Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956

Conclusion: Pedestrian Modern Futures

Walter Benjamin wrote that Eugène Atget’s images of deserted Parisian streets were comparable to crime scene photographs in which action is suspended and all hints of human presence are elided (Figure C.1).1 In particular, Atget’s 1920s store windows may have been empty of subjects, but they were bursting with signs of active consumption. This absent presence was a sign of modernity—the window became a flat screen onto which the world was projected, and, at the same time, it joined interior to exterior, the space of the store to the city beyond. The images document the world of commodities not merely as the outcome of mass production but also as a libidinal prompt made possible by the social system, which worked more efficiently with plate-glass windows. Yet Benjamin was ambivalent about the role of goods, and Atget’s images, he wrote, “stir the viewer” and raise questions, perhaps nudging the viewer toward an understanding of the reach of modernity and its material correlate, goods. Notable here is that Kenneth Welch took a keen interest in shopwindow lighting, glass angles, reflection parameters, and views.2 If Gruen and Lapidus fixed upon the shopwindow as almost a comedy, LönbergHolm saw it as a transparent plan, and Frederick Kiesler understood it as CO N C LU S I O N PEDESTRIAN MODERN FUTURES Arcades are houses or passages having no outside—like the dream. —Wa lte r Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1999 243 l Figure C.1. Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925. Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York. liberative, Welch’s technical expertise in the “science” of glass fills out a picture of a complex modernity in which the store was an active site of change. So, too, the infamous Parisian arcades that fascinated Benjamin presaged another trajectory of modernity. Inserted into the hidden cores of the city’s residential blocks, the arcades were made possible by skylights of iron and glass, and the stores were stocked with upper-class goods provided by the humming engines of mass production . Yet the space and atmosphere of the arcade were hard to describe, and Benjamin was uneasy, finding in the always-even, dimmed lighting an awkward pleasure in being almost lost but always comfortably managed. The arcades defied categories of time as well as the cues of inside and outside, street and courtyard, and created a space of possibility despite, or alongside, what Sigfried Giedion called their “lascivious ” extractive function.3 As an unknowable and liminal space lined with display windows and goods, the arcade was a strange piece of urban design. Like their spectacular descendants, the department stores, the arcades were glimpses of a designed and planned urban future, an almost totalizing condition—witness the attraction they held for Charles Fourier and other utopianists. As a fragment of a city made modern, in which ever-greater mechanisms of control and oversight were implicit, the arcade remained, somehow, prosaic and pedestrian. This was how the store and the shopping center, in the city or not, could be modern. Southdale, Gruen’s enclosed mall, and his subsequent Midtown Plaza in Rochester, New York (which opened in 1962), showed that complete containment might yet be the central design legacy of modernism and shopping.4 In this book, I have posited that designs for shopping, rather than being a secondary part of the architectural practices of the modern movement in the United States, were deeply embedded in that movement’s discourse. Quite simply, we can understand modernism better if we see stores as sites of historically specific architectural experimentation, and, conversely, we can better grapple with the design of spaces for shopping if we understand them as modern architecture, not merely as the products of economic modernization or suburbanization. But perceptions continue to change. Walking Back to the Future? In the summer of 2008, the New York City Department of Transportation proposed “Broadway Boulevard,” a length of the famed street between Times Square and Herald Square substantially closed to automobiles, with expanded space for pedestrian movement and café furniture. Months later, the department announced more street closings in the area and an intention to implement the pedestrianization program in other parts of the city.5 The overlooked fact in the debates that have surrounded the city’s new...