Page 28 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 15

Paris a century ago. The shops are angled toward the passage, creating shadowy alley-
ways intended to create a sense of secrecy. The stylized pillars and glass roof imitate
the popular iron constructions that held up glass ceilings in the late nineteenth
century, and that so fascinated Benjamin:

The first structures made of iron served transitory purposes: covered markets,
railroad stations, exhibitions. Iron is thus immediately allied with functional
moments in the life of the economy. What was once functional and transitory,
however, begins today, at an altered tempo, to seem formal and stable. 31
This architectural style embodies a sense of liminality, as Jon Goss noted, and has
been quite common in shopping malls, especially in the 1990s. A decade later, the
hypermodern and minimalist abstractness seems to be a more trendy transnational
style of shopping-mall architecture, but even that is replete with implicit or open
historical references – for instance to the 1920s’ functionalism of Le Corbusier.
Decades after Benjamin made his observation, the narrow corridor through Solna
Centre represents a fictive past, using history decoratively as a ‘sequence of style’. 32
Solna’s late-twentieth-century reference to the Paris Arcades reconstructs the form of
a commercial space that once embodied a new relationship between consumer and
goods, as Benjamin argues, creating a visual display that is both intimate and public.
This second kind of ‘history’ rewrites the specifics of locality within a frame of
popular culture and nostalgia, as a timeless past where Hollywood, celebrity and the
dim light from faux gas lamps are visually inscribed onto the local. Solna Centre, like
many other shopping centres around the globe, is filled with objects that stand synec-
dochically for other periods and places. Global electronic media and tourism have
vastly expanded the stock of place imagery in the consumer’s musée imaginaire,
creating a fount of ‘real and fictitious elsewheres’. 33 When these images refer to the
past, they articulate ‘an ideology of nostalgia’, generating what Susan Stewart calls the
‘desire for desire’, a fitting motif for a space for consumption. 34
Many theorists argue that these display forms, signifying the past as a heritage
35
culture industry, exploit nostalgia for real places and historic roots. However, people
with a long personal history of Solna Centre undeniably see it as a very real place. They
recall events that have taken place there and businesses that have been replaced by new
enterprises. Many people recount aspects of the shopping centre’s history, such as the
short-lived ice-skating rink that used to be on the lower level. These accounts have the
character of oral tradition, a received history that is not always based in the individual’s
own experience. Several people mentioned that horse-drawn carriages once used the
very street that now runs through the centre of the mall. These narratives, constructed
from a received mythical past, are quite unlike the references to community history
the architect wove into the shopping centre’s design.
There is also the political economic history of Solna Centre with roots dating back
to the 1960s, when the first shops were joined together around the town square. In
1985 the Solna city council and a large Swedish investment company signed an
agreement that laid the foundation for the company’s purchase and rebuilding of all

Locating Media Practices 15