Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris Book

Designs on Modernity presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in attempts to update the image of Paris as "capital of the nineteenth century." At the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris itself, as much as the commodity, was put on show. Tag Gronberg focuses on the exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and display for concepts of urban modernity. Here Le Corbusier’s now famous Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau with its Plan Voisin for the redesign of Paris confronted another equally up-to-date city: Paris as "a woman’s city," world center of fashion and shopping. Taking as her starting point one of the most dramatic 1925 exhibits, the rue des Boutiques which spanned the river Seine, Gronberg analyzes the contemporary significance of the small Parisian luxury shop. She shows how boutiques, conceived both as urbanism and as advertising, redefined Paris as the modern city. This emphasis on shops and shopping casts new light on French visual culture of the 1920s as well as on the role of gender in formulations of early twentieth-century modernity.Read More