The Arcade and the Atrium

This article analyses 'The Arcades Project' by Walter Benjamin and views its structure as anticipating the Internet. The text that we have, although written in the first half of the twentieth century, has, paradoxically, to be seen as a recently released cultural phenomenon that still needs to be absorbed by historians, literary critics, art critics, philosophers and sociologists: if the German edition did not appear till well into the twentieth century's second half, the book burst on the English-speaking world only as the century was in its death-throes. In the brief time of its existence so far, the English version, published by Harvard University Press, has been received with near-universal enthusiasm and admiration by readers and critics. What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments - restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. "Arcade" is the English name: in French the arcades are known as "passages", and in German as "Passagen". The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades' essence: "These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need".

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Watson 1 Joseph M. Watson The Culture of Glass [Arch 712-002/812-003] Professor Joan Ockman 3 May 2013 The Arcade and the Atrium Let us begin by describing a space. It is an interiorized public space on private property, disengaged entirely from the exterior life of the city, and lit only by a large, continuous skylight above. Its interior constitutes an entire universe. Since the streets outside are dangerous for pedestrians, this is at once a refuge and a city unto itself: a locus of social activity, the place to both see and be seen. Its vertical enclosure appears to be absolutely symmetrical, while its ceiling consists of nothing but glass and steel. Thanks, however, to the amount of visual stimuli, both people and things, the precise contours are a bit difficult to define, making the space itself at once invigorating and disorienting. An eclectic mix of people, mostly from the uppermiddle classes, in one way or another take part in the equally eclectic collection of activities: they populate the café tables, wander in and out of the retail boutiques, make their way up to the hotel rooms, or move about with no clear goal, simply taking part in (and being a part of) the spectacle. This could admittedly describe a number of spaces, but the particular combination of spatial and social phenomena specifically brings two to mind: the arcades of 19 century Paris th and the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in contemporary Los Angeles, especially as these are described in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism respectively. (Fig. 1 & 2) It seems rather strange that we could describe a spatial type that reached its apogee before the middle of the 19 century in the same th terms as one (re)invented in the latter half of the 20 , but beyond a cursory visual description th Watson 2 that brings to light interesting, but seemingly coincidental formal congruencies, there are further similarities which merit further investigation. The most important of them is that the architectural spaces described by each author function as indices of a particular moment in the development of capitalism. Benjamin begins The Arcades Project’s exposé with a quotation from an Illustrated Guide to Paris that describes the arcades as “a recent invention of industrial luxury,” their “glassroofed, marble-paneled corridors” lined with “the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature.” To which he immediately appends, “This passage is the locus classicus for the presentation of the arcades; for not only do the divigations on the flâneur and the weather develop out of it, but, also, what there is to be said about the construction of the arcades, in an economic and architectural vein, would have a place here.”1 Fifty years later and no longer in the socioeconomic context of “industrial luxury” but now a deindustrialized American cityscape which he describes as part of “the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself,” Jameson makes a strikingly similar observation, “I believe that, with a certain number of other characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris or the Eaton Center in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd.”2 Between these two quotations, it seems possible to immediately identify the question around which the following investigation is structured. What can these two spaces, their origins within specific urban conditions, and these two authors’ commentaries on them tell us about the complicated relationships among socio-economic transformation, subjective experience, and architectural production, in two different historical moments? Watson 3 This, however, necessarily begs a further question. What is the nature of the relationship between the arcade and the atrium, and, by extension, between modernism and postmodernism? Rather than a black-and-white distinction between High Modern and Postmodern practices (the context in which Jameson’s quote above situates the Bonaventure), the goal here will be to explore a more complex genealogy in which this new postmodern “hyperspace” appears less as a radically new conception, rather than as a modulation of existing formal and visual tropes that culminate in the production of a new type of disorienting environment. As we will see, the various incarnations of the modern–from 19 century Paris to early-20 centh th tury Manhattan to the mid-century proliferation of High Modernism–are all necessarily defined by their relationship to an unfinished process of modernization. Or, as Jameson puts it in a later text, “where modernity was a set of questions and answers that characterized a situation of incomplete or partial modernization, postmodernity is what obtains under a tendentially far more complete modernization,” which is exemplified by the industrialization of agriculture and the conflation of aesthetic and economic production into the culture industry.3 While the Portman atrium is a populist negation of a supposedly elitist High Modernism, it is also the absurd apotheosis of the tragically unrealized project of modernism that begins in the arcades. Although I rely heavily on Jameson and Benjamin, I do not intend the following to be primarily an investigation of two literary sources within which architecture plays a role. Together Benjamin’s fragmentary collection of material on the arcades and Jameson’s brief but provocative description of the Bonaventure will provide one means by which to access those spaces. But neither will what follows will be a comparative analysis of two distinct architectural objects (especially since the radical disjunction between interior and exterior in both cases would seem to preclude consideration of either as a singular object). Instead, it will be Watson 4 an investigation of two separate incarnations of a spatial phenomenon that are related by their similar situation at the intersection of numerous discourses, which include architecture, but also economics, politics, material culture, and subjectivity. While acknowledging architecture’s inevitable complicity with the market–it is after all “the closest constitutively to the economic” of all the arts as Jameson puts it,4 I also want to claim a relative autonomy for architecture from other modes of cultural production and to affirm (to paraphrase Manfredo Tafuri) that it neither is nor can be the perfect mirror image of ideology.5 The striking similarities as well as the distinct differences between the arcade and the atrium should provide an interesting lens through which to both explore and challenge received understandings of modern and postmodern space and the relationship between architecture and its socio-cultural context. Benjamin and Jameson’s common interests and collective concerns While attempting to trace a lineage from the Parisian arcades to the Portman atrium might be a novel undertaking, the connection between Benjamin and Jameson is less so. Benjamin has exerted a profound influence on Jameson’s thought, an influence which Cornel West attributes, at least in part, to Jameson’s attraction to “Benjamin’s conception of nostalgic utopianism as a revolutionary stimulus … which sustains hope and generates praxis in the present moment of the historical process.”6 Delving into the particulars of this intellectual relationship is well beyond the scope of the present study, but in West’s observation, we can find one of the key threads that, for our purposes, will tie these two thinkers together. Both are concerned above all with the necessity to think critically the relationship between history and the present, a necessity that remains consistent and retains its relevance despite their different historical circumstances. Both rely on a similar interpretation of Marxian historical ma- Watson 5 terialism, especially the dialectical understanding of history as both catastrophe and progress. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto explains that the revolutions which brought the bourgeoisie to power overturned feudal social relations, but also created a subjugated and disenfranchised working class which now threatens to turn “the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground … against the bourgeoisie itself.”7 Uncritical celebration and absolute condemnation are both incapable of capturing capitalism’s historic development and the possibilities which might change its course. If Marx begins to demonstrate the connection between the economy and culture, Benjamin takes it upon himself to express “the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and, accordingly, in the nineteenth century.”8 Benjamin attempts to do so by creating an image “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation,” what he terms “dialectics at a standstill.”9 The intention is that the collision of the past with the present will arrest the bourgeois notion of progress, causing his contemporaries to awake from the dreamworld of 19 century bourgeois th life. These concerns, which constitute the methodological centerpiece of The Arcades Project, arose initially out of Benjamin’s desire to come to terms with the relationship between his own childhood memories and collective history, or, in Susan Buck-Morss’ words, “with how public space, the city of Berlin, had entered into his unconscious and, for all his protected, bourgeois upbringing, held sway over his imagination.”10 While his earliest notes betray a more personal tone, when he returned to the Arcades in 1934 (after