Arcades Project

Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca.

Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it).

[4] However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment.

[3] It contains sections (convolutes) on arcades, fashion, catacombs, iron constructions, exhibitions, advertising, interior design, Baudelaire, The streets of Paris, panoramas and dioramas, mirrors, painting, modes of lighting, railroads, Charles Fourier, Marx, photography, mannequins, social movements, Daumier's caricatures, literary history, the stock exchange, lithography, and the Paris Commune.

[8] The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus was published in English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999 after years of difficult editorial work undertaken by Rolf Tiedemann [de], the editor of the landmark 1982 German edition.

View of an arcade (the passage Choiseul , located in the second arrondissement of Paris), as an example of the characteristic architecture of the covered arcades of 19th-century Paris.