The Arcades Project

Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of 13 years. His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things -a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.This book is Benjamin´s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of 19th century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed true history that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by progress, Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.