a suicide attempt in 1932 and his relocation to Paris in order to escape Berlin’s increasingly dire political situation) his work became more scientific, sociological.11 His primary concern is to reveal how “the new forms of behav- Watson 6 ior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria.”12 In other words, to demythologize bourgeois conceptions of history–both the forward-looking teleologies that fetishize the notion of inevitable progress and the backward-looking “wish images” that seek a classless society in some distant, pre-historical past. Although numerous phenomena weave in and out, the arcades are the centerpieces of this effort because they embody in physical form the delusions and dreams of the 19 century. th The centrality of the arcades probably grew out of Benjamin’s conversations with his friend Franz Hessel, but was influenced to a greater degree by his readings of Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris.13 The arcades, and the Passage de l’Opera in particular, reveal the reality of the bourgeois world to be nothing more than a modern mythology, and Aragon feels compelled to document its inhabitants before they disappear beneath “the great American instinct, imported to our capital by a Second Empire prefect, [which] has ruled the map of Paris into rectangles.”14 Aragon’s surrealist study of these “human aquaria,” which are permeated by the “modern light of the weird,” documents not only the establishments, but also the people that populate “this labyrinth of desire”: Aragon’s arcade is lined by the bookstore, brothel, cafés, gunsmith, milliner, a “combination orthopedist-truss manufacturer,” and Gelis-Gaubert’s famous barbershop. The “ugly and fatuous girls,” the “Gentleman who exhibits his dreary Subconscious and all the unexalted woes of his lamentable existence,” the “[a]ctresses from the Théâtre Moderne, their lovers, pets, and children,” the “flabby, disagreeable old man … playing … with a hoop,” as well as those either wishing to procure or those willing to provide more illicit services all play their roles.15 Benjamin’s interest in and understanding of the arcades is deeply indebted to Aragon, but with one important caveat. In his own words, “Whereas Aragon persists within the realm Watson 7 of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. […] here it is a question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history.”16 While Aragon might have been content to remain within the dreamworld of the arcade, suggesting that oneirique simply be added to the Passage de l’Opera’s street sign, Benjamin concerned himself above all with awakening. As the subheadings of the exposé indicate (Fourier, or the Arcades; Daguerre, or the Panoramas; Grandville, or the World Exhibitions; Louis Philippe, or the Interior; Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris; Hausmann, or the Barricades) Benjamin uses the dialectical nature of the arcades–it is at once a locus of commodity fetishism, of the bourgeois obsession with the interior, and the precedent for utopian projects like Fourier’s Phalanstery–to tease out the dialectic of the 19 century itself, namely how it could have produced both catastrophe th and progress, phantasmagoric delusions and utopian aspirations, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Jameson’s interest in Portman’s atrium is, like Benjamin’s in the arcades, the product of both personal experience and collective concern. He credits architectural debates with forming his understanding of postmodernism.17 His first foray into architecture came in the form a lecture delivered at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in 1982, published in 1985 as “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.”18 The essay offers a nuanced reading of Manfredo Tafuri’s methodology, which Jameson situates within a broader intellectual context and terms “dialectical historiography.” By putting Tafuri in dialogue with contemporary Marxist thinkers (namely, Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes), Jameson accounts for the architectural historian’s apparent pessimism and “end-of-history” worldview. Tafuri’s totalizing system is, in Jameson’s reading, an ideological necessity that risks failing in its ability to allow for change through the success of its paralyzing totality: since any positive social contribution architecture might be able to make is predicated on a total social revolu- Watson 8 tion, there is little hope for architecture to do so if the possibility of even imagining the revolution is diminished.19 This theme–the existence of a totality and the possibility of thinking one’s position within it–returns in the “Postmodernism” essay, but here his focus (insofar as architecture is concerned) has shifted from textual analysis to the study of a specific space, the aforementioned Bonaventure Hotel. But a rather simple question presents itself: why of all available contemporary works does he choose the Bonaventure? He admits that while it is populist and popular, it is not typical of what has come to be known as postmodern architecture. He mentions in passing Rogers and Piano’s Pompidou Centre, which would seem to be worthy of consideration. It opened the same year (1977) as the Bonaventure, but its conception predates it by at least five. Moreover, Jean Baudrillard’s exhilarating critique of the project published in 1977 (1982 in English) describes a “monument to mass simulation effects” which threatens to devour all culture by inviting the masses to initiate its “implosion.”20 Perhaps the Parisian masses rushing to partake in the “immense work of mourning for a culture they have always detested” betrays the “Beaubourg effect” as a specifically French phenomenon. But, why not critique one of Portman’s earlier designs, which each in its own way, provides just as much insight into the “cultural logic of late-capitalism”? The answer seems to lie in Jameson’s personal experience of the Bonaventure’s disorienting atrium. In 1984, Jameson, along with Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, visited the hotel together as part of a tour of downtown Los Angeles.21 Soja also recounts Jameson’s experience participating in a professional conference during which the participants frequently found themselves lost in the Bonaventure’s interior.22 Since the trip with Soja and Lefebvre seems too late to account for the original appearance of the “Postmodernism” essay also in 1984, this is likely the one to have introduced him to the space. Nevertheless, in Jameson’s Watson 9 “close reading” of the space, the immediacy of his personal encounter with the Bonaventure is clearly evident, but it is also extrapolated into a collective problem. The confusion that the space induces indicates that “we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution [of the built space]; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject.”23 This results in a rather overwhelming and disorienting experience for which our senses, still conditioned by older modes of perception, are not quite equipped. The problems posed by this disconnect between subject and object will not be resolved by either moralizing judgments or apocalyptic predictions. Like Benjamin’s “[a]ttempt to see the nineteenth century … positively” as a means by which to overcome the twin fallacies of “progress” and “periods of decline,”24 the advent of postmodernity as a new historical condition–and not simply one among other styles to choose from–requires “a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.”25 Just as Benjamin finds within the dream images of 19 century Paris and its bourgeois delusions the possibilities for awakening, th Jameson finds in the disorienting atrium of the Bonaventure not only a microcosm of the “logic of late capitalism,” but more importantly the imperative to create new “cognitive maps,” new ways of locating ourselves within the terrain of global capitalism. The origins of the arcades The entirety of Benjamin’s excerpt, quoted in part above, as it appears not in the exposé, but in the Convolute concerning "Arcades, Magasins de Neauveautés, Sales Clerks," essentially contains or alludes to everything we will need to know. Watson 10 "In speaking of the inner boulevards," says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1822, "we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature []Flâneur[], in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade–one from which the merchants also benefit.” []Weather[]26 The arcades (in French and German, Passages or Passagen, respectively) emerge as a specific type of retail environment contingent on the condition of both the city streets and the organization of industrialized capitalism in early 19 century Paris. th Johann Friedrich Geist, in his exhaustive historical survey of the arcades, observes that with no public entity to regulate the real estate market, the city became divided into industrial, commercial, and residential districts, the latter further differentiated along class lines.27 Private initiative and laissez-faire economics meant that profit-motive and speculation were the only considerations in the construction of residential buildings. In the aftermath of the Revolution, large plots of cheap land assembled from recently expropriated property formerly belonging to either the church or the nobility became available. Conversely, multiple property owners on the same block looked for solutions to collectively raise the value of their land by pooling their resources.28 In both cases, the arcades offered a novel way to solve a number of problems. They created public open spaces in the form of shop-lined pedestrian thoroughfares, connected one street to another in such a way that it was both undisturbed by vehicular traffic, and invented a previously untapped source of revenue for the owners. The Parisian streets were poorly paved, there were no sewers to speak of, and sidewalks were essentially nonexistent. (Fig. 3) Moving about the city was therefore not only a dirty, Watson 11 but also a potentially dangerous undertaking. According to Benjamin, “Until 1870, the carriage ruled the streets. On the narrow sidewalks the pedestrian was extremely cramped, and so strolling took place principally in the arcades, which offered protection from bad weather and from the traffic.”29 Geist observes that while sidewalks did exist on certain “exclusive streets” throughout Paris, there was no systematic network developed until nearly the middle of the 19 century. Prior to that, the sidewalks that did exist were exceedingly narrow and th constantly interrupted by driveways and uneven pavement, which meant that “they were nothing more than unconnected, protruding limestone curbs, serving to hold off carts.”30 Given the unpleasantness of navigating the streets, the construction of a series of enclosed spaces–paved and accessible exclusively to pedestrians–was greeted with enthusiasm by both the pedestrians themselves, but also shopkeepers, since the arcades not only allowed, but encouraged a more leisurely pace. It is this urban condition out of which the arcades arise. And, while they bear certain formal or programmatic resemblances to similar typologies–from Eastern bazaars to the colonnaded streets of Imperial Rome and Renaissance Florence to the markets of medieval Germany to the 17 London Exchanges to the near contemporary Parisian fairs and magasins de th nouveautés to the later department stores, exhibition buildings, and conservatories–it is their unique combination of spatial and organizational characteristics that distinguish the arcade from both earlier and later developments. Spatially, an arcade is a skylit corridor which provides access to and passage through the interior of a city block, is lined by two symmetrical elevations made up of a variety of retail shops, and provides a public space on private property.31 Organizationally, an arcade is a collection of individual, rentable retail shops (a type somewhere between the older medieval markets controlled by the guilds and the roughly concurrent department stores in which a similar variety of goods are sold in one building under Watson 12 one management), in which a specialization in luxury items is common. According to Geist, as technological development caused the overproduction of luxury goods, the arcades offered producers both "a supply of goods in department-store variety and a supply of public space for undisturbed promenading, window shopping, and display of merchandise.”32 The architecture develops in parallel with the newly empowered bourgeoisie. The arcade makes its prototypical appearance with the construction of the Galeries de Bois at the Palais Royal.33 (Fig. 4) Money ran out during the palace’s reconstruction, and in place of the planned colonnade to connect the palace itself with the new galleries an impromptu wooden building was built between 1786 and 1788. In order to bolster his faltering wealth, the Duc d’Orleans’ palace offered “an economically self-sufficient world, with its endless galleries, gardens, courtyards, avenues, fountains, cafés, theaters, gambling salons, clubs, brothels, shops, and apartments (rented by the Duke as a source of income for the maintenance of the palace). The Palais Royal was the first public urban space removed from the disturbances of traffic. It served as a site of political agitation, a promenade, luxury market, and place of learning and entertainment. It was, in short, a model of the arcade.”34 This eclectic list of programs, activities, and people recalls the bizarre cast of characters that Aragon describes in his account of the Passage de l'Opera, but lurking amongst them must also be the figure who occupies Benjamin's arcades. The fleeting figure of the flâneur The flâneur is a figure whose existence is both created in and threatened by the modern city. The metropolis does not control him, but neither is he entirely comfortable within it. As Benjamin relates, the flâneur lives “on the threshold–of the metropolis as of the middle class.”35 On the one hand, his lifestyle is an affront to the increasing speed and congestion of Watson 13 the urban environment: “His nonchalance would therefore be nothing other than an unconscious protest against the tempo of the production process.”36 Tortoises apparently became a fashionable accessory around 1840 and Benjamin “can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards.”37 On the other hand, as that observation no doubt indicates, the flâneur's ability to float through the aquatic dreamworld of the arcades, is not only impossible to maintain on the crowded, fast-paced city streets and thus confined to the arcades, but requires a certain privilege. “There was the pedestrian who would let himself be jostled by the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of a gentleman of leisure. Let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place.”38 The poet Charles Baudelaire evokes the flâneur not only in his works but in his person as well. He enters the marketplace by necessity to sell his poetry, but is not entirely beholden to its machinations. Baudelaire and the flâneur provide a model for Benjamin and his contemporary class of intellectuals who “study” amongst the crowd rather than in the confines of the academy. Capable of straddling the social division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the crowd is that which provides the context from which the flâneur emerged. When Benjamin saw critical potential in the flâneur’s activities, the crowd was the collective–a restless revolutionary mass that harbors the proletariat–but as his hope faltered, it became clear that “the ‘crowd’ is a veil hiding the ‘masses’”–a quite different group that “beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria” and foreshadows, in one permutation the National Socialists’ Volksgemeinschaft.39 The flâneur was only able to resist the pace of the metropolis for so long, since he was, in fact, “already out of place.” Moreover, his “way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nim- Watson 14 bus the coming desolation of the big city dweller.”40 The characteristics of the flâneur already evince to some degree those of George Simmel’s “blasé outlook,” but the indifference, impersonality, rationality, and anaestheticization characteristic of this attitude will only become more pronounced.41 The consumer culture with which he flirts will also overcome the flâneur, transforming his life of leisure into a commodity. His lifestyle becomes co-opted by the department store, to which we will turn momentarily, “which makes use of flânerie itself to sell goods” and is his “last promenade.”42 Benjamin’s one-time hope in the flâneur becomes by the end of the 1930s a warning to his fellow intellectuals, who might be likewise tempted by the market’s temptations. The advent of iron construction The Galeries de Bois was far from luxurious, but in it the arcade’s essential elements were already in place. The wooden structure was infilled in plaster-covered planks and canvas, and the floor was simply packed earth, which turned to mud when the crude glass-andwood roof did little in the way of keeping out rain. It was demolished in 1828 to make way for the much grander Galerie d’Orleans. (Fig. 5) The course of the 19 century would see the th transformation of this simple wooden framework into a more elaborate iron construction become a universal phenomenon. It seems logical then that this development, the advent of iron construction, is what Benjamin identifies as the second condition, after “the boom in the textile trade,” of the arcades' emergence.43 Though the more mature use of glass and steel might by his own generation reveal the path to a “new barbarism” capable of shedding the trappings of the bourgeois lifestyle, it comes “too early” in the arcades, “Glass before its time, premature iron.”44 Architects and builders of the 19 century do not fully understand the potential that these new materials th Watson 15 offer, making the arcades both anachronistic and anticipatory, both pieces of the past and visions of the future. This confusing coexistence of the old with the new is not only architecture’s problem; it has its analogues in psychology and the economy. In the exposé, Benjamin offers an explanation which is worth quoting at length. Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated by the old. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks to both overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated–which includes, however, the recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history [Urgeschichte]–that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society–as stored in the unconscious of the collective–engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions.45 Architecturally, the Jugendstil is one such “wish image.” In its desire to reconcile the old with the new, it reveals the mutual opposition between nature and technology by re-presenting the “new nature” of the machine as vegetal ornamentation.46 Benjamin also cites the mid-19 centh tury architectural theorist Karl Bötticher's writings as indicative of this desire to, quite literally in Bötticher's case, dress the new in the old. In his famous lecture of 1846, Bötticher elaborates a theory of architectural styles, specifically the trabeated Hellenic and the arcuated German (Gothic), that differentiates between the core-form [Kernform], or “the structural principle and material conditions” on which each style is based, and the art-form [Kunstform] which re-presents and reveals the structure.47 His primary motive is to develop a theoretical means by which to combine the two styles, appropriating the core-form of the Gothic and the art-form of the Greek, in order to respond to the Watson 16 demands that the new material iron has made upon architecture. He goes further into “primal history” in a later work in which he mines ancient literary sources in order to demonstrate that architecture originates in the cultic practices of the ancient Greeks and that, in fact, “tree were the first temples.”48 Benjamin critiques Bötticher’s style-structure dilemma by way of a political analogy: architects’ failure to grasp “the functional nature of iron” leads the “constructive principle” to dominate architecture is the same way that Napoleon “failed to understand the functional nature of the state as an instrument of domination by the bourgeois class.”49 Architecture’s grasping at stylistic straws is indicative of the increasing gap between art and technology, between decoration and structure, and the consequently increased influence of the engineer. Viewed in this light, the arcades themselves, in the disjunction between their symmetrical classicizing façades and glazed roof, are the architectural embodiment of Benjamin's “wish image.” (Fig. 6) This coexistence thus lends to the arcades a unique position historically and typologically. Beyond the physical pedestrian passage they provide from one street to another, they also exist somewhere between the 18 century palace galleries (which connects one part th of the building to another) and the nascent 19 century railway stations (which connects one th city to another), department stores (which connect consumers more efficiently with commodities), and