THE TWILIGHT ZONE
The arcade is one of those neither/nor spaces, a space of threshold, of liminality. Neither buidling nor not-building, the arcade hovers as an interstitial no-man’s land, between things. A kind of twlight domain. Beloved of the flaneurs, it became the emblem for Walter Benjamin’s never completed project, the Passagenwerk. The arcades of Paris resisted both time and place. They endured amidst the change all around, and persisted as what Benjamin thought of as fairy grottos. And spatially they resisted the inexorable drive of modernity, to maximise space, to commodify every square inch.
In Italy too, the arcades represent some of the most delicious spaces. Lingering between being in a building or being in the expanse beyond, the arcades proffer a kind of ‘prospect-refuge’ experience, to use Jay Appleton’s term. A memory of being in Bologna returns, it was a sombre time … the end of November, early December. One thinks of Flaubert’s November - where the books title symbolises the poignancy of the season, of an autumnal gloominess … a seasonal twilight, ”not dark yet, but getting there,” where the arcades present themselves as the twilight of built form…
(from my sketchbook c.1992)
An image I carried in my mind on my Grand Tour in the early 1990s, was of Christchurch painter Doris Lusk’s Arcades series. The fabric awnings suffused with a patina of age, and of agelessness, capturing the light amidst that diaphonous space of the arcade.
Doris Lusk (1976) Arcade Awning, Saint Mark’s Square, Venice (7)
Bob Dylan (1997) Not Dark Yet
