ARQ, n. 62 Consumos / Consumption, Santiago, march, 2006, p. 37-39.
READINGS
Alejandro Crispiani*, Marcela Silva
* Profesor del área Teoría, Historia y Crítica de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad Católica de chile, Santiago, Chile.
Abstract
An important part of our daily urban life is described here with such accuracy and perceptiveness, that it finally comes out of its domestic anesthesia. Thus, we recognize this choreography that gathers cars, customers, carts and products within the super sales room of the supermarket.
Key words: Architecture critique, commercial buildings, supermarkets, hypermarkets, retail, stores.
The supermarket is dead. Long live to the supermarket. The hypermarket has taken
its place, a worthy heir that has cleverly multiplied both the undoubted advantages
of its predecessor and its threatening flaws and ambiguities. Without being
a public place, and more so than a mall, to which it may appear to be associated,
but not necessarily so, the hypermarket is one of the main meeting places for
the public in the city at present. It serves the most basic needs of this public,
but nothing prevents it from also serving the most sophisticated ones. Regular
visits to it could be spaced out, but have become ever more inevitable due to
its impressive power of convergence and its apparent steam-roller effect in
the retail business of basic products. In principle, the hypermarket could stock,
and sometimes I have the impression that it really does, the total amount of
brands and types of products that circulate in the national market relative
to foodstuffs and hygiene, embracing in a limited way, but ever more decidedly,
the other items that end up inhabiting our homes: clothing, electrical appliances,
utensils, furniture and others. It is a key link in our urban life, in which
there is just about everything, and just about everybody.
At the rhythm of economic growth, it would appear that in Chile the hypermarket
typology has acquired notable importance at the urban and social level over
the past few years. The rigor, growth and propagation of the supermarket industry
in our country are several decades old. The first supermarket belonging to the
Almac chain was inaugurated in Providencia, in the metropolitan region,
back in 1957. The rise of a new architectonic type and the location and image
criteria that it demands will undoubtedly have lasting consequences for the
city and the market. But perhaps the most important aspect is the new relationship
between the client and the product that the supermarket proposes, eliminating
the mediating and paternal figure of the salesman and giving rise to a more
direct and introverted relationship with the product that no longer channels
that ancestral contact between the buyer and the seller (there are only buyers
in the supermarket). This is directly reflected in the introduction of the self-service
concept in traditional stores, changing the spatial and programmatic distribution
of their interior, increasing their surface areas and reducing the sale of non-packaged
products to the absolute minimum. Crowning the rapid growth and expansion process
that supermarkets have been experiencing since the eighties, the hypermarket
became consolidated as a new commercial typology at the end of the nineties,
being the result of a series of negotiations, restructuring and movements in
national industry that will condition its growth and development in years to
come. As of that moment, the idea of the hypermarket as a sort of urban container,
strategically located in the city, and a link in a greater framework of programmatic
and advertising networks and systems, has become exaggerated(1).
Macro-consumption and macro-city / Supermarket architecture harks back
to a referential type in the origins of modern architecture: the great vessel,
be it either industrial or exhibition fair, built according to a meccano-type
industrial system of dry assembly, with important spatial and construction flexibility,
capable of absorbing modifications at any moment. It is a vessel capable of
accommodating large quantities of people in motion, generator of a micro-climate
with strictly controlled lighting and ventilation conditions, that contains
all the buying activity without cracks or filtering to the exterior, guaranteeing
concentration on the product. Like the industrial ship, it is guided by the
idea of maximum spatial efficiency based on a primarily lineal ordering which
could be called the consumption line.
The great hall is the most patent manifestation of that change in the relationship
with the products that we mentioned: in the supermarket the buyer is the one
that buys, whereas before, the seller was the one that sold. Even thought the
disappearance of the salesman makes the products directly accessible, reaching
out to the buyer like never before, this does not necessarily mean that buying
has become a lonely activity. It is well known that buying in the supermarket
is in many cases an act of socialization. Family shopping is frequent. Now that
the salesman is gone, the supermarket appears to strengthen preexisting or already
established bonds. On the inside, the products offer themselves using different
techniques. In the first place, of course, there is the container, no longer
designed for products that will coexist more or less pacifically on the shelving
of shops, but rather for the relentless war of image in the aisles. The siren’s
song of the products, made up by their containers, fills the great hall. Following
a long-lasting western tradition of valuing naturalistic images, vision is more
important than any of the other senses here. Sight is the great avenue that
channels the desires that the products untiringly generate. It wanders unceasingly
in a field fully occupied by meticulously clothed merchandise. Few of them dare
show themselves naked under some more or less transparent covering. Sight may
be supported by hearing (at some moment it may guide us to products the great
hall wants to get rid of), but never by the sense of smell, which only sneaks
surreptitiously into the great hall, against its wishes. The great hall also
has other techniques to promote or discourage the circulation of a specific
product. The main one of them is location, which has to do with the greatest
exposure to sight. To see is to desire, and the more a product is looked at,
the more it rotates. That is where those privileged places come from: the heads
of the aisles, and the shelving at eye height. Above all, these aisle heads
reveal that the order of the goods is not static (although it appears to be),
but entirely to the contrary: within an unchanging length of aisle the different
trademarks appear and disappear. Besides, in its shelving, the products are
constantly being withdrawn, they move before our very eyes, but this movement
is imperceptible; despite their removal and repositioning they seem to continue
to be there, as if they were produced by the shelving itself. There are certain
characteristics of the great hall that make it a particular place, isolated
from the rest of the spaces in which the mass of the public meet. One of those
traits is what we might call the suspension of the property of objects. Upon
entering the great hall, the user must get rid of the greatest number of objects
of personal use that custom and social practice allow. Once in the hall, objects
don’t appear to belong to anybody. The only valid law for them is visibility:
all the products have to be visible, and it is not only about a sales strategy.
