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Analytical look at shopping's history

Carina Cha

The Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping

Edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas and Sze Tsung Leong

Benedikt Taschen Verlag $620

EVERYONE IS VICTIM, knowingly or not, to the institution of shopping in Hong Kong, whether they live above commercial malls in housing complexes or work in high-rises served by a network of stores.

Shopping is the second instalment of 'Project On The City', a Harvard University graduate seminar held by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. His students didn't just sit in malls across the globe and observe the act of shopping, however. Instead, they assisted in the production of a mind-numbingly comprehensive dissection of the history of shopping and the evolution of malls in an 800-page volume.

To Koolhaas' eager disciples, the act of shopping and everything related to it is analysed from top to bottom, as if the books was a science project. Terms such as 'psycho-programming' illustrate how the 'realm of the collective unconscious' comes into play when products are mirrored to us by certain brands. Shopping malls and their typical surroundings are defined as having their own specific ecosystems and one essay presents a glossary of 'shopping ecology' which can be seen as either an esoterically academic or an entirely nerdy endeavour. Words such as 'mobility' and 'scale' are discussed above the head of the layman and words such as 'Replascape', 'Co-opetition', and 'Ulterior Spaces' seem to have been invented. Industry bigwigs such as Nike, Disney and Japanese department stores (depato) are also examined with exacting scientific prowess.

As with the university's previous volume, Great Leap Forward, which looked at the rise of the Pearl River Delta, Koolhaas' main directive is that information drives good design.

Whereas eight theses made up the contents of that book, several dozen essays in Shopping explain everything from the evolution of escalators to the psyche of the consumer.

Important historical references are also discussed at length, such as the massive glass arcade built in London in the 19th century for a world exposition, the Crystal Palace.

As with the Great Leap Forward, readers with plenty of patience will gain the most from Shopping. And again, this book might better belong in a collector's library than on a dilettante's coffee table. However, it should be noted that the two books have a differeent appeal.

Shopping, as a sport or pastime, affects everyone, while Great Leap Forward 's discourse on China's Pearl River Delta is unlikely to capture a wide audience. Rather than a heavy tome, Shopping features dozens of small, digestible essays with interesting titles (such as JunkspaceThree Ring Circus and Thou Shalt Not Shop) , which analyse consumerism in all corners of the globe, not just the West.

Koolhaas has a knack for conveying information through design. His desire to create better design through interesting information is evident from the charts and graphs that inundate the text. But the real beauty of Shopping lies in the use of advertisements from the first half of the 20th century.

These seem comical from our shopping-savvy society's perspective and nowadays it's hard to imagine the world before globalisation.

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