Arcades to Mega-malls

Benjamin Walter describes the ‘arcades’ as if they are an architectural product of society during this time period, and really puts into perspective the fact that architecture is an ever changing discipline which has many disguises. He describes the streets as “…always besieged by carriages” and continues to elaborate about “the hazards to which pedestrians were exposed…” It is from these dangers that led to the birth of the arcade, which immediately set the underlying framework for a new type of consumer-retailer relationship which we still experience today.

One particularly interesting condition noted by Walter is the development of the rudimentary idea of the arcade to later on creating a cultural icon which thrives on the conditions set up by this type of architecture. In the most elementary arcade one would simply walk on the bare earth, but as earth turned to mud and retailers began to speculate about the profits to be made from these arrangements, the notion of the arcade was reconfigured. While reading the language in which Walter uses to describe these arcades, it becomes hard to ignore that our mall configurations today are based around the same basic principles. From an architectural standpoint he describes “reigns of enormous glass-paned roof” as well as floor plans which are designed so that “they can be taken in, so to speak, at a glance”. It becomes no secret that these arcades are arranged for one purpose only, to lure in buyers and keep you there long enough to purchase something. Walter notes that one “judges only according to his[her] senses”, meaning that perhaps the quality of the product does not matter so much as the display and environment in which you place your buyers. Although the mega-malls of today may be filled with water parks, aquariums, and golf courses, in principle they closely relate to the arcades in which Walter describes in his passages.