Retail Apocalypse

Shopping is history, in both senses of the word. As shopping shifts online and the COVID-19 pandemic transforms our perception of social contact, retail is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual. The entangled worlds of architecture, fashion, business and art that supplied those techniques now appear to us in a new way, as a museum of transmissible culture that is now becoming extinct. At the same time, retail’s techniques of attraction and distraction have become newly visible. Stripped of their use value, they reveal themselves as techniques of pure display.

Retail Apocalypse presents a compendium of case studies, artworks, interviews and oral histories rescued from the bonfire of retail culture. It ranges from Friedrich Kiesler’s display windows to Gae Aulenti’s Fiat showrooms, from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian fantasies to TELFAR’s critical utopias, from Rem Koolhaas to Herzog & de Meuron.

Retail Apocalypse addresses the heritage of fashion, the transmissible culture of high art, and the practice of retail in the recent past. The outline of the story is well-known: the emergence of mass markets for luxury goods, interrupted by the depression and Second World War, was turbocharged during the Wirtschaftswunder and deformed by the stagflation of the 1970s. It achieved decadence at the turn of the millennium and has been denatured by the growth in internet retail. The details of the story, though—its material history, techniques of display and interwoven biographies—constitute a world of references known only to insiders.

From the perspective of the architectural critic, the history of retail display can seem a bestiary of novel forms, a disordered field of possible worlds of fantasy, creativity, appropriation, emulation and plagiarism. Retail presents an extraordinary sourcebook for the grammar of forms and techniques of communication that currently shape architectural thinking.

This book offers an extraordinary compendium of teachable examples. For many of us, our encounter with retail—a world of mirrors, possibilities and self-reinvention—was also our first experience of transcendence in architecture. By bringing together protagonists as varied as Lilly Reich, SITE’s James Wines, TELFAR and Lynn Hershman Leeson, Retail Apocalypse presents an omnibus of figures whose influence is only now being adequately recognised.

Retail Apocalypse. Edited by Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, and Adam Jasper, in collaboration with Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, with the participation of Lisa Boos and Valentina Ehnimb. Show display and book design by Teo Schifferli and Fabian Fretz. Based on an exhibition at gta exhibitions of ETH Zurich (2020), Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2022).

RETAIL APOCALYPSE
Edited by Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, and Adam Jasper
2021. 21.6 x 27.9 cm, open thread-stitching
616 pages, 917 illustrations
ISBN 978-3-85676-414-2
49 CHF / 46 EUR
English
Published by gta Verlag, ETH Zurich