Introduction

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This is a research guide for a history of the department store architecture as a building type. This guide sets a direction for future masters project research, which will eventually compare the building types of the library and museum with the department store building type, to show their similar functions as places of learning. However, this guide is focused only on the department store building type and related histories selected from the literatures of retail, education, and material culture.

The Interwar years (1917-1939) brought new ways to learn literal and visual kinds of information, with the introduction of new communications, new industry, and new relationships in home and community. As a mediary between the user and the information or objects they wanted to find, department stores were designed to showcase goods according to strategies of merchandising, to create a “want” in the customer. Though this strategy in department store design is commonplace today, these ideas also thrived in nineteenth-century Europe. The rise of the middle class and their increased consumption of goods from factories, were the market for the first department stores, the form and function of which were established in the mid-nineteenth century.

Guided by the method set forth by Jules Prown, that physical objects and spaces are evidence of intelligence in operation at the time of design, select department stores from architectural history will be examined to draw out architectural features of department stores that have first appeared in such early stores as the Bon Marche, Paris, and have reappeared in subsequent stores, like Carson Pirie Scott, Chicago. These components constitute a specific building type that is recognized in contemporary culture as that of the department store.

The guide is organized by reference resource type. The first section covers relevant general reference resources and the second section covers reference resources in art and architecture. The third section covers more specialized reference resources in architecture and the fourth section covers important sources in educational history, history of material culture and history of retail. Clausen observes that the department store architecture has not gotten due attention in architectural history. This neglect may explain why so many of the important sources consulted in histories of art and architecture bear no references to this topic. However, with a broad search it is possible to find many sources that make a substantial bibliography. More was written on department stores in the early twentieth century, compared to the last fifty years. Perhaps a fuller historiography of department store architecture will emerge in the future.