Pilgrimage
America's thirteenth and largest IKEA lies near the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg,1 an upscale suburb an hour or so northwest of Chicago. "Mall" is a term best used loosely here, as the concrete membrane enclosing Woodfield's retail nucleus has symbolically if not architecturally dissolved, blurring into miles of mall sprawl networked by nearly indistinguishable access roads. IKEA's glass and steel-roofed, iconic blue-and-yellow octagon-symbolizing womb, cloaca,2 and omphalos3-is fronted by a slowly revolving door of yellow steel and glass, almost large enough to admit a Geo Metro. Inside, shoppers line up in the lobby-like entrance area to collect store schematics from a "greeter" before boarding the escalator to the second floor. Most shoppers then take another escalator to the third floor, in order to work their way through the store on a downward spiral, stopping at the first-floor "Self Serve Furniture Aisles" to collect their larger purchases before proceeding to the checkout area.
The second and third floors are arranged in concentric circles, with the outer "circuit" featuring room "vignettes"-model living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens furnished in unified schemes of color and materials. There are forty living rooms, twenty bedrooms, and twelve kitchen settings. Walkways separate the vignettes from the inner circuit, which contains furniture grouped by type: living room furniture opposite the living room vignettes, and so on. Discrete "giftshops" throughout the store stock the smaller items-tableware, candles, lamps and picture frames-on display in the vignettes.
Near the escalator are several eight-foot-square display cubicles on wheels, hung with vertical white banners ordering shoppers to "relax," "entertain" and "retreat." One cubicle contains a table of pale blonde wood, laden with white porcelain, white cotton and clear glassware. A white cabinet with glass shelves displays more white dishes and glassware. The gaze travels through the open-front and open-back cubes, which link the inside and outside of the store. The vitrines glimmer in the rays of sunlight, causing the objects within to glow with the calm, warm promise of elegant domestic simplicity.
The all-white scheme recalls Le Corbusier's purifying Law of Ripolin, the imperative "coat of whitewash" which would make people "masters of themselves" by cleansing the home of sentimental kitsch, the "accretions of dead things from the past."4 Every imperiously immaculate item and orderly room arrangement in IKEA trumpets an ideal, if somewhat authoritarian alternative: "Buy Me, and I will contain your objects! I will help you take control of your surroundings! Impose our systems and your soul will be at ease! We will absolve your errors of taste, your thrift-store budget, your sins of overconsumption, your neurotic and sentimental hoarding! Integrate us one by one-or in one cleansing, therapeutic weekend-and spatial utopia will be yours! Don't you long to throw everything out and start all over again?"
Model Rooms, Model Lives
In addition to the room vignettes, IKEA features a more innovative type of model room display, with fictional residents depicted in photographs accompanied by first-person narratives. Four of these model room displays are "teen" bedrooms; the other three are entire homes ranging in size from 800 to 1,100 square feet. The occupants of the teen bedrooms are pictured on brightly colored placards that hang at eye level from the ceiling next to "their" rooms. Each placard features a strip of four photo-booth-style photographs, with a few lines of first-person text underneath. These are happy, well-adjusted Everyteens, not too quirky or brainy, cute but not gorgeous, cool but not intimidating. The girls' rooms are cute and fuchsia, unintentionally signaling their occupants' impending transformation from chaste girls dressed in baby pink to sexual beings equipped with "hot" pinknesses such as labia and lipstick. The boys' rooms are filled with unequivocally masculine, institutional-looking furniture, as though the rooms were intended to silently confirm, fortify, or compel the occupant's masculinity while smoothing his transition from home to dorm to cubicle, or barracks, or penitentiary.
The full-sized model homes are occupied by a white couple with two children; an African American single mom with a teenage son; and three young women-two Asian American sisters and their African American friend-in their "first" apartment. Despite IKEA's use of various racial backgrounds and living arrangements to signify "diversity," the subjects' class markers uniformly reflect the tastes and concerns of young, educated, upwardly mobile people. There is little that is remarkable about the three roommates, for example, except that they can afford to shudder at the thought of living with "hand-me-down furniture or mismatched glasses and plates" and they "really wanted to have all new, matching things in the kitchen." What is significant here is the therapeutic fantasy of unity, uniformity, and purity enabled by the acquisition of "all new, matching things"-the freedom, as Le Corbusier described, from chaotic, unauthorized objects, from objects that have been contaminated by history and sentiment. The urge to start anew is understandable for young adults passing the milestone of independence from parents, but the imperative to excise every vestige of the parental home is, at best, unrealistic.
Of all the model home occupants, the black woman seems to have the fullest appreciation for IKEA-style design and aesthetics:
We live downtown because we want to be in the middle of everything-we love to walk to dinner, try to never miss a gallery opening…. The location is great, but we sacrificed a bit on space to be here. That means our furniture has to be smart and make good use of the space we have, but it absolutely has to be our style. I can't imagine having furniture in my home if I didn't love the design. Each piece is special to me and I enjoy both looking at and using it all everyday…. I knew I wanted glass doors in the kitchen cabinets, but if everything's not perfectly neat inside all the time, you really notice it. With this frosted glass, I got the light look I wanted and it always looks tidy.
