Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id DAA06686 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 13 Mar 2002 03:37:11 GMT Subject: Fwd: Harvard's Shopping Guide Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:31:14 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "Memetics Discussion List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <20020313033112.128EF1FD48@camail.harvard.edu> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Elements of Style
by Lynn Yaeger
Harvard's Shopping Guide
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0211/yaeger.php
The newly published Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping argues that
shopping‹so vital a force in the world economy, so powerful an agent in
our collective dreams‹has been getting short shrift from scholars for
centuries. In 800 pages of photo spreads and manifestos, its authors,
architect Rem Koolhaas and a team of Harvard design school graduates,
attempt to rectify this inequity, and the results are half stunning, half
really annoying. Though the book offers plenty of great
moments‹19th-century department stores provided the first public
bathrooms for women; some people go to church in malls‹it somehow misses
what even a four-year-old knows: Buying stuff is fun.
The fun aspect of shopping is frequently buried alive in the Harvard
guide, whose authors' idea of a good time is to subject you to sentences
like "To understand limit as spatial and excess, the transgression of the
bounds of limit, as action, it would seem that these two logics should
collapse neatly into the already established distinctions of shopping's
two modes of typological definition; the logic of limit belonging to the
typology of form or shape and the logic of excess belonging to the
typology of program or use." Best skip over that sort of thing and treat
the book like a rainy afternoon in a department store‹meander through the
aisles, stopping every few minutes to read about the glory of Parisian
arcades or the wretchedness of the Paramus Mall or a guy called Jon
Jerde, the architect responsible for Minnesota's Mall of America. (Of his
masterpiece he said, "What they wanted was four malls bolted end to end,
so it was a piece of shit. [But] I went in opening day, and I went, wait
a minute, this isn't so bad. . . . This isn't a shopping mall anymore. .
... . This is a strange new animal here that, if you learn to do it right,
could be off-the-wall, I mean really fucking great.")
Readers who aren't in the mood to trudge through Koolhaas's own essay,
which is about something he calls "Junkspace" and has a first sentence
that reads, "Rabbit is the new beef," can go see his theories in action
at his latest creation, the $40 million Prada store at the site of the
former Guggenheim Museum at Broadway and Prince Street in Soho. Here all
the ideas the Harvard book is so taken with‹the store as town square and
theme park, the ascendance of shopping over every other form of social
interaction‹are front and center, alongside Prada's merchandise, which
this season includes $950 pleated skirts made of silk based on men's
pajama patterns.
This Prada store has been in the works since March 1999, a time of
economic prosperity, and opened last December in a rather different
climate. (On September 11, work on its distinctive features‹the
monumental staircase and skateboard-ready mountain, both made of
endangered zebrawood‹came to a halt as construction workers rushed to the
Trade Center site.) The shop is anything but a traditional luxury venue:
There isn't a chandelier or plush carpet in sight. Instead, a gigantic
knitted stocking holding stereo equipment hangs from the ceiling and
disco cages on casters serve as display cabinets.
It's meant to be wild and wacky‹in a word, fun, but just in case not
everybody with $900 to spend on a skirt relishes rubbing shoulders with
the hoi polloi, there's a V.I.P. entrance on Mercer Street, where pills
with fat purses can be ushered into supersize dressing rooms and avoid
the milling entirely. Everybody else can gaze out the big windows
overlooking Prince Street, where really excellent fake Prada bags are
being sold not 20 feet from the store, by guys indulging in the most
ancient form of retail activity: setting up a blanket on the street and
haggling over prices.
Shoppers who don't want fakes but would rather not hand over a week's
income at Prada now have a third option. What would the authors of the
Harvard guide, with all their erudition, make of the fierce joy that
welcomed the reopening of Century 21 in Lower Manhattan?
Though the resurrection of a favorite store is a happy thing, a recent
visit left a visitor unprepared for a rush of conflicting sentiments.
Getting off the R train at City Hall‹the Cortlandt Street stop, directly
in front of the store, is still closed‹you pass St. Paul's Chapel, where
the fence is covered with flags and faded portraits of the dead. It still
smells a little funny in this part of town, and there are cops everywhere
and a perpetual line of people holding tickets for the viewing
platform‹an oddly exuberant bunch, like people waiting on line for a
really good horror movie. It feels funny to think about the treasures
awaiting at Century in this atmosphere, and yet the impulse to linger
only briefly over the memorials and then rush off to the store has a
weirdly liberating feeling. Well, maybe bobbing along in a sea of
contradictions‹our fabulous wealth compared to the rest of the world; the
alternating currents of shame and desire that inform bargain hunting when
it takes place directly across from ground zero‹is just part of the
landscape of the way we live now. Coming up the subway stairs, a woman
with a European accent and the determined expression of the international
shopper stopped a well-dressed fellow traveler and asked, with unintended
irony, "Do you know the way to the 21st Century?"
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