Retail Apocalypse

A compendium of lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture.

As shopping shifts online and the economic shocks associated with the coronavirus pandemic push bankruptcies to unprecedented levels, retail is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual. As a result, the entangled worlds of architecture, fashion, business, and art appear to us in a new light, testifying to a culture that is going extinct. At the same time, retail’s techniques of attraction and distraction have become visible in a new way. Stripped of their use-value, they reveal themselves as techniques of pure display. Retail Apocalypse presents a compendium of case studies, interventions, and object lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture, ranging from Friedrich Kiesler’s display windows to Gae Aulenti’s Fiat showrooms; from J. G. Ballard’s dystopian fantasies to TELFAR’s critical utopias; and from Rem Koolhaas to Herzog & de Meuron.
 

Fredi Fischli is a curator of the gta Exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. 

Niels Olsen is a curator of the gta Exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich.

Adam Jasper is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich.