Amazon’s new bricks-and-mortar bookstore, in Seattle’s University Village, lets customers experience the tension between front-of-house and back-of-house as a kind of pleasure. Photograph by George Rose / Getty
At first glance, the physical place that Amazon created with all its data is anticlimactic. The bookstore is not some through-the-looking-glass swoopy physical incarnation of the ineffable clouds of computerized memory. Instead, the books are all shelved cover-out, just as they appear on Amazon, and the relative prominence, proportion of stock, and pricing of best-sellers and recommended titles, including the little cardboard signs excerpting each book’s online user reviews and ratings, are calibrated to correspond exactly to what you would find online.
Other than that, the store looks sort of like a Starbucks—and, at least, the coffee chain’s latest look as developed by its in-house designer Liz Muller for the company’s upscale Reserve branches—one of which also opened in November right across the mall promenade from Amazon’s new bookstore. The look is a mash-up of a New England Barn and a Second World War submarine. It features wood that looks like it’s been salvaged from a shipyard. Black metal abounds, whether in the sign-holders, the window trim, the pipes and ducts up in the blacked-out ceiling above the overhead lights, or the lamps just inside the windows that, with their bulbous shades and pipe-like tubular mountings, look like something that would be attached to a drill press in a nineteen-forties machinist’s workshop.
It’s a style that’s been called Heritage Modern or Warm Industrial—a sleeker take on the neo-Victoriana waxed-mustache-and-varietal-pickle aesthetic of Edison lightbulbs, taxidermy, and gray metal stools that during the late aughts represented hipster chic, from Williamsburg to Portland. In home decoration, the look has been perfected by the Restoration Hardware chain of furniture stores, now known as R.H., where you can buy desks that look like parts of nineteen-thirties ribs-and-rivets airplanes and lamps that look like eighteen-nineties surveyors’ tripods, alongside monumental sofas and cabinets in leather and teak. As it happens, a Restoration Hardware store shares Amazon’s mall building, just two doors down. You could argue that this part of the mall isn’t so much selling books or chairs or cappuccinos but, rather, a particular look. And selling whatever this look does to soothe and stir the anxieties and ambitions of this moment in our culture.
The machine-age era that this look references, from the late eighteen-nineties to the late nineteen-forties, represents a precise period in the history of technology: post-electric and pre-atomic. This was a time in which radically new electromagnetic tools—gramophone, telephone, radio, radar, cinema, television—shattered our centuries-old expectations about how information and image are located and transported across space. And yet the objects embodying these technologies had, to today’s eyes, an appealingly heavy and clunky presence: wooden cases that opened and closed, Bakelite switches that turned on and off. These devices didn’t continuously communicate with one another and without us; or record our behavior for the corporations that made them; or insinuate themselves into our clothes and bodies; or, with some sly reversal of utility by hacker or terrorist, do us harm. So those machinists’ lamps descending from the ceiling of Amazon’s bookstore represent, in our age of pattern-recognition algorithms and drone deliveries, a specific kind of nostalgia—not for some lamplit pre-industrial era but for an earlier high-technology moment in which our machines were still uncannily powerful, but were more legible, more tangible, and more compliant.
This look, with its taste for rivets and gaskets and tubular steel, also provides a kind of aesthetically retroactive continuity for all the junky infrastructural odds and ends—the sprinklers, the pipes, the ducts, the conduits, the wires, the cables, the brackets, the beams—that until recently would have been hidden behind hung ceilings and maintenance panels. At Amazon’s bookstore, much of these overhead mechanicals are open to view but painted black, rather like the lighting grid or stage machinery in a small theatre. Something about those slender pipe-like lamp arms below makes all the preëxisting mess of pipes above seem more intentional, more interesting, more palatable.
At Amazon’s bookstore, this carefully staged view of the architectural backstage serves as an acknowledgement, conscious or not, of the online retailer’s own back-of-house. The real way that Amazon makes physical places out of all its data is in the form of its vast exurban fulfillment centers: the hundred or so warehouses around the globe, each about a million or more square feet in size and staffed by a thousand or more personnel, where it stores and sorts and sends all its stuff. These facilities are a kind of limit condition of big-box retail: endless steel shelves under florescent lights and steel trusses, in which the shoppers are elsewhere, their avatars now the stockers and pickers who fulfill orders, unshelving goods to a complex network of carts and chutes and conveyor belts to be packaged and delivered.
Seattle’s University Village mall, built over a drained marsh in the fifties and updated in the nineties, already represents an attempt at domesticating the big box. The mall’s former anchor tenant, a fifty-thousand-square-foot Barnes & Noble bookstore, lasted sixteen years before shuttering, in 2011. This mall is neither a university nor a village, but its layout rewards the kind of pedestrian stroll you might take across a campus or small town. It’s an outdoor mall, meaning that, past a ring of parking, its half-dozen big warehouse-like structures are wrapped in smaller storefronts that offer mall-goers the incomplete illusion of walking through a picturesque neighborhood made of freestanding buildings. Look past the brick cornice of Amazon’s bookstore and you’ll see, immediately behind, the higher blank stucco wall of the big box it’s really situated in, the big box that also houses and services the neighboring Restoration Hardware. From a drone’s-eye view, the top and back of this kind of big box, with its factory-like rooftop air-handling units and its loading docks, is indistinguishable from an Amazon fulfillment center.
If Amazon’s intention had been a miniature masquerade, to pose as the kind of downtown community bookstore that it (like Barnes & Noble before it) is conventionally said to have displaced, then plenty of actual neighborhood storefronts were available in Seattle. A wave of smaller online retailers—especially clothiers and accessories-makers like Bonobos, Frank & Oak, and Warby Parker, for whom in-person trying-on is a thing—has done just that, recently opening bricks-and-mortar storefronts in urban downtowns from New York to San Francisco. Amazon’s decision to occupy a pseudo-neighborhood psuedo-storefront is, intentionally or inadvertently, more interesting.
One of the entertainments of Blue C Sushi, the restaurant whose space Amazon took over and that moved to another part of the University Village mall, is those miniature conveyor belts that bring sashimi to your tabletop—a charming little extension, domesticated in scale, of all the industry of belts and docks and wheels involved in shipping flash-frozen tuna across the Pacific. “Our proprietary digital tracking technology,” Blue C’s promotional materials read, “lets us monitor every item on our delivery belt, determining how long it’s been on display and alerting the chefs when it’s time to refresh.” One of the entertainments of Restoration Hardware is simultaneously seeing a domestic vignette—sofas and tables and carpets arranged to make a scene of tasteful domesticity—and the stagecraft behind the vignette: the lighting grid holding the spotlights above, the fabric scrim that might masquerade as a wall, everything that holds everything in place. You see the scenes and behind the scenes. The back is made to look as good, in its own way, as the front.
The Amazon bookstore does something similar: suspended somewhere between a tangible (albeit exquisitely staged) reality of paper and wood, and a perceptible (albeit artfully obscured) reality of pipes and machinery, the bookstore customer is able to experience a curated version of the ethical and visceral tension between front-of-house and back-of-house—between the sleek one-click seamlessness of the screen and the unceasing labor of the fulfillment center—as a kind of pleasure. In our global moment of high-tech fabrication and doorstep delivery, we are gradually becoming more aware of distant factories and warehouses, from urban China to exurban America, and of the dispossessed lives of the faraway people who make and move our possessions. Can it be a coincidence that this awareness parallels the emergence of an aesthetic that seems, somehow, to remind us of warehouses and factories—but, with all that burnished wood and polished metal, of warehouses and factories at rest, from another time, at their most impossibly beautiful?
The first thing Amazon did to the building that would become its first bricks-and-mortar bookstore was add bricks and mortar. The store, located in Seattle’s University Village shopping mall, opened in early November. Amazon’s new bricks, mottled in color from chalky yellow to dusky near-purple, look thoroughly artisanal. Their irregular texture and wide mortar gaps, along with the casement-like black metal mullions of the new windows, make the bookstore appear much older than the storefronts around it. “We’re taking the data we have, and we’re creating physical places with it,” the Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast told the Seattle Times when the bookstore opened.
