Consumerism
Consumerism
Definition
Consumerism names the social and economic force in which mass production and mass consumption are synergistically linked, with advertising, branding, and product design used to stimulate and shape demand. Architecturally, consumerist architecture denotes buildings whose appearance is consciously planned as part of a marketing strategy to communicate with the public — the themed shopping mall, the fast-food chain, the "commercial vernacular" of the American roadside and suburb. It deals in "direct, rather than abstract, symbolism" and is opposed to self-referential high-art/avant-garde architecture.
Key Thinkers
- John Chase — the principal theorist in this wiki of consumerist architecture and commercial vernacular.
- Jean Baudrillard — the theorist of consumption as sign-system: in The System of Objects, the interior furnishing is "a cultural system of signs" organized by the calculated interplay of hot and cold, natural and cultural "values," serially produced objects compensate for absent qualities with bright colour ("a sign of emancipation… compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities, particularly a lack of space," p. 38), and the system's logic is closed: "No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity" (p. 42). The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) adds the phase-thesis beneath this: the passage "from the form-commodity to the form-sign" turns needs and demand into simulation and institutes "consumption as control." See atmospheric-values, design-atmosphere, system-of-objects, sign-value, form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.
- Xiaobing Tang — the literary-critical applier of the Baudrillard frame (1998/2006): the 1992 Changsha decoration craze — shops "rushed to have itself remodeled," "the entire nation… consumed by a craze in 'real estate, construction, gas and water-heater installation'" (pp. 329, 331) — as consumerism's rapid Chinese absorption; Heping the "conspicuous consumer, for whom consumption is more of a practiced ideology than a satisfaction of whimsical needs" (p. 330); and the interior-scale thesis — interior design "acculturat[ing] us to the system of sign-objects" (p. 332). See sign-value, conspicuous-consumption, consummative-mobilization, interiorisation.
- Michel de Certeau — consumer production: users "make do" with (poach on) imposed commodities, a hidden production of consumption.
- Siegfried Zepf — consumption as identity-building activity; the "ego project" and the desiring subject.
- Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the formation-period historians (1992/2006): the etymology of consumption ("to consume is to devour… To consume is to ingest and expel, to take in and lay waste. It is a process of elimination," p. 207); Calkins's "use up" doctrine; Frederick's "creative waste" as consumerism's positive self-theory ("production finds a place inside the process of consumption"); the economy-as-body of planned obsolescence; advertising as "a laxative for hastening the flow of goods through the economy" (see Streamlining).
- Ruth Madigan & Moira Munro — the empirical limit-case (1996/2006): lifestyle shopping "severely restricted by considerations of cost and utility"; use-value neglected by the playfulness-of-signs debate; the postmodern aesthetic as selling; consumers as neither dupes nor free players — "the idea that consumerism is something to be rejected and yet to be seen as out-of-date, or old-fashioned is a personal condemnation."
- (Named in the sources, not yet paged — see log: Ernest Elmo Calkins, the advertising executive whose 1932 doctrine the formation thesis quotes; Christine Frederick, the domestic theorist of "creative waste"; Daniel Boorstin's "consumption community.")
- (Related, not yet paged: J.B. Jackson, Charles Moore, Denise Scott Brown, Sharon Zukin — see log.)
Related Concepts
- Everyday Architecture — consumerist building as a large sector of ordinary production.
- Iconic Architecture — the image-driven, commodified spectacular building.
- Spectacle — the commodification of experience/images.
- Post-Retail Space — the shells consumerism leaves behind: obsolete malls, big boxes, and strip centers as the consumed-and-abandoned built form of consumptive identity.
- Automobile Vernacular — consumption made mobile: the car as the carrier of the consumer's own interior ("You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car").
- Creative Waste — consumerism's positive self-theory of discard: Frederick's oxymoron, waste as "a generative, necessary force"; the moralized engine of the consumption cycle.
- Process of Elimination — consumerism's semantic structure: digestion, consumption and simplification as overlapping eliminations; the etymology of 'consume' as devour-and-expel.
- Streamlining — consumerism's first total design style: the 1930s shell that accelerated products "through the cycle of purchase and disposal."
- The Drive-in House — the consumptive object (the car) installed at the interior's center as "the gorgeous object within."
- Ideology — the consumerist shaping of subjectivity.
- Form-Sign — the mutation consumerism's mature form names: "the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign."
- Political Economy of the Sign — the generalized critique in which consumerism becomes coded demand rather than mere commodity culture.
