits de l'Agriculture, de l'Industrie et des Beaux-Arts de Paris 1855. Paris also hosted world exhibitions in 1867, 1889, and 1990. Most of the structures were temporary, including a massive exhibition hall for the 1867 that one witness described as looking “as if there were before you a monument built on another planet, Jupiter or Saturn.” A few structures are still standing, including, most famously, the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 world exhibition. The architectural historian Sigfried Giedion described the world expositions as Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art, because of their phantasmagoric blends of technology and art, military displays and fashion shows, business and pleasure.

Walter Benjamin described the world exhibitions as the “folk festivals” of capitalism. They were the origins of the entertainment industry in that, for the first time, mass spectacles became big business. Each exhibition was grander and more spectacular than the previous one. While the original 1851 exhibition was a purely commercial affair, subsequent exhibitions were more explicitly about national progress. By the 1900 Paris exposition the line between commercial success and national glory was completely blurred. National pavilions became commonplace, a tradition carried on to this day with the “International Participants' Pavilions" for the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Once again, displays of national progress are mixed with industrial might in China’s most affluent city.

Contemporary world exhibitions, like their nineteenth-century precursors, are nationalist displays that don't really address individual fantasies. They parade goods before mass audiences with a passive, look-but-don't-touch ethos. The exhibitions were designed to overwhelm the individual, to place him or her in a new world space in which a single city (London, Paris, Shanghai) absorbs all other nations, including its own. The exhibitions are the height of nationalism even as they drain all essences from culturally-specific lived experiences.

The Eternal Return of the Arcades

As I mentioned yesterday, the Paris arcades had a relatively brief heyday, perhaps thirty or forty years. As shopping venues, they were replaced by the large department stores. The arcades' architectural forms were expanded by the world's fairs and the great urban railroad stations. Their visual experiences replaced by the cinema. Their means of engagement with the urban crowds taken up by literature.

Ordinarily we would consider these developments to be consistent with normal history. Progress means that inventions are improved upon. Structures get bigger, more comfortable, more convenient. Consumer goods continually improve over time. Stories get more realistic. Spectacles become more immersive.

But what if we looked at progress in these realms in a different way--not as progress, as moving forward, but as repetition. What if each new iteration of something--the arcades to the department stores to the shopping malls, for instance--represented not an improvement, but another attempt to address the same needs, the same social demands. Each new development, from this perspective, would look like a return to the past. There would be an implicit sense of failure accompanying every new development.

To get a better sense of what I'm getting at here, consider the way we think about fashion. We're often deeply ambivalent about it. Fashion is new and exciting, a chance to shed old styles and old identities. It's also hemlines up, hemlines down, then back up again. Padded shoulders are here one year, gone the next, then back again ten years later.

As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, fashion doesn’t just dictate a given set of details as fashionable; it also consigns other qualities as unfashionable, as banished (temporarily) or forbidden (more or less permanently, like the slit sleeves of medieval France). Yet when unfashionable details return to fashion, become visible again, we experience their return as novelty rather than recurrence. As Walter Benjamin remarked, “Fashions are the medicament that is to compensate for the fateful effects of forgetting on a collective scale.” The pattern of continual forgetting and constant novelty provide the illusion that the world is changing. In fact, fashion the human capacity for change is deflected into the object world. Meanwhile, fashionable people dress for eternal youth. Fashion arrests biological and social change, while introducing constant change in consumer choices. Nature is dead; only the thing world lives.

According to Benjamin, this is how we experience progress: repetition and forgetting on the subjective side, constant novelty and increased monumentality on the objective side. Progress, Benjamin declared, was an ideology, “the chief narcotic of the nineteenth century.” His own aim in researching the Paris arcades was to “drive out any trace of ‘development’ from the image of history.” Thus, the dwelling places of the masses—from the great department stores to the world exhibitions to railway stations to airports and sports stadiums—are really just the eternal return of the Paris arcades.