The scenario of a teenage son going gallery-hopping with his mom, however unrealistic, quickly establishes the mother's interest in art and aesthetics, which is elaborated in her rhapsody over the objects she loves. Why does IKEA work so hard to construct the African American case as especially urban(e), cosmopolitan, artistic, refined, and tasteful? I am certainly not arguing against the representation of a black person as any or all of these things; rather, what I am commenting on here is the apparent need to offset the woman's race and her status as a single mother by ratcheting her class markers significantly higher than the inhabitants of the other model homes. Taste and style-displayed through aesthetically pleasing objects of spare, modernist design-are used to counterbalance or even erase the more traditional markers of lower class represented here: blackness and single motherhood.
The text about the white family is entirely preoccupied with delivering household efficiency "tips." I call it IKEA pedagogy: teaching customers how to use furnishing styles, surfaces, configurations and systems to maximize domestic efficiency. The daughter's bed doubles as a play structure; you can "triple-hang little kid's clothes" in the closet system and place children's things in baskets so they are accessible; the kitchen features handy recycling bins and a computer workstation (pardon my skepticism that any actual work gets done while dinner is being prepared); the floor is low maintenance and "much better than carpet for kids with allergies or asthma because it doesn't give dust mites a place to hide." The TV "disappears"; cabinets, storage units, wood surfaces and corners are childproofed; slipcovers can be whipped off and replaced at the first sign of a stain.
The management of these middle-class standards of living, the maintenance of cleanliness as a class marker, has been taken over by (or left in the hands of) the hyper-efficient mother. Correct-that is, hygienic and efficient-parenting (or more precisely, mothering) conveys the routinization of the factory into the home. Household chores, rules, schedules and procedures-the governing components of domestic citizenship-acclimate children to the systems they will encounter at school, in the workplace, in their dealings with the state, and as consumers. What is lacking in this narrative of the model family home is any suggestion that one might lower one's standards of neatness to accommodate chaotic and untidy children. The solution, it seems, is not to change one's attitude, to relax and forget about the stains on the furniture, but to become hyper-efficient, to be super-strict about putting the toys back in the bins and the TV behind closed doors, to be vigilant about containing the children and their excesses so the home meets middle-class standards of presentability and acceptability. Significantly, it is the wife who seems to do all the organizing and worrying and containing and managing, even as she tries to do "at least … some work" at her kitchen computer "workstation."
Not only does IKEA pedagogy teach you how to organize things, but how to think about organizing things. Your problem is not that you have too many things, but that you don't have the right things to manage your things. The things that manage your things are modular, infinitely configurable, infinitely arrangable, "custom" furnishings for the masses. This RTA ("ready to assemble") furniture and the imperative of finding "solutions" to space management "problems" invites IKEA shoppers to become technical experts. Every system has its own literature-8 -by-11-inch booklets or leaflets that describe and picture all the parts, their prices and how they fit together, with spaces for notes and measurements. The store provides nifty little stand-up desks everywhere, complete with calculator, cup of pencils and paper yardsticks. In their roles as space managers and efficiency experts, IKEA shoppers are expected to combine the acts of economic calculation and aesthetic contemplation with the cognitive modes of spatial arrangement and systematization.
Space Management: The Antidote
to Surplus Embodiment
The aesthetic of modernist containment presented by IKEA is familiar to anyone who has visited stores such as Crate & Barrel, The Pottery Barn, Hold Everything and The Container Store, all of which emerged on a large scale in the United States in the 1980s. Of course, the spare, modernist aesthetic in furnishings is far from new. Furnishings by Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer were available in the United States as early as the 1930s, and their cheaper mass-produced versions proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s.5 Just as IKEA began to move outside of Sweden in the 1960s, Terence Conran opened his first Habitat shop on London's Fulham Road in 1964. The proliferation of well-designed modernist furnishings for the mass market in the United States, however, owes more to the development of large retail stores by Crate & Barrel, The Pottery Barn and IKEA, whose aesthetic of affordable style had by the 1990s begun to "trickle down" to the more innovative discount retailers such as Target. It is not insignificant that the names of the newer stores-Hold Everything and The Container Store-have cleverly ditched Pottery Barn's and Crate & Barrel's homey small-town general store imagery and foregrounded instead their primary ideological objective: to Hold! Everything!-to halt, or at least contain, the overwhelming, all but tyrannical proliferation of objects.