exhibition buildings (which connect the masses to the world market).50 Transformations in technology, scale, and type The arcade’s existence at a moment of transition affords them the opportunity to be the testing ground for various forms of social, commercial, and technological experimentation. It also ensures that they will be quickly eclipsed by more efficient ways of moving both people and merchandise. As Siegfried Kracauer recalls, the Linden Arcade (or, Kaisergalerie) in Ber- Watson 17 lin housed all of those “transient objects,” which the marketplace was incapable of completely destroying and so instead “exiled into the deep inner recesses, the Siberias of the arcade.”51 (Fig. 7) The curious assortment of merchandise and other attractions gathered together under the gaslight, “which illuminated the interior in the form of red and yellow roses,” gave to the arcade its critical power. Assuming here the critical edge of Benjamin’s dialectical “wish image,” “the arcade criticized the bourgeois world through the bourgeois world,” by displaying those very things that it tried in vain to sweep away. This critical capacity was lost, however, when the Linden Arcade was made over in 1928 with “cold, flat sheets of marble,” a new glass roof, and electric light, thus putting an end to the space’s existence as an arcade as such; the “twilight of the thoroughfare” now appeared more like “the vestibule of a department store.”52 (Fig. 8) Sigfried Giedion has a slightly different take on the arcade’s transitory existence. The only arcade he mentions is the aforementioned Galerie d’Orleans in the Palais-Royal, which in 1829 replaced the provisional wooden arcade on the same site. Its significance, along with other “first attempts” at iron roof constructions, lies not in the complex sociocultural environment that fascinate both Benjamin and Kracauer, but in its anticipation of further technological developments that result in iron construction’s “first formations,” such as market halls, railway stations, department stores, and exhibition buildings.53 Any number of these might occupy our attention, but the latter two, which Benjamin describes respectively as “temples consecrated to [Baudelaire’s religious] intoxication [of great cities,]” and the “places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish,” provide the most provocative link between the previous discussion of the arcade and what follows.54 In the exposé Benjamin describes the fascination of the World Exhibitions. They “glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value re- Watson 18 cedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity.”55 An essential part of this phantasmagoric environment is no doubt the massive iron and glass frameworks that house the overwhelming visual spectacle of art and industry, business and pleasure, and that, after 1851, make the history of exhibitions inseparable from the history of iron construction.56 Joseph Paxton’s impressive Crystal Palace for London’s Great Exhibition of that year is not only a watershed in construction techniques, inaugurating an era of increasingly sophisticated design that would culminate in the Galerie des Machines in Paris in 1889, but creates a bewildering space that contemporary visitors described in terms that foreshadow Jameson’s experience in the Bonaventure by almost a century-and-a-half. (Fig. 9) One visitor in particular, a certain Lothar Bucher, quickly realized that in the absence of solid walls, “the standards by which architecture had hitherto been judged no longer held good.”57 The ephemeral building gives no perceptual clues with which to gauge its dimensions. Instead, “the eye sweeps along an unending perspective which fades into the horizon;” its scale is impossible to grasp, since “there is no play of shadows to enable our optic nerves to gauge the measurements; and, while the increased illumination and density of “blue-painted lattice girders” at the transept might initially seem to offer a means by which to orient oneself, instead they “dissolve into a distant background where all materiality is blended into the atmosphere.”58 This experience is symptomatic of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch identifies as a “reorganization of space” brought about by the industrial revolution.59 Bucher’s inability to evaluate the new glass architecture in terms of traditional masonry architecture finds a correlate in a similar relationship between rail travel and preindustrial modes of transportation. The visual dissolution of space is, as Schivelbusch explains, the result Watson 19 of the dissociation of light and space from “the rules of the natural world in which they had hitherto manifested themselves.”60 The same applies to the speed of rail travel which, though not powered by horses, is still measured in those organic terms. “The intention to give rise to a vision of the human cosmos in a new state of movement,” that Giedion observes of these exhibitions, outpaces human perception.61 The development of the department store, though not quite as disorienting, nevertheless results in its own sort of spectacle. Giedion claims that it “had no models available from the past,”62 but this is not entirely accurate. It shares a similar lineage with the arcade, and as Benjamin observes, “The first department stores appear to be modeled on oriental bazaars.”63 Geist develops a more complex origin, noting that the department store like the arcade is the product of a particular moment in the development of 19 century culture and capitalism: both are part of a lineage of experith ments in perfecting methods of moving merchandise between producers and consumers. The arcade flourishes at a moment in the early 19 century when the trade in luxury goods cointh cided with the need for pedestrian friendly public space to attract a certain (wealthy) clientele; the department store is the result of an effort in the latter half of the century to attract a more diverse clientele by consolidating the different shops under a single management, allowing for a greater variety of goods with higher turnover and lower prices. Or, in Benjamin’s laconic description, “the customers perceive themselves as a mass; they are confronted with an assortment of goods; they take in all the floors at a glance; they pay fixed prices; they can make exchanges.”64 The designers of these spaces were, according to Giedion, required to achieve the “Greatest possible freedom for circulation, clear layout, greatest possible influx of light.”65 Needless to say, the capabilities of both the glass and iron industries have advanced since the crude, leaky skylights of the early arcades. The structure and glazing now allow for wider Watson 20 spans and thinner columns and, in turn, more light, freer circulation, clearer layout, and more display space. The result of which is that the solid walls that once lined the linear arcades give way to iron column framed galleries and grand stairwells suspended in a multidirectional space. (Fig. 10) As Geist relates, “Capitalism has mastered its methods by which buying is converted in the consciousness of the public into a festival.”66 The spectacular qualities of the space are specifically crafted to encourage consumption. The shopping experience is further enhanced by the invention of new technological devices beyond the glass and steel structure with which Giedion is preoccupied. Once the possibilities of iron and plate-glass have been (for the time being) exhausted, the question of how to further maximize space and free circulation turns to experimentation with the means of conveyance themselves. Originally patented in the 1850s, the escalator becomes by the turn of the century the preferred way to transport consumers to the merchandise.67 Marketed as a symbol of technological progress and efficiency, it supplants both the grand staircase that traditionally occupied the department store's sky lit central gallery and the elevator. According to the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, the elevator is deemed to be overly efficient and limited in its capacity–one mid-20 century advertisement alerts management that “The elevath tor is ideal for the ‘man with a mission.’ … Escalators encourage impulse buying”–while the stair is now “seen as an impediment to the fluid upward movement of shoppers.”68 The department store and its escalator transform the perambulations of the flâneur into a more passive type of circulation that leads to more predictable types of consumption. It eventually becomes clear that this mechanical device is a much more effective means of enticing shoppers to goods on the upper levels than the previously conceived architectural extravagances. In addition to the increasingly homogenous spaces that result, the proliferation of the escalator, “in alliance with air conditioning and artificial lighting, allows the interior to Watson 21 become increasingly isolated from the exterior, with increasing depth and with increasing levels of control.”69 The Bon Marché’s sky lit grand stair and surrounding iron-filigree galleries give way to more controlled and more standardized environments. Manhattan’s culture of congestion and cathedrals of commerce One final stop on the way to the atrium is the site of yet another development of “religious intoxication” enabled by another means of mechanical conveyance, namely the “cathedrals of commerce” of Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York. While the escalator provides a seamless shopping experience, the elevator is the necessary precondition for the infinite vertical multiplication of the site, “Since the 1870s in Manhattan, the elevator has been the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor.”70 In the increasing artificiality of the congested city, the elevator as it climbs further from the street also provides access to the last vestiges of nature (light and air). Manhattan and its infamous grid in general, but the skyscraper in particular are, in Koolhaas’s account, the product of irrational fantasies realized through the most rational processes. The elevator, along with the fantastic technological experiments that take place on Coney Island (and get imported to Manhattan under the guise of pragmatism), enables the skyscraper to take its eventual form by means of two related dissociations: one, between the interior and exterior, which results in “the architectural equivalent of a lobotomy;” and, the other, between the different programmatic elements that are stacked on top of each other within the skyscraper’s autonomous container, which results in a “vertical schism.”71 The result of all of this is the nearly limitless possibility to arbitrarily arrange programs on the interior with no obligation to “honestly” represent them on the exterior. The only limit to archi- Watson 22 tects’ and developers’ imaginations are the footprint allowed by the grid and the envelope allowed by the 1916 Zoning Law. After a number of unrealized, unrealizable, or piecemeal attempts, Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building of 1913 finally succeeds in giving this logic built form. While Koolhaas laments that it contributed nothing groundbreaking functionally–it contains only offices–its mere presence was enough for a contemporary critic to dub it “The Cathedral of Commerce.”72 A number of noteworthy projects, such as the Downtown Athletic Club, contribute more interesting and schismatic interior arrangements, but the logic of Manhattanism reaches its apotheosis at Rockefeller Center, the “masterpiece without a genius.”73 The product of an “eagerly consummated … forced marriage between capital and art,”74 Rockefeller Center resolves the seemingly impossible request to maximize both congestion and light and space. (Fig. 11) We will have occasion to comment on Rockefeller Center again, but a speculative project by a member of its design committee is more relevant to our immediate concerns. Raymond Hood designed numerous theoretical projects that were essentially different attempts solve the same problem, that of congestion. Assuming the grid and continued population growth to be necessary preconditions, the “City Under a Single Roof” of 1931 is, according to Koolhaas, actually presented as the answer to the condition it is determined to exacerbate.”75 (Fig. 12) Working with the premise that “concentration in a metropolitan area … is a desirable condition,” Hood creates a massive three-block complex that contains stores, theaters, and clubs on the lower levels, an entire industry and its related businesses in the middle, and workers’ housing on the uppermost floors.76 Elevators and stairs are the only elements that touch the ground. By arranging the various functions vertically within the same building, workers virtually never need to leave; by displacing the horizontal movement of pedestrians Watson 23 across the city into vertical circulation within the same building, Hood’s scheme alleviates the congestion of the city by further congesting its architecture. The origins of the atrium The atrium supposedly emerged fully formed in the mind of its creator, the Atlantabased architect and developer John C. Portman. The Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, built by Portman between 1963 and 1967, is typically offered as the project that “introduced the atrium design concept to the contemporary hotel.”77 This assertion, though technically true, requires some clarification, the process of which will complicate Portman’s claim to originality by tying in and tying together the multifarious elements of the foregoing discussion. Portman’s career began rather conventionally. After graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology, he worked for a number of local architects just long enough to gain licensure before opening his own firm. He quickly grew tired of working on the small, piecemeal commissions that trickled into the office and decided to explore the possibilities of real estate development. His first attempt–a speculative medical office building that left him in debt–was a failure. Rather than deterring him, however, the experience merely convinced Portman that he needed to be in control of every aspect of design and development from conception through construction. His first successful venture was the conversion of an old garage into the Atlanta Merchandise Mart in 1960. This project proved to be only the first in what would eventually become the Peachtree Center, which was by its completion in 1986 a massive, multi-block complex of offices, restaurants, retail, hotels, a theater, and parking, with the aforementioned Hyatt Regency as its centerpiece. (Fig. 13) Koolhaas, in his provocative essay on Atlanta, describes the process by which the Peachtree Center came to be, Watson 24 Portman started with one block, made money, and developed the next block, a cycle that then triggered Atlanta’s rebirth. But the new Atlanta was a virgin rebirth: a city of clones. It was not enough for Portman to fill block after block with his own architecture (usually without very interesting programs), but as further consolidation, he connected each of his buildings to each of his other buildings with bridges, forming an elaborate spiderweb of skywalks with himself at the center. Once you ventured into the system, there was almost no incentive to visit the rest of downtown, no way to escape.78 The network of sky bridges that connect the different parts of the Peachtree Center to one another, repeated in almost all of Portman’s projects, would seem to function like the Parisian arcades, at least in their capacity as pedestrian thoroughfares. Perhaps even more so, it recalls Harvey Willis Corbett’s elevated network of pedestrian arcades that traverses Manhattancum-Venice’s grid-cum-archipelago, first conceived in 1923. Both provide an alternative means by which to navigate the city and avoid the dangerous congestion of the streets. In reality, however, they are the first in what we will see are a number of reversals in which Portman’s architecture absorbs and hollows out different forms of modernist logic and returns them devoid of their previous content. Portman’s bridges do indeed provide a refuge from traffic and inclement weather, but unlike the inclusive nature of the Parisian arcades (their function after all being to invite passersby in to at least linger and window shop) or the bridges of Corbett’s “very modernized Venice” which are at least ostensibly a solution to congestion, the skywalks (and the atrium to which they lead) are above all exclusive, pretending to solve no other problem than that of providing safe passage for corporate tenants and hotel guests while ensuring that “others” (read non-white, non-wealthy) are kept out. Portman, for his part, performs some rather impressive logistical gymnastics in order to both deny and affirm this assessment. On the one hand, when elaborating his design philosophy, he insists that his primary concern is what people need and how they will interact with Watson 25 his spaces, “What I wanted to do as an architect was to create buildings and environments that really are for people, not a particular class of people but all people.”79 When, however, it comes to the specifics of the different locations in which he works, a certain degree of exclusion is justified as a circumstantial necessity. He insists, for instance, that the design of his seemingly impenetrable and isolated Renaissance Center in Detroit of 1976 is defensible since “in Detroit there had already been one insurrection in an earlier attempt to burn the city.”80 (Fig. 17) Likewise, “simple observation” will demonstrate that, given the lack of street life and the mute corporate monoliths that surround the Bonaventure's Bunker Hill site, he had no other option than to create a fortress-like ensemble, “What was I supposed to do–create a whole new environment in one stroke with one isolated building where there are streets void of pedestrians?”81 Ironically, this is precisely what he does. In this context, Jameson's description of the Bonaventure's relationship to downtown Los Angeles is as relevant to that project specifically as it is to Portman's projects in Detroit, San Francisco, Atlanta, and elsewhere. (Fig. 19) The projects' suppressed entrances and mute exterior form (whether mirrored glass or precast concrete, since both achieve similar ends) are indicative of an antagonism toward the city as it exists and an accompanying desire to completely detach from it. Here then is another reversal, but not so much from the logic of the arcades, which maintain a rather disinterested relationship to the city (except insofar as their unregulated existence depends on the city’s laissez-faire attitude towards them), as from the idealism of High Modernism. Projects such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation–physically separated from the existing urban fabric by pilotis and offering its own city-like program of housing, shopping, childcare, fitness, and so on–or Mies van der Rohe’s competition projects for Friedrichstraße and Alexanderplatz in Berlin–which insert a radically different formal logic into the existing fab- Watson 26 ric, clearly evident in the contrast between the new glass surfaces and the dingy surroundings in the Friedrichstraße skyscrapers’ renderings, but also in the standardized ferrovitreous volumes marching ad infinitum away from Alexanderplatz–define themselves as other from the existing fabric, using their utopian rhetoric to repudiate and therefore ultimately to transform the surrounding urban fabric. Portman’s approach maintains no such pretensions. His projects attempt no transformation of the broken city, but simply propose to take its place: having brought into being their own internal world, they are, according to Jameson, “content to ‘let the fallen city fabric continue to be in its being’ (to parody Heidegger).”82 We thus have one aspect of the urban and ideological context for the atrium, indifferent exclusion, but we can go further. Portman claims that he conceived of the atrium as a way to explode the dense, cell-like nature of most urban buildings, “to open things up and pull them apart. What the central city really needed more than anything else was public space, urban lungs, inside and out.”83 But this desire to alleviate urban density sounds a bit dubious considering that all of his interventions from the early-1960s to the late-1970s took place in cities devastated and depopulated by deindustrialization, economic crises, racial tension, and white flight to the suburbs. Images of the early design stages reveal a rather conventional block of hotel rooms atop a podium which contains public amenities. (Fig. 16) In other words, this initial incarnation seems rather typical of the slab buildings that Portman accuses of contributing to the overly dense and congested nature of the mid-century American downtown.84 So, while Koolhaas too locates the Hyatt as the site where Portman “(re)invented the atrium,” the prototype(s) actually lie in two projects also completed in the mid-1960s. On the one hand is the architect’s own home, known as Entelechy I and designed between 1961 and 1964, in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta. (Fig. 14) The house served as a testing ground for