Consumerism

Definition

Consumerism names the social and economic force in which mass production and mass consumption are synergistically linked, with advertising, branding, and product design used to stimulate and shape demand. Architecturally, consumerist architecture denotes buildings whose appearance is consciously planned as part of a marketing strategy to communicate with the public — the themed shopping mall, the fast-food chain, the "commercial vernacular" of the American roadside and suburb. It deals in "direct, rather than abstract, symbolism" and is opposed to self-referential high-art/avant-garde architecture.

Key Thinkers

• John Chase — the principal theorist in this wiki of consumerist architecture and commercial vernacular.
• Michel de Certeau — consumer production: users "make do" with (poach on) imposed commodities, a hidden production of consumption.
• Siegfried Zepf — consumption as identity-building activity; the "ego project" and the desiring subject.
• (Related, not yet paged: J.B. Jackson, Charles Moore, Denise Scott Brown, Sharon Zukin — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Everyday Architecture — consumerist building as a large sector of ordinary production.
• Iconic Architecture — the image-driven, commodified spectacular building.
• Spectacle — the commodification of experience/images.
• Ideology — the consumerist shaping of subjectivity.

Related Synthesis

• Consumerism, Capitalism, and Iconic Architecture — how consumerism, as the culture-ideology of capitalism, is built into the iconic object.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture
• Logan Airport / Junkspace (Koolhaas)
• The Museum as Destination (Skot-Hansen 2018)
• The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) — consumption as a creative, tactical production.
• Big Box Retail Decentralization (Wassmer 2002) — the fiscal/regulatory determinants of big-box commercial retail location.
• Consumerism and Identity (Zepf 2010) — consumption and the psychoanalytic formation of identity.
• Creating the Bilbao Effect
• The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
• Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics
• Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture
• Philosophy for Everyday Life
• The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay
• Radical Post-Modernism and Content: A Debate
• Megaprojects: Beneath the Pavement, Excess
• Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities
• Everyday Life in the Modern World
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment
• Meaning and Effect: Revisiting Semiotics in Architecture
• Reviewing the 'Bilbao effect' Inside and Beyond the Guggenheim: Its Coming of Age in Sprawling Cultural Landscapes
• Between Traditionalism and Modernism: Approaches to a Vernacular Architecture
• An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'
• Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle in Contemporary Art Museum Architecture
• Everyday (Virtual) Life
• Why the Customer Is Always Right: Debord's Spectacle as the Rationalisation of Mimesis
• The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary Architecture in Globalizing Cities
• Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization
• Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism
• The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization
• Towards an Understanding of Architectural Iconicity in Global Perspective
• The Future Is Hairy
• The Revolution of Everyday Life
• High Street Diversity
• Architecture and Capital in the 21st Century: An Interview with Matthew Soules

Open Questions

• Does consumerist architecture express popular values (even democratic ones) or merely reproduce commodified subjectivity? Chase holds both poles in tension.