Page 163 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 150

150 Consuming Media

Headed by its management, the centre consciously acted as a communicator. The
local Solna Centre manager saw his centre in its entirety as a communication
medium, where visitors corresponded to the readers of a newspaper. What the centre
more precisely intended to mediate was up to its resident businesses. As a material
and spatial as well as an organizational and economic unit, the centre had a commu-
nicative power: a force to influence visitors. The ultimate purpose of this power was
to maximize the profits of its corporate owners. The means to reach this final aim was
by a form of communication that primarily conveyed a wish and a promise of profit:
to the shops that were enticed to make good profits, and to the customers who were
enticed to make good deals in comfortable settings. In order to succeed in the compe-
tition for shops and customers with all other shopping environments with identical
goals, each centre has to create and display an image of itself as a unique and attrac-
tive place. It communicates its place identity through websites, advertisements, signs,
decoration and architecture.
A visitor to Solna Centre is struck by the impression of a lucid expanse, with a
wide modern city street with shops and houses under an elevated, suspended glass
roof. 15 But the internal space soon reveals a series of ambiguities. Not only is it, in
Walter Benjamin’s words, both street and house, both outdoors and indoors; it is also
both bright and dark, open and secret, transparent and opaque, ultramodern and
archaic, futuristic and nostalgic. Typically, modern shopping environments try to
create an urban feeling, and mall architecture therefore also directly connects to city
planning. Alongside the ‘high-tech’ urban style, Solna Centre offers plenty of histor-
izing elements of the ‘old town’ type. 16 The former constructs of steel, glass and
plastic materials an abstract city of metropolitan greatness and geometric openness,
with open elevators running up and down, producing a feeling of three-dimensional
rapidity and a soundscape crafted to give a sense of grand technological expanses. The
latter uses kitsch and nostalgic traits in stone, wood, brick and paint to simulate a
traditional, dense and intimate town labyrinth. In Solna, this was made by explicit
(but to most visitors and even the management not consciously registered) references
to the winding and enigmatic passages of nineteenth-century London and Paris –
precisely those arcades described by Benjamin. Together, they are balanced to offer an
impression of safe excitement – a secure place to ‘feel at home’ and pursue one’s daily
routines, but also an attractive centre of events and entertaining experiences.
To achieve such effects, architectural design is used as a means of communication,
but also decorative elements. Solna Centre made direct references to the Paris arcades
in its design of walls, windows, roofs and lamps. It also had a couple of mural paint-
ings made when the centre was constructed in the late 1980s, reminding us of old
Solna town houses. A unique feeling of the particular place was then further elabo-
rated in Solna Centre ads published in the daily papers and frequently exhibited in
the centre itself, meant to link a clear image and character to the body of the build-
ings and inducing a positive mood. The material body and the symbolic soul of the
centre were developed jointly, using all conceivable kinds of communication, from
glass and stone to print and electronic media.