The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 Review
I’ll start with the bad first: this book is too long, the essays are of uneven quality, and the layout is poor (if you are trying to read it, that is, and not just look at it). That being said, I think the overall product is excellent. This authors do not seek to answer questions but, instead, to raise them. Why is retail facing a crisis? How will advances in IT affect retail? What is changing about how we buy, what we buy, and why we buy?
The authors’ premise is that shopping is a living entity, one with survival on its mind. Retail, they claim, has evolved as other beings have evolved: Some advances are foreseen while others come through chance, but all advances are in response to external forces. In the case of retail, the dominant relationship is between the shop and the shopper. As the shopper changes, so must the shop evolve, write the authors.
That this work is not a completed whole, but rather a piece where some assembly is required by the reader, is important in making this book work. The authors do not and cannot answer all their questions. The idea of “ulterior motives” – which teases at the implications of increased use of IT in retail and urban planning – is, to me, the central issue. The authors note the shift from “how does spacial design affect people” to “how does information design affect people”. They note the importance of this shift for the future of shopping and present a history of retail as the vocabulary for which readers can begin to discuss these questions.
Because the authors have taken on the task of teaching the language of retail, readers may feel as if they are back in grade school English class – slogging through page after page of seemingly useless information that is not neccessarily connected to the next bit of information. However, if you spend some time playing with this information – looking at each bit of knowledge as building blocks that can be moved about and repositioned next to other bits of knowledge to uncover new and different patterns – this book comes alive.
The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 Overview
Like a favorite shopping emporium, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping is a browser’s paradise. This second installment of the Project on the City aims to investigate “a general urban condition undergoing virulent change.” A big brick of a book with hundreds of photos and a bundle of essays by prominent designers, architects, and urban scholars, it traces the evolution of the marketplace and the environments we create for the purpose of getting and spending. From the great covered arcades of the 19th century to the museum displays of grand department stores to air-conditioned suburban malls, the book examines the ecology and life cycles of retail space the world over. Dip into the book anywhere for insights into acquisitive behavior. Newspaper clippings cite retail trends; a bar chart compares retail square footage by country (the U.S. tops them all). Some of the essays are already marked in yellow highlighter so you can scan for the main points. A 2,000-year timeline tracks major developments with theme concepts: Disney Space, Three-Ring Circus, Brand Zones, Shopping Landscapes. The book makes a wonderful reference for urban planners, but it’s equally accessible to those who just want to shop ’til they drop.
The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 Specifications
Authors: Tae-Wook Cha, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter, Dan Herman, Hiromi Hosoya, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Kiwa Matsushita, John McMorrough, Juan Palop-Casado, Markus Schaefer, Tran Vinh, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Louise Wyman Design: Sze Tsung Leong and Chuihua Judy Chung
Book Description: Harvard Graduate School of Design’s independent study seminar Project on the City aims at identifying and analyzing problems leading to and resulting from accelerated urbanization, as well as developing new philosophies to help our increasingly metropolitan planet cope with such rapid change. Taking the roles of both architect and sociologist, thesis advisor Koolhaas and his students travel and research in the first phase of each cycle, and write their theses in the second. The result of each project is a comprehensive, specialized study of the effects of modernization on the contemporary city.
During the years 1997 and 1998, Harvard’s design graduates concentrated their studies on the phenomenon of shopping as a primary mode of urban life. As Sze Tsung Leong writes, “Not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping.” Shopping is an integral part of urbanization – as shopping environments have indeed become the defining elements of the modern city. Research for this project, targeting Asia, Europe, and the United States, focused on marketing strategies, retail technologies, and the hybridization of cultural/recreational environments and the retail arena. Including essays ranging from “Disney Realism: Constructing the Copyrighted Environment” to “Three-Ring Circus: Shopping vs. Architecture,” as well as hundreds of diagrams, floor plans, and photographs, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores in-depth the ways in which shopping has refashioned the urban institution.
About the Authors: Chuihua Judy Chung is principal of Content Design Architecture Group in New York. With Sze Tsung Leong, she has assembled The Charged Void: Architecture, the complete architectural works of Alison and Peter Smithson. She is currently editing “Owning a House in the City”, a study on low-income housing in the US.
Jeffrey Inaba, a partner of AMO (Architecture Media Organization) is writing a book on the work of Gordon Bunshaft and Kevin Roche.
Rem Koolhaas is principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, and the author of Delirious New York and the groundbreaking S,M,L,XL.
Sze Tsung Leong is principal of Content Design Architecture Group in New York, whose current projects range from residential design to graphic and environmental materials for human rights organizations. Sze Tsung Leong is the author and co-editor of Slow Space (Monacelli, 1998).
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