Is There Bauhaus in IKEA?

Today there are 231 IKEA stores in twenty-four countries, but it was news when IKEA opened a store in Michigan a few years ago, and it was news when IKEA recently opened a store here in North Carolina, where I now live. I am more familiar with Target, Costco and Walmart, and I detect in myself a reflexive Midwestern suspicion of IKEA, with its foreign pretentiousness, European colors and arrogant cleverness. IKEA may be as unquestionably assimilated into your life as Starbucks, Apple, and the Gap, and so I ask that you make an imaginative leap, entertain the unlikely existence of an IKEA virgin, and bear with me.

The new IKEA store less than an hour from my house was massive. I exited the highway, and a blue and yellow monolith rose on the horizon. The store was the horizon.

Once inside the lobby, I clung to the dotted trail on the floor. The store inspires an existential panic that I would call severe, and I imagined that a psychology graduate with a background in cartoons or cartography came up with the dotted line as a means to still the soul. “Follow me,” says the line, “and we’ll get through this together.”
I would have preferred to follow the painted shoeprints of Walter Gropius (a perfect square for the heel perhaps, a perfect parabolic half-egg for the sole), but there was only the white wandering stitch. Women shopped serenely in this aquarium of bright pebbles and jeweled bubbles. Men blinked and touched things for confirmation, sighed, then searched for another safe anchor point up ahead. I moved carefully from leaning towers of nested wastebaskets to dangerous ziggurats of dessert plates to the shelves of blue glasses set into cardboard sleeves like little employees in cubicles.

I passed from area to area in an efficient disorientation, never meandering somewhere that I had to back out of, never making a mistake. I was able to keep moving, never trip, and feel almost graceful, like a novice dancer led by an invisible instructor. I was afraid to stop. I understood that the store’s designers had mapped out the geography of the consumer experience, and I hoped IKEA would soon upgrade the system to a ride, like at Disney World (“It’s a Mall World, After All”). Or else I could sit on a bar stool as the IKEA products floated by like sushi on trays.

I moved naturally through the store, but the proportions were off, as if I’d stumbled into a city built for kids and laid out sprawling inside a sports arena. I was overwhelmed by the size of the store and disoriented by the small scale of the products. I was Alice in IKEAland and had nibbled from a cake labeled “Eat Me.” I doubted anyone in marketing at IKEA had recently visited Walmart and actually taken a good look at the size of Americans. We’re huge. Not even our children can sit in these chairs. As for me, I was simply too tall for any of their chairs or tables or countertops. This was bad news for my house and for Bauhaus. It wasn’t good design if I couldn’t use it. It wasn’t practical if it didn’t fit.

Brown is the color scheme of too many suburbs, from cream and beige to mocha and walnut. So I do appreciate that the giant hand of IKEA has stuck pinwheels of contrarian color in the drab concrete. But the utopia of IKEA is a colorful, plastic world of straight lines and little chairs. Why clean house when you can play house? The Bauhaus was no match for dictatorships and the market economy. Since its founding in 1943, IKEA has not yet met its match. It has expanded into building homes and sponsoring web shows and there are rumors that it might make a car and sponsor a movie. Maybe the Bauhaus just needed a food court and a theme park.