While the product shows itself in full view, there is no suspicion of theft,
(in the great space of the hall there is no theft of merchandise, only suspicion
of such, which will become effective or not when one passes through the tills).
In this regard the carts show the wisdom of their design: nothing can be hidden
in them. Taking merchandise out of a neighboring cart could be a sign of unforgivable
rudeness, but it does not constitute theft, as the person that had it in his
cart is not yet its owner. While it is in full view, it will only be a change
of location. It implies an irritation, but it does not represent a material
loss for the person it was taken from. Hence that relaxed attitude towards bought
objects that one can feel inside the great hall. They can remain inside the
cart free from their fate for a while; in the end, their improbable removal
will only mean a waste of time. This quite particular and extraordinary condition
of objects makes the space of the great hall consistent. Going through the till
puts an end to it: the visibility of the products ends as they are covered by
the white bags; from then on they have a specific personal owner, their open
availability is over, they are hidden from sight. The power of attraction of
their containers can rest under the thin white cover: it has fulfilled it commitment.
From that moment on, with the product having become private property and very
exchangeable, the function of the container becomes principally informative,
whereas before it was basically to arouse desire.
Another notorious characteristic of the great hall is its sectoring by specialties:
bakery, meats, fish, wines, cosmetics; each family of products creates its own
niche, the characterization of which in many cases is based on the commercial
typology of the city itself. Added to theses sectors are the food courts –not
necessarily fast, that allow for interrupting or energizing the shopping sequence–.
Thus the hypermarket corresponds to a type of neighborhood network(2).
Probably like in ancient cities where every productive activity had its own
sector, the borough of the blacksmiths or the tinsmiths, the hypermarket sectorizes
on the basis of families of objects or products. Different set characteristics
distinguish each one of these families within the impassive framework of the
general architecture of the vessel. The dividing lines between the different
micro-boroughs may be subtle or striking, but the flow network connects
them all. The tills act as a sort of customs of this interior citadel: one must
render meticulous accounts of the objects one is taking out of it and introducing
into the real city. But the citadel is surrounded by other spaces. Obviously,
the warehouses, storerooms and places for food production that serve it; the
parking lots and a mass of shops in the traditional manner, with personalized
attention, that have taken cover under the great container, or are crowded together
at its edges. Evidently, the hypermarket does not exclude these ancestral forms
of commerce, it only minimizes them, it puts them in their place: rotating in
orbit around itself.
The efficient use of the great hall requires a sort of mobile cupboard: the
supermarket shopping cart, without doubt one of the great creations of modern
design: easy to maneuver, heavy, transparent, it can be packed into extraordinarily
compact rows, capable of transporting apparently enormous amounts of merchandise;
it is the key piece of this architecture. Without it, the entire supermarket
apparatus would be inconceivable. It is the perfect counterpoint to the immobility
and the apparently frozen and efficient order that the shelving imposes on objects.
The cart takes the products out of this order and piles them up one on top of
the other, but not senselessly. The content of the cart constitutes a portable
universe of personal preferences and economic possibilities, perhaps more expressive
of their owner than any other group of goods to be exhibited in public. The
supermarket cart mirrors the great hall, as it is itself a variant of the container;
it is in fact a mobile micro-container. It is the instrument that allows
the closed-in sea of merchandise contained by the great hall, always at the
point of overflowing, to flow past the tills and then filter to the cars and
from them to the homes. Its identification with the supermarket itself, its
almost inoperable clumsiness outside this environment, reinforces the condition
of singular and differential space of the sales hall, a space that needs a tool
for its proper use, that is its own, and only works inside it.
