Flaneur’s Patina

“A definitive perspective on fashion follows solely from the consideration that to each generation

the one immediately preceding it seems the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable.”

--Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Budapest in midsummer. Hundred-degree days in the dry heat of the Carpathian basin. The sun like a hammer by early afternoon. My wife and I had made the journey here for the past three years to visit friends I’d made while studying at a local university. We met a few of them for lunch on a Thursday at a Vietnamese restaurant in Budapest’s District XI, a wealthy neighborhood, its well-manicured streets filled with chic cafes, restaurants, and galleries.

When we finished our lunch, we crossed over the Danube to take a stroll through District XIII. Where District XI is posh and stylish, District XIII is grittier. Community art spaces and boutique coffee shops butt up against hair salons, tobacco shops, and little parks haunted by rough men drinking cheap beer.

I caught up to Tomi as he pushed his two-year-old daughter in a stroller at the front of our little group. I’d come to learn he was something of a jack of all trades when it came to design. He’d worked in architecture, printmaking, and, most recently, movie sets. He’s a natural chatter, even in his second language. I could almost always count on him to fill me in on some obscure aspect of Hungarian culture.

We hadn’t even gone half a block when he struck upon the surrounding cityscape. He pointed to an old paint store and bakery (pékség, in Hungarian) on the ground level of the building to our left, telling me one wouldn’t see their sort in his neighborhood in Buda, the wealthier of Budapest’s two sides. To him, these businesses were emblematic of District XIII’s economic situation, which hadn’t seen much development since the nineties. Their signs were cookie cutter, prefab designs–sorely dated in the eyes of locals like himself.

Tomi said that for him the signs had a “patina.” I found his use of the word a bit odd. He wasn’t referring to anything outwardly visual about the signs—not their physical condition, nor an accumulation of grime across their surfaces. In fact, the signs looked well-maintained. Rather, what Tomi meant by “patina” was a sort of phenomenal screen—an invisible, historically-informed layer conveying age or out-of-date-ness. The same thing that makes a pristine Ford Pinto still look old.

The more I grappled with what he meant by the term, the more my mind began to race. I thought back to my own cultural context, where this idea of a “patina” conjured images of sprawling office parks, asphalt-shingled mansard roofs, McDonald’s ball pits, and beige airport hotels–the sort of cultural relics whose dated-ness could only be perceived through sustained habitation within my own turn-of-the-century American milieu. These everyday features of my environment had become, as I now saw them, my own temporal benchmarks.

Conversely, those businesses Tomi pointed out did not have this patina for me because their dated-ness was not readily apparent. I was an outsider. To me, they merely appeared strange, or unfamiliar. For Tomi they were part and parcel of a place and time–a particular historical moment. While we were two men of roughly the same age looking at the exact same thing, at the exact same time, the sight of those signs registered in profoundly different ways in each of our minds.

Just a stone’s throw from our destination, János Pál pápa Square, Tomi pointed out a an apartment building across the street that bore the hallmarks of late 1960s / early 1970s design. It was eight stories tall, with banks of windows jutting out diagonally from the facade like shark fins. Decades of grime had accumulated in the pores of the concrete and brick exterior. The whole thing was a hodgepodge of materials, shapes, and proportions.

Tomi explained that for him the building had a romance about it, something that appealed to his heart. The aesthetic was far enough in the past that he could not place it within the precise historical and cultural moment that produced it. He hadn’t even been born yet. But for his mother—someone from Hungary’s previous generation—such buildings were ugly, passé, misguided. She had lived through the period in which this style of buildings had emerged, and as a result, they appeared with the same sort of patina through which Tomi saw the bakery, or the paint shop that sparked our conversation.

If Tomi hadn't explained his use of the term, I’m not sure I would have grasped it fully. Nor would I have been able to discern the patina as a signal amid the noise of the Budapest urban landscape. It seems to me, then, that the cultural ephemera of the eras in which we are reared appear to us as quotidian, familiar, given, and that this sustained engagement prevents us from seeing them freshly, or with any degree of wonder. Patinas are a matter of conditioning—a phenomenological byproduct of our engagement with the visual culture all around us.

I wonder, then, what this might mean for us when we live in an unending stream of cultural production. How does our late-capitalist moment—with its insatiable drive for the ever new, the ever better, the ever improved—shape our taste and perception? How does this impact the speed with which the objects of our present era develop their own patina? For me, at least, these questions, and the notion of patina as a way of looking, begins on a street in Budapest.

Budapest / July 4, 2024

Captions

Image 1 Apartment building, Budapest. Photograph by Coleson Smith

Image 1 Pékség, street in Budapest. Photograph by Google Street View

Image 2 Apartment building, Budapest. Photographs by Coleson Smith

Coleson Smith is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing Program at the New School for Social Research.