Architectures of Display ─ Department Stores and Modern Retail

Through an international range of case studies from the 1870s to the present day, this volume analyses strategies of display in department stores and modern retail spaces. Established scholars and emerging researchers working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions shed light on what constitutes modern retail and the ways in which display, retail and interior designers, architects and artists have built and transformed their practice in response to the commercial context.

Patricia Lara-Betancourt is a research fellow at The Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, UK. Within the field of modern interiors and design history, her research focuses on the themes of modernity, representation and identity. Recent publications include, "The Quest for Modernity: A Global/National Approach to a History of Design in Latin America," in Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in the Age of Globalization (Berghahn, 2016), "Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the Middle-Class Home, 1890-1914," in Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues (Inter Disciplinary Press, 2014) and her co-authored chapter, "Latin America 1830–1900," in History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (Yale University Press 2013). She is co-editor of Seductive Discourses: Design Advice for the Home (Interiors –Taylor & Francis- Vol 5 Issue 2, July 2014) and of Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today (Berg 2011).

Dr. Anca I. Lasc studies the invention and commercialization of the modern French interior and the development of the professions of interior designer and commercial window dresser. She has published in Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, the Journal of the History of Collections, and the Journal of Design History. Her book, Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015 (paperback 2017). A recent volume, Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse, was released by Routledge in May 2016, while Dr. Lasc’s monograph, Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession, will be published by Manchester University Press as part of its Studies in Design and Material Culture Series.

Margaret Maile Petty is Professor and Head of the School of Design in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (AU). Her research broadly investigates the discourse, production, and consumption practices of the modern built environment, with a particular focus on artificial lighting and interiors. She has published broadly in academic journals such as the JSAH, Journal of Design History, Home Cultures, Interiors, and PLAT and is co-editor of Cities of Light: Two Hundred Years of Urban Illumination (Routledge, 2015) with Sandy Isenstadt and Dietrich Neumann.