The Shopping Center Without Food

“A vast, unbroken space, neutral in character, with all the emphasis given to display…” (Longstreth 163). Society views art in the same way that it stares uninterestedly at the cantaloupes. What has now become the traditional gallery space for consumer produce, both fresh and aged, has existed for us since the National Gallery in Berlin. After guiding us through his clinical sifting of discarded and digested retail forms, the author has successfully managed to reconcile Mies and Von. Perhaps more promising than this reconciliation is that the German art pavilion was constructed twenty years after the American food market. Heroic modernism looks through its wide and tall glass to the bratwurst vendor capitalizing on its steps.

Mies envisions his gallery as a kind of second frame for art, materials and assemblies recede and recognize their supportive role in the production. Both constructs involve large unsupported expanses, and subtle instances of phenomenal transparency which again frame the food and art. The goods receive the most attention and are thus celebrated and given the role of the subject. Even the exterior envelopes develops in parallel, the thickness of the roof harkens to super service station, the formal girth above a cleared ground plane.

Where the Neue National hermetically seals its 20th c. early modernist art in a gesture of preventative measures, the nested glass boxes of ubiquitous retail are still reciting and mutating their script. Perseverance seems to be the spirit of these kinds of vernacular buildings, things as dynamic and profane as American cheese, ever-enriching economic protein. The system responsible for these models is tested in a harsh climate un-insulated by artistic vision, celebrity identity, obsessive historical progeny, and excessive pseudo-complexities. The desired effect is clear, the means always spinning. Architecture can continue to learn from these models, stepping outside its exquisite box and investing in retail.