Portman’s spatial and organizational concepts, an opportunity to, in his own words, “face Watson 27 himself and probe the essence of architecture.”85 Portman is fond of citing his experience at the opening ceremonies of Brasilia in 1960 as a profoundly negative experience due to the "inhumanity" of the place–"Nothing but great blocks of buildings arranged in military order"86– and his house provided one of his first opportunities to craft an alternative. Observing that human beings innately require order because it “creates a sense of comfort and well-being,” but that the strict imposition of order with no allowance for variety (which the mind also craves, but which was purportedly absent in Brasilia), Portman concludes that the solution is "an order strong enough to permit variety and informality without losing the integrity that creates a harmonious environment: order and variety simultaneously achieved."87 The architectural result of these musings is an array of 8-foot diameter columns which contain auxiliary spaces and vertical circulation; they also integrate structure, lighting, and ventilation. This allows for a Louis Kahn-esque division of major and minor spaces, the latter allowing the former to flow freely into one another, creating a variety of functional arrangements and experiences. On the other hand, and on the other side of Atlanta, Portman was working on a commission for low-income housing for the elderly, known as the Antoine Graves Houses after a prominent late-19 century realtor and educator. (Fig. 15) Intent on finding a solution that th would “enhance people’s lives and not just put them away in a filing cabinet,”88 Portman’s scheme consists of two interior courtyards around which the small apartments are arranged. Balcony-corridors provide access on each level, allow for cross ventilation, and create a sense of community. The atria also provide sheltered interior spaces which could be used by the community. These possibilities for social interaction, combined with the relative economy of construction convinced Portman to transpose the idea into his hotel. Watson 28 There seems to be a (perhaps not so) subtle ideological shift, however, between the housing project’s altruistic scheme and its reiteration in the hotel. While Portman retains the humanist rhetoric of creating a shared communal space, it very apparently becomes just one part of justifying the atrium as a novel way to distinguish the hotel from others in the same market: “if you were going to build another hotel in downtown Atlanta, it shouldn’t be an ordinary building. When people come to Atlanta, we wanted them to try to get into our hotel first; its uniqueness would be its competitive advantage.”89 The most important lesson learned from the earlier project is not the human aspect, but that by working within the constrained budget of a public commission he found a way to convince his fellow investors that using a minimum of relatively cheap materials in combination with conventional construction methods would offset the costs of creating the grand central space. This indicates that between these two prototypes, we can draw two preliminary conclusions about the atrium’s (re)invention. First, it was not a solution to the unique problems of the city center. While Portman claims (echoing similar claims by Koolhaas’s delirious Manhattanites) that the atrium was conceived as a means by which to alleviate the density and congestion of the inner city by introducing an interiorized public space. It might be more accurately described as originating somewhere between the suburban house and public housing: less the “antithesis to congestion and anxiety” than the uneasy synthesis of the two racially defined poles of American urban politics. Second, the atrium here inverts the typical function that such a device has served throughout history. From the peristyle houses of Greek antiquity to the Roman insulae to the walk-through houses (Höfe) of the Danube region, which Geist chronicles as ancestors of the arcade,90 the courtyard was a means by which the exterior (specifically, light and air) was brought into the interior. The 22-story, nearly cubic volume surrounded by balconies and Watson 29 filled with people, plants, and the movement of gondola-like elevators, is meant to “evoke and enhance positive human reactions,” to create “the feeling of an outdoor piazza on the interior” in which people can participate in “a dynamic panorama of events within the controlled parameters of the atrium.”91 Yet, as Koolhaas describes, “in Portman's hands it became the opposite: a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight forever–a hermetic interior, sealed against the real.”92 Moreover, the innocent people-watching encouraged by Portman becomes a more sinister voyeurism when the empty center and cell-like perimeter of the hotel function as a "modern panopticon," and, by extension, "[d]owntown becomes an accumulation of voided panopticons inviting their own voluntary prisoners: the center as prison system."93 The nearly unavoidable racial overtones in Koolhaas's remarks (but also in Portman’s own defense of the seeming impenetrability and isolationism of his works, especially in Detroit) seem to suggest that the Antoine Graves Houses are not so much a precedent, as they are a specter haunting the atrium. Or, in Koolhaas’s language, the real threatening to tear a hole through the interior’s hermetic seal. Reinhold Martin picks up on this theme in his treatment of Portman’s works, focusing particularly on the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, the Renaissance Center, and the Bonaventure.94 Through an extended comparison of Portman to Louis Kahn–though not in terms of the formal or spatial concepts discussed above, but rather in terms of the two architects’ related searches for lost meaning–Martin unearths in Portman’s works so many attempts to naturalize the circulation of multinational capital that his spaces both enable and embody. On the one hand, the Renaissance Center’s name itself hints at the machinations of late20 century urban policy. The logic of suburbia fills the void of the rapidly depopulated city th center in an effort to stave off further abandonment. Rather than creating a vital link between the city and new development, the RenCen, as it is known colloquially, turns its back on the Watson 30 urban context, a move which leads one contemporary critic to wonder, “why not put the RenCen on wheels, like a television ad cajoles us, and have the center drive out to us?”95 The Embarcadero, on the other hand, invites inevitable comparisons to Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center. Begun in 1971, the 8.5-acre project was dubbed “the Rockefeller Center of the West” upon its completion a decade later in part because David Rockefeller was a primary investor, but also because its formal and programmatic arrangements invited comparison to its East Coast predecessor.96 (Fig. 18) There is, however a crucial difference. Whereas Rockefeller Center is the Machine Age’s most complete realization of so many previously unbuilt fantasies and partial successes, Portman’s “disurbanist” scheme97 reveals ideological motivations more akin to his own Peachtree Center. A glimpse into the atrium of its Hyatt Regency should tell us more. Completed in 1973, the hotel completes the march of office towers, which are copied almost verbatim from the Atlanta originals, toward San Francisco bay. Rather than a triumphal arrival, however, the hotel’s form retreats from the primary east-west axis, its “façade leaned back as if in fear of collision,” as one reviewer puts it.98 The resulting interior is a 17-story space framed by balconies which gradually step in on one side and filled with natural light, trees, hanging plants, and water. This creates a dramatic “Piranasian” volume that echoes the wedge-shaped exterior form. (Not only critics, but Portman himself describes his atria in terms of Piranesi’s “architectural fantasies.”)99 In terms that echo, but also subvert Portman’s stated desire to “open things up and pull things apart,”100 Martin reads the atrium as a “prying open” of the typical cell-like hotel building “to reveal a surreal, naturalistic canyon, or an archaeological ruin dripping with hanging plants.”101 This, in turn, turns the atrium into an evocation of a “mythology of the information age and of corporate entrepreneurship” that sublimates the problems plaguing the ruined city into a more palatable, pastoral, and above all Watson 31 classless image of a “new nature [sprouting] from amidst the empty shells of warehouses, factories, and other such leftover equipment from the first machine age.”102 The ruin-like naturalism of the atrium both masks the ruined state of the city outside and, in light of the foregoing discussion, marks the culmination of so many previous attempts, beginning in the arcades, to naturalize capitalism’s devastating effects. Portman describes these natural objects–plants, light, color, but above all people–as integral parts of his design process. Curvilinear forms, daylight, color, hanging fabrics, flowers, and landscaping are all “means that can be used to soften the rigidity of architecture, making it easier for people to relate to a building.”103 Trees are a way to mediate between the intimate scale of human and the potentially overwhelming scale of the atrium. Water is another natural element with which people can interact, “Water is kinetic, active; water also makes sounds, provides a background. It is one of the elements that can transform a building from a static object to a dynamic environment.”104 Nature exists in the atrium primarily as a means by which to negotiate the often alienating and antagonistic relationship between human beings and the built environment. This latter concern–architecture's relation to humans–occupies a good deal of Portman's writings. While it is the experience at Brasilia, mentioned above, from which it purportedly proceeds, Portman observes a tendency toward inhumanity intrinsic to the entirety of architectural history. From the pyramids of Egypt to the cathedrals of medieval towns to the boulevards of 19 century Paris to most contemporary corporate office buildings, architecth ture–or at least that deemed worthy of historians’ attention–is nothing more than one or another form of domination over people’s lives.105 Portman, for his part, concerns himself with what people, “not a particular class of people but all people,” need and how they will interact with his spaces. Watson 32 While his comments on space, light, curving lines, and potted plants are relatively innocuous, it is difficult