Related Synthesis
- Consumerism, Capitalism, and Iconic Architecture — how consumerism, as the culture-ideology of capitalism, is built into the iconic object.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Ultrasuede (Wagner 2002/2006) — the postwar material culture register, stated in the editors' headnote: Wagner grounds his speculations 'in the social culture of postwar North America, in the animated jostlings between rebellion and freedom, institutional deliberation and bodily improvisation' — and traces how 'material invention and industrial production influence the theoretical notions at play in interiors as well as how they reflect values of innovation and convention in a material oriented culture.' The interior's surfaces here are a consumer economy's values made spatial: the fashion-magazine tented room (Vogue's 'glamorous domesticity,' p. 383), Baldwin's client-commodities ('The element of separation from the world was the very commodity these spaces offered,' p. 383–384), and the industrially produced continuous interior. Where Sklair's consumerism is iconic-building-scale and Baudrillard's the sign-system, Wagner supplies the consumption register of the surface: the designed interior as where a material culture's values of innovation and convention are negotiated. See mechanization, fashion.
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The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) — consumption as a creative, tactical production.
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Big Box Retail Decentralization (Wassmer 2002) — the fiscal/regulatory determinants of big-box commercial retail location.
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Consumerism and Identity (Zepf 2010) — consumption and the psychoanalytic formation of identity.
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Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the everyday consumption of the interior: "the commodity consumption of everyday material culture emits a signal representing our chosen identity. In this model, using fashion, design, and online identities, we must project ourselves as unique so as to undermine the banality of everyday life" — consumption as the everyday's signalling system, set in tension with her other claim that design access is "a basic human right" rather than a consumption choice; the Situationist dérive as a practice that "question[s] the nature of urbanism, consumerism, and the individual."
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Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities
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Between Traditionalism and Modernism: Approaches to a Vernacular Architecture
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An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'
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Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle in Contemporary Art Museum Architecture
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Why the Customer Is Always Right: Debord's Spectacle as the Rationalisation of Mimesis
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The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary Architecture in Globalizing Cities
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The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization
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Towards an Understanding of Architectural Iconicity in Global Perspective
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Architecture and Capital in the 21st Century: An Interview with Matthew Soules
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Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the domestic register of consumerism: taste's "likely alliance to consumption and the acquisition of possessions as a symbol of social status" (p. 12); rooms of plush textiles and gilded wallpaper as "indexical indicators of the infrastructure of inhabitation" (p. 11).
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Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the end-state of the consumptive cycle: the "post-retail" reality of roughly a billion vacant retail square feet; Gruen's mall as "the Heart of the City," which "became a social center and cultural icon deeply ensconced in national identity via spatial form"; Koolhaas on retail as the essential means to understand urbanity despite the "dead mall" condition; the shift from physical to digital goods (including home 3-D printing) as the structural cause.
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Inside out (Webb 2018) — the showroom destabilized and the consumer catalog quoted: SITE's Best Products project, the big box store volume "shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open" ("the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies"); Banham's drive-in inventory of brought-along consumption ("You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill"); and note 4's J.C. Penney with the self-driving car "waiting for you when you exit."
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Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the founding analysis of consumption as a system of signs, at the domestic scale this page's architectural sources rarely reach: the modern interior organized by the DESIGN/ATMOSPHERE counterpoint (see design-atmosphere) and its calculated sign-values (see atmospheric-values); serially produced objects whose bright colour "is always apprehended as a sign of emancipation – in fact it often compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities (particularly a lack of space)" (p. 38); the closure that binds consumption to political economy: "No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity" (p. 42).
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The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the book's full consumer-society analysis, now ingested: the model/series hierarchy and its class face; personalization as ideological concept ("a misadventure of the person"); credit as "a new ethic" that makes "consumption precede production"; advertising as a discourse-as-object working through the Father Christmas logic and a maternal agency; and the concluding definition of consumption as "an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs," "irrepressible… because it is founded upon a lack."
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Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — consumerism's gendered origin: the historical moment the consumer function was assigned. With men's dress conscribed into "the 'uniform of industrial capitalism,'" women — advertising "wealth and status" "by their very economic idleness and concomitant elaborate dress" — became "the primary consumers of fashion by the mid-nineteenth century," the visible consumers whose elaborate dress "demonstrated the prosperity that the men they were associated with had achieved" (pp. 129–131). The consumer position is thus gendered at birth: the man's relation to the commodity became production ("Men's relationship with fashion became primarily a matter of production" — Worth's 'House of Worth,' p. 131), the woman's became display; and the same division governs the home's consumption, both woman and dwelling "adorned to testify to his success" (p. 131). Consumption here is not private pleasure but impression-management — the "front" (Goffman) that dress and furnishings jointly project "to the world at large" (p. 129). See fashion, separate-spheres, gender-and-the-interior.
