“The Department Store is the emporium of industrial production. Like the covered market hall, the railroad station, the exhibition hall, it had no models available from the past.” —Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete

Course Description

This seminar explores the intersection of consumerism, fashion, advertising, and architectural design by focusing on the particularly modern phenomenon of the department store. Tracing its architectural development from the iconic structures along New York’s Fifth Avenue and Chicago’s State Street through the contemporary suburban shopping mall, it will also consider the various ways that architecture can both reflect and help determine cultural practices. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the goal of this course is to encourage students to develop critical methods for evaluating visual and material cultural artifacts in general while expanding their knowledge and understanding of a pivotal component of modern architecture in particular.

Required Reading

• Peter Corrigan. The Sociology of Consumption. London: Sage, 1997.
• Henri Lefebvre. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
• Dean McCannell. The Tourist, A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
• Michael Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park, The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
• Thorstein Veblen. Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
• Emile Zola. Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight). Translated and edited by Robin Buss. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
• All other required reading will be available on e-reserve or 2-hour book reserve (at Olin Library), will be posted to the telesis website, or will be distributed in class.

Course requirements and grading

Course credit will be based on class participation (15%), in-class presentation (10%), two short papers (10%, 15%), and a final, medium-length research paper (proposal/annotated bibliography/outline 10%; first-draft 10%; completed paper 30%). There will be no final exam in this course.

Participation: Class attendance is mandatory. Unless otherwise noted, class time typically will be divided between a lecture and slide presentation or film excerpt on the theme of the day and a discussion of the readings. You are expected to have completed all the required readings for each meeting and to come prepared with questions and comments. As this is a seminar course, one of its primary aims is to encourage discussions and thoughtful debates. Much of our time will be spent interrogating the relationships between the visual and textual materials presented in the course.

In-Class Presentation: Each member of the class will be responsible for an in-class presentation to be given during the closing sessions of the semester. This will be a public presentation of your research paper topic and will be the final stage in its development before the paper is due. We will discuss this in detail during the first class.

Papers: Your first paper will be a three-page analysis of one theme/motif from Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight). You will receive a detailed description of the assignment at the second class session.

The second paper is five pages in length. Topics will be distributed ahead of time.

The final research paper is to be about twenty pages long and will be comprised of three components: The first part is the proposal, annotated bibliography, and outline that will be five-pages in length; The second part is the first draft; and the third portion is your finished paper. You will receive detailed instructions on how to complete each of these assignments well before their respective due dates.

There are no extensions.

COURSE SCHEDULE

A Brief History of Cities and Shopping
Week One

September 1: Course Introduction

THE LATE-NINETEENTH AND EARLY-TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Modernity, Industrialization, and Urbanization.
Paris, London, New York, and Berlin

Week Two

September 6:

• Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, pp. 1-89. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Peter Corrigan. The Sociology of Consumption. Chapter 4, “Shops and Shopping: the Department Store,” pp.50-65.
• Meredith L. Clausen, "The Department Store: Development of the Type" Journal of Architectural Education vol. 39, no. 1 (Autumn, 1985) pp.20-29.

September 8:

• Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Chapter 3, "Industrialization and Urbanization," pp.65-85; Chapter 7, "The Specificity of the City," pp.100-104; Chapter 12, "On Urban Form," pp.133-138; Chapter 13, "Spectral Analysis," pp.139-146.
• Emile Zola. Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight). Introduction, Chapters 1-3.

Week Three

September 13:

• Walter Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Selected Writings vol. 3: 1935-1938. pp.32-49. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life. Chapter 4, (sections 1-2), pp.41-48, Chapter 5, "Circulation as a Way of Life," pp.57-70. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Zola. Au Bonheur. Chapters 4-6.

September 15:

• Louise Wyman, "Crystal Palace," in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, pp.229-241. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Chapter 1, "Objects of Ethnography," pp.17-78. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Zola. Au Bonheur. Chapters 7-9.

Week Four

September 20:

• Corrigan, Sociology of Consumption. Chapter 2, "Theoretical Approaches to Consumption," pp.17-26; Chapter 3, "Objects, Commodities, and Non-commodities," pp.33-49.
• Zola. Au Bonheur. Chapters 10-14.

September 22:

• M. Christine Boyer, "Ladies Mile: The Rise of a Victorian Amusement District," in Manhattan Manners, Chapter 3, pp.43-129. (on reserve at Olin Library)

Week Five

September 27: PAPER ONE DUE

• Janet Ward Lungstrum, "The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism," New German Critique no. 76 (Winter 1999) pp.115-160.
• Kathleen James, "From Messel to Mendelsohn: German Department Store Architecture in Defence [sic] of Urban and Economic Change," in Cathedrals of Consumption, Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain eds., pp.252-278. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Thorstein Veblen. Theory of the Leisure Class. Chapters 1-7.

September 29:

• Corrigan, Sociology of Consumption. Chapter 11, "Clothing and Fashion," pp.161-176.
• Georg Simmel, "The Philosophy of Fashion," "Adornment," "The Problem of Style," in Simmel on Culture, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. Part V, pp.187-217. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Veblen. Leisure Class. Chapters 8-14.

Exhibitions and World’s Fairs
Week Six

October 4:

• Lefebvre, Writings on Cities. Chapters 8-11, pp.104-132.

October 6: In-class screening: A World on Display, the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis

• Meg Armstrong, "'A Jumble of Foreignness': The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions" Cultural Critique No. 23 (Winter 1992-1993) pp.199-250.
• Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs. Introduction, pp.1-16; Chapter Three, "Search for Identity: Architecture of National Pavilions," pp.95-138.

Week Seven

October 11:

• Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History," Reviews in American History vol. 26, no. 1 (March 1998) pp.175-204.
• Paul Mason Fotsch, "The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World's Fair," Cultural Critique vol. 48, no. 1 (Spring 2001) pp.65-97.

Gender, Class, and the Exotic 'Other'

October 13:

• Corrigan, Sociology of Consumption. Chapter Five, "Advertising," pp.66-80; Chapter Six, "Women's Magazine's," pp.81-95.

Week Eight

October 18:

• William R. Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925" Journal of American History vol. 71, no. 2 (September 1984), pp.319-342.
• Erika D. Rappaport, "The Halls of Temptation: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London," Journal of British Studies vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1996), pp.58-83.
• Katharine Sykora, "Merchandise Temptress: The Surrealistic Enticements of the Display Window Dummy," in Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein eds., Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. pp.130-141.

October 20: PAPER TWO DUE

• Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving, Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, and 7, pp.3-62, 173-196. (on reserve at Olin Library)
• Mary McLeod, “Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity” in Architecture: In Fashion. pp.38-123.
• Leila W. Kinney, "Fashion and Fabrication in Modern Architecture," The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 58, no. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (September 1999), pp.472-481.

THE POSTWAR ERA
Week Nine

October 25:

• Shelley Nickles, "More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America," American Quarterly vol. 54, no. 4 (December 2002) pp.581-622.
• Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," The American Journal of Sociology vol. 44, no. 1 (July 1938) pp.1-24.

October 27:

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment. pp.94-136. (on reserve at Olin Library)

Suburbia, Surplus, and the Simple Life
Week Ten

November 1: In-class screening: Our Home (1954), In the Suburbs (1957), Shopping (1957)
SUBMIT PROPOSAL, ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, AND OUTLINE FOR FINAL PAPER

• Levittown, PA: Building the Suburban Dream (web exhibit, State Museum of Pennsylvania). http://server1.fandm.edu/levittown/default.html
• Herbert Gans, The Levittowners (excerpt)

November 3:

• Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas. (excerpt)
• Kenneth T. Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier (excerpt)

Week Eleven

November 8:

• Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. (excerpt)
• The Congress for the New Urbanism website: http://www.cnu.org/index.cfm

November 10:

• Marianne Conroy, "Discount Dreams: Factory Outlet Malls, Consumption, and the Performance of Middle-Class Identity," Social Text no, 54 (Spring 1998), pp.63-83.
• Paula Young Lee, "Modern Architecture and the Ideology of Influence," Assemblage no.34 (December 1997) pp.6-29.

It's a Disney World (Kind of)
Week Twelve

November 15:

• Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Introduction, Chapters 1-5, pp.1-107.
• Andy Warhol, "Underwear Power," in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
• Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," in Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park. pp.3-30.
• Michael Sorkin, "See You in Disneyland," in Sorkin, ed. Variations. pp.205-232.
• Chuihua Judy Chung, "Disney Space," in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. pp.270-297. (on reserve at Olin Library)

November 17:

• MacCannell, The Tourist. Chapters 6-9, Epilogue, pp.109-203.
• Edward W. Soja, "Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County," in Sorkin ed., Variations. pp.94-122.
• M. Christine Boyer, "Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport," in Sorkin, ed. Variations. pp.181-204.

Week Thirteen

November 22: SUBMIT FIRST DRAFT FOR FINAL PAPER

• Corrigan, Sociology of Consumption. Chapter Nine, "Tourism," pp.132-146.

November 24: Thanksgiving Holiday

Boutiques and Fashion Architectures
Week Fourteen

November 29:

• Malcolm Gladwell, "The Terrazzo Jungle: fifty years ago, the mall was born, America would never be the same," New Yorker 15 March 2004, pp.120-127.
• David Gilbert, "Urban Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture," in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson eds., pp.7-24.

December 1: In-Class Presentations

Week Fifteen

December 6: In-Class Presentations

December 8: In-Class Presentations

FINAL PAPER DUE TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2005.