Shopping Defines The Contemporary City Dominant Public Activity Examined In Provocative Essays

By Harvard Design School Graduates In Collaboration With Rem Koolhaas

Taschen will soon publish the first and second volumes of a projected four-book series from the Harvard Design School's Project On The City, an ongoing research collaborative that studies the effects of modernization on the contemporary city. Each year, six to twelve individuals document, examine, and analyze new forms and mutations of urbanity through particular areas or topics undergoing dramatic change, in order to develop a conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that defy traditional categories. Even though research is formally conducted as graduate-level thesis projects advised by Rem Koolhaas (Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Design School), the Project represents "an important reversal, in the sense that teaching is no longer the distribution of a central knowledge, but is more the assembly of different insights and different experiences, where the students often represent deeper knowledge of a very specific condition than the teacher can ever hope to represent," according to Koolhaas.

The Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping, the second volume of the Project on the City series, is an incisive, in-depth look at the culturally defining activity of modern life that has affected almost every aspect of the contemporary city. Through a battery of increasingly mutable forms, shopping has infiltrated-even replaced-almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and even the military, are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The extent to which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which we experience the city.

The Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically reconfigured the city. The book's 14 authors examine the nature of this experience in 45 essays covering topics such as air conditioning, the dying mall, mechanically enhanced plants, how the military is so compatible with shopping, how "high" architecture disdains yet embraces shopping, how American downtowns have become indistinguishable from the suburbs, how women were "liberated" as consumers, and how shopping spies on us. The book is a fascinating analytical survey of the evolutionary forms and pervasive influences of shopping around the world.