to believe the last statement is not ironic. Certainly Portman does not actually suppose that his spaces are somehow egalitarian. Dismissing these remarks as mere ideological obfuscations, however, risks missing what is really at stake. The sum total of Portman’s design philosophy indicates the degree to which his humanizing desires, to create “an architecture for people and not for things,” in reality brings the process of commodification full circle. Whereas in the earlier stage of industrial capitalism, social relations were transformed into relations between things by imbuing them with a near sacred aura, in Martin’s words, now “things had to become like people.” In addition to critiquing modernism’s objectification of people, “the atrium and its accessories were also the next logical step in the commodification of the urban environment. Not by de-humanizing it further (i.e. converting the city into a field of lifeless commodities), but by humanizing it, animating it, bringing it back to life.”106 This is not an entirely novel development, since as Benjamin observed, J. J. Grandville’s caricatures conflate the relationship between humans, nature, and things, “Under Grandville’s pencil, the whole of nature is transformed into specialties.”107 (Fig. 20) Martin’s indictment might best be understood as the coming to fruition of a process born in the phantasmagoric environment of the arcades. The co-optation and commodification of movement A number of terms from the previous sections–animation, circulation, dynamism, kinetics– each highlight a certain quality of Portman’s architecture. They are also, taken together, synonymous with a term that plays a key role in Jameson’s analysis of the Bonaventure and its “hyperspace”: motion. This is perhaps the most defining feature of the Portman atrium, and he describes in depth the numerous ways in which he sets his spaces in motion. Watson 33 Riding an escalator is also a transitional experience, and it can be used in such a way that the space you are entering is gradually revealed … When you enter on an escalator, I want the space to unfold rather than explode upon you all at once. Riding an elevator is another important transitional experience, and there is no reason why you must ride in a closed-in box. Pulling the elevator out of its shaft and opening it up with walls of glass makes it another way of experiencing architectural space. The elevator is like a seat in a theater, one in which your vantage point is moving continuously. […] Movement is also interesting to watch. Movement in people, objects, and water, and even the sounds of movement are important … People are innately interested in movement, for movement means life, and human beings are kinetic creatures. You can incorporate kinetics in a building and strike a responsive human reaction.108 Whether being whisked through the atrium in one of Portman's “huge kinetic sculptures” or simply seated in the space, you get a sense that not only the people, water, lights, and elevators, but the space itself is in motion. And, it is this aspect of Portman’s work that for Jameson indicates, in addition to a “mutation in built space itself,” a mode of experience that makes “Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire, and of the emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, … both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated in light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation.”109 What Jameson describes as “the narrative stroll” is derived from architecture theory’s appropriation of narrative analysis in other disciplines, but it also calls to mind the leisurely meanderings of the flâneur as he studies the crowd, Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale, and Koolhaas’s Paranoid Critical Method. Both of the former, however, begin by taking leave of some vehicle (the carriage or the automobile) in order to meander through space at one’s own leisure, while the latter is both a product of and a means by which to counter the anxiety Watson 34 brought about by a too rationally organized environment by constructing an alternate, delirious narrative. In the Bonaventure, “the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which will become evident when we come to the question of what remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably walking itself.”110 The movement of people is co-opted, intensified, and transformed by “people movers” into an exhilarating, but ultimately passive conveyance, of which the pedestrian is no longer in control. The walking to which Jameson refers has a certain analogue in Lothar Bucher’s experience in the Crystal Palace. Like the Bucher, Jameson realizes that the space itself defies description in terms of a previous paradigm, “I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are impossible to size.”111 (The quote is Jameson’s, but it could just as well be Bucher’s.) The four towers of Portman’s hotel create an absolute symmetry which mocks any attempt to navigate the atrium on foot, the result of which is that the various methods of constructing narratives under previous circumstances–from the flâneur’s meanderings to Le Corbusier’s promenades to Koolhaas’s delirium–all break down. What makes this so significant is the fact that this “populist” space is neither exceptional nor exemplary, but rather symptomatic “of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”112 This incapacity is brought about by the schizophrenia–that Jameson defines, following Lacan, as a breakdown in the relationship between the signifier and the signified, meaning and content113– that the postmodern world induces. The qualification–“at least at present”–is however key, Watson 35 because it indicates that alongside this disorientation exists the dialectical imperative to create new ways of locating ourselves within the terrain of global capitalism. In a way, Benjamin’s hope in the flâneur’s capacity to awaken the bourgeoisie from the dreamworld of high capitalism gets reiterated for a late-capitalist context in Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping.” While in the earlier “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” Jameson suggests a rather vague notion of a “counterhegemonic” Gramscian architecture, he here draws on Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, in combination with an expanded understanding of Louis Althusser’s critique of ideology (and its Lacanian underpinnings), to articulate an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” wherein the individual can gain a foothold in the “unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”114 Lynch describes the ways in which different buildings, monuments, statuary, perspectives, spatial configurations, and boundary conditions allow for individuals to mentally map their urban environs. Jameson takes this concept, but replaces its positivist and phenomenological tendencies with Althusser’s (re)definition of ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”115 The increased awareness of both individual and collective subjects (hopefully) enables a political praxis that, with its combination of social and spatial qualities, is capable of transforming the symbolic realm of social relations, the third order of Lacan's subjective schema left implicit in Althusser's ideological formulation. Conclusion Given the proliferation of hotel atria and mixed-use developments in recent decades that make Portman’s Peachtree Center look rather quaint and domesticated, I wonder whether these types of spaces are still as disorienting as they were for Jameson. In our journey from the arcades to the atrium, we have been confronted by over a century-and-a-half of spatial Watson 36 configurations that, while they enable the free circulation of capital, control to an increasing degree the movement of human bodies. Moreover, as the subjective experiences that parallel these spatial mutations indicate, neither co-optation nor transgression is ever absolute. Subversive behavior in one context enables the market’s smooth functioning in another. A space that bewilders one generation is normalized by the next. The hope that both Benjamin and Jameson placed in social transformation was defined in the midst of and despite empirical evidence that seemed to indicate the impossibility of doing so. Likewise, ours seems to be a situation in which the “logic of late capitalism” has penetrated further into not only new markets, but our imaginations as well, making even the thought of new, radical praxis untenable. Despite that, and in light of recent world historical events from Manhattan to the Middle East, I wonder whether we are not witness to a slippage, fracture, or event that might be the first signs of instability in the system and that, in turn, indicates the imperative to begin remapping our cognitive landscape. 1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 31. 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 38, 40. 3 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (New York: Verso, 2012), 12. 4 Jameson, Postmodernism, 5. 5 “No work, not even the most pedestrian and unsuccessful, can ‘reflect’ an ideology preexisting itself. The theories of ‘reflection’ and ‘mirroring’ have been in disrepute for some time. But the ‘swerve’ that the work executes with respect to what is other to it is in fact charged with ideology, even if the forms it assumes are not completely expressible.” Manfredo Tafuri, “The Historical ‘Project,’” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, tr. Pellegrino d’Ancierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 16f. 6 Cornel West, “Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics,” boundary 2 11 (Autumn 1982-Winter 1983), 181, 180. 7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Signet Classics, 2011), 72. 8 Benjamin, Arcades, 460. 9 Ibid., 462f. 10 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 38. 11 Ibid., 39. 12 Benjamin, Arcades, 14. 13 See Geist, Arcades, 116f; see also Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 32ff, 388n.48. Buck-Morss insists that while the earliest notes were the product of a collaboration between Benjamin and Hessel, and that Benjamin was certainly indebted to Hessel’s writings on Berlin, when Benjamin took up the project again in 1934, the work, “especially in its philosophical complexity, far outstripped the original idea which they conceived together.” Watson 37 14 Louis Aragon, Nightwalker [Le Paysan de Paris], tr. Frederick Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 10. 15 Ibid., 10, 12, 74, 75, 83. 16 Benjamin, Arcades, 458. 17 Jameson, Postmodernism, 2. 