BUILDING MORALITY

 “[John Wanamaker] saw his department store as a tool to extend his religious aims. .."

Last year, sometime in October when I went to the Macy's department store in center city Philadelphia for the first time, I had no idea that its building, under the name of the John Wanamaker Building, is one of the historical landmarks of Philadelphia, where tourists go to visit what is advertised as the largest fully functioning organ in the world. As I entered the atrium of the building, I was surprised by the mixture of Greek and Egyptian interior architecture, and the juxtaposition of elements such as U.S. flags, women's shoes, the gigantic organ, and a colossal bronze eagle sculpture. At that point, I didn't know that John Wanamaker had founded this building in 1911 as one of the first department stores in the United States, not only to make a kind of utopian place for white middle and upper-class customers but also to manipulate their tastes and to provide the experience of a palatial environment. Further, he saw his department store as a tool to extend his religious aims. He was influenced by the concept of "Christian Nurture" by Horace Bushnell, an American theologian, who promoted the idea that "if a Christian home life cultivated Christian children, then a Christian building has a similar power." Wanamaker believed that "men are changed by changing their architecture."

Grand Court of Macy's in Philadelphia (Wanakamer Building). Photo Courtesy "Diff" 2017. CC by SA 4.0

CREATOR
Armaghan Fakhraeirad    

AFFILIATION
PhD Student Ethnomusicology
University of Pennslyvania

PRACTICE
Armaghan is a second-year Ph.D. student of (Ethno)musicology who has recently started working on music, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism in port cities of the Persian Gulf, Iran. Previous work was mainly related to revivalist, and purist trends in Iranian folk music during the 1970s and 1980s.

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