The contents of the cart spill out into the boot of the car. Both wheeled vehicles
share this other great container: the parking lot. The parking lots are indispensable
as they contain that extension of the supermarket cart - the automobile. In
them, the automobile becomes a hyper-cart swallowing buyers and merchandise.
However, the parking lots have an inverse relationship with the objects they
contain compared to the relationship the great hall has with its goods. Contrary
to the latter, whose natural state is jam-packed, the parking lots accept being
(or maybe secretly want to be) an empty space, or at least partially occupied.
A completely full parking lot is ineffective or imperfect, shows its lack of
coherence with the great hall, is incapable of fully fulfilling the desires
the latter awakes. There is nothing more irritating than the tight knit of other
people’s cars at the expectant moment of entering the great hall. Strangely
enough they reach perfection in their relationship in its partial occupation,
in its wasteful use. Its holes and empty spaces are necessary for the fluid
circulation of merchandise. They are only perfect when they are not full. This
partial occupation would be intolerable for the shelves (for those who have
witnessed it, there is no more disturbing sight than a half-empty supermarket).
On the other hand completely empty parking lots are a sign that the great hall
has closed its doors. When completely empty they dissociate from the great hall
and its extension on wheels, acquiring an esthetic fullness that makes them
valid in their own right. We architects educated in the modern tradition, have
been trained to admire this type of space: a great hypostyle hall, an enormous
flat form, perfect, extensive, nocturnal and uninhabited. It is intriguing that
these spaces reach their utmost expression when they are no longer fulfilling
their purpose, when the objects they must accommodate have abandoned them. They
are not, nor can they be, useful, but if they were, they could be considered
beautiful abstract sculptures to be contemplated from a vehicle in motion.
Despite the complexity of the interior of the hypermarket, from the city one
only perceives a container that is installed on an urban scale. A common skin
covers its entire perimeter. Different advertising objects, of relatively long
or short life, usually announcing bargains and new products, are hung on this
skin. But the purpose of the existence of this skin is to be the impassive background
against which the company’s logotype and the letters that make up its
name stand out. In effect, both things make up one graphic unit, one trademark
that reflects all the trademarks in its interior. One hyper- brand that hovers
above all the products in the interior and spreads out on an urban scale. The
outer skin exists to give the logo its place. The entire architecture is impregnated
by it(3). The logos have to be simple and unforgettable, they
are the reference points in the consumer world: “modern lighthouses
that guide us in our experience and journey through the world” the
logo tells us where we are(4).
The exterior of the hypermarket is decidedly poor: all the resources used are
rudimentary: a simplistic use of volume, the elemental gigantism of the logo
and the equally elementary relationship of form to background. It is bearable
when seen from afar, isolated from other buildings, and whenever possible, in
the midst of greenery. But the consolidated city does not digest it well. Expressed
so brutally, its huge interior scale only produces urban isolation. Observed
from the outside, the hypermarket seems to retain its condition of a large habitable
advertising object without ever becoming a building. The intentions of making
the hypermarket an important link in the functioning of the borough, which its
design embraces and articulates in the great sales hall, does not appear to
have rubbed off on the outside of the building, which only appears to want to
impose its trademark. The contrast between the inside and the outside of the
hypermarket could not be more manifest. The number of artifacts used to regulate
the flow of objects and people that inhabit its interior, allowing for the satisfaction
of many diverse interests, encouraging certain aspirations and desires and blocking
others, does not even lightly touch the relationship of the building to the
city, which is somewhat childish; (despite its efforts in this regard it has
not been able to surpass the department stores). This problem will hopefully
change, as it is an eminently architectural problem, or one that could be resolved
with tools that architecture could provide. Here and there, but definitely more
there than here, there seem to be signs that our profession is beginning to
take this matter, and other similar ones, in hand. The great hall still awaits
its architect.
Notes
1. See Silva Fischer, Marcela: Hyperarchitecture: a contained
micro-city. The hypermarket in Santiago, Chile. Thesis for the title of
Architect and Master in Architecture, Universidad Católica de Chile,
2005. Guiding professor Fabrizio Gallanti.
2. For more details see: Marcela Silva Fischer, op. cit.
3. For greater expansion on this theme as well, see Marcela
Silva Fischer; op. cit.
4. Pozo, Patricio; “ The global economy of image”
In ARQ Magazine Nº 49, p.27.
References
Silva Fischer, Marcela: Hiperarquitectura:
una microciudad contenida. El hipermercado en Santiago de Chile. Tesis
para optar al grado de Magíster en Arquitectura, Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile, april 2005.
Pozo, Patricio; “La economía
global de la imagen”. ARQ Nº 49, Ediciones ARQ, Santiago,
2001, p. 27.