ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates mainly on arcades and department stores. But there is a common historical narrative that threads through both. It looks at how medieval marketplaces, as an inclusive public space, underwent transformation and found competition from more organized shopping spaces in the era of industrial capitalism. The chapter considers how certain recognizably modern consumption practices thereby formed, with architectural continuities in terms of the configuration of materials, space, and practice. It also looks at how these new architectures of consumption transformed public space. The chapter describes the way that, during the period of architectural innovation, ideas about desire and fantasy weigh into an allied transformation of the experience of consumption for the bourgeois subject of modernity. Subject of modernity based not only on the abundance of material goods but also the possibilities inherent in daydreaming, fantasy, and seduction.