This urge to contain and conceal rampant objects is analogous to an aesthetic of absent bodies which had become evident in mail order catalogs such as J. Crew by the 1990s. While most clothing catalogs intersperse photographs of the products by themselves with photographs of products worn by models, the J. Crew catalog uses models much more frequently in the men's section than the women's section, where the clothes are often arranged in "outfits" but without the interference of actual female bodies. Instead, the clothes float against pure white backgrounds like objects in a "white cube" museum of modern art.6 This difference in display suggests a strategy specifically catering to women with negative body images; why suggest that the customer form a troubling comparison of herself to gorgeous, stick-thin models when you can eradicate the body altogether and encourage a more pleasurable experience-one in which the customer can engage in a utopian projection of her fantasy self into the clothing on display?
Cultural critic Stuart Ewen has argued that the increasing slimness and streamlining of representations of women's bodies bespeaks an urge to streamline the body right out of existence, or at least to discipline the body to mimic a machined surface:
Conforming to ideals that have informed developments in architecture, design, advertising imagery, and fashion, the ideal body is one that no longer materially exists, one that has been reduced to an abstract representation of a person: a line, a contour, an attitude, skinned from its biological imperatives. Regardless of the shape one's body takes, whatever flesh remains is too much; image must be freed from the liabilities of substance.7
Historian Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that this rigid bodily discipline arises out of the struggle of the upper middle class to maintain its economic status-a struggle that is no longer a residual of the Protestant work ethic but of a post-World War II "anxiety of affluence," a fear that abundance makes us "soft" and therefore economically and morally vulnerable:
If this [professional middle class] is an elite, then, it is an insecure and deeply anxious one. It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. But in the middle class there is another anxiety: a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will. Even the affluence that is so often the goal of all this striving becomes a threat, for it holds out the possibility of hedonism and self-indulgence.8
For this upwardly mobile professional class, Ehrenreich suggests, "voluntary simplicity" became more than a political statement or lifestyle choice; it was a "set of behavioral cues," markers distinguishing them from the working classes, who, with their "tasteless home furnishings, high-fat diet, and unwholesome addictions-[served] as an object lesson in the perils of succumbing to the consumer culture." In terms of its consumer choices, this new middle class "was able to construct a new identity around conspicuous consumption, redefining it not as surrender but as a pious form of work."9 This is the pious work-the work of containment and hygiene, the work of class maintenance-that goes on in the model family home described above.
"Space management systems" from IKEA, the Container Store and Hold Everything, then, provide the spatial equivalent of muscular armature, the skeleton or architecture whose subdivisions and smooth surfaces rigidly dictate the tight management of objects-the containment of our houses' disorderly guts. The space management system is the domestic, object-oriented equivalent of successful, tightly managed bodies and successful, tightly managed lives. The configurations of space management systems, in their modular, efficient way, are designed to resolve the problems of excessive consumption as well as to engineer the tasks of household production and maintenance, conveying the Taylorized10 systematization of the factory into the home. The way in which IKEA presents these systems conflates utopian desire with authoritarian discipline. The moral of the story is not that we've all become factory robots, obsessed with "conserving steps" and maintaining family and class hygiene, but that that's what-it seems-we'd like to become.
Notes
1 In German, schaum means "foam" or "froth"; a burg is a fortress, stronghold, citadel, or castle. Schaumburg, then, is a Citadel of Foam, a Fortress of Froth-a superb analogy for the effervescent pleasures of shopping.
2 A cloaca is an excrementory cavity, a sewer, or, figuratively, a receptacle of moral filth. I use the word to call to mind Lewis Mumford's comparison of Rome's aqueducts and sewers, which were designed to "cleanse the inhabitants and remove the offal of its congested districts," to the "man-sewers" of modern cities, "in which the mass of plebeians could be daily drained back and forth between their dormitories and their factories." Sticks & Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), 65-6. The retail space similarly functions as a conduit that has been carefully engineered to manage the circulation of bodies, goods and capital (which has an excretory symbolism all its own: see Martin Pops, "The Metamorphosis of Shit," Salmagundi 56. (Spring 1982): 26-61.
3 Omphalos means navel, central point, or hub; it originally meant the "sacred stone, of a rounded conical shape, in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, fabled to mark the central point of the earth" (O.E.D.). It also designates the reliquary of a cathedral-the tomb in which saintly relics (bodily remains, clothing or other emblems) are enshrined.
4 "Imagine the results of the Law of Ripolin. Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners…. Then comes inner cleanness, for the course adopted leads to refusal to allow anything at all which is not correct, authorized, intended, desired, thought-out: no action before thought." (Emphasis in original.) Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today. James I. Dunnett, trans. L'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui (Cambridge: MIT, 1987), 188.
5 For an overview, see George H. Marcus's Functionalist Design (Prestel, Munich and New York, 1990).
6 See Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. (San Francisco: Lapis Press,1976) for a discussion of the significance of the white wall-the space "devoted to the technology of esthetics" (15)-for modernist and post-modernist art.
7 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1988), 182-83.
8 Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 15.
9 227.
10 Reference to Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1911). Scientific management is also called Taylorism.
