Text by Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen and Adam Jasper
CURA.36 SS2021
FUTURITY
At the time of writing, Zurich’s most famous department store Manor is closing. U.S. American corporations like JCPenney and Barneys New York are bankrupt, and so is the department store chain Neiman Marcus. What is left of Sears, once the world’s largest retailer, survives on emergency credit. Amazon, for its part, has seen massive increases in revenue in the same period. Hybrid retailers, with a presence both online and on the street, are rapidly trying to adapt their business models. Zara, for instance, may close over a thousand of its shops, even as it sees online sales increase by a half. The department store was already in trouble, not least because of online shopping and the increasing vertical integration of luxury brands. Successful brands, that once vied with each other to be displayed in department stores, now seem hampered by them. The department store, a genre of business that has a continuous history that goes back to the 19th century, is officially toast. This will have consequences.
Anonymous Club, Prologue Performances by LEECH I, 2020 Performance direction by Josh Johnson and Boychild, Luma Westbau, Zurich Photo: Jelena Luis
Aside from all the traditional business models, left maimed and dying on the battlefield after Amazon’s victorious global campaign, what will go missing with the end of retail is other shoppers? When we shop in department stores, we see products, but we also see people. The classic moments are perhaps provided by escalators, those post-industrial conveyor belts designed not to speed up production but to foster consumption. Watching people on escalators, carrying their shopping bags, their aspirations, their anxieties, is endlessly entertaining. Other shoppers function as examples. Everything that they wear and carry show a history of past shopping sprees, and we can choose to model ourselves on them, or attempt to differentiate ourselves from them, just as they do with us. You see them, and they see you. That tacit mutual observation is the agora, the market incarnate of consumer democracy. When we shop online, however, the dynamic changes radically. We see products, and the products see us. Thanks to the information that we offer up with each click, we are transparent to the algorithms. But what we no longer see are… other shoppers. At most we see indirect traces of them in the form of product reviews or comments, but these are always at the discretion of the purveyor. In physical shops, the products are blind; in the digital shop, we are.
What is the value of the brute material fact of the dead mall for contemporary architects? What potential does the condition of uselessness offer?
The obsolescence of the shopping mall, ruthlessly defined by its program, offers degrees of freedom for architecture that resemble, or even constitute, a kind of autonomy. In contrast, “flagship stores” remain viable, although not necessarily for shopping per se. They serve as a physical mechanism for building an environment, or rather, a world around a brand. They bear the scars of the gladiatorial struggle to differentiate themselves from each other in the midst of a generic global capitalism. And they allow us to re-imagine the perfect museum.
Anonymous Club reflect on the current shift in retail, where the store’s significance as an urban phenomenon is based on the notion that the marketplace is the driving force of our cities. In recent years, retail became increasingly abstract, it escaped to the countryside and moved into enormous warehouses closed off to the public, despite their size, invisible to the consumers. Now commodities are predominantly viewed virtually, and we are no longer looking at the physical product. It is the other way around: the product sees us and records our data, while we are passively blindfolded. The act of shopping as a social habit and as a form of public activity is rapidly dissolving.
Anonymous Club was founded in the midst of this phase of transformation, but instead of acknowledging a crisis of retail, it evolved out of a virtual condition that challenges the ongoing detachment and remoteness through their residency at Luma Westbau. While we are all participating as remote consumers, there is a physical manifestation of something completely abstract. A production site of virtual fantasies. Instead of garments or any kind of tangible commodities, it is a studio inhabited by proxies.
The architectural environment of the opening project presented a raw structure carrying a ‘glass ceiling’, a display while remaining a void. For the next iteration Pavement, sub introduce a stage for Anonymous Club’s resident Santi, the first addition to the abstracted white space; presented as a cleared-out version of a greenscreen set, operating solely as a projection and remotely controlled in Zurich.
sub’s architectural projects define a distinct aesthetic expressing a certain zeitgeist. Since the 1990s a sensual minimalism has dominated retail spaces and the common notion of comfort. By introducing forms of roughness and challenges into this domain, sub created a kind of baroque subversion of minimalism, drawn from youth culture and exemplified in their work for Balenciaga and the artist Anne Imhof.
CURA.36
Spring Summer 2021
THE FUTURITY ISSUE
CREDITS:
Anonymous Club, The Glass Ceiling, 2020, installation view, Luma Westbau, Zurich
Photo: Annik Wetter
FREDI FISCHLI AND NIELS OLSEN are directors of exhibitions and lecturers at the department of architecture at ETH Zurich. Together they have curated numerous exhibitions on art and architecture. Collaborations with international institutions include the Harvard GSD, CCA Montreal, Luma Foundation, Fondazione Prada, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Swiss Institute New York, Nottingham Contemporary, among many more. Their writing has been published by the Buchhandlung des Verlags Walther König, Edition Patrick Frey and gta Verlag.