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From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — consumerism's founding scene in design history, and the cleanest prehistory of demand-construction: the Wiener Werkstätte's showrooms staged as well-furnished homes ("soft carpets and armchairs… for customers to relax in while gazing at the elegant glass cabinets"; fashion illustrations on the walls; "felt-covered floors" for barefoot customers, p. 158), inviting patrons "to mentally design their own aesthetically coordinated homes, furnished with products ranging from draperies, upholstery fabrics, and carpets to dishes, light fixtures, silverware, and shoes" (p. 158) — the coordinated-lifestyle purchase in 1904. And the system's self-awareness: the popular fashion magazine as "a vehicle for perpetuating both commerce and culture" (p. 160), with art and marketing "a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively" (p. 160) — the first modern design enterprise to treat the aesthetic and the commercial as one mechanism. See wiener-werkstatte, interior-as-garment, fashion.
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Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — consumerism's megastructural interior and its self-consumption: the Portman originals as "temples of consumerism" and "forums for the guilty pleasures of consumerism," complexes that "attempted to renew American cities by means of interior urbanity" — and the consumption-trend that then consumes them ("Today, Portman hotel interiors are characterized less by the permanence of their original interior architecture and more by temporality and trend-influenced interior design"). Lefebvre's frame via the chapter: "In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines space as a commodity directly linked to production and capital" — and the RenCen podium "spatializes Baudrillard's theory of consumption, ambiguity, and postmodernity" from The Consumer Society (1970). The consumerism that built the icon erodes it: "As evidenced in these case studies, the Portman originals have been continually undermined by shifting stylistic and consumer preferences" (see atrium-hotel, interior-urbanism, material-memory).
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Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — consumerism's domestic-consumption register and its prehistory: the Veblen lineage — household objects "serve a range of manifest, intentional and latent unintended functions," and "by themselves, manifest functions do not fully account for the prevailing pattern of domestic consumption, or the decoration and equipment of homes" (p. 184); the latent functions of "acquisition, accumulation and consumption" that are "remote from manifest functions" (Veblen, quoted p. 184; see manifest-and-latent-functions) — the micro-level mechanism the culture-ideology of consumerism mobilizes; affluence as "a relatively greater degree of control and choice that can reflect and reinforce personal preferences and identity" (p. 185) — wealth as symbolic latitude; and the standing research gap ("still no comprehensive understanding of the functions of status claims," p. 185). Where this page's architectural sources treat consumerist building, Lawrence treats consumerist dwelling: the home as the consumption system's most intimate scale (see taste, domestic-interior, consumerism's domestic lineage in Gordon 1996/2006).
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Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — consumerism's formation document (1890–1940) and its linguistic-semantic self-portrait: "Between 1890 and 1940, America's culture of consumption took its modern form: products were mass produced and mass distributed, designed to be purchased and rapidly replaced by a vast buying public" (p. 204); the word's bodily truth — "the term's more literal reference, however, is to the food cycle: to consume is to devour, to eat in a voracious, gluttonous manner. To 'consume' an object is to destroy it in the process of implementing it, as fire 'consumes' a forest" (p. 207); the marketing doctrine — Calkins (1932): "an urgent task of marketing is to make people 'use up' products that they formerly 'used:' cars and safety razors must be consumed like tooth paste or soda biscuits" (p. 207); Frederick's "creative waste" — "the garbage of consumer culture… elevated… into a form of positive production… 'waste' not merely as an incidental by-product, a final residue, of the consumption cycle, but as a generative, necessary force" (p. 207; see creative-waste); the economy-as-body — "The policy of 'planned obsolescence' pictured the economy itself as a 'body,' whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion" (p. 206); advertising as "a crucial lubricant… defended as a laxative for hastening the flow of goods through the economy," which "created desire for new products and generated emotional differences between otherwise indistinguishable ones" (pp. 206–207). Where Sklair names the culture-ideology and Chase reads its built forms, Lupton & Miller catch the ideology being written — at the domestic scale, in the kitchen door's entry and exit of goods (see process-of-elimination, streamlining, kitchen).
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'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — consumerism's empirical limit-case, the sign-system and lifestyle-shopping theses tested against the households they address: "the view of consumption as pleasurable leisure activity and a means of self-expression is easily overdrawn" (p. 224); "participation in lifestyle shopping, careful co-ordination of style and detailed attention to 'taste' is severely restricted by considerations of cost and utility" (p. 224); "Use value is a concept which gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (p. 225; see use-value); the supply-side continuity — "We cannot forget that 'commodities' are designed for sale at profit. The creation of a postmodern aesthetic is just as much about selling as the mass marketing associated with Fordist production, even if it presents apparently more differentiated customised products. Differentiation may meet specialised needs… but it is also about creating 'needs' and amplifying social divisions" (p. 225); advertising "designed to play on insecurities about being a good housewife/mother, and an attractive/fashionable wife or worker" (p. 225); and the lived ambivalence the manipulation/liberation binary misses: "the idea that consumerism is something to be rejected and yet to be seen as out-of-date, or old-fashioned is a personal condemnation" (p. 226). Where Sklair names the culture-ideology, Lupton & Miller catch it being written, and Chase reads its built forms, Madigan & Munro supply its reception: the households for whom heightened design consciousness "may not represent freedom to manipulate symbols and images… but may instead serve to re-emphasise their lack of resources" (p. 225). See respectability, homeliness, taste.
