Running Abstract....

The Architecture of Luxury Goods

This thesis explores the relationships between the consumer and architecture of selling luxury goods. The need to buy and the desire to buy has refined itself over and over again. From the great covered arcades of Louis XIV to grand department stores, the past has shown us that the politics of a plan or the spectacle of a window display always alluded to more than itself. In pilgrimages to retail cathedrals of today, one seems to expect to find secular salvation. The ultimate goal is to, even if only momentarily, transcend the here and now, to appreciate the incredible, and to cross a boundary to able to associate the self with a higher purpose.

An area often labelled trivial to academic study, most critics of mass culture have pigeonholed the relation of person to object as vicarious, fetishistic, or even sinful. But unlike the Marxist interpretation of “objectification”, the consumer is not estranged from the objects they produce, but rather it is a process of development that can only co-exist with society and culture at its conception. And the strategies people use to assimilate these acquired objects into their lives range from the daily to the cosmological. Consequently, a designer’s promises are consecrated in the glass, concrete, and steel of its houses of merchandise, the contrived displays on the runway, and the polished world of its advertising campaigns. The analysis of their imagery into discussions of psychologies, mythologies, and subtexts deconstructs their attractive packaging down to iconic, and often times ironic, spaces that define current societal desires. The breakdown of the physical anatomy of the product, the context of their creation, and the mechanisms of how they are marketed declare volumes on our culture’s collective notions on value and beauty. The proposal presents a hypothetical sanctuary of luxury, a perverse extension of a Joseph Cornell Box, as an annotated assemblage of transcendental materialism.