| This dissertation addresses issues of consumerism, representation, and spatial theory in the development of the American department store from 1870 to 1930. It is a cultural study of a modern building type through the lenses of architectural history and spatial practice, interweaving considerations of the material artifact with those of space as a social and perceptual construct. Using the Wanamaker's Department Stores in Philadelphia and New York as a paradigm, it explores the relationship between architecture, in its real and imagined forms, and society, in identity and practice. The premise here is that this retailing type acted both as the site of commercial exchange in the modern city and as the setting for the staging of the myths of modern consumption. Visitors and inhabitants experienced the physical space defined by this architectural enclosure as both a material and fictional place, constructed as text and image as it was performed in social space and concretized in steel and glass.; This project of analyzing the Wanamaker's department store as the embodiment of the economic systems and representational practices of modernity is divided into three parts. The first section sets out to examine the history of the institution as a retailing category, building type and spatial practice and then locate it in the larger context of the commercial city. Part Two traces the development of the store at the turn of the century in its shifting guises as a warehouse/factory and palatial home. The final section examines the construction of the retailing establishment as a modern utopia, made manifest in the representation of shopping as domestic routine and aesthetic excursion into the early twentieth century. The agenda in this dissertation is thus three-fold; to address the specific lack of a comprehensive treatment of the department store as a modern spatial type in the United States; to expand the analysis of the commercial landscape as a socially and mythically, as well as materially produced artifact; and to continue recent efforts in the social sciences that seek to concretize theoretical conceptions of space as a historically produced and actively contested construct. |
