Arcades

Definition

The arcades (Parisian passages) are the 19th-century glass-roofed shopping galleries that Benjamin made the central object of his unfinished Arcades Project (Passagenwerk). For Benjamin, the arcade is the architectural figure of commodity capitalism's dreamworld — "the original temple of commodity capital" — a space where interior and exterior, private and public, dream and waking collapse. The Arcades Project is itself an architectural construction: "an intentionally fragmentary text constructed through montage method" (Elliott), assembling citations, images, and reflections into a "dialectical image" of the 19th century. For architecture, the arcade is both a historical type (the proto-department store, the covered passage) and a methodological model: the built environment as a text whose meaning emerges through montage rather than narrative.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the Arcades Project; the arcade as temple of commodity capital.
• Brian Elliott — the Arcades Project as montage method and genealogy of urbanization.

Related Concepts

• Dialectical Image — the mode of presentation of the Arcades Project.
• Flâneur — the arcade is the flâneur's native habitat.
• Phantasmagoria — the arcade as the architectural form of phantasmagoric commodity culture.
• Modernity — the arcade as a crystallized image of 19th-century modernity.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — the Arcades Project and its architectural significance.