Arcades

Definition

The arcades (Parisian passages) are the 19th-century glass-roofed shopping galleries that Benjamin made the central object of his unfinished Arcades Project (Passagenwerk). For Benjamin, the arcade is the architectural figure of commodity capitalism's dreamworld — "the original temple of commodity capital" — a space where interior and exterior, private and public, dream and waking collapse. The Arcades Project is itself an architectural construction: "an intentionally fragmentary text constructed through montage method" (Elliott), assembling citations, images, and reflections into a "dialectical image" of the 19th century. For architecture, the arcade is both a historical type (the proto-department store, the covered passage) and a methodological model: the built environment as a text whose meaning emerges through montage rather than narrative.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the Arcades Project; the arcade as temple of commodity capital.
• Brian Elliott — the Arcades Project as montage method and genealogy of urbanization.

Related Concepts

• Dialectical Image — the mode of presentation of the Arcades Project.
• Flâneur — the arcade is the flâneur's native habitat.
• Phantasmagoria — the arcade as the architectural form of phantasmagoric commodity culture.
• Modernity — the arcade as a crystallized image of 19th-century modernity.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the exposé's interior section quoted as the bourgeois interior's theory: Benjamin's 1939 exposé ("'Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century'", in The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland & McLaughlin, pp. 19–20) supplies the interior "separated from sites of work and productive labour," the collector as "the true resident of the interior," the connoisseur's value against use value, and the "traces of inhabitation" — the arcades-project's domestic chamber, which Rice reads as the interior's de-realisation and casts as an effective-history event. See bourgeois-interior, the-collector, de-realisation, effective-history.
• Benjamin for Architects — the Arcades Project and its architectural significance.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the arcade's twentieth-century afterlife: "In the nineteenth century, the tectonic qualities and material conditions of commercial arcades blurred city streets into building interiors. Parisian passages and other interior urban environments such as the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1865) in Milan, Galerias Pacifico (1889) in Buenos Aires, and the Old Arcade (1890) in Cleveland served as forerunners of the atrium hotel-shopping complexes of the mid-twentieth century. The architectural language of these European and European-inspired interior spaces was appropriated by John Portman for his unique interior-exterior aesthetic in America." And the Lefebvrian reading: "Analogous to Lefebvre's consumption-oriented theory, arcades and Portman atria extended commercial space into large urban plots to establish new interior streets for storefronts and cafés" — the arcade's language carried into the atrium hotel (see atrium-hotel, interior-urbanism).
• Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — the arcade inverted: Benjamin's "glass-covered, steel-framed arcade," turned "from interiority to exteriority, it more aptly forms the lineage towards transparency and nomadism that, as stated by Deleuze and Guattari, define the spaces of the later twentieth century" — "The arcade as wandering path expands from line to network to field, from infrastructure to surface." Where Marinic's chapter reads the arcade as the interior's commercial expansion (streets becoming interiors), Voordouw reads the same glass-and-steel figure as the interior's erasure lineage — the interiorized street becoming the exteriorized interior, the arcade's covered path unrolled into the continuous topological field. See topological-interiority, benjamin-walter.