arcades project excerpts A2,1_A2,6_A3,10

Shops in the Passage des Panoramas: Restaurant Veron, reading room, music shop, Marquis, wine merchants, hosier, haberdashers, tailors, bootmakers, hosiers, bookshops, caricaturist, Theatre des Varietes. Compared with this, the Passage Vivienne was the "solid" arcade. There, one found no luxury shops. Dream houses: arcade as nave with side chapels.

The regime of specialties furnishes also-this said in passing-the historical-materialist key to the flourishing (if not the inception) of genre painting in the Forties of the previous century. With the growing interest of the bourgeoisie in matters of art, this type of painting diversified; but in conformity with the meager artistic appreciation initially displayed by this class, it did so in terms of the content, in terms of the objects represented. There appeared historical scenes, animal studies, scenes of childhood, scenes from the life of monks, the life of the family, the life of the village-all as sharply defined genres. Photography.

A first winter garden-a glassed-in space with flower beds, espaliers, and fountains, in part underground-on the spot where, in the garden of the Palais-Royal in 1864 (and today as well?), the reservoir was located. Laid out in 1788.

[Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin]