The Arcades Project - Operi

inclined to linger before the transparent image of the old thermal baths of
Contrexeville, it was as though he had already wandered, in some previous life,
along this sunny way between poplars, had bmshed against the stone wall close
by-modest, magical effects for domestic use, such as otherwise would be experienced
only in rare cases, as before Chinese groups in soapstone or Russian
lacquer-painting.
Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally
wakeful, eternally agitated being that-in the space between the building
fronts-lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do
within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled
shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in
the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls wiell their "Post No Bills" are its writing
desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom
furniture, and the cafe terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on
its household. The section of railing where road workers hang their jackets is the
vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the
open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the
entry to the chambers of the city. Among these latter, the arcade was the drawing
room. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the
furnished and familiar intelor of the masses.
The bourgeois who came into ascendancy with Louis Philippe sets store by the
transformation of near and far into the interior. He knows but a single scene: the
drawing room. In 1839, a ball is held at el,e British embassy. Two hundred rose
bushes are ordered. "The garden;' so runs an eyewitness account, "was covered
by an awning and had the feel of a drawing room. But what a drawing room! The
fragrant, well-stocked flower beds had turned into enormous jardinieres, the graveled
walks had disappeared under sumptuous carpets, and in place of the castiron
benches we found sofas covered in danlask and silk; a round table held
books and albums. From a distance, the strains of an orchestra drifted into this
colossal boudoir, and, along the triple gallery of flowers on the periphery, exuberant
yonng people were passing to and fro. It was altogether delightful!" TI,e
dusty fata morgana of the winter garden, the dreary perspective of the train
station, with the small altar of happiness at the intersection of the tracks-it all
molders, even today, under spurious constructions, glass before its time, premature
iron. middle of the previous century, no one as yet understood
how to build with glass and iron. The problem, however, has long since been
solved by the hangar. it is the same with the human material on the inside
of the arcades as with the materials of their construction. PinlPS are the iron
uprights of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores.
For the flaneur, a transformation takes place with respect to the street: it leads
him through a vanished time. He strolls down the street; for him, every street is