SAM BRUDNER: The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City is, in its way, about as cool as the flagship store of a corporate giant can be. I went there shortly before the start of this school year and the environment affected me substantially. On some unconscious plane, many of the anxieties that naturally attend the start of an academic year dissipated; the store’s sleek wares and ultra-modern building implicitly promised me that, with the right state-of-the-art accoutrements, life would be easy. Papers, the daily flood of emails, schedules and due dates and midterms: all this might tidy itself up under my Mac’s silver cover and cease to frustrate and challenge me.
What could make a computer store so compelling? To answer this question, we must realize that Apple isn’t making these promises all on its own, or even in its own terms. The store draws from modern architecture and design for its symbols; it appropriates a futuristic aesthetic ala Le Corbusier, with impeccably clean white walls furnished with glass-and-steel, functional fixtures. Within this tradition, the Apple Store, like much architecture of its kind, stands as a symbol of the future, of high hopes and expectations for mankind. More broadly, the store manifests a consistent theme in Western thought: the hope for happiness in an unrealized utopia. Though disagreement over the nature of this utopia animates Western philosophical history, many thinkers have fundamentally agreed that happiness belongs to some idealized realm – not to the imperfect, apparent world in which we live. This basic thesis has motivated distinct projects from twentieth-century experiments in political theory, to Christian eschatology, to Plato’s ideal world of forms.
Recklessly Curious 