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Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — consumerism's Cold War register: consumption conscripted as interstate competition and its objects as applied economics. The American National Exhibition's "50,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling consumer goods" was "what one historian called a 'combat of commodities'"; the finale's bifurcated prefab staged "a mass consumption of, well, consumption"; and State Department documents "clearly delineate 'consumer goods designed to raise the standard of living' as the primary directive" of the 1952 Berlin display. The register's thesis sharpens the page's recurring object/systems question: "It was never really about consumer goods at all, but instead about the economic systems that governed and manipulated the acquisition of those consumer goods" — the acquisition-system (income, choice, salaries, industrialization) as the true contested object, "trickle[d] down into the dishwashers and bedrooms of an average family." Where Sklair reads consumerism as capitalism's culture-ideology and Lupton & Miller catch it being written, Larson shows states waging war with it — consumerism as the era's official comparative standard ("Both industrial design and interior architecture were seen as a way to charm consumers into choosing which economic and political system to align with"). See kitchen-debate, soft-power, kitchen, cold-war.
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The Kitchen as a Place to Be (Potter 1990/2006) — consumerism's domestic-scale verdict from the design side, and the demand side named as half the problem: "Kitchen design is usually impoverished, and its terms of reference falsified, as much by consumer fantasy as by the commercial pressures that incidentally nourish it; but the High Street retail store is the more obvious culprit" (p. 264) — the culture-ideology working through desire (consumer fantasy) as much as supply. The commercial assembly as consumption's interior form: "a permutation of the familiar storage units with worktops, distinguished in price, but little else, by surface finish, detail, and material. Such assemblies have little to do with kitchen design: their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin" (p. 264) — differentiation priced by finish, form traced to production-and-marketing feasibility; the equipment's own styling the commodity's signature ("junky pseudo-high-tech plastic assemblies," "surplus dials and insignia," stripped by the designer, p. 265). And the counter-criterion: "music is to be experienced, not consumed – is also something to try for in kitchen design" (p. 265) — experience against consumption as the kitchen's design principle. Where Sklair, Chase and Lupton & Miller analyse consumerism's ideology and buildings, Potter supplies its room-scale experience and the design refusal (see kitchen, mechanization, work-leisure-distinction).
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Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — consumerism's literary-critical witness and its interior-scale mechanism: the 1992 decoration craze as consumerism's rapid Chinese absorption — "Many shops were torn down beyond recognition, but overnight they would all be decorated absolutely anew. As if caught in a fierce competition, one store after another rushed to have itself remodeled" (p. 331) — restyling that "helps set off a new visual regime and sign system"; Heping as "conspicuous consumer, for whom consumption is more of a practiced ideology than a satisfaction of whimsical needs" (p. 330), progressing through brand names (domestic→American cigarettes, "Italian-made crocodile skin shoes," Nanfang→Royal Honda); the four-star-hotel apartment as the first wealth-display consumed by its owner; and the page's largest-scale claim — interior design "by instilling a sign-consciousness in our most private and personal sphere, serves to acculturate us to the system of sign-objects" (p. 332). Where Sklair names the culture-ideology and Gordon dates the consumer position's birth, Tang documents the ideology's compressed arrival in a new market and its design-administered installation (see sign-value, consummative-mobilization, interiorisation, domestic-interior).
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The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — consumerism as coded demand rather than stimulated appetite: needs and demand "correspond more and more to a mode of simulation," and the system "can afford the luxury of contradiction and dialectic through the play of signs. It can indulge itself with all the signs of revolution" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," pp. 119–128); consumption becomes strategic — "the monopolistic system institutes consumption as control, as the abolition of the contingency of demand, as planned socialization by the code" (same section) — and the mutation that makes this possible is stated as "the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 121). See form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.
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Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
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source-notes/gattegno-johnson-2018-ambient-environments-sentient-spaces
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source-notes/patterson-2020-bilbao-effect-revitalization-transformation
Open Questions
- Does consumerist architecture express popular values (even democratic ones) or merely reproduce commodified subjectivity? Chase holds both poles in tension.
