My new project, with support from UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, is “Kress Variety Stores and the Architecture of Mass Consumption: A Building Geographies Approach.”   It asks what we can learn from Kress buildings, produced in the early-to-mid-twentieth century to house the S.H. Kress & Company’s thriving 5-10-25-cent stores, about changing infrastructures of consumption in U.S. cities, linking aesthetic constructions of space and landscape to the practical work of high-volume commerce, and by tracing the stores’ ‘afterlives’ in the built environment.  Bringing together local case studies—at the building scale—with an analysis of Kress as an entrepreneurial corporate actor (which chose to launch its chain store in the segregated South), my research proposes a situated analysis of the explosion of commodity capitalism around contours of race, class, region, and gender, taking Kress stores’ material remnants in—and enduring contributions to—downtown  landscapes as starting points from which to raise questions about the wider patterns of cultural production and circulation that made the buildings possible.

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