18 Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 49-87. 19 Diane Ghirardo insists that this reading of Tafuri is not entirely fair, since the point was not that a total system renders any action impossible, but that social reform needed to be enacted beyond the bounds of architecture. See Diane Y. Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000,” Perspecta 33 (2002), 38-47. 20 Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” tr. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, October 20 (Spring 1982), 3-13. 21 See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 63n.12. 22 See Edward Soja, interview on Los Angeles: City of the Future (London: BBC2 and Open University, 1992). 23 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. 24 Benjamin, Arcades, 458, 460. 25 Jameson, Postmodernism, 46. 26 Benjamin, Arcades, 31. 27 See Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, tr. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). 28 Benjamin cites a prospectus of 24 October 1847, which outlines one such plan addressed “[t]o the inhabitants of the Rues Beauregard, Bourbon-Villeneuve, du Caire, and de la Cour des Miracles.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 52. 29 Benjamin, Arcades, 32. 30 Geist, Arcades, 62. 31 Ibid., 12ff. 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Ibid., 452ff. 34 Ibid., 60. 35 Benjamin, Arcades, 10. 36 Ibid., 338. 37 Ibid., 106; cf. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 197n.6. 38 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 172. 39 Benjamin, Arcades, 334, 10; see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 304ff. 40 Benjamin, Arcades, 10. 41 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 14f. 42 Benjamin, Arcades, 10. 43 Benjamin, Arcades, 3. 44 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 732; Benjamin, Arcades, 150. 45 Benjamin, Arcades, 4-5. 46 Ibid., 348. 47 Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm Bötticher, “The Principles of the Hellenic and Germanic Ways of Building with Regard to Their Application to Our Present Way of Building,” in In What Style Shall We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style, ed. Harry F. Mallgrave (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 147-167. 48 Karl Bötticher, Der Baumkultus der Hellenen (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1856), 9. 49 Benjamin, Arcades, 4. 50 cf. Geist, Arcades, 54. 51 Siegfried Kracauer, “Leaving the Linden Arcade [Abschied von Lindenpassage],” in Geist, Arcades, 158, 160. 52 Ibid. Watson 38 53 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete, tr. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 104, 105. 54 Benjamin, Arcades, 61, 7. 55 Ibid., 7. 56 Giedion, Building in France, 120. 57 Lothar Bucher, Kulturhistorische Skizzen aus der Industrieaustellung aller Völker, in Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 251. 58 Ibid., 252. 59 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “The Space of Glass Architecture,” in The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, tr. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books, 1980), 50ff. 60 Ibid., 54. 61 Giedion, Building in France, 121. 62 Ibid., 115. 63 Benjamin, Arcades, 48. 64 Ibid., 60. 65 Giedion, Building in France, 117. 66 Geist, Arcades, 52. 67 Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Sze Tsung Leong, “Escalator,” in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, ed. Chuihua Judy Chung, et al. (Köln: Taschen; Cambridge: Harvard Design School, 2001), 350ff. 68 Ibid., 346, 341 (italics in original). 69 Ibid., 341. 70 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), 82. 71 Ibid., 100, 105f. 72 Ibid., 99. 73 Ibid., 178. 74 Ibid.,195. 75 Ibid., 174. 76 Raymond Hood quoted in Ibid., 175. 77 Paolo Riani, Paul Goldberger, and John Portman, John Portman (Milan: L’Arcaedizioni, 1990), 79. 78 Rem Koolhaas, “Atlanta,” in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 841. 79 Ibid. 80 Portman quoted in Riani et al., John Portman, 40. 81 Ibid., 39. 82 Jameson, Postmodernism, 41. 83 Portman quoted in Riani et al., John Portman, 30. 84 See Riani et al., John Portman, 29. 85 John Portman, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 62. 86 Ibid., 61. 87 Ibid., 66. 88 John Portman quoted in Maria Saporta, “Portman’s first atrium building to be torn down,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, 12 October 2009, accessed 27 April 2013, http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/10/12/story12.html. As the article describes, Portman protested the decision to demolish the building. 89 Portman, The Architect as Developer, 30. 90 See Geist, Arcades, 12ff. 91 Riani et al., John Portman, 79. 92 Koolhaas, "Atlanta," 841. 93 Ibid. 94 See Reinhold Martin, “Money and Meaning: The Case of John Portman,” Hunch: the Berlage Institute Report 12 (2009), 36-51. 95 Bruce N. Wright, “Megaform comes to Motown,” Progressive Architecture 59 (February 1978), 60. 96 See Donald Canty, “Evaluation: Rockefeller Center West?: John Portman’s San Francisco colossus is complete, for now,” AIA Journal 71 (October 1982), 56. 97 Koolhaas, “Atlanta,” 857. Watson 39 98 Canty, “Rockefeller Center West,” 57. See Portman, Architect as Developer, 70. 100 Ibid., 30. 101 Martin, “Money and Meaning,” 39. 102 Ibid., 40 (emphasis in original). 103 Portman, Architect as Developer, 95. 104 Ibid., 102. 105 Ibid., 64. 106 Martin, “Money and Meaning,” 47. 107 Benjamin, Arcades, 7. 108 Portman, Architect as Developer, 74, 76. 109 Jameson, Postmodernism, 45. 110 Ibid., 42. 111 Ibid., 43. 112 Ibid., 44. 113 Ibid., 26ff. 114 Ibid., 51. 115 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 109; see also See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); cf. Jameson, Postmodernism, 51ff, 399ff. 99 figure 1 Passage de l’Opera, Paris, 1822-1823. [from Geist, Arcades, 484.] figure 2 Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. [from Michael Franklin Ross, “A star for Tinseltown,” Progressive Architecture 59 (February 1978): 56.] figure 3 [above left] Avenue de l’Opera. Paris, late-19th century. [from Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 128.] figure 4 [middle left] Galeries de Bois. Palais Royal, Paris, 1786-1788. [from Geist, Arcades, 455.] 5 [below left] Galerie d’Orleans. Palais Royal, Paris, 1828-1830. [from Geist, Arcades, 527.] figure 6 [below right] Interior façades of the Passage du Saumon (left) and Galarie d’Orleans (right). Paris, 1828 and 1829. [from Geist, Arcades, 103.] figure figure 7 [above left] Kaisergalerie. Berlin, 1871-1873. [from Geist, Arcades, 152.] figure 8 [middle left] Kaisergalerie, modernization. Berlin, 1928. [from Geist, Arcades, 156.] 9 [below left] Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton. London, 1851. [from Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 84.] figure 10 [above and middle right] Bon Marché department store. Paris, 1876. [from Giedion, Building in France, 118, 119.] figure figure 11 [below right] Rockefeller Center, postcard depicting penultimate scheme with hanging gardens and “Venetian” bridges connecting towers. Manhattan, ca. 1931. [from Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 201.] figure 12 [below right] “City Under a Single Roof,” Raymond Hood. Manhattan, ca. 1931. [from Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 175.] figure 13a [above] Site plan and exterior views. Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961-1986. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 62, 64.] figure 13b [below left] Typical plan and section. Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1963-1967. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 78.] figure 13c [below right] View of the atrium from the 17th loor. Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1963-1967. [from Peter Cook, “The hotel is really a small city,” Architectural Design 38 (February 1968): 92.] figure 14 [above left] First loor plan and interior view. Entelechy I, Atlanta, 1961-1964. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 49, 57.] figure 15 [middle left] Interior view. Antoine Graves Houses, Atlanta, 1965. [from Portman, Architect as Developer, 28.] figure 16 [below left] Perspective rendering, early scheme. Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, ca. 1963. [from Portman, Architect as Developer, 28.] figure 17a [above right] Lobby level of atrium and exterior view from Detroit River. Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1976-1981. [from Bruce N. Wright, “Megaform comes to Motown,” Progressive Architecture 59 (February 1978): 57, 59.] figure 17b [bottom right] Plan view of model. Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1976-1981. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 96.] figure 18a [below] Exterior view and site plan. Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1965-1982. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 82, 84.] figure 18b [above] Section and atrium views. Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1973. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 92, 94, 95.] 19a [above left and below] Plan, section, exterior view, and atrium view from upper level. Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles, 1977. [from Riani et al., John Portman, 104, 105, 108, 109.] figure figure 19b [above right] Atrium view from lower level. Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles, 1977. [from Portman et al., John Portman: Art and Architecture, 77.] 20 [above] “Fish ishing for people, using various desirable items as bait.” J. J. Grandville, 1844. [from Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 155.] figure 21 [below] “Fashionable people represented in public by their accoutrements.” J. J. Grandville, 1844. [from Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 100.] figure Bibliography Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, 85-126. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker [Le Paysan de Paris]. Translated by Frederick Brown. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.” Translated by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. October 20 (Spring 1982): 3-13. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 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Translated by Pellegrino d’Ancierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. West, Cornel. “Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics.” boundary 2 11 (Autumn 1982- Winter 1983): 177-200. Wright, Bruce N. “Megaform comes to Motown.” Progressive Architecture 59 (February 1978): 57-61.

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