Fresh Windows: Commodity, Consumption and the Architectural History of Decadence

In a seminal essay from the early 1970s in the first ever issue of the influential architectural theory journal Oppositions, the emerging historian Kenneth Frampton developed an ambitious argument in relationship to the history of architectural aesthetics.1 Frampton argued that, in the century from 1750 to 1850, the field of architecture and engineering became conceptually distinct, as architecture became increasingly aligned with the emerging field of aesthetics and the inherent superficialities that accompanied this. In Frampton’s argument, architecture went through two significant transformations that—equivalent to the passage from courtly art to bourgeois aestheticism—saw the artistic status of architecture shifting as its economic independence diminished. In the first instance, architecture was separated from the functional and experiential domains through the arbitrary expression of form and, in the second instance, it was conditioned by the controlling forces of an accelerating bourgeois economy which limited the expression of architecture to the narrowing requirements of market forces. The nineteenth century saw architecture commercialised to a previously unprecedented extent, becoming an instrument in facilitating commerce through the design of markets, exhibition halls and the department store. This paradigm coincided, in Frampton’s argument, with the simultaneous appearance of wholesale kitsch: a cycle that both he and Manfredo Tafuri linked to the inherent decadence of the nineteenth century city.

Not surprisingly, the paradigm that Frampton charts in his work was also the timeframe that saw the emergence of a dedicated space of consumption within the city and the emergence of “window- shopping” as an externalisation of the commodity to the surface of the street. Exploring the role of consumption and aesthetics in early modern architectural types, this paper will examine Frampton’s argument in regard to consumption and kitsch against a broader historical landscape of consumerism, and the influence that this had on the development of architecture and the city. The paper will focus specifically on early avant-garde experiments with consumption and the space of commodity through the photography of Eugene Atget and later surrealist experiments with the space of the shop-window. The paper argues for a broader understanding of architectural history in this period, due to the complexities of commercialisation in architecture and the role of market forces in redefining the typology of the street. While there is an inherent decadence within these cycles, there is equally a radical appropriation of consumption as a subject for architecture in this period, and this complicates the relationship to decadence that is intrinsic to the architectural histories of the 70s.