Paris Arcades

자료: 어느 이미지 자료

Paris Arcades

The Paris Arcades are narrow passageways between buildings, lined with retail shops, and covered with intricate roofs made of iron and glass. Over a hundred arcades were built in Paris during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but now they are nearly extinct, a fate mourned by Louis Aragon in Paris Peasant. The original gas-lit aura of the arcade has been commodified, and today, the passageways, far from being the otherworldly hideaways of Baudelaire's Paris, might remind visitors of disneyfied strip malls. But the arcades have always been about commodities--they were the first shopping malls, and Walter Benjamin identified them as microcosms of capitalist culture. The Paris arcade was the birthplace of 'browsing," an activity hailed by Baudelaire--a self-proclaimedflâneur (browser)--for its uselessness. It is the arcades, congested with commodities and browsing Parisians, which inspired melancholia, or spleen, in Baudelaire, and provoked Walter Benjamin to launch his ambitious Arcades Project, an exhaustive, though unfinished, history and criticism of modern bourgeois culture.